Philadelphia ad man and booze baron Steven Grasse is honored as a Food & Wine innovator

Food & Wine magazine has named Philadelphia advertising executive and distillery owner Steven Grasse one of its innovators of the year.

Grasse, 58, the marketer behind brands such as Art in the Age, Quaker City Mercantile, Tamworth Distilling, Sailor Jerry Rum, Narragansett Beer, and Hendrick’s Gin, is spotlighted as a “groundbreaking talent who is changing the way we drink for the better.”

Grasse also is the author of books The Cocktail Workshop, Colonial Spirits: A Toast to Our Drunken History, The Good Reverend’s Guide to Infused Spirits, Evil Empire, Brand Mysticism, and the soon-to-publish Backcountry Cocktails: Civilized Drinks for Wild Places.

Tamworth, the craft distillery he founded in 2015, focuses on creating small-batch spirits that reflect the flora and fauna of Tamworth, N.H., the longtime haven of artists, writers, thinkers, and innovators. The brand also highlights prominent historical American events, figures, and notable geography, including figures such as Henry David Thoreau, and landmarks including New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain.

Several years ago, for example, Grasse and team tapped into a maple tree that has been growing near a New Hampshire graveyard since the colonial era. Graverobber Unholy Whiskey paid homage to an old New England superstition: that tapping a cemetery maple would disturb the dead.

It was Grasse’s Crab Trapper, a whiskey distilled with an invasive species of green crab, that made F&W’s radar: “Take that, bad crabs.”

The article also cites Deirdre Heekin at La Garagista in Vermont, Edgar Preciado of California’s Beer Thug Brewing, Ntsiki Biyela, South Africa’s first Black woman winemaker, of Aslina Wines, and Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock, creator of Cann low-dose cannabis seltzers.