The Ten Most
Sustainable Bars in the world

Opened in 2015 as the world’s first distillery bar, himkok being the Norwegian for moonshine, it produces roughly 80 to 85 percent of the spirit it serves on the premises, powered by renewable hydro. The ethanol is distilled from leftover potatoes a local farmer couldn’t sell. The honey comes from rooftop hives. Straws are organic material, herbs and spices are Norwegian, and the cider garden out back exists to make Norwegian apples into something that isn’t sugar water.

The motivation was carbon, specifically the carbon in shipping. Founder Erik Lorentzen’s route to it was oblique: he was running a brewery pub, flew to Denver for a beer festival, saw the American craft distilling scene and came home with a different idea. Head barman Sebastian Sandvik is candid that going sustainable was expensive and slow to set up, and that using ingredients intelligently saved money afterwards. They serve over 200,000 cocktails a year.

Jean Trinh is French with Vietnamese heritage and arrived in Colombia in 2014. What struck him was the absence of something he’d taken for granted at home: labelling. In France, he has said, you always ask where food came from, and the packaging tells you. In Colombia he found no such practice, and the questions that followed, what am I eating and what am I drinking, became the reason the bar exists.

In 2018 Alquímico bought a 25-acre farm. When the pandemic closed the bar, Trinh moved half his team to it, housed bartenders and their families, and they learned to farm. They built an apiary to cut the bar’s sugar purchasing, replanted native trees, donated food baskets, and created a teaching space for local growers. The team went from six people to over seventy. Staff eat a family meal together before every shift. The Comunidad cocktail menu funds clean water storage for a farmers’ association, and there are partnerships supplying instruments to local music schools.

A farm-to-glass model built on direct relationships with small French producers, with menus conceptually organised around art and social science rather than spirit categories. It has appeared on the World’s 50 Best list nine times since 2012.

What makes their reasoning worth quoting is that it isn’t primarily environmental. Alex Francis, who directs the bars, frames seasonal local buying as an economic argument first: money spent locally circulates locally, and the effect lands on the small farms as much as on the carbon ledger. His honest complication is that importing out-of-season produce is currently so cheap and easy that virtue alone won’t shift anyone. The answer, in his view, is building a system that benefits several industries simultaneously, because a system like that is hard to unpick once it exists.

Hyper-local Scandinavian sourcing, seasonal foraging, and a drinks list built from Swedish ingredients reimagined by season. Cocktails are presented on a map, so the provenance of what’s in the glass is the first thing a guest sees rather than a footnote.

The origin is a kitchen rather than a bar. Hampus Thunholm worked with chef Magnus Nilsson at Fäviken, the remote Swedish restaurant built entirely on what its own latitude could produce, and describes the experience as unlearning what he thought he knew about ingredients and technique. Röda Huset is that education applied to drinks: plums from a named orchard in Höör, raspberries and whey, elderberries, cold-pressed carrot.

The name is a portmanteau of zero and waste, which tells you the intent was there before the bar opened rather than added later. Founded by Demie Kim, Sean Woo, Jisu Park and Noah Kwon, it reached number nine in the world in 2024 and sixteen in 2025.

Every mixer is made in house, which eliminates a substantial stream of single-use bottles and cans that most bars never think about. Honey comes from urban beehives. Ingredients are contract-farmed with Korean growers, and the spirits backbone leans on Korean micro-distilleries and craft breweries rather than imported standards. The zero-waste practice and the hyper-local sourcing are the same decision seen from two angles.

The current holder, and the bar that moved the definition. In 2024 it became the first cocktail bar in the world to achieve B Corp certification. That is an audit of the whole company, not its recycling.

Staff work four-day weeks with full health insurance and structured routes to progression. One percent of annual income goes to Parisian charities through the Cambridge Community Plan, which is organised around six United Nations goals. And rather than treat any of this as competitive advantage, co-founders Hugo Gallou and Hyacinthe Lescoët give it away: the Cambridge Global Series brings bars from around the world together for seminars and workshops, and Shaken Leaf is a free online platform for bartenders anywhere who want to adopt the practices.

The Echo Park bar is on this list because of its back bar, and of everything we researched this is the practice closest to our own work.

Thunderbolt applies published criteria to the agave spirits it will stock. Producers must demonstrate genuine effort toward sustainable production, use ancestral methods, and pay fair wages. The tequilero or mezcalero must be explicitly named and credited rather than hidden behind a brand. And the spirits must be free of additives and free of celebrity involvement. That last pair of conditions excludes a substantial share of what the category currently sells. Beyond the bar, proceeds from the Echo Park Trash Club fund clean water and shelter initiatives in Los Angeles, and the team runs open educational sessions on sustainable sourcing for the trade.

The most recent winner anywhere, and the one that demonstrates what happens when a bar sits inside an institution willing to spend at institutional scale.

Library Bar occupies the Fairmont Royal York, which replaced its centrifugal chillers with cool water drawn from deep in Lake Ontario and fully electrified its heating, cutting more than 7,000 tonnes of carbon annually and earning certification under the Zero Carbon Building Performance Standard. On the community side, partnerships with La Table des Chefs and B12Give have redistributed over 6,000kg of food, including more than 2,000 meals a month to Toronto charities.

Singapore imports roughly ninety percent of its food and generates hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food waste a year. The country has set itself a target of producing thirty percent of its own food by 2030. FURA, owned by Christina Rasmussen and Sasha Wijidessa and run by a female-led team, treats that national problem as the bar’s design brief.

Local sourcing is the core of the strategy rather than a garnish on it, paired with a systematic approach to reducing, reusing and repurposing what would otherwise be discarded, and active involvement in the surrounding community. It is the clearest example on this list of a bar built in direct response to where it happens to be standing.

Thirty-seven floors up in the Rosewood Phnom Penh, with the largest whisky collection in Cambodia. It is precisely the profile of venue people assume is inherently wasteful.

Over seventy percent of its ingredients are sourced locally, some from the hotel’s own hydroponic garden. The Sora Martini, which the judges singled out, uses a house vermouth made from the hotel kitchens’ leftovers in collaboration with local distillers, the entire orange including peel, and native Kampot pepper. The spirits list leans on Cambodian producers like Samai Distillery and Seekers Spirits, chosen partly because they pay a living wage. Single-use plastics are gone, and the bar runs waste-reduction workshops for the wider Cambodian hospitality trade alongside an NGO partnership providing education and employment routes.