Of all the bars involved in the Great Cocktail Reawakening, perhaps none has had the cachet and hipster street cred as New York’s “Death & Co,” which opened on New Year’s Eve 2006-07. It quickly established a reputation as a bartender’s bar, providing the artistes of the mahogany a place to present their innovations.

Success came so quickly to Death & Co that it overreached, trying to open a small empire of bars around the country. But the prowess Death & Co crowd exhibited with the shakers and jiggers and ice was sorely lacking when it came to the business acumen needed for such an ambitious goal. But now, after well over a decade of artisanally distilling their magic bean juice, Death & Co bars have finally begun to proliferate. There is an LA iteration, a Denver redoubt, and now a Washington, D.C., variation down a back alley in the Shaw neighborhood.