The 18 Best Bars In America

It's not just great drinks that make a great bar - it's also great service, great ambience, and fair prices that complete the experience.

We looked at six notable bar rankings compiled by critics and experts and aggregated the rankings to come up our own list of the Best Bars in America.

The rankings we used were James Beard Foundation's 2014 Restaurant and Chef Award Semifinalists for Outstanding Bar Program; Esquire's Best Bars in America; Food & Wine's Best Bars in America; Zagat's Hottest Bars in 15 U.S. Cities; The World's 50 Best Bars from Drinks International; and Liquor.com's Best Bars in America.

We gave each bar a numerical rating based on how many lists the bar appeared on and how high it appeared on lists that were ranked. We used the number of five-star Yelp ratings as a tiebreaker, where a bar with more five-star Yelp ratings outranked another bar when a tie occurred. You can read more about our methodology here.