About Me

Hi there! My name is Jeffrey Morgenthaler and I’ve been tending bar since 1996 and writing about it since 2004. I started tending bar while getting my degree in Interior Architecture, and slowly I came to the conclusion that bartending was what I really loved, and that I might as well drop everything and focus on being a professional bartender. Over the years I have strived, both behind the bar and through this website, to elevate the experience of having a drink from something mundane to something more culinary.

If you’d like to read my official bio, here it is:

Jeffrey Morgenthaler is an award-winning bartender and author from Portland, Oregon. He has worked behind the bar full-time since 1996 everywhere from neighborhood taverns and college nightclubs, to fine restaurants and upscale cocktail bars. He is the co-owner of Portland’s newest cocktail bar, Pacific Standard. Prior to this, he managed the seven-time James Beard Award-nominated bar program at Clyde Common, and the highly celebrated Pepe Le Moko.

Jeffrey has been writing about his experience with bartending and cocktails for several years at his website, jeffreymorgenthaler.com. He has been a regular columnist for Playboy Magazine, and contributes to a myriad of other publications, including Imbibe, Fine Cooking, and Punch. He is the best-selling author of the world’s first book devoted entirely to cocktail technique, “The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique” 

He is an educator and speaker, sharing his work at Bar Convent Berlin, the P(our) Symposium, Tales of the Cocktail, and Portland Cocktail Week. He is the head judge of the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and regularly judges cocktail competitions such as the Heaven Hill Bartender of the Year competition and Diageo World Class. His recipes and wisdom have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wine Enthusiast and Wired magazines, and immortalized in classic cookbooks such as The New York Times Cookbook and The Joy of Cooking.

Playboy magazine named him one of the top ten mixologists in the United States, Food and Wine Magazine named him one of the ten most influential bartenders of the past decade, Drinks International voted him the 9th most influential bartender in the world, and Thrillist named him one of the 15 most influential bartenders of the past hundred years.

He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast. In 2018 he released his second book, Drinking Distilled and was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where he fortunately didn’t burn the place down with his version of the classic flaming coffee drink, the Spanish Coffee.