Olive or Twist preparing barrel-aged cocktails

If you talk to Olive or Twist (Map it!) owners Scott Gremillion and Joshua Duke, they’ll tell you the bar’s true passion: broadening Baton Rouge’s palete.

“Part of our mission is to stay on top on the trends and bring them to Baton Rouge,” Gremillion says. “We want to broaden people’s horizons and serve them what’s going on elsewhere.”

For the duo’s next project, they are working on six barrel-aged cocktails. By taking five and one-gallon Tuthilltown Spirits wood barrels, Olive or Twist is batching cocktails with various flavors, then letting them sit for a couple of weeks.

“The sky is the limit,” Gremillion says. “You’re limited only by your imagination.”

Of the cocktails Olive or Twist is experimenting with in the barrels are the Averna Negroni, the Vieux Carre—which features rye, cognac, sweet vermouth, bitters and more—the bar’s signature cocktail Bullet Proof with Buffalo Trace bourbon and hibiscus liqueur, and a few others.

If you visit the bar, you’ll notice the barrels off to the right. The aged cocktails aren’t ready yet; Gremillion expects they’ll be ready to serve in about a month.

The bar also created a buzz two weeks ago at a pre-Tales of the Cocktail event, State of the Art: A Cocktail Extravaganza in New Orleans. Olive or Twist was the only Baton Rouge bar out of 25 participants featured in the State of the Art demonstration, where Louisiana bars crafted a cocktail using an specific ingredient.

“We were in elite company,” Gremillion says. “Our ingredient was Wild Turkey, and we used Wild Turkey Rare Breed to create out Bullet Proof cocktail. We had a great response.”—Matthew Sigur