The best whisky bars in Melbourne

The folks at this slip of a bar on Russell Street know whisky. They've got almost 500 bottles of the stuff glittering on the back bar, along with a miniature wooden cask which delivers extreme eye-watering flavours. Know nothing? They’ll teach you. Want to know what’s going on with locally made hooch? Chances are that the guys from Bakery Hill and Starward Whisky (a distillery in Port Melbourne) are sitting at the bar right now. If you’re after an educated talkin’ to, all matched to smoky beers and snacks like pickled garlic, this is your bar. Plus, Whisky & Alement took out our Bar of the Year award in 2017, so you know they're onto a good thing. 

The Elysian is located on Brunswick Street, but this whisky bar by two former Whisky and Alement alums is also straight out of Japan. The small space has that olde-worlde ambience you want when you’re dropping serious cash on drinks, with jazz standards on the stereo, wooden bar, wood-panelled walls, and a back bar holding an eye-watering 300 whisky bottles. Wong and Low are making it their life’s mission to hunt down the world’s rarest and most interesting drams, so that you can taste whiskies unavailable anywhere else in Australia. 

This jazzy back-alley speakeasy has a giant, twinkling whisky library out the back and right now, its own whisky. Like to do a little peacocking? Buy a bottle of something off the back bar and you can store it in your own hooch locker. They also do a whisky cocktail matched degustation if you want to indulge your wild side.

If you like cocktails, whisky, blues, good service and eating Reuben sandwiches at 2am, Beneath Driver Lane is your basement of dreams. Occupying an old bank vault in the CBD, this bar has a Harry Potter feeling that’s rare in a city whose subterranean spaces are sorely underused. 

If you’d worked a long, hard day, you probably wouldn’t want to quench your thirst with a Sex on the Beach. What you’d want is a Boilermaker: one shot whisky, one glass of beer. This brown-as-a-Brazil-nut bar on Lonsdale Street, which scooped Best New Bar at the 2016 Time Out Bar Awards, is the city’s second temple to whisky, joining sister bar Eau de Vie, which has been getting Melburnians elegantly imbibed on aptly named Malthouse Lane since 2014.

If you’re a cocktail rookie on a fact-finding mission, take yourself to 1806 – the prettiest booze school in the land. Sit at the long, ornate bar, behind which is a twinkling rainbow of liquor bottles theatrically framed by velvet curtains, and prepare to get learned. The menu is literally a book starting with drinks from the year 1806, and if you're into whisky, then you can leaf through the Scotch whiskies, through Ireland and into America and Japan. For the full experience, check out the flights menu and take a tour through the diversity of Scotch whisky.

Curtin House is frankly ridiculous, brimming over with a host of outstanding bars and club spaces. The Toff in Town is one of the swankiest, with a private booth bar to the left of the stairway and the excellent band space to the right. They do some pretty interesting things with whisky: the Chocolate Ginger Bourbon Old Fashioned is a sweeter take on the classic. You could mix things up and get the awesome bar team to mix you up a Honey Old Fashioned with Aberfeldy 12-year-old.