State Line Distillery

State Line Distillery takes its name from the Illinois border a few miles south and makes gin, vodka, whiskey and seasonal spirits in a building on Northern Court, tucked behind Williamson Street on the near east side. The cocktail lounge sits alongside the production floor, which gives it the particular atmosphere of a distillery bar — you can see where the thing in your glass was made, and the menu changes as the stills produce different things.

A distillery is the least likely kind of venue to accommodate a non-drinker well, because the entire commercial logic points the other way: every drink sold without the house spirit in it is a drink that does not showcase the product. State Line does it anyway. Visit Madison, the city's official visitor bureau, records that the lounge offers non-alcoholic alternatives to its seasonal rotating cocktails and to the classics, which means the bartenders are rebuilding the same drinks without the base rather than offering a separate list of three sweet things. In practice that gives a non-drinker the best possible outcome — the drink the table is having, made to the same specification.

Because it rotates, we have not recorded named builds here; the honest advice is to describe what you like and let the bar work. Practically, the lounge keeps good hours for the neighbourhood — 5pm to 10pm Monday through Thursday, 3pm to midnight Friday and Saturday, 3pm to 9pm Sunday — and it sits within a few minutes' walk of two other entries in this guide: Rooted In Sanity, Madison's only kava lounge and one of just two fully alcohol-free rooms in the metro, and I/O Arcade Bar. The Marquette neighbourhood is the most walkable part of Madison's east side and the easiest place here to string an evening together on foot.