For the last 10 years, Julep has been serving all Houstonians who walk through its doors on Washington Avenue—not just with cocktails, but also a sense of community. For bar owner Alba Huerta, that’s one of the best parts about her job.

What started as a small business has since grown into a destination for cocktail lovers, and on November 17, the bar will be putting its party hat on with a lineup of female bartenders and entrepreneurs in celebration of Julep’s decade-long success. And to keep the festivities going, the City of Houston is recognizing the bar with a proclamation, making November 18 “Julep Day.”

However, the story begins much earlier for Huerta. She began bartending at the ripe age of 18 and was immediately captivated by the energy of the industry. Huerta notes that although cocktails at the time weren’t what they are today—her job was mainly serving highballs and beer—she still loved the spirit (no pun intended) of it all.

“It always felt like a satisfying job,” Huerta says. “It was instantly gratifying—you get to meet really great people and put on a great shift with your coworkers. It was an environment that I always found enticing.”

Huerta was a college student at the University of Houston, but instantly realized that bartending was a career she could continue even after her studies. She never saw it as a job she could leave because of the affection she felt for the service industry. And although she loves Houston—and always knew she would eventually come back home to her family—she decided to move to Las Vegas in 2005.

“I wanted to be in a city where people were doing this as a career,” Huerta says. “Most of the workforce in Las Vegas is in the service industry and to get a glimpse of that was very eye-opening and a great experience. It also gave me some really strong training.”

During this time, she became focused on learning about spirits and just a few years later, she brought this knowledge back home to Houston and continued to bartend around the city. The various jobs she held were all preparing her for what she ultimately wanted—her own bar—and after more than a decade in the industry, she took that leap of faith.

In late 2014, Julep officially opened its doors. The cocktail bar highlights the global flavors of the city, including flavors that reflect the cultures and experiences of its staff. Huerta says there was a cocktail culture in big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago at the time, but Houston was lagging behind. She opened Julep with the intention of creating that same culture here at home. Huerta also wanted to make Julep a space where customers walk in and feel like they truly belong.

Huerta bartended at Julep full-time until 2018, when she stepped back to focus on the business, but she still works behind the bar when the staff needs some help or a break. That same year, she took her next big leap: a recipe book called Julep: Southern Cocktails Refashioned. For her, the coolest thing about the book is that it’s a medium that can reach people who may never have the opportunity to visit Julep. She focused on what cocktail culture was like at the time with about 80 different recipes. Though Huerta notes some parts of the book seem ancient now, because she feels the pandemic did a full reboot on the beverage industry.

Huerta says you can prepare for a lot of things, but a pandemic wasn’t exactly on anyone’s bingo card. When Julep had to shut its doors like many other businesses, it was an unsettling feeling, but with every decision, she knew she was working toward the bar’s reopening—which finally happened in 2021. Huerta says it was met with a lot of excitement and love from the community. One of her lessons from the pandemic: The only way to get it over with is to go through it.

This mindset proved to work well for Huerta, because in 2022, Julep won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar. That same year, the bar also got a spot on the inaugural 50 Best Bars in North America list.

“In hindsight, everything in the last 10 years has been a beautiful time,” Huerta says. “My life is great because this has been a part of my life for the last 10 years. And any time we win, it feels like everybody’s win.”

Of course, a lot changes in a decade, and since opening Julep, cocktail culture has evolved, which is something Huerta finds fascinating. She loves modern takes on cocktails, like drinks that are clarified or smoothed. With these processed techniques, the concoctions are not always necessarily shaken or stirred, which opens the palate to other flavors.

Customers can still enjoy timeless cocktails that were featured on the bar’s first menu, like the Cherry Bounce Sour, made with bonded corn whiskey, house cherry bounce, turbinado, lemon, angostura bitters, and egg white.

Huerta hopes to inspire people who are also mesmerized by cocktail culture and yearn to one day be in her shoes. She challenges them to do bigger things than her and follow their own goals and dreams.

“No one can give you better advice than your own intuition,” Huerta says.