Philip Greene

At Victoria University School of Law in Wellington, New Zealand, Philip Greene’s early professional work took shape in 2007–2007 as InternetNZ Senior Research Fellow in cyberlaw. That law-and-research base later carried into a career that moves between formal counsel and the more social terrain of food and drink culture. Today, he is trademark and Internet Counsel of U.S. Marine Corps, founder and Founders Board member of Museum of the American Cocktail, board of directors member of National Food & Beverage Foundation, toastmaster and Honorary Bartender of OSS Society, and contributing columnist of The Daily Beast. Taken together, those roles show a practice built on institutions, archives, and regular public writing.

The Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans is one of the organizing centers of Philip Greene’s work, placing him inside a city where cocktail history remains a living part of the trade. His schedule also reflects a cadence familiar to anyone who works between scholarship and service: lecture room, seminar table, and ceremonial bar. The line lands in the register his work occupies: literary, social, and anchored in keeping tradition active.

Recent appearances show the same mix of research and presentation. On March 30, 2026, he presented, with world renowned bartender and cocktail historian Dale DeGroff (aka King Cocktail) a cocktail seminar on the topic of his new SOURS book, held at Lockworks Tavern in Branford, CT. Then, on December 10, 2025, he produced and co-presented at a Holiday Cocktail Seminar at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. In each setting, the craft is the same: history handled as public-facing work, with the talk structured as carefully as the drink.

Philip's signature dishes include To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail, A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, SOURS, and Army & Navy Cocktail. The list shows the range of his subject matter: Hemingway, cocktail lineage, Paris in the 1920s, sour drinks, and a classic Army & Navy build, all approached with a historian’s attention to context and a collector’s sense of how forms travel.

Philip's honors include Best New Book (2013). The award sits alongside a body of work defined less by spectacle than by sustained attention to the institutions, narratives, and drink traditions that keep cocktail culture legible.