Jon Christiansen has been living a life behind bars since 1993, a scant year after earning a degree in anthropology from Whitman College, which included time working on fishing boats, and a cattle ranch, running from campus police and occasionally drinking something besides cheap beer and whiskey. His first real restaurant job was in Seattle at Tulio, where he learned to serve classy people classy drinks and has since slung drinks at dens of sin, and snazzy cocktail joints all over Seattle. Work on his palate began at Tulio where Jon took the role of bar manager and wine guy, curating an award winning wine list, grilling kitchen folk for details, and slinging classic cocktails to people with combed hair and Brioni ties.

Fast forward a couple decades, and Jon is still working the shtick, albeit with a day job attached to it, advising for five top-notch cocktail programs and creating cocktail lists quarterly and curating spirit lists for the lot of them. He has won cocktail contests high and low, authored recipes for nationally distributed Brovo Spirits, including the gold medal winning Amaro 11, Witty dry vermouth available in wells at Nordstrom bars and across the U.S. and co-authored Brovo’s orange curacao. Jon has had the pleasure of playing at Modernist Cuisine’s kitchen on several occasions, feeding the exploration of technique into finding flavor and continues pushing boundaries with his cocktail programs with the help of a great bunch of mixologists and nerds.