Kate Gerwin, a widely celebrated bartender and hospitality consultant, is well-known in the drinks industry for being the first woman world bartending champion and first American to win the Bols Around the World Bartending Championship in 2014; but this is just one of her many worthy accomplishments. In her more-than-20-year career, Gerwin has been named by Drinks International as one of the industry’s “Top 100 Most Influential Figures in the World.” Between 2019 and 2023, she worked as a certified advanced master sommelier for some of Napa’s top wineries, consulted on the docuseries Bar Rescue, and was a finalist in the Netflix reality competition series “DRINK MASTERS.” She taught at the Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts campus in Scottsdale AZ and the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier VT, and she is currently one of the instructors for the prestigious Bar 5 Day program, hosted yearly at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. In 2015, She was inducted into the Tales of the Cocktail Hall of Fame Catalyst Awards, which celebrates the contributions of hard-working people to the spirits and cocktail industry and is one of the only “peer-judged” awards in the industry. But it is her bar and distillery named Happy Accidents in Albuquerque NM that represents her biggest passion. When she and her long-time business partner, Blaze Montana, opened Happy Accidents in 2021 on the tail end of the pandemic, they aimed to set a new standard in cocktail bars. Happy Accidents won “Best New American Cocktail Bar” twice at the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards and twice at the Liquor.com awards. Kate’s crowning moment happened in 2024, as the bar was awarded “Best U.S. Bar Team” at the Spirited Awards, the award Kate has coveted the most. Kate and Blaze have also received the Drinks Industry’s Innovator of the Year Award from Seven Fifty Daily in 2023. Kate was awarded “Bartender of the Year” in 2023 and the bar brought home the prestigious “Bar of the Year” award at Bar & Restaurant Expo awards in Las Vegas in 2024. Kate is currently designing a glassware collection for Onis, a prize for her global win in the Glassology competition in 2023 in Athens, Greece.