How Julie Reiner and Dale DeGroff Transformed Cocktail Culture

This article is part of The Spill Awards 2025, covering the best in spirits, cocktails, bartenders and drinks culture. Find all of the stories here.

Greg Boehm, Julie Reiner and Dale DeGroff have earned Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Spill for building careers out of making us have the time of our lives. Their vision, taste and deep knowledge of cocktail culture are things we’ll be talking about for years to come. They’ve all toiled tirelessly at creating fun from empty spaces and glasses.

They brought an academic’s intellect, a designer’s vision, a chef’s palate and a producer’s ear to nightlife, dragging it from the comfortable but staid rut it was in and transforming it into a place that keeps us emotionally, physically and aesthetically engaged in the hard work of sipping cocktails into the wee hours.

For this, we salute them. If you don’t know their names, you definitely have felt the effect they’ve had on cocktail culture.

Greg Boehm: Cocktail Toolmaker, Entertainer

You may have heard about Greg Boehm’s library of rare and out-of-print cocktail books from yester-centuries. But if his 3,800+ collection of books on drinks or his family’s publishing company Mud Puddle Books (which he credits with sparking his obsession with all things cocktails) have escaped your notice, you’ve certainly run into one of the many bar tools, glasses, knives or books he’s introduced to the world via Cocktail Kingdom.

No? Then you’ve definitely been to one of his genre-redefining bars, like Katana Kitten, Superbueno or the Cabinet Mezcal Bar.

“I’m super behind the scenes, especially in the last decade, but it’s true that my work has reached many corners of the cocktail world,” Boehm says when asked to reflect on the seriousness of a Lifetime Achievement Award. “When I started Cocktail Kingdom 16 years ago, bartending was not considered a serious profession. I wanted to provide bartenders with the tools they needed to perform at a high level. Just like chefs have their own equipment, bartenders needed their own gear to differentiate themselves from people at home.”

Initially, Boehm imported barware and tools from Japan, but soon he began manufacturing his own. In the process, he launched a craze for copper barware and a range of esoteric drinks accouterments that soon even flowed into the bars of serious cocktail makers at home. In addition to gathering an empire of books (currently housed at Cocktail Kingdom’s headquarters in the West Village, available and frequently used for serious academic research) and cocktail-making tools, Boehm has also built up a fiefdom of legendary bars and a Christmas-themed series of pop-ups dubbed Miracle.

“Miracle was my mom’s idea, and it more than any of my projects has helped spread cocktail culture across the world,” Boehm says. “Now we are in the 11th year. Last year there were 207 Miracle pop-ups in the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Canada and Japan. Millions of people have tried Miracle cocktails, even Taylor Swift, who drank one at our pop-up in Kansas City.”

What’s next? He says he wants to continue pushing the Boehm gospel of balanced and thoughtful cocktails, made with the best ingredients in grand but utilitarian glassware in an inspiring setting. Plus, he is opening his first bar south of Houston Street (look for that in June).

“I’m coming full circle,” Boehm says. “I started importing Japanese barware, and then I started making my own. I’m going to release a new line of glassware [made in Japan] that looks incredibly delicate but is sturdy.”

Julie Reiner: Cocktail Bar Revolutionary, Entrepreneur

Julie Reiner was raised in Hawaii, where fresh fruit, esoteric spices and flavors, a spirit of fun and a sense of adventure pervade everyday life. That I-live-where-you-vacation mentality informed Reiner’s approach to nightlife, infusing it with whimsy and easy-breezy, sippable beauty.

Reiner opened her first bar, the Flatiron Lounge in 2003. From there, it was off to the races with the co-founding of the Pegu Club in 2005 with Audrey Saunders, then the iconic Clover Club and Leyenda in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and more recently, Milady’s in SoHo. While Clover is a paean to the classics with a dash of farm-to-table freshness in every sip, Leyenda is a celebration of Spanish drinks and food culture with fare from Chef Sue Torres, and Milady’s is a resurrected, upscale take on the classic dive bar.

Taking stock of her impact in recognition of this award, Reiner says “showing that a super quality and innovative beverage program can happen in very high volume” setting was a big part of her contribution. But Reiner also knows she has served up opportunities for other women that would have never existed otherwise.

“Quite a few of the ladies who worked with us 20 years ago are now leaders in the global drinks industry, and I couldn’t be more proud,” Reiner says. “I think that I helped influence the culture of the way people enjoy cocktails.”

Reiner has also found ways to reach cocktail enthusiasts across the world who would never find their way into one of her bars. In addition to publishing recipes in a range of publications, from The New York Times to O Magazine and serving as a judge on Netflix’s Drinks Masters, Reiner co-launched a line of ready-to-drink canned cocktails called Social Hour Cocktails with her Clover Club partner Tom Macy in 2020.

While Reiner is thrilled to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, she’s hardly ready for last call. Stay tuned for more of the same, plus. Her most recent coup was opening the Saloon at Clover Club last summer, and now she’s expanding into the private event world with a capacity to host curated parties for 200 people. “I have a few things in the works, but nothing I am ready to talk about yet,” Reiner says.

We’ll be listening when she’s ready.

Dale DeGroff: Cocktail Overlord, Author

Dale DeGroff’s mantle must surely heave. The recipient of two James Beard Awards, the TOTC Lifetime Achievement Award and a Wine Enthusiast Cocktail Legend Award (among others), DeGroff has been changing our drinking diets since the 1980s when he pioneered the concept of creative, joyful but classic cocktails at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. And he reinvented the concept of what it means to tend to bar in the process.

Not that he or his mantle has gotten used to the accolades.

“It’s mixed feelings when you get these Lifetime Achievement Awards,” DeGroff admits. “There’s something amusing about it. I think about them as sort of out-to-pasture awards. It’s a wonderful thing, but it also marks the moment when you’re reaching the zenith.”

But DeGroff has arguably been at a zenith for decades. Starting with his gourmet chef’s approach to mixing a drink, he is also founding president of the Museum of the American Cocktail, a partner in the bar training program Beverage Alcohol Resource, author of The Craft of the Cocktail and the name and vision behind DeGroff Spirits, co-founded with absinthe distiller T.A. “Ted” Breaux. And while DeGroff is always ready to hit the road again to teach up-and-coming bartenders or open up a new market for his line of spirits, he is often most animated when considering the incredible evolution of cocktail culture writ large and the role that he, and his fellow honorees, played in it.

“Greg [Boehm] has made so much available from his massive collection of 19th and early 20th century cocktail books,” DeGroff says. “He would just open his library for bartenders to come and browse.” Plus, DeGroff continues, there’s his line of useful and beautiful bar tools that pros and amateurs can utilize for making more thoughtful and tasty drinks.

“Julie [Reiner] and Audrey [Saunders] were running the two most popular fast bars in the city of New York,” he adds. “I remember in the 1970s when I was behind the bar, there were zero women. The only place you saw a woman behind a bar was in the old 42nd Street Times Square. And even as late as 1987, when we opened the Rainbow Room, Joe, who I respect tremendously and consider my mentor, he still had that old-fashioned idea.” A notion that has, thankfully, expired.

Boehm shaped cocktail culture’s brain, Reiner transformed its soul and DeGroff remade its palate. We are drinking — and living — better because of them.