Albuquerque, New Mexico
For Tammy Bouma, getting under the hood of a drink comes naturally. Bouma comes from a family of engineers, who, she says, gifted her with a logical strain of creative energy. Since leaving Baltimore, where she worked at The Bluebird and NiHao, to join Happy Accidents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a year ago, Bouma has been putting this penchant for tinkering to good use, expanding the bar’s menu with playful cocktails built around a roster of ingredients unique to the Southwest.
Take, for instance, the inclusion of Mexican champurrado, widely consumed north of the border, in Bouma’s Almost Forgotten, or the way pistachio, which is planted across New Mexico and neighboring Arizona, plays a key role in a Mai Tai riff called Knotty by Nature. But the spirits, too, are unique. Not just to the Southwest—but to the bar itself. Happy Accidents doubles as a distillery, exclusively serving its own bespoke spirits, which are often purpose-built for a specific cocktail. “If I want something like a Bénédictine or green Chartreuse or Curaçao [in a drink], we have to figure out how to reverse-engineer it,” says Bouma.
For a visiting bartender’s cocktail called “It’s Toe-Mae-Toe,” Bouma helped develop a spirit in the style of Gin Mare (an herbaceous gin meant to evoke the flavors of the Mediterranean) to form the base of the savory Martini variation. Deconstructing the backbar in this way often unlocks a new perspective for Bouma, even with familiar ingredients. “My favorite thing to do,” says Bouma, “is take something apart and put it back together.”
Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Years as a bartender: 7
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
“Can you make something that balances my masculine and feminine energies as an Aquarius rising?”
A bar that’s closed that you miss dearly:
Machine Nightclub in Boston, where I started bartending. It had drag shows on Monday nights; it was a perfect divey gay bar.
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
I built a stovetop smoker out of tinfoil and tried to make a smoked mango syrup. It came out delicious, but the house also smelled like barbecue for days. There was also an N/A dog cocktail: squash juice and bone broth with apple cider vinegar “bitters.”
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
You are always being interviewed—whether you’re at work, out after work, etc. Behave yourself appropriately; you never know if your next boss, coworker or employee is in the room.
Almost Forgotten
In this playful, indulgent flip, champurrado—a hot chocolate drink enjoyed in many Mexican communities—pairs with house-distilled rum, passion fruit and a whole egg.
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
RECIPE
SILLY
tammy bouma
Get to know
learn more
Tammy Bouma
A Bar that's closed that you miss dearly:
Machine Nightclub in Boston, where I started bartending. It had drag shows on Monday nights; it was a perfect divey gay bar.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Growing up in Korea, Han Suk Cho wasn’t familiar with the concept of coupling drinks with specific dishes to enhance the dining experience. Today, it’s second nature. Cho is responsible for developing cocktail pairings at the celebrated Los Angeles omakase restaurant Kato, where she mines cherished memories and childhood flavors for inspiration, and where spirited and zero-proof drinks receive equal billing.
After years of working in fine dining kitchens, her first foray into bartending came around 2018, developing nonalcoholic cocktails to go with the Japanese-inspired food at SingleThread Farm’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant north of Sonoma, California. Today’s wide selection of commercial zero-proof spirits was still years away; Cho was building each cocktail ingredient from scratch. A favorite pine bud soda she drank in Korea, for instance, was the basis for an N/A Collins made of foraged pine needle syrup and sudachi (a yuzu-like fruit), which was meant to pair with black cod. The alpine-and-citrus flavor profile evokes comparisons to gin.
At Kato, Cho threads similarly nostalgic flavors into her drinks, often turning to desserts as inspiration. For her N/A Seascape Sbagliato, for instance, she force-carbonates clarified strawberry juice with
the nonalcoholic Martini & Rossi Vibrante sweet vermouth, seasoned with housemade bitters made from pandan for a drink that is both perfectly of-the-moment, and nostalgic. The inspiration? Strawberry shortcake.
RECIPE
A playful cocktail inspired by almond jello, a popular Korean dessert often served with canned lychee, built on a base of rum, pisco and yogurt.
Monterey Park Lychee Martini
Get to know
HAN SUK CHO
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NOSTALGIA
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Hometown: Yongin, South Korea
Years as a bartender: 1
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Extra-dirty Martini with Suntory Roku.
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
Making sesame milk with sesame paste.
Han SUK CHO
Tampa, Florida
As the opening bartender of the appropriately punch-focused Punch Room, in Tampa, Florida, Renée Fitzgerald is dressing a centuries-old drink format in party clothes. Her modern takes on punch celebrate the flavors and spirits of the Caribbean and Gulf regions while incorporating unconventional ingredients and contemporary techniques, like throwing and clarification. Meanwhile, she’s embraced a hands-on, convivial approach to hospitality—find Fitzgerald working the room, ladling out 30-serving punch bowls—that has quickly made the bar, within the recently opened Edition Hotel, a must-visit for visitors and locals alike.
Fitzgerald’s Tampa Punch showcases her style of bending—but not upending—the traditional punch mold (spirit, spice, citrus, sugar, dilution agent) with a blend of mezcals, pineapple oleo saccharum, rum and coconut-tinged sauvignon blanc. (Today’s wealth of agave spirits wasn’t so close at hand for yesterday’s punch makers.) The rum-based Ziggy’s Punch, meanwhile, goes bold and original on its spice component with Jamaican jerk seasoning and ginger. And Fitzgerald often dabbles in different lengtheners, using traditional choices like tea, wine and vermouth, but also beers such as the Edition house lager, which is used in Ziggy’s Punch.
After running Punch Room solo since its debut last fall, Fitzgerald recently onboarded a co-bartender, Amber Carregal, as part of her goal to give more women opportunities and prominence in the expanding Tampa drinks scene. They’re collaborating on a still-secret new menu featuring cocktails and pours from rare and high-end spirits, a collection that Fitzgerald says will be unrivaled in Florida.
RECIPE
The centuries-old punch format is modernized with clarified citrus and agave spirits alongside the familiar tea component.
Donato Punch
Get to know
ReNÉe FITZGERALD
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GRACE
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
A bar that’s closed that you miss dearly:
Nitecap in NYC. It was my mentor, Natasha David’s bar. Nitecap was a casualty of everything that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. When I learned that it closed, it was a poignant lesson for me about impermanence and loss, but also an equally good lesson about pivoting and finding different happinesses.
The one thing you wish would disappear from
drink lists forever:
Honestly, NOTHING. Is that lame to say? I just think that if you can make it good or fun, if you can reimagine it, or bring it back from the dead or make it work for you and me and the bar guest and the bar concept in whatever way... then I want to see it all. Why limit that?
Hometown: Holbrook, New York
Years as a bartender: 10
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
I’ve had a request for that Tapeworm shot—the one with mayonnaise in it. But I’m also probably guilty of being someone else’s “weirdest drink request.” So this is my official apology to anyone I’ve asked to make a Cheeseburger shot for me and my friends!
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
I tried to do a savory dehydrated feta cheese meringue thing as a component for a competition cocktail. It was
not good.
Your approach to cocktails, in one word:
Grace. It has multiple meanings: elegance, charm, goodwill and honor.
RENEE Fitzgerald
NEW orleans, louisiana
Erika Flowers is right at home at Cane & Table in New Orleans, where the rum-focused cocktail program and Caribbean-inspired cuisine give her full license to engage her Belizean heritage. There, she marries the bounty of sugar cane–based spirits with the ingredients she grew up around, like cinnamon, pineapple and sorrel, to create holistic flavor profiles that feel unique within the tropical canon.
Flowers’ career in drinks began when she introduced bottled cocktails to her line of beverages and home goods, Taste of the Tropics, which she sold at NOLA pop-up markets. With no formal training (she described herself, at this point, as firmly a “home-tender”), her success in the RTD space led Flowers to foray into professional bartending via Turning Tables, a local nonprofit run by Touré Folkes that strives to increase diversity in the hospitality industry through training programs and externship placement. Flowers secured the Cane & Table gig soon after, and has, in short order, established a POV all her own.
Her Banana Blossom cocktail—with its striking scarlet hue and manicured lemon twist studded with a mint plume to resemble a banana blossom—is the perfect encapsulation of Flowers’ ability to blend the dramatic with the approachable. The drink features banana liqueur, lime and aged rum infused with hibiscus, an ingredient “so ingrained in me, growing up in a Caribbean household,” she says. Flowers finishes the drink with a spritz of lavender tincture on both its surface and the stem of the glass, so the aroma transfers to the drinker’s fingertips—a subtle bit of that aforementioned flair. “You touch your face, and it’s like, Wow, I smell good. This tastes great. I love being here.”
RECIPE
Marrying eye-catching presentation with an approachable build, Erika Flowers’ tropical sour gets its striking color and tart backbone from hibiscus-infused rum.
Banana Blossom
Get to know
ERIKA FLOWERS
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INTENTIONAL
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
What part of your job do you like most?
I love introducing people to new things, whether it be spirits, brands or potentially their new favorite cocktail. It’s unfortunate that folks allow one bad experience with a spirit to deter them from trying new things. Like, do you really hate rum? Or did you have a cruise ship drink that one time that was too sweet? It brings me great joy to share my knowledge and empower my community. The more you know, the more you grow!
The one thing you wish would disappear from
drink lists forever:
Bottomless brunch
Hometown: Bronx, New York
Years as a bartender: 2
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
I put Guinness in a tropical cocktail, and to my surprise,
it worked.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known
five years ago?
I wish I knew that it was OK to start over and explore different avenues of creativity. The pandemic was a life-changing moment for us all, but it really opened my eyes to the fact that I can be anything and everything I want to be in this lifetime. Don’t let people put you into a box.
ERIKA FLOWERS
Growing up in Korea, Han Suk Cho wasn’t familiar with the concept of coupling drinks with specific dishes to enhance the dining experience. Today, it’s second nature. Cho is responsible for developing cocktail pairings at the celebrated Los Angeles omakase restaurant Kato, where she mines cherished memories and childhood flavors for inspiration, and where spirited and zero-proof drinks receive equal billing.
After years of working in fine dining kitchens, her first foray into bartending came around 2018, developing nonalcoholic cocktails to go with the Japanese-inspired food at SingleThread Farm’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant north of Sonoma, California. Today’s wide selection of commercial zero-proof spirits was still years away; Cho was building each cocktail ingredient from scratch. A favorite pine bud soda she drank in Korea, for instance, was the basis for an N/A Collins made of foraged pine needle syrup and sudachi (a yuzu-like fruit), which was meant to pair with black cod. The alpine-and-citrus flavor profile evokes comparisons to gin.
At Kato, Cho threads similarly nostalgic flavors into her drinks, often turning to desserts as inspiration. For her N/A Seascape Sbagliato, for instance, she force-carbonates clarified strawberry juice with the nonalcoholic Martini & Rossi Vibrante sweet vermouth, seasoned with housemade bitters made from pandan for a drink that is both perfectly of-the-moment, and nostalgic. The inspiration? Strawberry shortcake.
Los Angeles, California
RECIPE
A playful cocktail inspired by almond jello, a popular Korean dessert often served with canned lychee, built on a base of rum, pisco and yogurt.
Monterey Park
Lychee Martini
The drink that got you interested in bartending
and why:
Negroni. I didn’t find pleasure in bitterness until I had a perfectly balanced Negroni.
NOSTALGIA
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
The drink that got you interested in bartending and why:
Negroni. I didn’t find pleasure in bitterness until I had a perfectly balanced Negroni.
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
Healthy physical and mental state helps to focus, and focus is everything.
The one thing you wish would disappear from drink lists forever:
Celebrity tequilas and mezcals.
Kat foster
Brooklyn, New York
jake powell
Kim VO
Baltimore, Maryland
denver, colorado
Ramsey Musk
Los Angeles, California
Laura Maddox
Austin, Texas
TAMMY BOUMA
ALBUQUERQUE, New mexico
Erika Flowers
New Orleans, Louisiana
New York, New york
Marc Rodriguez
Han Suk Cho
Los Angeles, California
renÉE Fitzgerald
TAMPA, FLORIDA
As the opening bartender of the appropriately punch-focused Punch Room, in Tampa, Florida, Renée Fitzgerald is dressing a centuries-old drink format in party clothes. Her modern takes on punch celebrate the flavors and spirits of the Caribbean and Gulf regions while incorporating unconventional ingredients and contemporary techniques, like throwing and clarification. Meanwhile, she’s embraced a hands-on, convivial approach to hospitality—find Fitzgerald working the room, ladling out 30-serving punch bowls—that has quickly made the bar, within the recently opened Edition Hotel, a must-visit for visitors and locals alike.
Fitzgerald’s Tampa Punch showcases her style of bending—but not upending—the traditional punch mold (spirit, spice, citrus, sugar, dilution agent) with a blend of mezcals, pineapple oleo saccharum, rum and coconut-tinged sauvignon blanc. (Today’s wealth of agave spirits wasn’t so close at hand for yesterday’s punch makers.) The rum-based Ziggy’s Punch, meanwhile, goes bold and original on its spice component with Jamaican jerk seasoning and ginger. And Fitzgerald often dabbles in different lengtheners, using traditional choices like tea, wine and vermouth, but also beers such as the Edition house lager, which is used in Ziggy’s Punch.
After running Punch Room solo since its debut last fall, Fitzgerald recently onboarded a co-bartender, Amber Carregal, as part of her goal to give more women opportunities and prominence in the expanding Tampa drinks scene. They’re collaborating on a still-secret new menu featuring cocktails and pours from rare and high-end spirits, a collection that Fitzgerald says will be unrivaled in Florida.
Tampa, Florida
RECIPE
The centuries-old punch format is modernized with clarified citrus and agave spirits alongside the familiar tea component.
Donato Punch
The one thing you wish
would disappear from
drink lists forever:
Honestly, NOTHING. Is that lame to say?
GRACE
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Erika Flowers is right at home at Cane & Table in New Orleans, where the rum-focused cocktail program and Caribbean-inspired cuisine give her full license to engage her Belizean heritage. There, she marries the bounty of sugar cane–based spirits with the ingredients she grew up around, like cinnamon, pineapple and sorrel, to create holistic flavor profiles that feel unique within the tropical canon.
Flowers’ career in drinks began when she introduced bottled cocktails to her line of beverages and home goods, Taste of the Tropics, which she sold at NOLA pop-up markets. With no formal training (she described herself, at this point, as firmly a “home-tender”), her success in the RTD space led Flowers to foray into professional bartending via Turning Tables, a local nonprofit run by Touré Folkes that strives to increase diversity in the hospitality industry through training programs and externship placement. Flowers secured the Cane & Table gig soon after, and has, in short order, established a POV all her own.
Her Banana Blossom cocktail—with its striking scarlet hue and manicured lemon twist studded with a mint plume to resemble a banana blossom—is the perfect encapsulation of Flowers’ ability to blend the dramatic with the approachable. The drink features banana liqueur, lime and aged rum infused with hibiscus, an ingredient “so ingrained in me, growing up in a Caribbean household,” she says. Flowers finishes the drink with a spritz of lavender tincture on both its surface and the stem of the glass, so the aroma transfers to the drinker’s fingertips—a subtle bit of that aforementioned flair. “You touch your face, and it’s like, Wow, I smell good. This tastes great. I love being here.”
New Orleans, Louisiana
RECIPE
Marrying eye-catching presentation with an approachable build, Erika Flowers’ tropical sour gets its striking color and tart backbone from hibiscus-infused rum.
Banana Blossom
Weirdest cocktail experiment you've ever attempted:
I put Guinness in a tropical cocktail, and
to my surprise, it worked.
Intentional
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Banana Blossom
Brooklyn, New York
Kat Foster honed her bartending skills at fine dining restaurants like New York’s Aquavit and Eleven Madison Park. But what really allowed her to dial up her own voice was single-handedly launching the beverage program at Brooklyn’s Margot earlier this year. Drawing on her upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, Foster is flexing a repertoire of passed-down Appalachian kitchen techniques—including pickling, canning and fermentation—to execute complex culinary cocktails that flow with Margot’s ever-changing menu of seasonal, seafood-centric cuisine.
The bar’s cocktail menu consists of ambitious originals plus a section of classics, giving guests several points of entry into a drinking experience that balances surprise and satisfaction. The Windowsill Thief—an original cocktail whose name alludes to pilfered pie—incorporates amaro, thyme liqueur, sherry, brown butter–washed rye and lacto-fermented cherry syrup. The fermentation process, Foster says, lends the cherries a savory, meaty quality.
Tapping into these ancestral modes of cooking isn’t for the sake of showmanship; Foster is after profound flavors, foremost, as well as an opportunity to unlock a deeply personal dimension in her drinks. She explains: “Those historic foodways made me fascinated in a part of my family’s history that I hadn’t really given a ton of credence to for a long time.”
RECIPE
Lacto-fermented cherry syrup and brown butter–washed rum come together with thyme liqueur and amaro in this signature drink, designed to evoke the flavors of a pie left on a windowsill.
Windowsill Thief
Get to know
KAT FOSTER
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Raucous
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
What part of your job do you like most?
Being a part of the bar and restaurant community. This industry and the people in it have been so formative in who I am as a person. There is such a deep well of passion in people who have chosen to work in hospitality, and in some of my lowest moments, those people have always supported me and lifted me up, no questions asked.
The thing you wish would disappear from drinks lists forever:
Bacon, duck fat, foie washes, etc. That’s mostly from a sustainability standpoint, though; if that’s a byproduct of your restaurant and makes a tasty drink, have at it. Outside of that, I have drinks that I hate (glaring at you dirty Martinis), but I think everyone tailors their list to their market and I’m never mad at that.
Hometown: Charlottesville, Virginia
Years as a bartender: 8
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Belvedere Martini, up, no vermouth, olives, lemon twist, Irish whiskey rinse, shaken.
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
Radish-infused gin. When I took the lid off of the infusion, my chef at the time said, “NO. WHO DID RADISHES? SMELLS LIKE FARTS.” Years later, I interviewed for a job with a beverage director and he asked which failed experiments I’d done. I said, “Only one, with radishes.” And he said, “I tried that once too. Smelled like farts.”
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
Asking for help is a sign of professionalism, not weakness.
Kat Foster
Austin, Texas
Not every bar can claim that four in 10 cocktail orders are simply “bartender’s choice.” But at Small Victory, an intimate sliver of a bar near the state capitol in Austin, Texas, Laura Maddox’s goal—to make “a bartender’s dream bar to work in”—has helped foster a team that’s earned the deep trust of Austin bargoers. That, for her, begins with the details (a cracking custom-ice program; hyperorganized bar stations; glassware-specific dishwashers—they’re all here) and with mentorship.
She and partner Josh Loving oversee a bartender training program that’s considered the gold standard in Austin. Their “cocktail compendium”—a house manual unpacking the classic cocktail canon and the scores of variations built on it—is the centerpiece. “It’s got to be over 500 or 600 drinks deep at this point,” she says. Obsession with quality also dictates that every spirit that makes it in the door must be delicious served neat, at room temp.
Those that earn a spot on the backbar find themselves put to use in revived classics, which make up the core of Small Victory’s offerings. Maddox pores over old cocktail books to uncover hidden gems like the FrankenJack, a dry Martini enhanced with apricot liqueur and triple sec, and finds creativity within the confines of “tweaking the ingredients just so.” For now, she feels comfortable with her originality being defiantly unflashy. “There are so many amazing drinks that have already been created, yet are not appreciated, and I want to share them with people.”
RECIPE
A faithful approach to the tequila classic is updated only in the fine-tuning of ratios.
Tequila Daisy
Get to know
LAURA MADDOX
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EXCELLENCE
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
My staff and I spend a lot of time looking through old cocktail manuals searching for lost classics that deserve a comeback. We love trying to replicate some of the weird drinks, like the Bullshot (vodka and beef boullion) and the Prairie Oyster (egg yolk topped with Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper served alongside a fizz cocktail). We also love to have mini cocktail competitions where we challenge each other to make the best drink using a full pour of something odd, like Rumple Minze or Mälort.
The one thing you wish would disappear from
drink lists forever:
Celebrity spirit brands.
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Years as a bartender: 11
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Dirty Martini with grenadine and olive brine.
What do you know now that you wish you'd known five years ago?
Personality always trumps drink-making skills when it comes to coworkers and staff. Almost anyone can memorize recipes, but not everyone can come to work every day ready to create a welcoming environment.
Laura Maddox
Los Angeles, California
As beverage director at Accomplice Bar in Los Angeles, Ramsey Musk has found a way to creatively unite his visual sensibilities as a graphic designer with a pleasantly offbeat list of drinks that read like a call-and-response from his childhood. Musk grew up in an artistic family in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, surrounded by a beach-tourist drinking culture swimming in poorly made Mai Tais. After swapping coasts for college, Musk settled in L.A. and honed his bartending skill first at the now-closed Filipino restaurant Ma’am Sir, where he found ways to elevate, and better appreciate, tropical drinks—think clarified Piña Colada milk punches.
But it’s at Accomplice that Musk learned that “a cocktail doesn’t just have to be a riff on the Manhattan—you can do whatever you want, as long as you understand the structure of flavor, where you need bitter, heat, acid, sugar.” Musk is also a natural storyteller. He now produces ’zines with original writing and graphic design as a way to give narrative shape to his nostalgia-fueled drinks. His latest drop is about “bringing people to a specific place and time,” Musk says. A savory Martini with celery gin and carrot eau de vie conjures the vichyssoise Mom made on sick days; a stirred drink made with mezcal, fig leaf and bitter blueberry cordial is a summertime jaunt through a Connecticut meadow; and for a taste of Grandma’s Christmastime orange salad, he’s got a Gibson riff with red onion, chile pepper and a topping of orange air. Or, if you prefer to head back to the 1990s (raises hand), Musk’s got just the Appletini for you.
RECIPE
Clarified sour apple cordial forms the core of this throwback ’tini filtered through a thoroughly
modern lens.
Apple Martini
Get to know
RAMSEY MUSK
learn more
SASSY
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
The drink that got you interested in bartending and why:
Well, I made Mojitos for my mom as a kid during the summer. So that was my first dip into cocktails. I would experiment with different types of mint, rums and simple sugar syrups. It was really fun to perfect a recipe for someone else and see how much they enjoyed it each time, or when they didn’t care for it. I don’t think I realized how impactful those summer nights were in the moment.
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
No one owes me anything. Work hard and let the work and passion speak for itself.
Hometown: Harwich, Massachusetts
Years as a bartender: 8
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Stoli Blueberry Bloody Mary. Unhinged, but they loved it, so who am I to judge? Also Hpnotiq and hot sauce. Feral, and I’ve never been happier to not be able to accommodate (no Hpnotiq).
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
Mayo Martini.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known
five years ago?
How to advocate for myself and others.
RAMSEY MUSK
Denver, Colorado
Jake Powell has an innate feel for the internal logic that makes a cocktail exceptional—the way ingredients contribute structure, flavor and texture in differing and sometimes unexpected proportions. As the bar manager at Death & Co. Denver, Powell uses his self-described “mathematical” process to doggedly shape his drink concepts until they are not only balanced but efficient in build, often with an eye toward reducing waste. Take Powell’s Desert Bloom cocktail, for example: He honed the delicate fruit and floral qualities shared by mezcal, raicilla, pear eau de vie, white port, blanc vermouth and orange bitters by fine-tuning volumes within the framework of a 50/50 Martini, maintaining the equal-parts split between full-proof spirits and fortified ingredients even as the ingredients list ballooned, always focused on “fitting together puzzle pieces to fit the formula.”
Powell entered bartending via craft beer, but encountering the Death & Co. book Modern Classic Cocktails is what steered him toward bartending. So it’s nothing short of “surreal,” he says, to be now stationed at the very institution that provided the foundation for his analytical style. A Florida native, Powell has been nomadic for years, jumping between New York and Australia before landing in Colorado. That he’s become a big supporter of the Denver bar community—including organizing speaking events at Death & Co. for visiting bartenders—suggests he’s planning to stay awhile.
Of course, any time he wants to be reminded of home, he’s got a drink for that. The Wizard in Black cocktail is Powell’s take on two South Florida staples: Cuban coffee and plantains. It contains aged rum, Punt e Mes, banana liqueur, Angostura bitters, salt and orange oil, and it’s pre-diluted with cold brew. That’s seven components, but if you ask Powell, it’s essentially an Old-Fashioned—if you do the math.
RECIPE
This equal-parts build, combining rum, aloe liqueur, falernum and lime juice, puts Jake Powell’s pared-down, analytical approach to cocktail structure on full display.
Alabaster
Get to know
JAKE POWELL
learn more
Analytical
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Weirdest drink request you've ever gotten:
We once had a bartender that no-call/no-showed after one day of training. Two days later, he came in on a date and called for a drink as if it were a well-known classic. We Googled it, and turns out he had written it, and the only evidence of it was some Reddit post he had made. Wish I had half the confidence of that guy.
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
“Every rush ends. When you’re in the weeds and it feels like it’s never going to end, it always does. Just keep making drinks.” —Angry Joe, a poolside bartender at the Stuart, Florida, Marriott when I was an annoying towel boy just getting into bartending.
Hometown: Jensen Beach, Florida
Years as a bartender: 9
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
A Zombie Ramos. It was during the pandemic and I was very bored. It was not good.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known
five years ago?
People know what they like. Help them deepen their arsenal by helping them discover drinks that are similar. Don’t try to change people’s taste completely.
JAKE POWELL
Kat Foster honed her bartending skills at fine dining restaurants like New York’s Aquavit and Eleven Madison Park. But what really allowed her to dial up her own voice was single-handedly launching the beverage program at Brooklyn’s Margot earlier this year. Drawing on her upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, Foster is flexing a repertoire of passed-down Appalachian kitchen techniques—
including pickling, canning and fermentation—to execute complex culinary cocktails that flow with Margot’s ever-changing menu of seasonal, seafood-centric cuisine.
The bar’s cocktail menu consists of ambitious originals plus a section of classics, giving guests several points of entry into a drinking experience that balances surprise and satisfaction. The Windowsill Thief—an original cocktail whose name alludes to pilfered pie—incorporates amaro, thyme liqueur, sherry, brown butter–washed rye and lacto-fermented cherry syrup. The fermentation process, Foster says, lends the cherries a savory, meaty quality.
Tapping into these ancestral modes of cooking isn’t for the sake of showmanship; Foster is after profound flavors, foremost, as well as an opportunity to unlock a deeply personal dimension in her drinks. She explains: “Those historic foodways made me fascinated in a part of my family’s history that I hadn’t really given a ton of credence to for a long time.”
Brooklyn, New York
RECIPE
Lacto-fermented cherry syrup and brown butter–washed rum come together with thyme liqueur and amaro in this signature drink, designed to evoke the flavors of a pie left on a windowsill.
Windowsill Thief
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
Asking for help is a sign of professionalism, not weakness.
Raucous
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Not every bar can claim that four in 10 cocktail orders are simply “bartender’s choice.” But at Small Victory, an intimate sliver of a bar near the state capitol in Austin, Texas, Laura Maddox’s goal—to make “a bartender’s dream bar to work in”—has helped foster a team that’s earned the deep trust of Austin bargoers. That, for her, begins with the details (a cracking custom-ice program; hyperorganized bar stations; glassware-specific dishwashers
—they’re all here) and with mentorship.
She and partner Josh Loving oversee a bartender training program that’s considered the gold standard in Austin. Their “cocktail compendium”—a house manual unpacking the classic cocktail canon and the scores of variations built on it—is the centerpiece. “It’s got to be over 500 or 600 drinks deep at this point,” she says. Obsession with quality also dictates that every spirit that makes it in the door must be delicious served neat, at room temp.
Those that earn a spot on the backbar find themselves put to use in revived classics, which make up the core of Small Victory’s offerings. Maddox pores over old cocktail books to uncover hidden gems like the FrankenJack, a dry Martini enhanced with apricot liqueur and triple sec, and finds creativity within the confines of “tweaking the ingredients just so.” For now, she feels comfortable with her originality being defiantly unflashy. “There are so many amazing drinks that have already been created, yet are not appreciated, and I want to share them with people.”
Austin, Texas
RECIPE
A faithful approach to the tequila classic is updated only in the fine-tuning of ratios.
Tequila Daisy
What do you know now that
you wish you'd known
five years ago?
Personality always trumps drink-making skills when it comes to coworkers and staff.
Excellence
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
As beverage director at Accomplice Bar in Los Angeles, Ramsey Musk has found a way to creatively unite his visual sensibilities as a graphic designer with a pleasantly offbeat list of drinks that read like a call-and-response from his childhood. Musk grew up in an artistic family in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, surrounded by a beach-tourist drinking culture swimming in poorly made Mai Tais. After swapping coasts for college, Musk settled in L.A. and honed his bartending skill first at the now-closed Filipino restaurant Ma’am Sir, where he found ways to elevate, and better appreciate, tropical drinks—think clarified Piña Colada milk punches.
But it’s at Accomplice that Musk learned that “a cocktail doesn’t just have to be a riff on the Manhattan—you can do whatever you want, as long as you understand the structure of flavor, where you need bitter, heat, acid, sugar.” Musk is also a natural storyteller. He now produces ’zines with original writing and graphic design as a way to give narrative shape to his nostalgia-fueled drinks. His latest drop is about “bringing people to a specific place and time,” Musk says. A savory Martini with celery gin and carrot eau de vie conjures the vichyssoise Mom made on sick days; a stirred drink made with mezcal, fig leaf and bitter blueberry cordial is a summertime jaunt through a Connecticut meadow; and for a taste of Grandma’s Christmastime orange salad, he’s got a Gibson riff with red onion, chile pepper and a topping of orange air. Or, if you prefer to head back to the 1990s (raises hand), Musk’s got just the Appletini for you.
Los Angeles, California
RECIPE
Clarified sour apple cordial forms the core
of this throwback ’tini filtered through a thoroughly modern lens.
Apple Martini
Weirdest drink request
you've ever gotten:
Stoli Blueberry Bloody Mary. Unhinged, but they loved it, so who am I to judge?
SASSY
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Jake Powell has an innate feel for the internal logic that makes a cocktail exceptional—the way ingredients contribute structure, flavor and texture in differing and sometimes unexpected proportions. As the bar manager at Death & Co. Denver, Powell uses his self-described “mathematical” process to doggedly shape his drink concepts until they are not only balanced but efficient in build, often with an eye toward reducing waste. Take Powell’s Desert Bloom cocktail, for example: He honed the delicate fruit and floral qualities shared by mezcal, raicilla, pear eau de vie, white port, blanc vermouth and orange bitters by fine-tuning volumes within the framework of a 50/50 Martini, maintaining the equal-parts split between full-proof spirits and fortified ingredients even as the ingredients list ballooned, always focused on “fitting together puzzle pieces to fit the formula.”
Powell entered bartending via craft beer, but encountering the Death & Co. book Modern Classic Cocktails is what steered him toward bartending. So it’s nothing short of “surreal,” he says, to be now stationed at the very institution that provided the foundation for his analytical style. A Florida native, Powell has been nomadic for years, jumping between New York and Australia before landing in Colorado. That he’s become a big supporter of the Denver bar community—including organizing speaking events at Death & Co. for visiting bartenders—suggests he’s planning to stay awhile.
Of course, any time he wants to be reminded of home, he’s got a drink for that. The Wizard in Black cocktail is Powell’s take on two South Florida staples: Cuban coffee and plantains. It contains aged rum, Punt e Mes, banana liqueur, Angostura bitters, salt and orange oil, and it’s pre-diluted with cold brew. That’s seven components, but if you ask Powell, it’s essentially an Old-Fashioned—if you do the math.
Denver, Colorado
RECIPE
This equal-parts build, combining rum, aloe liqueur, falernum and lime juice, puts Jake Powell’s pared-down, analytical approach to cocktail structure on full display.
Alabaster
Weirdest cockail experiment you've ever attempted:
A Zombie Ramos. It was during the pandemic and I was very bored. It was not good.
Analytical
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
As the bar manager at two-Michelin-starred Atomix in New York, Marc Rodriguez is continuously set to R&D mode. He’s instituted a lab-like cocktail program that is as ambitious as the wildly creative Korean cuisine exiting chef Junghyun Park’s kitchen. With little prior experience working with Korean food and beverages, the alum of Nightingale 9 and Marta swiftly rose to the challenge of making ingredient-focused drinks to pair with Atomix’s dishes, calling on everything from a vast array of sojus, loose teas and persimmon to smoked seaweed, kokum and house-fermented elixirs—despite the lack of any established playbook to follow.
“Korean drinking culture was never super cocktail-heavy,” explains Rodriguez, who has, since joining the bar team, immersed himself in studying Korean language. “We’re using Korean ingredients in cocktails in ways that they were never traditionally used.”
One of the things that sets Rodriguez’s program apart is his insistence on crafting pretty much all of the nonspirit components of Atomix’s cocktails in-house (kombucha is one exception), from Sichuan peppercorn tincture to kelp syrup. With sustainability in mind, Rodriguez also employs preservation techniques with seasonal ingredients to prolong their use and cut down on waste. Each new drink—sometimes at a clip of a half-dozen a week—is workshopped through tastings with Atomix’s research-and-development chef, Ruben Hernandez Mosquero. “I’ve made, like, eight iterations of a drink with lacto-fermented plum juice until I was finally like, Okay, got it,” he says.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
RECIPE
An unconventional cocktail ingredient—butternut squash—drives the flavor in this drink, alongside curry leaf–infused oat milk, two types of citrus, acidified syrup and both gin and rye.
Butternut Squash No. 1
WEIRDest drink request
you've ever gotten:
Mezcal mixed with water, no ice.
Eccentric
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Joining the gin-focused bar Dutch Courage three years ago prompted Baltimore bartender Kim Vo to deepen her understanding of the botanical spirit. This narrowing of focus has resulted in a fluency that enables her to upend expectations, even beyond the realm of gin classics. Tapping into a strongly intuitive, personal style, Vo loves “reading” guests: probing their tastes and responding with original cocktails that are “a little more fun and unexpected,” says Vo, “but ultimately hit the craving that they’re looking for.”
Her cocktail Petals for Armor, for instance, adds peach schnapps and green tea to the traditional Gin & Tonic build in proportions that lend earthiness and fruit notes without disrupting the drink’s off-dry character. Vo is also constantly collecting what she calls life’s “snapshot” moments that inspire new drinks. For her La Cosecha (Spanish for “the harvest”), “I really wanted to hit that late-summer vibe,” she says, “something crushable.” To achieve the desired effect, Vo juiced a whole bushel of corn and made a stock reduction out of the husks and cobs before mixing it with mezcal, sherry, Nixta Licor de Elote and watermelon. The result was “corn-forward ... smoky, juicy and herbaceous,” according to Vo, a master class in foregrounding a star flavor and complementing with backup vocals.
Fresh off strong showings at competitions like Speed Rack, where she was a national finalist, Vo is poised to raise the profile not just of her bar, but of her city, one gin cocktail at a time. “I’m so ingrained in this place,” says Vo. “Baltimore, especially as far as bars and cocktails go, is very much growing. But I would also say at this point that it’s super slept-on.”
Baltimore, Maryland
RECIPE
Green tea brings an earthy, grassy quality to this layered take on the G&T, which gets a spiced kick from Becherovka.
Petals for Armor
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
Take your time and do things the right way;
it saves effort on the back end.
Perspective is everything.
SnapshoT
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
New York, New York
As the bar manager at two-Michelin-starred Atomix in New York, Marc Rodriguez is continuously set to R&D mode. He’s instituted a lab-like cocktail program that is as ambitious as the wildly creative Korean cuisine exiting chef Junghyun Park’s kitchen. With little prior experience working with Korean food and beverages, the alum of Nightingale 9 and Marta swiftly rose to the challenge of making ingredient-focused drinks to pair with Atomix’s dishes, calling on everything from a vast array of sojus, loose teas and persimmon to smoked seaweed, kokum and house-fermented elixirs—despite the lack of any established playbook to follow.
“Korean drinking culture was never super cocktail-heavy,” explains Rodriguez, who has, since joining the bar team, immersed himself in studying Korean language. “We’re using Korean ingredients in cocktails in ways that they were never traditionally used.”
One of the things that sets Rodriguez’s program apart is his insistence on crafting pretty much all of the nonspirit components of Atomix’s cocktails in-house (kombucha is one exception), from Sichuan peppercorn tincture to kelp syrup. With sustainability in mind, Rodriguez also employs preservation techniques with seasonal ingredients to prolong their use and cut down on waste. Each new drink—sometimes at a clip of a half-dozen a week—is workshopped through tastings with Atomix’s research-and-development chef, Ruben Hernandez Mosquero. “I’ve made, like, eight iterations of a drink with lacto-fermented plum juice until I was finally like, Okay, got it,” he says.
RECIPE
An unconventional cocktail ingredient—butternut squash—drives the flavor in this drink, alongside curry leaf–infused oat milk, two types of citrus, acidified syrup and both gin and rye.
Butternut Squash No. 1
Get to know
Marc Rodriguez
learn more
Eccentric
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
The time I used five-year aged sea snail fish sauce in a Martini to make The World’s Dirtiest Martini. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t great.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known
five years ago?
Creating a cocktail list is more than putting together a group of tasty drinks. It’s about looking at the list as an entire body of work, with the understanding that each cocktail is playing a different part, and each part is important to making the list balanced and appropriate for the venue it is featured at.
Years as a bartender: 9
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Mezcal mixed with water, no ice.
The drink that got you interested in bartending and why:
The Negroni, because it was the first drink I ever tried to make before I started my career and mistakenly thought it was going to be easy because it only had three ingredients. After making it and realizing how bad it was, I really wanted to understand what made one Negroni better than another, which led me to asking a neighborhood bartender too many questions, which then led to me barbacking and eventually bartending a few months later.
Marc rodriguez
Baltimore, Maryland
Joining the gin-focused bar Dutch Courage three years ago prompted Baltimore bartender Kim Vo to deepen her understanding of the botanical spirit. This narrowing of focus has resulted in a fluency that enables her to upend expectations, even beyond the realm of gin classics. Tapping into a strongly intuitive, personal style, Vo loves “reading” guests: probing their tastes and responding with original cocktails that are “a little more fun and unexpected,” says Vo, “but ultimately hit the craving that they’re looking for.”
Her cocktail Petals for Armor, for instance, adds peach schnapps and green tea to the traditional Gin & Tonic build in proportions that lend earthiness and fruit notes without disrupting the drink’s off-dry character. Vo is also constantly collecting what she calls life’s “snapshot” moments that inspire new drinks. For her La Cosecha (Spanish for “the harvest”), “I really wanted to hit that late-summer vibe,” she says, “something crushable.” To achieve the desired effect, Vo juiced a whole bushel of corn and made a stock reduction out of the husks and cobs before mixing it with mezcal, sherry, Nixta Licor de Elote and watermelon. The result was “corn-forward ... smoky, juicy and herbaceous,” according to Vo, a master class in foregrounding a star flavor and complementing with backup vocals.
Fresh off strong showings at competitions like Speed Rack, where she was a national finalist, Vo is poised to raise the profile not just of her bar, but of her city, one gin cocktail at a time. “I’m so ingrained in this place,” says Vo. “Baltimore, especially as far as bars and cocktails go, is very much growing. But I would also say at this point that it’s super slept-on.”
RECIPE
Green tea brings an earthy, grassy quality to this layered take on the G&T, which gets a spiced kick from Becherovka.
Petals for Armor
Get to know
Kim Vo
learn more
Snapshot
Your Approach to Cocktails, in One Word:
What part of your job do you like most?
I love taking care of my bar team. It’s a fine balance between coaching and holding them to my high expectations, but also being empathetic and understanding. Their well-being means the world to me.
What part of your job do you like most?
I wish I didn’t doubt myself, and that I went into this industry with more confidence. I was too scared to participate in cocktail programs, events and competitions. Now I know that not only am I more than capable, but everyone takes a different path, and the constant pursuit of growth is what drives us all forward.
Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland
Years as a bartender: 9
Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
A Hendrick’s Gibson, using some of the pickled onion brine.
Best piece of advice you got when starting out:
This is a fast-paced industry and it’s easy to be caught in the moment, but it is important to step back. Take your time and do things the right way; it saves effort on the back end. Perspective is everything.
Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
An umami-forward, Negroni-inspired cocktail, using a touch of a fish sauce–based Vietnamese dipping sauce called
Kim Vo
nước chấm.