Robert Hess
The Microsoft executive who became one of the earliest serious cocktail educators online. Founder of DrinkBoy.com, co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, host of The Cocktail Spirit. A digital-era figure who built the infrastructure the revival needed to spread.
The internet-era founding father of cocktail education.
Robert Hess spent his day job at Microsoft for most of his working life, where he was a senior program manager. His evenings and weekends, starting in the late 1990s, he spent building what would become one of the first serious online cocktail resources: DrinkBoy.com. Launched in 1998 and updated for the next two decades, DrinkBoy was, for a generation of American cocktail enthusiasts, the place you went to learn how to make a proper Martini or find an obscure 1930s recipe. It predated the modern cocktail-blog era by a decade and the cocktail-Instagram era by closer to two.
DrinkBoy and The Cocktail Spirit
DrinkBoy was a serious site. Hess wrote essays on cocktail history, conducted recipe research, hosted discussion forums where serious bartenders and home enthusiasts argued about technique. The forums were one of the earliest places the next generation of professional bartenders—including some of the figures now most famous in the industry—found each other and started talking. The site is still online; the forums are now mostly inactive but archived.
In 2007, Hess began hosting The Cocktail Spirit, a video series sponsored by Small Screen Network, in which he and various guest experts taught cocktail recipes and techniques to a camera. The series ran for several years and produced hundreds of episodes. It was educational television for the cocktail revival, in a format and at a quality level that nobody else was producing for a general audience at the time.
The Museum
Hess co-founded the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans in 2005 with Dale DeGroff, Anistatia Miller, Jared Brown, Ted Haigh, and others. The Museum has operated continuously since, holds rotating exhibits on cocktail history, and serves as both a public-education institution and an industry gathering place. It is the closest thing the American cocktail world has to a permanent scholarly home.
The book
Hess’s The Essential Bartender’s Guide (2008) is a working reference: clear, opinionated, technically rigorous, organized for home bartenders who want to learn. It’s not the flashiest cocktail book of the era—flashier ones came along—but it’s one of the most usable, and it served as many people’s first serious cocktail manual.
What he made
Hess belongs to the revival’s quieter infrastructure tier. Where Jeff Berry rebuilt the Donn Beach catalog and Audrey Saunders ran the bar program that trained a generation, Hess built the digital and institutional scaffolding that let the revival propagate beyond the bars. The website that taught people how to make a Daiquiri at home before YouTube existed. The video series that demonstrated technique to a public audience. The museum that gave the cocktail world a physical institutional presence. The book that worked as a working bartender’s reference.
None of those are the most visible parts of the revival, but the revival wouldn’t have scaled the way it did without them. Hess is one of the figures the industry knows well and the public knows almost not at all. That asymmetry—quietly consequential infrastructure work—is what makes him worth profiling.
To go deeper
- Site DrinkBoy.com is still online; the archives are worth browsing for late-1990s and early-2000s cocktail history.
- Video series The Cocktail Spirit is archived on the Small Screen Network’s site; episodes hold up well as technique tutorials.
- Book The Essential Bartender’s Guide by Robert Hess (2008).
- Institution The Museum of the American Cocktail, now part of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum complex in New Orleans.