Make Mynah Double

Katie Stryjewski has loved birds since she was a kid, and she always wanted to be an ornithologist. She majored in biological sciences at Louisiana State University, which has one of the best ornithology programs and natural history museums in the country. While there, she studied the genetics of Jamaican Streamertail hummingbirds and went on a museum expedition to Peru. She completed her PhD at Boston University in 2016. There, she studied the evolutionary genomics of a radiation of finches in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and spent nearly seven months in the field. Her work has been published in multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nature Ecology and Evolution and PNAS. She also published a short essay about her fieldwork in Natural History magazine. After receiving her PhD, she did her postdoctoral work on bird vision at Harvard University.

She became interested in cocktails while writing up her dissertation. Unable to afford the prices at most Boston bars, she instead bought as many obscure ingredients as she could afford and learned to make the drinks at home herself. She started her cocktail blog, Garnish, in 2015. Following her postdoc, she took advantage of the time she had at home with her newborn son to grow her Instagram account, @garnish_girl, and turned it into a paying job creating content for liquor brands and promoting products on her feed. Since then, she has been featured inChilled Magazine, Fox News,Forbes,The Wall Street Journal, Liquor.com, Boston.com, and others. Her first book,Cocktails, Mocktails and Garnishes from the Garden, was published by Mango in 2021.

No matter how long she works with cocktails, her first love will always be birds, and she has always wanted a way to combine these two interests. And so, this book was born!