Blithe Spirit

FAN FAIR

STEVEN GRASSE UNCORKS A NEW LIQUOR

Steven Grasse spent nearly two decades in the advertising business, building a small but attention-grabbing company in Philadelphia called Gyro Worldwide and creating campaigns for everyone from R. J. Reynolds Tobacco to Lilly Pulitzer, before it all “just snapped,” he says. No longer would he help to foster the commodification of our culture. He wanted to get his hands dirty, to make things. Rebranding his agency Quaker City Mercantile, he resolved to quit promoting a “creed of consumption, free living, and hedonistic disregard,' the company’s Web site puts it, in favor of something more benevolent and meaningful.

His latest project is an 80-proof liqueur he calls Root, a throwback to the alcoholic root teas that were popular in the Northeast before Prohibition. (Credit the pharmacist Charles Hires with inventing and popularizing the temperance-friendly alternative, root beer.) Experimenting with old recipes, Grasse has perfected a highly potent, goldenbrown elixir combining ingredients such as birch bark, cinnamon, cardamom, and allspice with a sugarcane base. After test-marketing Root in Philadelphia, he’s slowly rolling it out in other cities this fall.

Grasse isn’t a newcomer to the world of spirits. He helped create Hendrick’s gin for William Grant & Sons, and invented a whimsically retro marketing campaign to go with it. Then, after purchasing the estate of Norman Collins—better known as Sailor Jerry, the Greatest Generation’s favorite tattoo artist— Grasse launched Sailor Jerry spiced rum, the fastest-growing rum brand in the country last year. He also presides over a Philadelphia boutique and artists’ collective, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (named for an influential 1936 essay by cultural critic Walter Benjamin). And then there are the 72 acres of land he owns in rural New Hampshire which he hopes to turn into a working organic farm. “The hippiedippy Birkenstock stuff—1 have those principles,” he insists. “But I also know the marketplace.”

AARON GELL