It’s not every day that you get the chance to have a celebrated cocktail expert mix you a drink. Starting this Friday, though, patrons at Northport’s Yard & Lake will be able to avail themselves of that opportunity on a weekly basis – at least for the rest of the summer.

Yard & Lake has tapped Philip Greene, a noted cocktail historian, columnist, author, consultant, and all-around expert, for a summertime bartending residency. Most Friday evenings until the end of the season, Greene will be on hand to whip up drinks in accordance to a pre-set cocktail theme. This Friday, July 19, the theme is a celebration of Ernest Hemingway, himself a famed cocktail enthusiast and one-time northern Michigan resident.

Greene knows a thing or two about Hemingway and his impact on the cocktail landscape: In 2012, he authored To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, which blended a historical deep dive into Hemingway’s life with recipes for cocktails the author loved, popularized, or invented. The Washington Post praised the book as a “fascinating literary-booze study.”

Since then, Greene has published three additional books: The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail, A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, and Cheers! Cocktails & Toasts to Celebrate Every Day of the Year. Next February, he’ll add a fifth: Sours, a history of sour cocktails.

How did this cocktail connoisseur find his way to northern Michigan? After all, Greene’s day job means he has an office at the Pentagon, of all places, where he’s worked for the past 15 years as the trademark counsel for the United States Marine Corps. In that job, he’s the man responsible for managing the hundreds of registrations of the Marines brand, from the eagle, globe, and anchor emblem to the slogan, “The Few. The Proud. The Marines.”

While Greene spends most of the year living in Washington, D.C., though, he’s increasingly found himself feeling the magnetic pull of Leelanau County. When he was doing research for his book about Hemingway, Greene learned plenty about northern Michigan, thanks to the fact that the legendary author “spent all his summers over on Walloon Lake near Petoskey until he was 21 or so.” Greene learned even more about the area when his daughter Liv, an aspiring singer-songwriter, enrolled at Interlochen a little over a decade ago. The whole family subsequently fell in love with northern Michigan – particularly Northport, where they spent a summer vacation. In the late 2010s, the Greenes bought property in the area, and in 2022, they began construction on a summer/retirement house.

As of this year, that house is finally done, which means Greene is now a part-time Leelanau resident. It also means he’s looking for new opportunities to get involved with the local community, which is where Yard & Lake comes in.

“This is our 10th year coming up to Northport, and a few years ago we met Shawn Santo, the owner of Yard & Lake, at one of her other stores, Porcupine,” Greene recalls. “At some point, I let her know about my books, because she had a handful of cocktail books on the shelves at Porcupine. And then, when she opened Yard & Lake, she told me, ‘Hey, when you’re finally up here full time, it’d be fun to have you do a guest bartending gig.’”

When Greene arrived in Northport this summer, the two struck up their concept: a weekly recurring residency, with each Friday evening carrying a different cocktail theme. Hemingway was a natural pick for the debut week, given both Greene’s expertise on the subject and the proximity to the author’s birthday, which falls on July 21. All the drinks will come from Greene’s To Have and Have Another book, from the famed Hemingway Daiquiri to the Jack Rose, a cocktail featured in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.

As for other themes, Greene and Santo are still working out the full summer slate, but Greene says at least a few weeks will be dedicated to drinks from his book Cheers, which offers up a cocktail recipe for every day of the year.

For his part, Greene is extremely excited about the engagement. While he says he’s “guest-bartended a bunch of times over the past 15 years while supporting different books,” he’s never done something quite like this before.

“I was never a commercial bartender,” he laughs. “I’ve done everything else in a restaurant, which is kind of ironic.”

In particular, Greene says he’s looking forward to getting involved in the local business community and meeting some new people. He’s hopeful the gig will be the first of many opportunities to bring his expertise to the table in northern Michigan.

“I’d love to set up some mixology/cocktails 101 classes at different places around the region, or design a beverage program for a restaurant, or work with a brand by doing outreach and telling the stories behind different drinks,” Greene says. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll do what my friend Dave Wondrich [Esquire’s drinks correspondent and a James Beard Award-winning author] does, where he consults on different products with distilleries. Any of that stuff could be a lot of fun, and it’s what I think I’ll try to spend more time doing after I retire.”