The first time I heard about Murray Stenson, the legendary Seattle bartender who died last week, he was refusing to accept an award.
It was July 2010 and I was attending Tales of the Cocktail, the annual booze-biz confab in New Orleans. Stenson was nominated for two Spirited Awards — the convention’s version of the Oscars — for Bartender of the Year and the Lifetime Achievement Award. But he had no intention of leaving Seattle and attending the ceremony. This, to my mind, made Stenson an instant badass, the cocktail equivalent of George C. Scott or Marlon Brando thumbing his nose at the Academy by throwing their trinkets back at them.
The second time I heard of Stenson was in connection to the Last Word, an obscure pre-Prohibition cocktail that became all the rage in mixology circles in the late aughts and early 2010s. Stenson was given credit for digging up the old drink, an improbable mixture of gin, lime juice, Chartreuse, and Maraschino liqueur, and putting it on the menu at the Zig Zag Café, where he worked. The bartender grapevine saw to it that the Last Word soon swept the nation. Its equal-parts formula of spirit-juice-sweet liqueur-herbal liqueur became the template of hundreds of new cocktails. This, to me, made Stenson a seer and pioneer in mixology.
When I finally met Stenson, however, he didn’t strike me as either a rebel or a trailblazer. We were both guests at a Seattle-area wedding in 2011. He was a balding
