River Coyote, situated on Ludlow Street in NYC’s Lower East Side neighborhood, may not look like a typical wine bar at first glance.

Stemware doesn’t hang from a rack, bottles are nowhere to be seen and beautiful copper espresso machines stare back at you. What makes it a wine bar? The 20 taps that line the wall behind the bar.

With a couple of exceptions, everything (including house-carbonated seltzer) is available on tap. The establishment’s dedication to being a bottle-less bar stems from a yearning for freshness that happens to have the added benefit of sustainability, owner Jay Nir says. Because the wines arrive in kegs, the amount of waste from bottles, labeling and packaging are all minimized. Some of the kegs are even recyclable, while the others are sent back to distributors to be reused.

“The thinking behind the keg is that every glass is equally fresh,” he says. “You pull [the tap], the wine is released, nitrous is in place so that no oxygen ever touches it”, he tells FoodRepublic.

River Coyote offers eight white and eight red wines, cider, kombucha, cold-brew coffee and seltzer, all on tap. The same focus on consistency of wine is also applied to the bar’s coffee program. Their drip coffee maker is programmed with a tablet to ensure the same cup is brewed each time.