Cocktail culture is thriving in large part due to a passionate contingent of exceptional bartenders and mixologists. This feature places a spotlight on the craftspeople behind the bar, and not just the structure itself. Meet www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com, bartender at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon.

1. Do you consider yourself a bartender or a mixologist? What’s the difference?
I think of myself as a bartender who takes his job very seriously. I’d be just as happy working in a sports bar on a beach somewhere as I am working at my current job in downtown Portland. I love creating cocktails, I love the craft of bartending, but I also love the enjoyment of a bar as a sort of sacred social space, a space that has helped define us as a civilization for millennia.

2. How did you become interested in tending bar?
Tending bar was only supposed to be a summer job while I was in college, I had no intention of pursuing it professionally as I have. But my love of cooking combined with years spent behind the bar eventually blossomed into a real love for the craft and eventually replaced architecture as my lifelong endeavor.

3. What’s your first cocktail memory?
It must have been around 1994 and I had recently discovered a Bombay Sapphire martini at home (I drank them sans vermouth, shaken, with, like, a lemon wedge on the side) So I’m with a friend one night, pontificating about my ideal martini and bemoaning the fact that nobody in our little college town served a good one.

So we get a wild hair and drive to Portland in search of a great martini at ten o’clock at night. “I know a place” says my friend. Two hours later we’re bellied up to this posh place in the city, and I look the bartender dead in the eye and say, “Sapphire martini, bone dry, with a twist.” I’m feeling pretty good about my order. The bartender takes out a cocktail glass and fills it with ice, you know, to chill the glass. I raise my hand and say, “Actually, I’d like that up, please. No ice.”

Brilliant. The bartender just looked at me and went back to what he was doing.

4. What’s your current favorite spirit or liquor?
I’ve been rediscovering aged rums lately. I love the challenge of making drinks with rum that don’t scream “sweet” or “fruit punch”.

5. Which cocktail is past its prime?
Oh, I don’t know, I think taste is somewhat cyclical. We’re drinking Manhattans, Sazeracs and Old Fashioneds these days, drinks that twenty years ago were widely dismissed as the sorts of drinks only old men drank. Who knows, the hot drink ten years from now might just be a Harvey Wallbanger.

6. What’s the cocktail of the future?
Whatever the robots are drinking.

7. Describe one of your original cocktails. What’s it called and what was your approach?
One of my favorite drinks that I’ve come up with lately is called The Beauty Beneath. I wanted to explore a more savory side of rum and the combination of 12-year Appleton Estate, chinato, Cointreau and bitters ended up doing the trick.

8. Do you have a cocktail mentor, and what did they teach you?
I’d already been bartending for a while, but it was sometime in the late Nineties that I discovered the (now defunct) Hotwired Cocktail website, written by a San Francisco bartender named Paul Harrington. His passion for bartending as a craft, understanding of its history, and elegant prosaic writing style inspired me to delve deeper into the profession I’d already been a part of for several years.

9. Outside of your bar, what’s your favorite bar in town and why?
There’s a good old pub near my house. 12 beers on tap, great sandwiches, huge deck in the summer, friendly staff, televisions and newspapers everywhere. That’s my kind of place. But when I’m in the mood for a cocktail I always go to the Teardrop Lounge.

10. Who’s another bartender/mixologist you respect and why?
I have always admired the bartenders I strive to be. My most recent role model is a German bartender I met while delivering a presentation at the BCB in Berlin this past fall, Gonçalo De Souza Monteiro. We have similar career arcs – both exploring architecture before falling in love with bartending – and a very similar set of bartending philosophies. I think he’s one of the best practicing bartenders out there right now, and sadly very few people in the United States know who he is. I hope to help change that.

11. If you had a bar of your own, what would you call it?
That’s a secret.

12. What’s the best simple cocktail for people to make at home, and what’s the recipe?
Everyone should experience the true pleasure of a simple Daiquiri. Take two ounces of aged rum (I like the El Dorado 15-year for this one), one ounce of freshly-squeezed lime juice, and 3/4 ounce of a 2:1 ratio simple syrup. Shake it well and strain into a cocktail glass.