A well-made tasting room cocktail program can be a powerful tool for craft distilleries. It’s a way to showcase how people might enjoy your product at home, and it has the potential to draw in new customers tantalized by the promise of a great drink.
In San Francisco, Brucato Amaro has taken the cocktail-focused tasting room to its logical conclusion: Bar Brucato, a real-deal cocktail bar and restaurant that just happens to feature Brucato Amaro’s products in every drink.
Named for John Brucato, founder of the San Francisco Farmers Market, Brucato Amaro launched in 2018 with the mission to make hyper-regional amari that capture the flavors of California. For the first few years, they worked out of a 400 square foot space and sold their products through distribution only. Then, in March of 2025, Brucato Amaro unveiled their very first consumer-facing space.
Bar Brucato is a full-service cocktail bar, complete with food, plus a dramatically expanded production space all under one roof in the Mission District. “Originally it was going to be a distillery and tasting room,” says Brandon Conley, head distiller at Brucato Amaro. “But it just kept growing from there. We thought, if we have the space and we have the skills, let’s take a chance on it.”
San Francisco is one of the nation’s top cocktail cites, so the stakes were high to create a menu that simultaneously showcased Brucato Amaro’s products, pushed some stylistic boundaries, and delivered a few easy crowd pleasers.
One of those is Conley’s favorite drink on the menu: The Friend Place, which pairs Brucato’s Chapparal Amaro with gin, orgeat, and lime juice served on crushed ice with a fresh mint garnish. “It’s the most popular drink at the bar for sure,” says Conley. “It’s so good. It’s easy drinking, it has that citrus and that creaminess, it’s sweet but not too sweet, and there’s a lot going on with the botanicals.”
Inspired by California’s distinctive landscape, Chapparal includes a collection of botanicals that wouldn’t be out of place in a gin build, like fresh bay, yerba santa, lime leaf, cardamom, cinnamon, mint, and tarragon. Bartender Morgan Shick, who created the Friend Place, took inspiration from the unincorporated community of the same name west of Redding — as well as another iconic California flavor, almonds. Here’s how to make one.
The Friend Place
- 1 ounce Brucato Amaro Chapparal
- 1 ounce London dry gin (Brucato Amaro uses Beefeater)
- ¾ ounce Small Hand Foods orgeat
- ½ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
- Lemon wheel and mint sprig, for garnish
Shake Chapparal, gin, orgeat, and lemon juice in a cocktail tin with ice. Strain into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice, then garnish with the lemon wheel and mint sprig.
