Ice Plant Bar - A Bar Review
We traveled up to St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continually settled city in the U.S., for the long MLK weekend. While up there, we dropped in on St. Augustine Distillery, one of the first wave of craft distilleries to open in Florida and the one that's achieved the most recognition and success to date. So much success, in fact, that it was tough to get a tour of the place! Instead of waiting the 1.5 hours or so that it would take (seriously, this place was packed with people on Saturday), we visited the distillery's gift shop to sample their wares and also had a few cocktails at the upstairs bar, the Ice Plant. While strictly speaking not a whiskey bar, it has an impressive selection of bottles and, for someone in St. Augustine, may be the best bet to have a dram.
Atmosphere and Service: The bar comes straight out of a hipster's dream, or central casting for what a repurposed warehouse bar is supposed to look like. The bar itself is on the upper floor above the distillery gift shop, in a space with high ceilings, exposed brick, and sunlight filtering in through the upper windows of the warehouse. It also was bustling at 2 pm on a Saturday, and remained buzzy until we left around 4:30, so St. Augustine Distillery and Ice Plant clearly are the place to be in town.
As mentioned above, this place is more of a craft cocktail bar than a straight-up whiskey bar, and it also has a full food menu and sit-down service for those who'd like something to soak up the booze. The bartenders are quite skilled, and Ice Plant features many of the hallmarks of the high-end cocktail aesthetic, including hand-chipping large ice cubes out of a huge block of ice at the bar.
Also, the bar has a drink for two that's served out of one of these faux-gold pineapples. Yes, as the picture above shows, my wife and I did get one. Don't judge us.
Selection: The three shelves on the right when facing the bar are all whiskey, so this place has a no-joke selection of the dark stuff. I'd guess that they had something in the range of 80-90 bottles, including a mix of bourbon, scotch, Japanese and Irish whiskies, and other miscellaneous world whiskies. I was able to take a picture of the bar's whiskey list, although based on comparison to the selection that I saw, this list is extremely incomplete. It didn't even include any of the bourbons that they had!
Rare Bottles: The top shelf of Ice Plant deserves the name. I saw a bottle of Booker's Rye, the $300+ bottle of rye released in small numbers but great acclaim a few years ago. There were also several bottles of the higher-end Michter's offerings, Black Maple Hill, and a bottle of Whistlepig's Boss Hog Black Prince (a $400-500 bottle of rye). I also noticed some nice but not exceptionally rare bottles of scotch, including Glenfiddich 21 and Balvenie 14 Peat Week.
Value: Here's the bar's weak point, and the reason why I'd recommend grabbing cocktails or mixed drinks here instead of whiskey. Some of the prices are outlandish, particularly for a non-major metropolitan area. Lagavulin is $38 a glass! Really basic, mid-level scotches like Balvenie 12 are over $20. That just isn't reasonable. The only half-decent price I saw on the list was Redbreast 15 for $15. I didn't dare ask how much a pour from some of the rarer bottles cost.