Jeffrey Morgenthaler: Portland

When Jeffrey Morgenthaler of Clyde Common got fed up with commercial tonic water, he made his own. “I don’t like the sweetness,” he says. “There’s a lack of depth in the flavor profile." For his housemade version, he boiled cinchona bark with citrus peel, citric acid and lemongrass to extract the quinine, then filtered it and cut it with agave syrup. “The final product, to me, is that flavor, not the thrill of [making] it,” he says. Morgenthaler lists this recipe on his blog, along with how to make ginger beer and how not to make a mint julep. “I’m constantly [traveling] and talking to people, I go to bars, sit back and watch,” he says. During a recent visit to Hamburg, Germany’s Le Lion had Morgenthaler in awe of freezer-stored glassware, a practice he’s still trying to implement at Clyde Common. He came to the Portland bar in early 2009 armed with a preference for gin (“Vodka is too much of a blank slate while gin provides a neutral spirit with a mild starting point”), a stash of orange bitters aging in a Madeira wine cask and his charm. “What I fell in love with was bartending, not just the search for flavors, but the hospitality, that social aspect. I want to continue moving forward and keep learning.”

Current ingredient obsession: Aged rums