The Bartender's Handshake

The Bartender's Handshake sits on Ingersoll Avenue west of downtown Des Moines, a cosy vintage-styled room with a patio, and it opens at 2pm every single day of the week, running to 1am and to 2am on Friday and Saturday. That is the widest availability in this city guide by a distance, and across this whole directory the reliably open room usually turns out to matter more than the clever one.

It happens to be both. The two documented alcohol-free builds are among the most savoury in this entire batch of cities. The Karate Kid is built on carrot with ginger syrup, lime, ginger beer, ancho chili and mint — a vegetable base, two forms of ginger heat and a dried chili, with no fruit sweetness carrying it at all. The Vacation Email uses orange spice tea as its backbone with grapefruit, lime, cinnamon, tonic and coconut, where the tea supplies tannin, the tonic supplies quinine bitterness and the coconut supplies fat.

Both are worth studying if you order a lot of alcohol-free drinks, because they demonstrate the principle that separates a good one from a bad one. Alcohol contributes bitterness, weight and burn; a drink that removes it and adds sugar instead is unbalanced and becomes tiring within a glass. These replace those qualities with chili heat, ginger, tannin, quinine and fat. That is why a carrot drink works at eleven at night and a fruit punch does not.

Des Moines' tourism board documented both in January 2026, describing the bar as serving fashionable and tasty mocktails alongside its handcrafted cocktails.

The Ingersoll location puts it a couple of miles west of the downtown cluster, near Eatery A and Fresko, so that stretch works as its own evening.