Bars & Nightlife: From ginger beer to tonic water, more Twin Cities bars are making it themselves

It is seven hours before Saturday night guests will start trickling into Marvel Bar for one of its palate-dazzling mixtures. But bartenders Megan Arts and Matthew Voss already are on the job. Arts slips on a blue apron and sets up in a small prep room for her morning task of making a house orgeat — an almond syrup often used in Mai Tais and other tiki drinks.

"Once you taste a [homemade] orgeat, you don't go back," she says.

Cocktailing is a nuanced art, predicated on striking the right ratios and flavor combinations with precision. Bars and restaurants with serious cocktail programs are taking pride in making in-house ingredients.

"It's so important that I guess we would call it our trademark at the Strip Club," said bartender Dan Oskey by phone, while whipping up a batch of his Lil' Danny's Iconic Tonic. "When we opened, our goal was to make everything from scratch."

The St. Paul steak and cocktail joint's menu is littered with Oskey's house-made ginger beer, bitters, tonics and syrups. While more laborious than cracking a commercial mixer, Oskey said handcrafting ingredients allows for customization. His sour recipe, for instance, was made with the Strip Club's popular Cobra Kai in mind, and he is rolling out garden-picked rhubarb for a coming-soon cachaça cocktail.

"It is time-consuming, but we're reminded every day what the difference is, when people tell us how much they like the particular drink that they're drinking," Oskey said.

Oskey recently launched his Easy & Oskey line of make-your-own-bitters kits with pal Erik "Easy" Eastman. Some of the flavors are based on his Strip Club creations, including Oskey's personal favorite, a habanero variety also used in the Cobra Kai.

The idea stemmed from a golf trip during which Rasmussen and his friends were staying in a Wisconsin cabin and "getting really silly and crazy" putting pine needles and anise star in their gin and tonics. "It was just like drinking the woods," Rasmussen said. "We thought we were the smartest people on Earth. We were definitely the happiest people on Earth."

Though tonic is relatively simple to make, the affable barman said the recipe required some honing. After tweaking it five or six times, Rasmussen finally arrived at a formula he likes. The result is more full-bodied than many boutique tonics, he said.

"That's totally a Johnny Michaels thing — EQ'ing drinks," Rasmussen said of his La Belle Vie mentor. "He's like, 'You've got to be like a sound technician about it and you've got to get everything just right. If your bass is too high, you pull that down and pop up the treble a little.' I like thinking about cocktails that way."

Back at Marvel, Arts is gently stirring a creamy white blend of hand-peeled almonds, plumped by basking in distilled water, toasted macadamia nuts, sugar, rose water, orange blossom and a touch of Wray & Nephew rum. She meticulously strains her 1.25-liter orgeat batch into a vat before sampling her divinely sweet spoils, which will be featured the following evening during Marvel's "improv night," when ad-lib cocktailing is encouraged.

All told it's a two- to three-hour process, but Voss said he enjoys pleasing people with their DIY ingredients. "There's just way more of a connection there," he said.

French Meadow Bakery & Cafe expanded its Lyndale Avenue presence this week with a new wine bar. The new Bluestem Bar & Table is connected to the existing French Meadow on the west wall, co-owner Lynn Gordon said. The separate-entrance vino parlor features 16 tap beers and 26 wines by the glass, with a focus on sustainable, organic and biodynamic wines. The food menu is mostly small plates.

Surly is commemorating the release of its seventh anniversary beer SeVIIn not at a neighborhood bar, but at the plush Varsity Theater on Sunday. Aside from dropping this new Belgian-style strong ale, Team Surly will unveil the sketches for its new "destination brewery" in the nearby Prospect Park neighborhood. Surly fans were stoked when the beloved beermaker recently announced plans to open a taproom in its current Brooklyn Center brewery, but renderings of the future Surly Central could have them spitting up their CynicAle.

6-11 p.m., Sun., free, 21-plus, Varsity Theater, 1308 4th St., Mpls., www.surlybrewing.com