The independent editorial voice of craft cocktail culture — written from behind the stick.

In March 2014, I left my last shift at PDT and rented a 200-square-foot room above a bar in Williamsburg. I had no investors, no masthead, and a notebook full of recipes I had been quietly re-testing on my days off for two years.

My name is Jenna Marlowe. I spent six years behind the stick — first at the Dead Rabbit, then at PDT — a combined run of roughly twenty-three years of bar experience shared between the founding team. We started Boobar because every cocktail website we read in 2014 was either a recipe aggregator with unverified measurements, or a glossy magazine that never named the testers. Neither was honest about what was happening in the glass.

So we made a different bet: every recipe in this publication gets made at least twice by a member of staff before it ships. Every spirit we recommend has been tasted blind against two or three comparables, on our 1,800 sq ft Brooklyn test kitchen line, by people who have actually poured for a living.

Ten years later, Boobar is still independent. We are a team of eleven — editors, bartenders, and recipe developers — and we publish a thing on the internet every week that 47,300 people open. (Mailchimp's 2024 benchmark report puts our 41.2% open rate above the media-industry median of 21.4%.) If you are reading this, you are one of the people we built the place for.

— Jenna Marlowe, founder & editor-in-chief