Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, est. 1938, is a house on a corner of Milwaukee’s Mitchell Street residential neighborhood. A bar in a house—oh boy. It could feel like drinking in grandma’s basement. Not so. Bryant’s has so many cool, cheap design tricks—tricks that feel utterly natural—that I felt it some of them were worth sharing.

The first thing you notice: no alcohol. Not a bottle visible. All the booze is in the well or cupboards underneath. The back bar is stocked exclusively with glassware. About 35 different glasses, many specific to a single drink.

There is nothing on the front bar. No coasters, no napkins. It is flat and smooth, uninterrupted. No taps, either. There is no beer (this, in Milwaukee, is probably a statement in and of itself).

There are no drink menus.

It’s almost like you expect no bartenders. But there they are, in white shirts, vests, ties. Ordering is done by discussion, a talk as short or as long as you’d like. They take your order by suggestion, by inference, by your mood. Tell them where you’re from, there’s a drink. Tell them the last piece of poetry you read, there’s a drink. They’re young and they’re not perfect at this brand of palmistry but I appreciate the effort.

Bryant’s makes “serious” cocktails but they also do a fair business in fruity pseudo-island drinks which makes me happy. So much bartending these days is furrowed brow nonsense. It’s refreshing to see umbrellas and big hunks of pineapple and drinks that try to make you laugh instead of squint and nod.

The bar was redecorated after a fire in 1971 and, from what I can tell, nothing has changed. It has wood veneer paneling, leatherette everywhere, wall-to-wall carpeting, patterned wallpaper, drop ceilings, fake flowers. I know this sounds horrible. I have no way of assuring you that it is not. A singular, cohesive vision makes it work somehow.

They have also made it work through darkness. Dim the lights far enough and it doesn’t matter what how big a travesty your wallpaper is. I have no argument with this technique. One of my other favorite joints, the Bronx Bar in Detroit, does the same thing and I’ve come to appreciate super dark bars. I know they’re hiding something, but I don’t care. At Bryant’s they shutter all the windows, keep the few lights they have on deep dim, light indirectly with burnt caramel orange color bulbs and use a vintage Macintosh tuner as the bar’s sole light source. Darkness forgives a lot. I’m sure if you saw the place in daylight you’d run screaming. But in the evening it’s so dim they deliver your bill on a tray with its own light so you can read it. It’s so dark that a Google search for pictures inside the bar comes up empty. I guess it must be like trying to take a picture at the bottom of the ocean.

At the Manhattan Cocktail Classic I took a class on preserving fruits in alcohol. It was the most interesting class I attended. If there was one thing I took away it’s that any bar should be thinking about doing this, especially one in a fruit-growing state like Michigan. It’s also something anyone can do at home.

Preserving is different than infusing. Infusing — adding fruits or aromatics to alcohol and letting them mingle at room temperature — creates a certain kind of flavor effect. When the alcohol is gone, however, the fruit is basically inedible. (Maraschino cherries are preserved, not infused. If you’ve ever tasted some “home made” ones that are bitter, alcoholic and nasty, chances are they were infused, not preserved.)

Preserving fruits with liquor is like canning but using alcohol instead of water. There’s usually sugar and spices and some cooking involved. When you’re done everything is usable. Use the alcohol in drinks. The preserved fruits go in drinks, in desserts and so on.

There are plenty of recipes for preserved fruits out there on the internets. But I also took down ten notes that seemed important and might not be covered in any recipe:

1. Start with pint canning jars, not quarts. That way you can test lots of different recipes.
2. Once you open a jar you need to use it up in two weeks.
3. You will fail more than succeed in the first year.
4. It’s expensive so be conservative.
5. Use stone fruits that are slightly under ripe, that way they fall apart less.
6. Strawberries and plums are good, but they will get so soft they’ll only be good for muddling.
7. Vegetables and cocktails almost never go together.
8. Follow the latest USDA canning guidelines for temperatures and sanitation. Botulism is the main danger.
9. If you are in a restaurant have the kitchen chef in a restaurant supervise the process, not the bartenders. (No offense, bartenders.)
10. Jars blow up sometimes.

When you throw a party and want your guests to have a drink as soon as they take off their jackets punch does the trick. It can handle a mob of arrivals that would crush a bar making drinks to order. You can buy beautiful old cut glass punch bowls cheap at flea markets and garage sales. Settle a giant hunk of ice in the middle of the bowl. As it melts the flavor of the punch changes, the architecture of the evening follows suit.

There are several bars in New York (Prime Meats, for one) doing punch service either at bar or table side. San Francisco, too. And one in Ann Arbor. Punch originated in Southeast Asia, quickly moved with sailors to the West Indies and before the age of the cocktail it was the most common blended drink in America. After that it unfairly faded into kitsch. Old cocktail books often have whole sections devoted to it. It fits nicely into the flow of traditional American food.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend Punch by David Wondrich. Wondrich writes some of the most comprehensive treatises on drinking today. He has a few books under his belt and commits a regular column to Esquire. I always learn interesting tidbits from him. Like from this book: bartending was traditionally a woman’s job in eighteenth century England; the term “pop-in” meant a shot of booze dropped in a mug of beer.