Aromatic compounds are essential components in many everyday products such as plastics, dyes, pharmaceuticals, or flavoring agents. Furthermore, aromatic hydrocarbons play an essential role as organic solvents in the industry. So far, these aromatic solvents are produced from petroleum which is associated with energy-intensive processes, ecological drawbacks, and the dependency on fossil resources. To access alternative and sustainable ways to produce such challenging chemicals, we employ microbial catalysis in highly solvent-tolerant and metabolically engineered strains of Pseudomonas taiwanensis. We demonstrate the production of several hydrophobic aromatics such as 4-ethylphenol and anisole. Furthermore, we are working on the production of an industrially important solvent, ethylbenzene, by employing cyanobacterial aldehyde-deformylating oxygenases, which have already been used for the biosynthesis of alkanes. We perform pathway optimization by adaptive laboratory evolution and strain and enzyme engineering to approach the solubility limit of our hydrophobic products. The final goal of our work is to achieve the formation of a second phase of the aromatic compound, which would allow one to harvest the pure product from the bacterial culture.