The gap between the beer and cocktail worlds is shrinking: bartenders are taking a hint from their beer-brewing comrades and incorporating hops into cocktails. Mixologists are now turning to the common brewing ingredient to add floral, tropical, citric and (of course) bitter notes to their builds.

Much like their distant cousin, "Babe," the Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs that live on Virtue Cider’s fifty-acre orchard want to be useful. The breed was popularized in the early 1900s as a farm animal that would graze on agricultural byproducts like fallen apples, which is when they also earned the nickname “Orchard Pigs.” 

What’s in a name? Whether it’s the Oaxaca Old Fashioned that helped put Death & Co. on the map or A Lonely Island Lost In The Middle of A Foggy Sea that you ordered last night at the tiki bar, a cocktail’s name is like packaging that can make a guest choose one drink over another. Recently, however, bartenders have been abandoning the centuries-old tradition of naming cocktails in favor of a more streamlined approach.

Tight-knit bar communities are not always safe places for outsiders looking to stake their claim. This is particularly true in Chicago, a city built on the backs of the native bartenders who elevated it from plastic-cup-bound vodka-sodas to Old Fashioneds served in glass spheres. When Broken Shaker co-owners Gabe Orta and Elad Zvi chose downtown Chi-Town for the second Broken Shaker, the announcement was met with equal excitement and hesitation. How would the poolside Miami lounge translate to frigid Chicago?