Most bars in Sheridan have a whiskey shelf. WYO Spirits & Cocktail Lounge on North Main has an entire room dedicated to the subject — around 200 bottles at any given time, lined up behind a bar that owner Derek Stith built himself from reclaimed Wyoming barn wood. The building used to be a tire shop. Most people who drive past it today have no idea what’s inside.
Stith grew up in Sheridan and spent several years bartending in larger cities before coming back. He’ll tell you, without a lot of drama, that he came home because his parents were getting older and he wanted to be close. The cocktail lounge came later, born out of frustration with what he calls “good beer and not much else” in the local bar scene. He opened in 2019 with a tight spirits program and a short cocktail menu he wrote himself, and he hasn’t tried to make the place into something it isn’t.
The room is small — maybe sixteen seats at the bar, a handful of tables, exposed brick on one wall. On a Thursday night it fills with a pretty specific crowd: people who know what they want, the occasional out-of-towner who stumbled in after dinner, and a regular or two who’ve claimed the same barstool for going on four years. It does not have a television. Stith says this was a deliberate choice and he has never regretted it.
The whiskey list skews American, with a Wyoming section that takes up a quarter of the menu on its own. Wyoming Whiskey, of course, but also some smaller-batch regional bottles you won’t find at the grocery store two blocks north. The cocktail menu changes seasonally — four or five drinks, written on a small card, no preamble. In late spring the menu ran an oat-washed bourbon old fashioned that regulars asked for by name for weeks after it rotated off. Stith makes most of the syrups and infusions himself, in the back, during afternoon prep.
Prices are reasonable for what you’re getting. A well-made cocktail runs $12 to $15. A pour of something serious from the back shelf might run higher, but Stith is honest about it — he’ll tell you what something costs before he pours it, and he’s good at reading whether you want a recommendation or just want to be left alone with the menu.
The thing that makes this place work isn’t the bottle count or the barn wood or the lack of a TV. It’s that Stith is actually behind the bar most nights. He’s not an absentee owner who checks in on weekends. If you sit down around eight on a Wednesday, he’s probably the one who’ll take your order, and if the place is slow he’ll talk to you about the differences between pot still and column still bourbon in a way that doesn’t feel like a lecture. He just finds it genuinely interesting.
WYO Spirits keeps shorter hours than most bars in town — closed Sundays and Mondays, open from around five in the afternoon the rest of the week. It’s not a late-night spot; last call comes earlier than you’d expect. But for a deliberate drink in a room where somebody has actually thought about what they’re serving, it’s the most considered option Sheridan currently has.
