Don Lee, Thinker and Tinkerer

It’s hard to overstate Don Lee’s impact on the cocktail industry. He seems to be simultaneously moving in fifteen directions while plotting his next move. He was there at the beginning of the craft cocktail resurgence, sitting at the bars at Milk & Honey, Pegu Club, and Death & Co., asking questions of the bartenders and taking notes. In the years since, he left his job in IT and started working at Jim Meehan’s acclaimed cocktail mecca, PDT, developed bar tools for Cocktail Kingdom, modernized techniques in the cocktail community, built his own Jim Henson-style puppets, and is now working with kindred spirits Dave Arnold and Greg Boehm to open a new bar, Existing Conditions.