The Philip Duff Show
Liquor, bars, cocktails: the people and companies who make them, sell them and drink them, plus everything & everyone in-between, with your host, globetrotting spirits guy and escaped bartender, Philip Duff.
The Philip Duff Show
Brendan Bartley, GM Bathtub Gin, co-owner Hello Hello, co-founder Silent Alibi Distillery, all NYC
Brendan's a hell of a cool guy: Australian, learned distilling in parallel with his university medical and science studies back home, got a Phd from NYU, GM of New York's hugely fun Bathtub Gin, and in late 2025 he opened Hello Hello Bar and Silent Alibi distillery, both of which are in the West 26th Street space in Manhattan formerly occupied by the New York branch of Pernod-Ricard's epically failed Our/Vodka distillery program.
This is a proper long Philip-Duff-Show episode, so settle in!
We kick off talking neuroscience and Ozempic (because of course) and it quickly morphs into Brendan's career path, immigration advice, bartender training, how they got hold of a distillery smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, what they do at the distillery, and his consulting work formulating liquids for clients as well as running two bars and a distillery, and we taste their first brand, the amazing 11th Hour Coffee Liqueur, as well as a rum brand from a consulting project he's working on and a million other things besides.
Enjoy!
Brendan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/b.is.somewhere?igsh=MWI0MzEzdGJjajBiag==
11th Hour Coffee Liqueur: https://www.instagram.com/drink11thhour/
Hello Hello bar: https://www.instagram.com/hellohellobar/?hl=en
Bathtub Gin: https://www.instagram.com/bathtubginnyc/?hl=en
(Get in touch with Duff!
Podcast business enquiries: consulting@liquidsolutions.org
(PR friends: we’re only interested in having your client on if they can talk for a couple of hours about OTHER things besides their prepared speaking points or their new thing, whatever that is.
They need to be able to hang.
Oh, plus we don't edit, we won’t supply prepared or sample questions, nor listener or “reach” stats, either, and no, you can't sit in on the interview (or lurk on the Zoom.)
Retain Philip’s consulting firm, Liquid Solutions, specialised in on-trade engagement & education, liquor brand creation and repositioning: philip@liquidsolutions.org
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Hello everybody, it's Artell here with another introduction. This is a brilliant episode on a nice long one, I know you like them, with my friend Brendan Barkley. Brendan is an Australian with quite a few degrees, as we'll learn in the episode, who has a dual life as general manager and bar manager of two hotspots in New York City, the second of which is the former Aur Vodka Texting Room Distillery, which we took over. I realize not everyone will know about this, that's why I'm giving a couple introduction. So our vodka was an exit from the outlets on the Puerto Ricardo that they would open distilleries right in the middle of major cities around the world and somehow make their vodka with respect for the local ingredients. So they make it with, you know, corn in one city and wheat in another city and they use local water and all that. The first one opened in Berlin in 2013. The last one to open was New York, in fact, in 2018, and they all closed. Uh not entirely sure exactly when they stopped, but COVID kinds of helped. And very entrepreneurs were able to buy the bar distillery for pennies on the dollar, just like Brendan. And spoiler alert, in a couple of weeks, I'll have an episode with my friend Ruben Maduro of Spirit of Union Botanical Rums in Amsterdam. And believe it or not, he bought the Amsterdam our vodka tasting room distillery for uh Eurocents on the Euro, as it were. But anyway, just a bit of background as we go into this lovely chat with Brendan, which we did downstairs in the distillery, right? SmackDab in the middle of Manhattan. Enjoy. We're back with the Philip Duff show and the bowels of Hello Hello in possibly the largest distillery for blocks around. Brendan Bartley, how's things? Good man. Good to see you.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for having me. And you just got back from Australia.
SPEAKER_02:Fucking hell.
SPEAKER_01:I did. It's uh it's a tedious flight. I was 26 hours in transit, so came through the west coast. Came through the west coast.
SPEAKER_02:Oh shit, San Diego, LA?
SPEAKER_01:Uh LA. LA, Sydney. Who'd you fly with? Uh Qantas.
SPEAKER_02:There's really good deals with Qantas at the moment.
SPEAKER_01:There are, I mean, it's that they're really stammered for flights at the moment. So if you get in early, you can get some. I think I flew there$1,300 return.
SPEAKER_02:Oh no, you can get it much lower.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you get like some thousands. I think it was because of the time period going over that Christmas New Year's period. It's um, you know, everyone's trying to get home. So but it was$1,300 is not a bad deal, to be honest with you, uh, to to Australia.
SPEAKER_02:No, I it it it doesn't really matter, but uh for a friend I was looking into it because his girlfriend will be there for a few weeks in between cruise ships. She gets dropped off by one and uh gets picked up by another, and he was thinking of going out to sea or never been to Australia. Yeah. So we just like quickly looked it up, like New York, Australia return for two weeks in April. You could you could do it with Emirates, which took a little longer, but you go via Dubai, or you could do it with Qantas and you go via the west coast of the US. Both of them were like sub a thousand dollars. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Like ridiculous. That's yeah. I mean, if you go in winter, it's a good deal. Like their winter, it's a good deal. Yeah, well, I hope it'll still be sunny in April because I'm going there as well. If you go north, you go like Queensland way, should be okay. But if you're in Melbourne, you're gonna get you're gonna get some weather.
SPEAKER_02:No, we're gonna go to Brisbane for a few days, and I have never been. Oh, good part of the world. So I am stoked. I'll be seeing young Martin Lang there, who I've seen for quite a while. He's become a little bar baron there. And yeah, everyone talks about Bris Vegas. And Sam Bygraves, I think, had his inaugural sort of bartender festival there.
SPEAKER_01:So I haven't seen Sam in a minute, but yeah, we uh I I grew up 45 minutes north of Brisbane. I was in the Sunshine Coast.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, right.
SPEAKER_01:Old Queen Samboy.
SPEAKER_02:Well, let's get into that. Let's talk about the Brendan Barkley origin story, mate. Because I know you from here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. But let's talk about how you got here. Um oh, it's a long story. I I came here. We've got plenty of booze. I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We're not sure if it's a lot of. If I start flagging for me from 11th hour.
SPEAKER_01:The the the the the non-boring part is like I flew over from Western Australia. I was uh studying at UWA over there. The University of Western Australia. In Perth, presumably. Most remote city in the world.
SPEAKER_02:How long is the flight from Sydney?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, six hours. Jesus Christ. Six and a half hours. It's it's as big as it's as big as the United States, uh, the kind the size of the country. It's it are maybe bigger. Certainly. Maybe bigger. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Maybe bigger, but it's it's comparable. So yeah, I was I was living over there and uh I was doing an internship at another distillery called Hippocampus, um, run by Lex Poulson and studying psychology and medicine and helping out a friend in a bar, and then he asked me to go on my very first bartending competition. Competition? Yeah, it was the botanist one they had back in the day. Uh it was like uh the Quantro um the Remy Quantro one. And then uh it was my first one. Uh they flew me to Sydney, and then I won that, and then they flew us to Vietnam. And then uh I met Dave Oz. Well, I did meet Dave Oz, a friend of Dave Oz from Bath Sub Gin. Uh he was opening a bar called the 18th Room. And so what, you met him in where? Vienna? Vietnam. Oh, Vietnam? Yep. And then uh this guy called Joseph Barowski who owns a bunch of.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, Joe Broski, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Of course. Yep. So I met him there, and then uh we kind of kicked it off, and then three months later I got a phone call to come over and and help out a bar program in terms of sustainability and eco-friendly. And then This was just because you bumped into Joe. Yep. Amazing. Lit lit literally we had a conversation. It's a weird conversation, I think. We had this really long drive, and this is gonna be boring, but like it was literally a conversation about free will, and that that that's how we became friends, and then the rest is history.
SPEAKER_02:Uh not necessarily. How was that how hard or easy was it for you to get a uh a work permit or a visa back then?
SPEAKER_01:It's in 2018. Yeah, it was tough. It's it's still tough now. It's much tougher now. Yeah, it's but it's once you have it, you have it. I came on a J1 originally because I was still at university and I transferred to NYU. Oh. So so I kind of piggybacked on this. It was their easiest way in. Nice. Um, and then my J1 turned into my E3s. Right, yeah? Yeah. And so I've just been if you're on an E3, you can kind of renew them pretty easily. What is it, three years longer? Uh two or three years, depending on what kind of E3 you're you're banking on.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But no, it has, I think they've paused all the J1s. Yeah. If not, cancel them certainly. Because I remember I was um, as I told you, I was in Ireland before Christmas, and my nephew Aaron, who's now 20 or so, um he said, uh, yeah, we're gonna get the J1, we're gonna go to Vancouver. Yeah. And I'm like, so what? Where where did Vancouver come from? It's not like there's a bunch of Irish people there. I mean, there might be. And he's like, just don't want to go to the US. Or rather, can't. Yeah. And he's it's not about like this summer.
SPEAKER_01:I had a scare in October, Phil, where I was going over to renew my visa because you can't renew it in the country that you're to go back to Australia? Well, no, I went to London. Oh, right, okay. And um, because usually I go to Barbados or London or something like that. And uh the day before I was supposed to do my interview, they s the you know, president announced, oh, you have to go back to your home country for E3 renewals now. Which is a major pisser if you're from I was not happy and I was scared. I was like, I don't know what's about to happen. It it all went through without a hitch, but it was a very, I was so worried. It was the first time I've been worried about getting my visa here.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, they're so backed up. Um my green card was due for renewal last year, and it was going to expire in September. Okay. So in March, like a good boy, I put in for the renewal, and you get a letter saying in so many words, yeah, um, we are hopelessly backed up. So fill in this form and we'll give you a letter that extends the validity of your green card by three years, which shows you how backed up they thought they were. Now, so I uh we were living in Spain in the summer and in September. Uh-huh. First, me and then Mrs. Duff came on board. We flew back for exactly 26 hours to present that and be part of Robert Simons' Martini expo here in New York City.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So my green card is technically expired. Well, it was expired, it said expired. So that was kind of a test. Yeah. But you know, I held up this letter, and the customs agents like, yeah, or the whatever Homeland Security, or like, and then and then I uh by October I had the actual new green card, which people not that green. I'm not saying they've gone gay, but it's an extremely colourful card now. There you go. It really is.
SPEAKER_01:I I've heard them in back, I heard the shutdown really put a damper on everything, and you know, going back to liquor, even with TTB, um, there's been a lot of things that we've been doing.
SPEAKER_02:I've had I've I've been up and down with T T V it's all about the person you get.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but really what I start hearing from people was that when Donald Trump first became president in 2016, which is Jesus Christ ten years ago now, um, he gutted immigration as a sort of a a way of discouraging immigrants. Yeah, yeah. Uh and it's been that way ever since. Like I know people who got married to an American, and then you expect to get your work permit and your green card within about two or three months, and they're still waiting for it a year later. That's wild. I didn't know that. So I think that's a structural thing that's still gone. But let's go back to you. You were studying in Perth. What were you studying? Uh psychology and medicine. Psychology and medicine. Yeah. And that was gonna be what, four-year BSC or something?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I got I did my uh undergraduate in um a double degree in psychology and then wanted to transfer into Meta after that to do psychiatry. And so that's when I transferred from um data here and and went to NYU.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And did you graduate from NYU or with what? Uh my PhD in neuropsychiatry.
SPEAKER_02:So you were done how many years in Perth? Oh, I did six. Six? Yeah. So you already had your undergraduate degree? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you were studying there for what, like a PhD or a master's? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And because like your undergraduate's kind of worth nothing. Um, you and you kind of find that out really quickly. Like you leave school with an undergraduate and you're like, okay, it's the same as a high school diploma trying to find a job in your field. Um I also found that it was like half a half a side of a coin doing psychology. You're kind of missing the uh the medical side of things, and you're getting a lot of behavioral stuff. Um, so I kind of just had an inkling to get into that more. And uh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:All in research, never in clinical stuff. I don't really want to say that. It's interesting though, because now we have so many um, it's probably not the right term, but psychoactive drugs, like drugs to help people, that it would make sense that the person prescribing it understands the actual chemistry and could, for instance, read a research report or a study. But like the vast majority of therapists don't have, you know. No. And well, I didn't know until recently, not that I'm suggesting you would have gone into therapy, but um I had no idea, and maybe this is just the US, how s how female skewed it was. Apparently, 70% are female. More.
SPEAKER_01:Really? I I remember whether my first year in university, um, uh, there was probably about 800 kids uh in my first year of psych psychology, and it would have been 80 to 90 percent. That it was like trying to spot the guy. Um, and then even when I went into med, it became very um female.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, med's very female, we know that med law. Yeah, so yeah, it's just not a it wasn't a male uh there's no role models except for the therapist in Ricky Gervais's afterlife, who is a complete cunt. Did you see that series? No, I haven't. I do know about it. Oh no, he made the guy an utter cunt. It's so good. The actor is so good.
SPEAKER_00:If you haven't seen Afterlife, just watch it for that part. I've I've heard many good reports about the show, but I haven't quite got uh got ahead of it yet.
SPEAKER_01:But no, look, I I love the industry, and if I wasn't doing this, I'd I'd be doing that for sure. It's um it's interesting and it's one of the newest sciences. So there's a lot of exploration we had. We're lucky enough to have like a Nobel Prize laureate at my university. We had Dr. Barry Marshall, who's uh famous for um kind of curing stomach ulcers. Before that, it was you know, stress and everything, and then he ingested bacteria.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, pilobacter, right? And then cured it. That's him. That's him. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So um we had, you know, uh Dr. Archer Fox, and she and her team discovered paraspicles in the human body and a bunch of really great educators there. So I was really enamored with the field.
SPEAKER_02:It is it is odd. You know, it's it's like the meme, like all all, you know, young women have uh anxiety. It's like I don't know why I have anxiety. I've just listened to 18 hours of murder podcasts and had four liters of coffee. Like, where where could it be coming from? We're still looking for the person.
SPEAKER_00:Possibly anything I'm doing with my day, but yeah, no, but it's it's it's such an interesting, you know.
SPEAKER_01:We um we were primarily focused on um and blockers and inhibitors, and it's just a fascinating field. You know, it it it it will bore people to tears, but it's such a fascinating field.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you say blockers and inhibitors, that's one of the hot topics out there with the old Ozempic and Wigove and psilocybins and all of the fun stuff, you know. Well, the agonists in particular, because all of this is quite new. And you know, if you bear in mind, people are now raising questions about the birth control pill, which is 60 years old. Yeah. Because we've now had women, we've had cohorts of women who were on it their entire lives, so you can actually examine that. Like, what's gonna happen 10 years down the line if people find out it's like, ooh, transepatite makes you suicidal or something.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I think with a lot of these experimental things, it's we don't have a lot of case studies, long-term, long-term case studies, to find out what's actually going on. And there's no roadmap for it either. Um, it's it's why, you know, everyone should be, you know, unless you're getting prescribed to it or you have a serious medical condition, be very adverse to taking these things, you know, um, because we don't have a long-term study for it, and they should be used um with you know very skeptical mind. Um psilocybin, magic magic mushrooms, you know, is the main you know, contributor to that kind of stuff. I think of more studies on this, and so it's easier, but essentially what they're trying to do is put the roadblocker exactly where you want it in your brain. You know, and and this is why they're talking about things like you know, PTSD and so forth, is because uh your brain is the dumbest smart thing in the world. Where once it starts growing neural pathways, it doesn't want to retract them. So it's gone, okay, we've created them. Why would I not why would I want to destroy them? I mean, obviously. Yeah, so once these neural pathways come out, it's why, you know, when you get into a sinkhole of depression, it's because you know it wants to keep you know growing and growing.
SPEAKER_02:That's why you know you're you're depressed, so you listen to sad music. Yep. It's like it's like washing your car in the rain.
SPEAKER_00:Great analogy. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So once once it happens, that what these inhibitors and blocks are trying to do is, you know, we and we don't have the sense of this yet, is put that blocker exactly where you want it, you know. Yeah, and that way, you know, it it's taking a different neural pathway. So your your thinking and your mentality changes. And so, you know, those are the positive attributes that we're trying to get. Well, not me, but you know, much smarter people than me and and doctors and researchers trying to get to. Um, because it will change, it will change uh neuroscience forever.
SPEAKER_02:Well, this stuff is going at warp speed, and like you could look at the weight loss drugs as being the tip of the spear. It's like, well, everybody wants to lose weight, yeah, sure. Right? But the effect it's having, there's a big uh New York Times article. I like to drop in the fact that I read the New York Times every episode of the podcast multiple times. Um, and it was about the, you know, for people who don't know, all these Ozempics and Wagovies and Manjaros and etc., are agonists, right? They block a neuropathway uh and they have other effects as well. But these aren't just hitting your appetite for food, they're hitting your appetite for alcohol and also sex. And in the New York Times article, and every female listener is gonna go typical as soon as they hear this, apparently it really fucking kills your libido if you're a woman. Okay, and in a particular irony, although I ask all the ladies listening to bear in mind that men die 10 years earlier, uh it increases male libido. So you've got hornier, skinnier dudes, and utterly uninterested skinny ladies.
SPEAKER_01:I I I'm not as familiar with Ozepic in and its um its uh you know side you know differences with sex libido and so forth. So I can't really comment, but um yeah, these things scare the shit out of me, you know, because it's all you that there's no long-term study, is is more to the point. I I don't to you you mentioned it earlier, you don't know what's gonna happen 10, 20 years from now and the side effects and and what it does to your neuropathy and and you know the counterpoints to that. Because if it's stopping your libido, what else are you doing in your day-to-day that's stopping behavioral things? You know, yeah. Um yeah, it's it's it's a scary, scary but interesting world, I guess. Um yeah, but I I think there's some really good things that can come out of you know inhibitors and blockers, uh, especially in neuroscience in the future, um, that are positive for behavioral outcomes. Yeah. But as I think I'm not well, it kind of drops.
SPEAKER_02:Like, let's be clear. You can't always fix stuff by having a nice workout and a cold plunge. You can't always fix stuff with a positive attitude. Like some, you know, psychological issues require, or rather, are greatly helped by medication. Some people find it really, truly, truly, truly difficult to lose weight. So these things are great. But in the bigger picture, you know, it is a quick fix.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, the the the the thing here is like, you know, taking a vitamin pill instead of eating an orange. Yeah. Um drinking orange juice instead of eating an orange. Yeah, it's there's so many other benefits that come with eating an orange than just the vitamin C. So, you know, losing weight through dietary pills, you know, work for some people, and that's completely fine. Yeah, some people have to do it, and that's completely fine. Um, but for the best part, there's so many things that come with exercising and good dietary behaviors. Um, if you can, that are just so much beneficial. It's you you have to eat the orange.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Bought workout gear for at home during COVID, right? Because you couldn't work out. I've got fucking kettlebells and a pull-up bar and all that shit. But it's much better to go to the gym or go to the park. Yeah. It just really you can work out at home. You can get your boxing game, you know, on the Nintendo Switch. But the benefit of going somewhere else, leaving the house, seeing the sky, touching some grass.
SPEAKER_01:I used to do the same thing when I was studying. I could study at home, and I had, you know, an office where I'd study for uni and stuff. I was so much more productive when I went to the library at university. Just so much more productive. I can listen to my lectures online, so much more productive when I went to class.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's just being around like-minded people, it's you know what we we have tribe mentality, you know. So being around and surrounded and getting all the sensory components of actually being there is vastly better for you, in my opinion. And I think most studies will will kind of back that up.
SPEAKER_02:No, I I couldn't agree more. But we didn't come here to talk about psychoactive drugs. As much fun as it undoubtedly is. Yeah, well, one one particular psychoactive drug. Um so you had bartended in Australia, right? Yeah. In Perth only?
SPEAKER_01:No, all over uh Adelaide, Western Australia, Melbourne, Sydney. So because didn't you study in Adelaide as well? Yeah, I did uh I did um my W sets there and did some uh viticulture and aren'tology.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And is Adelaide what wine central or something? It is wine centre, man. And Adelaide.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, look, Adelaide is a beautiful part of the world. Great produce, great wine. The Adelaide Hills are like a 30-minute drive from the city, and some of the best wineries up there. I really do enjoy going up there.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I'd love to go there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and you get the Barossa just there as well. If you are a wine enthusiast, I highly recommend going to Adelaide. So much good stuff there.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, weekend in Adelaide, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of my old students has actually like a bar tycoon there, Marcus Motorum.
SPEAKER_01:I know, Marcus. He has the uh the gin and rum bar that is called I know, I always forget the name as well.
SPEAKER_02:So he's always wearing like a captain's.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. I I remember when he first opened it because I was working like two streets away, uh yeah, two streets over at Uderberry, which is like a Busque wine bar.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, right.
SPEAKER_01:Um I I'll I remember the name halfway through this conversation.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It'll come back.
SPEAKER_02:So you worked in Perth, you worked in uh Adelaide, like so wine bar in Adelaide, any other kinds of places?
SPEAKER_01:Like um uh a mixed bag, to be honest with you, Phil. I've I've done everything from remote pubs in the middle of Australia to high-end cocktail bars everywhere around the world. What was like the most serious bar you worked in before you came to New York? Um when I was in Perth, we had uh serious. I mean, I I worked in London for a long time, mainly as a bar back and as a bartender. Um I would say, I don't know, they're all the last 10 years has been filled with notable cocktail bars, you know, with you know, the crews over in Western Australia and Melbourne, worked with Darren Leaney. I just went and seen him at um Caretaker's Cottage, you know. Um we worked at the Botan, the Botanic Bar in Adelaide, which was you know a notable bar at the time. I think it was yeah, top five. Um, yeah. And where did you borrow back in London? Uh I did a stint at um Milk and Honey for a second. Nice. Yeah, I kind of cut my teeth there a long time ago. Nice. I found out, you know, serious bartenders, serious bartending really quickly, you know. Um and it was a good it was a good error because I think it taught you like a sense of creativity and discovery and camaraderie. So we're talking about 2010s now, right? Well earlier than that. We're talking, I got to London in 2002. 2002, good lord. So 2003.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, I had more or less just left. I left in 95. There you go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I um yeah, getting along in the tooth. And uh yeah, so bar backing was a right of passion back then, and you know, yeah, kind of got treated like a like a you know, a bad chef in a kitchen, you know, you got yelled up.
SPEAKER_02:It was great training in the match bar group though, with Kevin Arms.
SPEAKER_01:It was. It was I I still use a lot of the mentality and technique um today. Like that that that work ethic doesn't go away. And I think if you work under good tutelage um and you get a good education from your from your peers, then it will take you a long way. I think um you you see bartenders now that didn't get trained a certain way, and you can see it, you see a few shortcomings in how they operate.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's it's particularly uh biting now, because the conversation I have, you know, I'm lucky in that I get to travel pretty much everywhere. I mean literally everywhere from Yerevan to London to Kazakhstan to New York to Australia, it's the same conversation. It's like these guys are just pouring batch cocktails and they don't know how to make them fresh.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And that's partly their fault, but it's partly the fault of the system they came into. We haven't sort of fixed it since we survived COVID.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's it's it's very true. I good fundamentals, it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what your skill set is or you know what vocation you're in, good fundamentals, that's what you're always going to pivot to when times are tough and when you get stuck in the weeds. And then if you don't have good fundamental technique, um it kind of all falls apart really quickly. And to your point, I mean a lot of like especially in a especially sort of move to the States, Phil. You know, I interview a lot of bartenders, you know, doing a lot of bar programs. And you know, I'll ask them I was like, out of ten, what would you say your classic cocktail knowledge is? You know, just to kind of get a brevity of where they are and what they've done. The amount of times I've heard New York bartenders say 10 out of 10. I've I I fall back in my chair. I'm like, I don't, I don't even know all my classics. I reckon I got a Rolodex of about 200 flicking around upstairs. So to say you know, like, I know 10 out of 10, ask me anything, and I was like, okay, what's an Alambusalum? What's an Algonquins? Give me a Satan's whiskers, give me a blue moon, monkeys gland. You're like, uh, okay, let's just reel it back in again. It's okay not to know everything. It's okay not to know all of that. It's okay to say four, you know.
SPEAKER_02:Um I mean you could get by in New York with about 12 classics.
SPEAKER_01:You could. Well, depending on the bar though. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm talking in a very general sense.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah. I mean, if if you're looking to go into a notable cocktail bar and you know, you've got your Long Island Iced teas and mojitas down, then okay, maybe, you know, but you you kind of want a Swiss army knife of of recipes because that's what you draw from. You're you're not looking at the recipe per se as you're looking at ratios and looking at drinks are built once upon a time and now. Um, and it gives you a long set of how to be more creative because you're you're working off building blocks, you know. So, yeah, I I see a lot of that. And I'm not saying you have to know all your classics to be a good bartender, it's not saying that at all, but it helps with your fundamentals, it helps with ratio building, it helps with you know bar programming and creating menus.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, Kevin uh later, the match bar group with Daniel Wadi has written Round Building. Have you seen that book? No, it's brilliant, and it's now in the second edition, which is an expansion of 50% on the first book. And I think it's actually being published by Simon Difford. Okay. So if you go to DiffordsGuide.com, you should be able to buy it. Um I don't know if they're shipping to the States yet. They probably are, they've got some presence here, but it's amazing. It's crazy. If you think about it, right? Yeah, it's the first technical book on bartending ever. Like making rounds of cocktails, breaking it down, because that's probably only about two-thirds of the book. A third of the book is a ton of uh empirical research that they've done on making drinks in rounds so that everything is served in optimum quality. Like, for instance, yeah, what happens if you're stirring cocktails and you have to go away and quickly bang out two beers? Well, spoiler alert, nothing happens. The dilution is just stopped. You can pause, you can cheerfully go away, pour a few beers and come back, it won't dilute anymore. Stuff that's really useful like that.
SPEAKER_01:So and and round building is an important skill set. You know, it's it's how it's one of the fundamentals we teach barbacks when we're training them in operations. It's like, okay, if you have six these six drinks, where are you starting and where are you finishing? You know, um, yeah, I I think those simple things just take you a long way. You know, when you when you came here how did you learn round building?
SPEAKER_02:I worked for TGI Fridays. Oh, there you go. We invented it. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Well, it's it started with the speed round at Fridays. Yeah. And then uh so Fridays had invented the bartender contest in order to pick the person who would train Tom Cruise and Brian Brown for the movie Cocktail. Yeah, right. And a guy called JB Bandy, who's still around, by the way, uh, won and was the trainer. So what everybody knows about Friday's contests is you know, maybe the flare or maybe the the front bar section, as we call it, where you you've got to literally simulate guest interactions. But what you generally don't see is the pore testing and the speed round, and they are incredible. So what happened was competitions to simulate that or even go beyond it popped up. And the first big one, the first global one, was the quest for the best in Orlando. Okay. That was actually held at Disney, believe it or not, Treasure Island Disney, and that was huge. Yeah, and then uh, however, it happened, a few of the casinos in Las Vegas kind of saw what was happening there, and they started building bar concepts uh like Carnival Court around flare bartenders, and they started importing flare bartenders from around the globe. So I must have written like 20 visa recommendation letters, and a whole bunch of the Florida bartenders moved to Las Vegas, and of course, they promptly started a contest there called The Legends of Bartending. Uh, and that was incredible, that was way tighter than Quest had ever been. And it had an amazing speed bartending round. So we would all like practice, and this was the early days of internet message boards, and you kind of share information with one of the VHS tapes and stuff like that, and eventually that coalesced into uh and and married the Fridays uh speed round info, which was it would teach you a calling order, what order you had to make the drinks in, and all that's happened over the years is the drinks have got more and more and more complicated, so we've needed to learn and do more research, and it's all in uh Kevin Armstrong's book, Round Building, second edition. So fascinating. Yeah, I'll have to have a look. So when you came to New York, yeah, what was kind of was there any culture shock bartending wise, customer-wise, speed? Speed, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Speed kills here, yeah. It's the thing that um that I think was the most aggressive change. Um everyone wanted everything immediately, and the mentality that I grew up with, you know, through Europe and Australia was like, good drinks take time. You know, yeah, yeah, you don't rush things, you do them meticulously and you do them properly, and you know, so forth. And here everyone's like, I want it and I want it now. And you're like, okay, that's not how I was used to, but it was shocking and and you kind of had to, you know, work at their pace. Um, and then just you know, ratios of cocktails changed as well. Sugar went up dramatically. You know, I I knew the sour to be a three to one ratio kind of thing. And then when I got here, it was closer to you know, one to one sour, like uh acid and and sugar. Um that that was the that was a change, you know. I remember making gimlets when I first got here. I was putting out a gimlet to the to the spec that I'd always made it, and then everyone's like, oh, it's it's a bit too tart or too bit sour. And I was like, it's it's a gimlet. You can always add sugar to think. You can you can't say it out. Yeah, yeah. So um and then I just you know I asked a bunch of other bartenders around, I was like, well, what specs are you guys using? Just so I understand. And I was like, oh, okay. But yes, speed was was crazy, and you know, it's it's a learned skill, and you if you set up correctly and you do some protocols and you know, you organize your bar, you know, in a certain way, you don't have to move feverishly, you can just move a little bit more efficiently and it comes out the same. So that's what we did, you know. Um, it was a good learning curve, enjoyed it. Um I took to it and uh yeah, it was it was fun. It was it was a fun challenge. I enjoyed having to kind of like relearn bartending into a new system, I guess, you know, because sometimes it gets a little bit operational. You just kind of just go through motions. You're like, okay, bartending, I got this. But now when you like the push as a change, you know, and when we opened up the 18th room, it was a real bespoke cocktail bar. We were making ingredients on the day, um, we were getting very um simple instructions. It was like we kind of work backwards. I don't know how a lot of other bespoke cocktail bars do it, but we were working off um spirit or refreshing, spirit forward or refreshing. Um, and ingredients you are allergic to or you don't want like. That was we don't ask what you do like. It's it's irrelevant. Any deal breakers? Yeah, um, just because if you say I want something with pineapple and tequila and refreshing, I'm like, okay, I can do that. And I put cherries in there and you hate cherries, it's a wash. You're not gonna like that cocktail regardless of what I do.
SPEAKER_02:It's like don't like absence, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so if you don't like absence, that's good. I need that information because now I can make you the cocktail with the things that you don't like. And if I'm good at my job, I'm gonna make a balanced, refreshing cocktail for you with dog specs. So um, yeah, it was it was good. It was like being creative every day and it was it was engaging. So yeah, it was it was a good um it was a good turn of events moving to the States and falling in love with bartending again.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's easy to fall in love when you make as much money as you can here. You can, yeah. I mean, that you know, a lot of other places like Australia, that there's a ceiling, you know, to the amount of hours you work, you know, that's it, that's as much money as I can make in a day. And here is well, how busy am I and how much customer service, how good am I am I in my craft and and you know, uh working with customers. And so your ceiling is infinite. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And you're getting a percentage of sales, like you are we have seen like prices go up dramatically, right? And that's something I I I remember noticing it. It was probably two, maybe three years ago, when we had the first North America's 50 best bars uh here in New York City, and there was a bunch of people who came over from London and they were shocked at the prices. Like when the London people are shocked at cocktail prices, you know it's really high. Yeah. Is that something you noticed?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we have um I think uh the biggest, well, cost of goods, man.
SPEAKER_02:Has it gone up? Yeah. What's what's gone up?
SPEAKER_01:Like the price of booze, the price of juices, what? Uh both like fresh produce has gone up, um, and there's a fluctuation, you know. Like, you know, when we buy chicken now at some of the venues, like it will change from in in terms of the differences like one to two dollars in in within a week. And one to two dollars per pound a week is a dramatic increase. And so like you know, we have you know printed menus that you know take a long time to print. So we can't just readily change our prices on the spot. So yeah, the price of booze has gone up, you know. Um we're definitely seeing that. Um, you know, with surcharges coming to the city, you're getting surcharge prices in Manhattan now. I mean like the congestion charge?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So that they're an added on cost. Um, you know, rent is is going up. Um the minimum wage went up.
SPEAKER_02:Um, what is it now in the state here in New York?
SPEAKER_01:I think for a TIP employee, I think it's uh 11.70, I think it is. Uh yeah, nearly hitting$12, I think.
SPEAKER_02:But it's gonna eventually be the actual minimum wage, which is probably something like$18 or something.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it's uh yeah,$16,$16 to$17 or something.
SPEAKER_02:Like for people who don't know, typically in the US, minimum wage in a state would be something between$15 and$20 an hour. But if you were tipped, you would get something like$2.50 an hour. You'd be expected to make up the difference in tips. Yeah. But now many states, and I think the first was California, are saying, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. You actually have to pay the tip minimum, which is great for the bartenders, but you know, there's not endless margin for everybody, it's hitting the operators.
SPEAKER_01:So I mean it it has to come from somewhere. Yeah, I mean, the overheads, you know, most venues' biggest overhead is wage cost. Yeah. Um, so when that goes up, you know, it makes a huge difference on how you look at your business um and and how you structure things. Um, and then the cost of goods is going up and everything else. So, you know, that there's no there's no leniency for for small business. Um, you know, I I know there's some hotels in New York that are paying way above reward, you know, for for their bartenders and and so forth. Um and you can't compete with them. It's it's a non-competitive. I know bartenders that are getting paid$50 an hour plus tips.
SPEAKER_02:Whoa. Non-union or union?
unknown:Non-union.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, that's amazing. I want that job.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I. Um, so yeah, it's it's well when there's people out there doing those things, it's really hard to compete as a small business. So the the best you can offer, you know, is obviously you know trying to be busy, trying to offer them hours and also education, you know, offer them things that they can't get anywhere else, um, train them correctly, you know, show them skills to develop themselves. Yeah, I mean, why what were some of the biggest things that stuck made you stick around at a bar when when you were I I was lucky, I'm a uh I hesitate to say exception, especially if my wife just has a list.
SPEAKER_02:But my very first job at the ripe age of 15 was in a bar, and what it was was in my hometown, which is a bustling metropolis of 5,000 people by the seaside north of Dublin, and there was 12 pubs there, so going out was like doing the stations of the cross, and the son of one of the pub owners uh he had, I think, family in Texas, and he had been to visit them. We're talking the late 1970s here, before I started, just to be clear. And uh it was he visited what was then only the second ever TGI Fridays, and it was killing us, yeah, right? And he came back and he built a replica of it in my hometown. It's called the Coast Inn. And in as far as he could, he copied everything, even got the uh the carousel beer taps which weren't available in Ireland, so it did everything. So my first bar job, I was handed a manual and a spec sheet, and I was given one-on-one training for weeks and follow-ups because I thought so. I thought that was normal. I didn't realize most people never got training, and then I went on to work for hotel groups and Fridays. So, you know, my next step after that was to teach myself because it had been so ingrained. But most people don't have that experience.
SPEAKER_01:No, and and I kind of found that that there was not a lot of um you know, chance to move. Up either. You know, when when I was working at a lot of bars and I was interviewing people, and uh, you know, I would speak to the bar backs and I'd be like, okay, hell give me the bar back, and they're like, 11 years, and I'm like, Do you want to be a bartender? They're like, Oh, if you let me. And I'm like, Yeah, I'll let you, you just gotta Well, let me ask you a question there then.
SPEAKER_02:Sure. It's sort of like, imagine if you were trying to hire somebody for a job in sales and they didn't negotiate the salary. Okay, you might still hire them, but how hard are they gonna negotiate on your behalf? Sure. Right? So if somebody wants to be a bartender, and again, it can be intimidating and different cultural backgrounds and whatnot, but if you've been bar backing for 11 years and you haven't put your hand up, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's also just not been offered an opportunity. I I know some people like you know, you shouldn't be trying to reach for it and ask for it. I 100% I get that. But not all personalities are developed like that, you know, and some people are a little bit more subordinate, going, well, when they think I'm ready, they'll just offer it to me. So, you know, it's about finding people and then making sure that that's what they want, firstly. And secondly, like I make sure that's what they want. Do you want to be a bartender? Because some of them are happy just not doing all perfectly fine, which is awesome. You know, you you are a master of that craft. Awesome. Um, but for the people that do, I'm like, look, I'm the bull's in your court. I'm gonna give you all the training and all the skills, and we'll develop together. Um, there's barbacks that I've had that didn't speak English, and part of their training to be a bartender was coming in half an hour early and reading the menu together and learning English together and learning the metric system so we could, you know, all speak the same mathematical language.
SPEAKER_02:Who doesn't know the metric system that's an immigrant in America? This is the only country that doesn't use it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but a lot of them have been so ingrained here that you know it's it's not part of their everyday. And so, yeah, I mean, it was, you know, it's a lot of the bartenders I have at like places like Bathtub Gin in here, 70%, 80% of my bartenders are barbacks that that came up. And, you know, that's just how we develop.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, of course. So, what does a training program look like if let's say uh let's say I've been a bar back or you know, I'm hired as a rookie bartender at Bathtub Gin or here at Hello Hello, um, regardless of whatever skills I have or don't have, what does the training program look like?
SPEAKER_01:So, so obviously, you know, the minutia of like just looking after the bartenders and being attentive, that's your baseline. And the reason we use the reason we really want bartenders to come in, uh sorry, bar backs to come in for first before they're bartenders is if you you have to start predicting the bartender's needs and wants, just like bartenders have to predict the needs and wants of a customer. So it's that first intuitive behavior that we're looking for. So when they come in, does my bartender have to keep asking the fill the answer, or are you doing it you know intuitively? Um are you you know uh taking the bottles out, replacing backups, all of those things? Because if you can't do that for the bartender, then you sure as shit ain't gonna do it for the for the customer. So it's about looking for those you know tertiary moments of of before they move up. The second part is um we start teaching them to do basic things, so basic syrups and and and basic um um components for for drinks and cocktails and and then garniture.
SPEAKER_02:Um so how what form? This is barback training, obviously. So what form does that take? Are you are they coming in early? Is there separate classes? Do they have a manual? Is there something online?
SPEAKER_01:So so we use like Trello boards, so everything we have is on boards and they're on Trello. Yeah, and it's just kind of built out over this like you know network of information. So we have everything from how to do fermentations and everybody can view the boards. We have like over 200 classic cocktails on them. So you can study everything at your free will, on your phone, on your laptop, whatever you've downloaded. And do you test them on this? Yeah, and so when it comes to you know trying to move up, um, there's like you know, steps that we do. So, firstly, it's about you know execution of how to make cocktails, round building, all of this. And this is done before their shift starts. So I'll give them a couple of days and be like, okay, you know, um, come in on these two days and we're gonna learn how to stir and shake correctly, build rounds, we're gonna teach you what all the equipment's called. Because just like every uh job in the world, whether it be you know legal or medicine, there's a jargon. You know, so if someone asks you for a strainer and there's a julep, a hawthorn, and a fine, how do you know which one's which? So um, you know, the American bath spoon is bigger than a European bath spoon. You've got to know why we use these things and what it means. So we teach equipment and then we teach, you know, about um technique and and how to And is this structured into a program? Yeah, well, for it's it's different here and there because we have different different modes. But yeah, it's it is you know a structure, you know, it's it's over a course of time. Um and then when they're behind the actual bar, we get the bartenders on certain days to make sure that they're finishing drinks, that they're garnishing correctly, they know what the drink looks like as it comes out. When they move from, when they start getting ahead of all these things, um, they move into service bar. And the service bar is only ever set up to make menu cocktails. Right. They don't touch the, they'll never make a vodka lime soda, they'll never make a margarita, they only make menu cocktails because they know what they should taste like, they know how they're built, um, everything's kind of like streamlined for them. So that way they just get repetition using the skills that we've been training you to do for the past however many months or years, and now you get to execute them in a very um specific form. And then once they go from that, then we can start integrating them into front of a customer. So it's it's a three-tier system. It takes time. And is the do you have a manual or is it all trello boards? Well, Trello is the manual. Every, every the whole manual, you can print the manual out, but there's a man, there's a manual on there for them. And it teaches you like everything, you know, from different types of shakers, like cobbler, Parisian, Toby's, Austin's, it's all on there, what they do, why they are the way they are. Um, and then, you know, once they're even in the um service station, I come in and I'll be like, okay, make me a uh make me an Americano, make me a uh Lucy and Gordon. And and I'll be like, okay. Or, you know, um if it's something really obscure, I'll be like, okay, I want you to learn uh a I'm trying to think Army and Navy. Army and Navy, there you go. Cameron's kick. Um and then I'll come back in at some random point during that week, and I'll be like, give me the army and so it's it's just that, and and they get really proud of these things, you know. And it's universal. That's that's what we tell the staff there. And here is look, we're not training you how to be a bartender here, we're training you how to be a hospitality professional because these skill sets are transferable. You can take these julip strainers called a julip trainer everywhere. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And what about like the soft skills, like guest interactions, a hospitality? Yeah, what Steve Schneider at Stiff and Gosl will call commanding around.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So so once we get them from that server station, so now we call a head up, right? So your head's always gonna be up, doesn't matter what you're doing, you're not buried down, heads always up. We say hello to every guest that comes in and every guest that says goodbye. And we pick certain you know topics and and generally I try and help them through the topics of conversation that you can kind of minute a customer. Um, I play fun games, you know, like so. Some of the things we'll do is like, okay, if everyone's quite quiet, you like play a game, like okay. You know what the collective noun for jellyfish is? And then we're like, what? You're like, you know what? Collective noun, you know what a jellyfish is? And they're like, no, it's like it's it's a smack. They're like, so you start playing these weird games, like what's the you know, collective noun for pandas? It's uh an embarrassment. And then now everyone's joining, and you're like, hey, if you can get this, guess this one, I'll give you a free shot. Whoever can guess this one, five guests. And so now you're bringing a room together. So we we teach them how to engage with customers, but not to engage is just as important. Um, but yeah, how to build conversation points. Um, I believe every individual has their own way of engaging, but my job is to tease out how they do it. Um, the way we do it, the way I do it and we train behind the bar is I'll kind of like, you know, like it's like that how I met your mother kind of situation. Like, have you met? So I'll be I'll start a conversation with like, hey, Phil, has they been? Do you know about Slogen? Eric. And I'll just walk away. And now you're kind of left talking about something and you've been catched with somebody. But yeah, we we we do the we do the soft training as well.
SPEAKER_02:I I find that that's probably one of the more neglected things in our industry. Yeah. It's very easy to go to a seminar or see something online about you know how to use a roto map or you know, fat washing this, whatever, but there's very little. It's not like there's none, but there's very little.
SPEAKER_01:I I agree. It's it's so funny you say that because I find that I have a lot of staff who are technically proficient. They can tell you what's in a Royal Bermuda Yock Club, but they don't know how to start a conversation. And you know, the reason we do a lot of batching and and so forth, um, besides consistency and control, is so we can have more time with customers. We want to we want to talk to you, we want to engage with you. We we don't want to be robotic. And uh it is a skill, and it's a it's a sad skill when you walk into a bar and it's you know it's quite as a chip sometimes. You're like.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's something Jonathan Adler said. He was interviewed recently of Shinji's, and he's talking about their process, which is complex to say the least. But you know, he finished up by saying, and all of this is just in service of us being able to talk to the guests more and have fun and not be, you know, in the weeds for every single drink that we make. And the the flip side is true as well. If you're batching a lot, yeah, right, your bar staff would better have a one banter because it's nothing worse than a batch program and a bartender you can't chat to. A hundred percent.
SPEAKER_01:And like, you know, I'm not saying that doing seven bottle pickups isn't, you know, bartending or isn't good and you shouldn't do it. But I remember having those seven bottle pickups and being feverishly moving and then trying to have a conversation, and you know, you got your time you got your back to somebody trying to turn around and put something back half the time or in the fridge, and you just lose that interaction, you lose that person ability. Yeah. So I I totally agree, but to your point, if you have a batch system but you have no banter, then you've got two bad problems. Yeah. Especially if your staff aren't batching your cocktails. So all of our, all my bar staff batch the cocktails. So they can tell you the process.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But if you just have a batch person and the staff are unprivy to how this works, which is something that's happening. Then you've you're like, hey, what's in it? How's this one? You're like, um the guy comes in and does it for me.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, batch tenders. Yeah, and very often it's not their fault.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's not. It's just the the lack of training and and you know, but again, it's one of those teachable skills that are universal. So so again, it's handing over the keys to the class. We I want you to know how to do all of the fun stuff because then you can talk about it. And then when you go run your own program or do your own bar, you've got those skills with you.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And how do you develop managers?
SPEAKER_01:That's a good one. So managers, I find, are much harder to develop than bartenders. It's a harder skill.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and it's not even close because the the road from bar back to bartender to head bartender, there's a little bit of consistency in there. You know, like you kind of find, but once you get from head bartender to manager, the skill set just drops off. The customer service bit sticks around a little bit, but it's a different kind of customer service. Because before you just hand it over to the manager, oh, let me get the manager for you, they'll fix your problems. So, you know, one of the things we have in, one of the things we have at um as a as a manager training program is this, is like, okay, we have black and white rules. These are our house rules, these are our do's and don'ts. We live in the gray. Everything is in the gray. So we want you to like, okay, in this scenario, somebody's okay, you don't allow hats, but this person feels uncomfortable, maybe they've got alopecia or something, and they're like, it's okay. Yeah, sure. You know, for the situation, it's okay. Um, so dealing with a lot of diplomacy, dealing with proactive behavior, then reactive behavior, um, dealing with diplomacy. Um, it's it's hard because you've got 40 different personalities with staff in a room. You're trying to make them all work seamlessly and effortlessly, um, while every individual in that room is special to that business, and you're trying to appease them as best you can as well. It is a tough job. Um, it's a very unthankful job as well, because the owners are looking down on you going, why wasn't this done and why is my wage cost so high? And then every all the floor staff are going, Well, I need this, and you don't do this for me. Well, I'm trying to appease two opposing thoughts here. Um, so it's it's very hard. Our training program for that, we've got, we've had like um a lot of managers that come in and have never managed before. Right. And I've trained them up, and it's a lot of hand holding. Um, it's a lot of hand holding, it's a lot of um 2 a.m. phone calls um for me and going, hey, this happened, what do I do? And you can't teach everything in a manager situation. I can teach you cocktails all day. No problem.
SPEAKER_02:You can Google it. There's hard skills for managers too, you know. There's the old Excel and there's sure financial planning and scheduling stuff. That's all easy, but there's also person management. Like, is that something that you teach explicitly?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, mainly. So the Excel stuff uh it's kind of like handing over a cocktail recipe book. It it just takes time and effort and you'll get there. Yeah, you'll you'll get uh the memory for it. Um, you know, it costing things out, you know, plug and play, as long as you've got your your costing sheets done right, I can show you it's easy. It's easy once you've done it enough. Um the personal skills is it's nearly impossible to teach directly because you don't know what's going to come up and how. So if somebody comes up to you and goes, you know, a family member passed away or something you know tragic happened and they've missed three days and they didn't call because something happened. Like, how do you deal with that in real time? Um what's uh what's forgiven, what's not forgiven? How do you deal with staff stealing? How do you reward staff when they're doing things right? How do you promote staff? Those are the tough things. Those are the tough things as managers to kind of like teach. Um you kind of got to wait for them to kind of like come up and then kind of like guide them through it.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, do you have a management training program? Do you have a manual? Do you have Yep? Trello is what we live off. But does that also have soft skills on it? Like I said, things would just be discussed.
SPEAKER_01:So how to do a write-up? So if some if you're writing somebody up, this is what we do say, this is what we don't say, this is how we do it, make sure there's always two people in the room so there's no conflict of, you know, I said, they said situations, um, things to stay away from. You know, if you're never doing anything firing or anything like that, it's never personable. Like you don't say, well, you're a bad no, we're firing for these reasons. Best of luck, however, it works out. Um, so there's do's and don'ts for for that kind of stuff as well. But have you ever been fired? I haven't been fired. Yeah, I have. I have. I got fired because I got drunk at a bar and uh didn't show up the next day either. You got drunk at your bar? At my bar. Were you working or no? I was working. Oh yeah. I was about 24 and uh I I wasn't uh most of the bars I worked at were dry bars.
SPEAKER_02:Meaning what?
SPEAKER_01:That you don't drink behind the bar. Right. Okay. So this bar was a wet bar. Nice. It was, and I just didn't have I didn't have the um skills to drink.
SPEAKER_02:To drink. I wasn't it's probably the not showing off that got you fired. If you would show it.
SPEAKER_01:It was a hundred percent, but I was like a no no call, no show. I remember like I don't know what time I go home the next day, but I remember waking up at 10 p.m. and and uh realizing that I had not gone into work and then very, very tentatively called the next day, and they're like, Yeah, buddy, that's you you can't get drunk at work and then not show up. Fair enough.
SPEAKER_02:I I was fired once, but to be honest, the bar owner hired me again the next day because he fired me while he was drunk. So I kind of technically correct, I suppose I was fired for like 23 hours or so.
SPEAKER_01:No, look, I I took it on the chin, that was my bad, you know, fucked up. So I think it's important. But it's good. You you're kind of wearing you like, okay, don't do that again.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So tell me about uh the other thing that I think probably most people don't know about you is product formulation. How did you get started in that?
SPEAKER_01:Um I I guess it's a it's a little combination of I had tried I tried to always make my things in-house, you know. Um everything wasn't always available when I first had the bartending. Right, you know, so you kind of if you wanted something, you kind of had to figure out how to make it. So it started there very early. In Perth? Yeah, well, earlier, like when I was working in the UK at bar backing, you know, like if you wanted a cherry brandy, you kind of just like figured out how to like combine cherries and branding and then all the minuti flavors in between and kind of create something from from nothing. Um and then all that those were the building blocks. And then when when I was doing my intern at Hippocampus in Perth, um they were very young distillery. Um, there was only one distiller there, and we were, you know, we're doing vodka, we're doing a gin, we ended up doing a whiskey, but we were doing vodka from a mash. So we weren't buying GNS and then redistilling, we're creating the mash and the wart and developing it from there. Um so when Lex and I were working on that, you know, distilling is a hurry up to weight situation, you know. So where there was downtime, so we had byproducts of things and leftover ingredients from gin. So we were developing flavors and things that we could use natively and and um byproducts of other things, and so we're kind of building flavoring and I was learning distilling on the fly um on how to formulate something that wasn't in existence. And so fast forward to here, and uh I had friends that were in um that were looking to make brands and they didn't know how to create the thing they wanted. Um these are just people that you knew from the 18th room, yeah, the 18th room, Bathtub Gin, uh mutual mutual friends. Um, you know, so I you know helped out Dos Ombres um when they first started. Um we launched down in New Orleans for that. Um worked with uh Don and Scott Um from Garden Gin. Garden Gin. Botanery Barn Dister. Batannery Barn Distillery. Those guys were great. Worked with Steve on doing some stuff with a tequila liqueur. And then we're currently working on a RAM called Rebellion with Alexander Gabriel. And then we, you know, bought this beautiful place in the middle of Manhattan.
SPEAKER_02:We'll get onto that. But did you ever like study the chemistry of product formulation?
SPEAKER_01:So that kind of organic a little bit of bio came from from doing med. And then it was a learned skill from just being in distilleries, around distilleries, and then bartending. So it was like, okay, I'm going to take what I know from study on how chemical reaction works. And then what I've learned from doing working in distilleries and breweries, and then taking what I've flavor profiling, I've used it in bars, and kind of just married those three ideas together to create what I'm doing now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Because for product formulation, one of the key issues is stabilization and scaling. Yeah. So, you know, if you've never created a spirit, one of the things that can trip you up is you'll go to a distiller and you say, I want to make you know peach brandy, and he'll be like, great. And a few weeks later, you'll get a peach brandy, it's amazing. And you're like, brilliant, let's make a thousand liters, and a thousand liters taste different.
SPEAKER_01:How do you scale up without points, Phil? I think those two things, scaling and stabilizing, are two big things. And it's the thing that I get come across my table more often than not. Yeah. You know, um, where I'll have bartenders come to me and they're like, hey, I created this really cool product, you know, I created my own Amaro. And you're like, cool, what is it? And you're like, well, I used all these like ostentatious ingredients that you've never heard of, and I use Brazil nuts in there, and I'm like, okay, uh, we need to refine this because like if you've tried to distill nuts before, it's a pain in the ass and it's expensive. I have to ship them, then I need um TTB approval for the ingredients. And then I need to figure out how each component works in a distillery. So I need to have multiple tanks if I'm doing multiple, you know, distillates in there and then combining them, and to your point, you know, making a consistent and replicable product. Those things are really, really tough. And so how you start doing it is like all things we start at a bench top. So we do bench top formulation out the gate, which is you generally using all fresh natural ingredients and using you know whatever distillate you want to start with. Um if it's a if it's a mixed distillate, so gins or you know, flavored vodkas or amaras or stuff, that's fine. Um, if you're doing real-world um like rum, if you want to make a single thing, that's tough. Because now you have to have a distillery or you need a copacker, which is like, you know, if you most rums are coming from ENA Shear out of Amsterdam because it's tough to own your own distillery or find someone who wants to distill that thing for you. Um so going back to like a gin or something like that that you have to formulate, it's it's mainly bench top. Then you go, okay, these are the components we want to use. Now we have to figure out what's TTB approved, um, what's commercially viable. So what can we get readily and steadily? So, you know, and how expensive is it? And then if you can't get a one-to-one, then you start looking at components that make those things the same. You know, it's it's like the old for using fresh ingredients, the the easiest component is go, you add cucumber and raspberries, and you get watermelon, you know. So you have to start looking at those kind of combinations. You know, if you're looking for the um like the limone uh chemical agent, the turpentine that you find in like lemons and citrus, well, you go to green cardamom. It has the highest per capita of it in in most ingredients. That's why it's been most identical.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Nature identical.
SPEAKER_01:So you're looking for these one-to-ones, you know, and this is where chemistry helps. Understanding where it comes from, the family, you can kind of start putting these things together, how they react, how the proteins react. Um listening.
SPEAKER_02:So you're looking at it on a molecular level.
SPEAKER_01:Correct. And because you have to, because like you can't just say, okay, we want we want uh this ingredient, but A, it doesn't react to heat or it doesn't react to GNS well, you know, um, you know, the proteins start burning in GNS, so you're like, okay, this doesn't work. Um, so you can't go one-to-one all the time. Um, you can't heat everything, you know, one-to-one all the time. So yeah, you have to use a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of um know-how in terms of like what certain ingredients work best and how they work in other things. That's why when you look at gin, you'll you'll see a lot of them with green cardamom. It's because it brings the citrus up and they don't have to buy bags, bags of citrus. Interesting.
SPEAKER_02:But how do you then solve the problem of going from you know making five liters on the vent top to making a thousand liters on the distillery with the same flavor in the end?
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, I I say this, I used um I used a uh analogy, one of the bartenders, they were like uh like a last word. So if you're making a last word as a cocktail, you know, chartreuse, blah blah blah. Now, if I wanted to make that same last word, if I'm like one mil out on chartreuse when I'm making it on the bar, you're not gonna taste it. You'd be have to have a superpower to figure out that out. Yeah. But if I'm out on a thousand liters and we're two or three liters out, that chartreuse is is above and beyond killing everything. And also how that flavor changes from you know 30 mil to a thousand mil is it starts killing everything else and becomes very, very notable of the flavors that's diminishing on the back end. So, and then you're adding oxygen and a bunch of other stuff, right? So scaling up, you start doing you know increments. So, so you go from bench top to pilot, where you'll go from you know 10 liters to a hundred liters or 50 liters, and you're like, okay, how is this going to react? Um, and you start doing them individually. Um, so you know, ingredient-wise, um, and then batch wise, and then blending. So, yes, scaling is scaling is hard. Um, doing the stabilizing, it really depends on the methodology and what you're wanting to distill. Yeah. Um, if you're doing like if you're distilling over fresh ingredients, it's gonna be pretty stable. There's a few things that won't won't um translate like that. That will uh that won't that that won't ferment. Um, but using fresh ingredients steeping and you know, all that now we're treading in very you know treacherous waters. Um and how you're blending that, when you're blending it, um, what oxygen's gonna do to it? Yeah, that's trial and error, and and you know, know-how. Sometimes flavor houses are the best way to go where you're using like a flavoring agent to get where you want to go. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And how is it doing that with a straight liquor, a roam, a gin, for instance, versus a liqueur or a marrow? The latter would have to be more difficult, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because the you know, if you're using something like a revivalist, uh garden gin, um, it's it's a 10 ingredient component, you know, which is really good. I I think I think like most things that I work on, you want to keep a minimal because it leaves less room for error, in my opinion. And you want to do things with as much control as you can. So, you know, when I'm talking to like a lot of people about gin or something, I'm like, look, the best way to do this is to most of your components individually and then blend, like a recipe, like putting everything in the pot at once. That way, if anything's ever out, you don't know how much fat or lipids are going to come off an ingredient because you know everything's different. So you don't know. So the best way to do it is to blend and blend to perfection rather than just wait for what's coming out, and then you're like, well, that's what we got. This one didn't come out that right. So, you know, people that do like one-shot gin where you put everything in distill, whatever comes out, comes out. That's that's tough for me. I I think you end up rectifying more often than not. Um, I'm our we're working on a paratif at the moment, working on three actually, and it's it's tough, you know, because these little tweaks make a huge difference in terms of ingredient profiles and blending. So we use the parative that we're working on right now has 12 ingredients, and we have to steep eight of them separately, which means you have to have eight holding tanks at any given time to blend everything together. That costs money, it costs time, um, you have to have ingredients on hand all the time. That's the hard part. Yeah, is it's time and space.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the irony of Amaros and sort of let's be the cures is uh they're arguably the most difficult to make.
SPEAKER_00:And they don't sell a lot. Yeah, you're uh preaching to the quiet. Relatively speaking.
SPEAKER_01:They're preaching to the choir, but you know, and they're the thing that one of the most interesting things you can also have. But yeah, it's it's weird, you know, people don't use them often enough and they're not like sought after as much as you know your whiskeys or your bodicas or so forth, but they take the most amount of you know time. It's kind of like a blended whiskey. No one really appreciates a good blended whiskey over like a single malt. But time and the effort that master blender has to have be on top of his job.
SPEAKER_02:Especially if you've got a lot in the blend. Like the classic example is Johnny Walker. Yeah. You know, it's ubiquitous, but it is an incredible blend.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And you have to appreciate that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So it's it's hard, it's it's really difficult. Um, it's not it's not an envious job. It's you're kind of like pulling your hair out for the best part. Um, yeah, but it's it's rewarding. Um, I love formulating. Um, I enjoy it more than any other job I've ever had in my life. Um, you know, we're sitting in a lab right now, the downstairs lab here. I love spending time down here. Uh, we're doing some consulting for some other projects right now, and we're tinkering away upstairs and down here, and it's I love it.
SPEAKER_02:I I love failing. Let's just uh pick up the chronological thread. Uh so from the 18th room, I was actually there on the opening night. I remember getting uh an invite uh to Bathtub Gin, which is now it's 10 years more? 15. Jesus Christ, which is an institution at this stage um to where we are now. Hello, hello. So tell us about how this place, which is a bar and a distillery on West 26th Street and 7th Avenue here in New York, how how did it ever even come on your radar?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that came from formulating. Okay. Yeah, it's it's it's actually like a I I do a how I explain this. I do a lot of work for free. And it's it's much to the advice of everybody around me is like, oh, you should charge people, you know. Maybe it's the capitalist American way, but if somebody needs help, I'll help you. And you know, especially if it doesn't take too much out of my day or time, I'll happily help anybody, anybody that asks me. Yeah, and it's just it's just good natured. It's hospitable. Someone wants help, you help them. So um over just past COVID, uh a friend of mine, one of the one of the owners of um Dos Ombras, reached out and he was like, you know, do I make this or do I make this? You know, I don't know. You're thinking about doing a new project. He was, he was. And he was like, you know, calling me and asking me for my advice. I was like, yeah, man, look, this is this is what I think, you know. Um let's let's try if you want some help. And so he brought me on board and we started a started a rum brand called Revellion that we're we're just finishing up now and launching this year.
SPEAKER_02:Um and then you talk about it or now?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely talk about. So, you know, we've been formulating this with Alexander Gabriel. Um, it's distilled in Barbados.
SPEAKER_02:So this uh unnamed person, I mean there's only two people involved, but comes to you and what kind of brief did you guys agree? Because the brief, in my experience, is the most important thing, and it must be agreed.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. Yeah. The brief for me as a formulator is the crux of everything that I'm about to undertake. And the better the brief, the better the result. So what what one did you kind of agree on? Yeah, well, it wasn't so much of an agreement as was a statement. Right. It's him just going, because I asked him, I was like, what do you want to do? And he's like, well, I just want something that that's rum, that's real rum, and it doesn't have any additives, and it doesn't have, you know, any you know, sugars and caramels, and okay. All right. Just so you know, most rums do do this, they have disagreements. Nothing wrong with it. That's a whole lot of podcasts, but yeah. Yep, that's it. We can get stuck into that. But he gave me this brief, he just wanted it to be rum in its purest form, so in quotation marks. I was like, okay. And presumably age rum or no?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So we we have two SKUs. We have an entry level and then we have a premium level. All right. And so we the other brief was for the entry level, it it was for cocktails.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And the the the term he used was I want to make a Swiss Army knife for bartenders to make rum cocktails. Okay. Cool. Which is a good idea because excellent idea. You know, we went through three dots and a dash and a bunch of other notable rum bars, um tiki bars here. And every time we went to one, you know, their daffories would have two different rums in them, and their their My Tires would have two or three different things.
SPEAKER_02:But there's nothing that a tropical bartender likes more than adding six rums where one or two will do. It's still the nature of the piece.
SPEAKER_01:It wasn't I didn't really understand that at the time.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you know the trader Vic saying.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, no, what is it? Three rums can do what two cannot, something like that.
SPEAKER_01:And I didn't I didn't really understand it, if I was being truthful. I didn't I wasn't in-depth in the rum world at the time. Oh, it's wild. Yeah. And I, you know, quick study and I read everything I get my hands on, went to every bar I could, I tasted more rums enough to drown a sailor. And okay. Okay, I get this. So then we went to work and we wanted the rum to come from one region. We didn't want to blend rums from around the world. Why was that? I think there was a romantic story behind it, and we wanted to find like, you know, a birthplace of rum. So, you know, ours is from Barbados, which is arguably, you know, Caribbean Romantic. Caribbean rum, exactly. You know. So what we just wanted to be regional.
SPEAKER_02:We wanted to, we wanted to speak about the place we got it from and and the heritage of because the other the the uh brief, Swiss Army knife, you know, that has been done before. It's a very logical thing. Like one that comes to mind uh is banks ROM. I was it was yeah, took the words out of my mouth. Aggressively a multi-regional ROM.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. You know, so you've gone the other way. Correct. And the question now is like, how do you do that if you're not picking out different regions from from um their flavor banks, you know, like Jamaican with the funk and blah blah blah. So we went down a road that I was more familiar with, and that was maturation and and different cast finishes. And so that's that's how I got to have my flavor bank. You know, it's like having a cocktail. If you're making cocktail, you need a flavor bank, you need somewhere to draw flavor, whether it be Amaros or syrups or get, you need somewhere to add flavor to your profile. So that's what we did is we went after cars and we we looked at the stores, you know, with Alexander, and um we went through what was what and who was who and how we could manipulate it, um, even using you know some jaws, which is like you know, the high Esther rum that they don't really use in Barbados, but you know, reaging that, you know, um to get some extra flavoring and so forth in there, and then barrels from around the world. So, you know, we wanted we didn't want to use dosage, so how do you get that? Well, we used sherry cars, you know, you get residual sugar from them. I'll take out the sherry, yeah. Yep. So uh how do we get extra flavor from that? You like obviously we have bourbon in there, so then we're like, okay, how do we get some like extra characters having tropical notes and so forth? So we used Amberana, and so you know, there's a couple extra casts in there that we used as well. And so we created this flavor bank of barrels and blended them together to create these Swiss army knives, and that's how we kind of got it. And you know, again, working with someone as talented as Alexander, and then you know, based off the blending I was doing, we kind of created these two.
SPEAKER_02:And when you were creating the uh this entry-level SKU at least, what were the drinks you tested it with? Like every time you got a sample, what were the drinks you tested to say, hey, this is gonna be a Swiss Army knife or not?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Dacquiri is number one. Dacqui? I think everything started with a daiquiri. That was number one. Um we tested that, we tested Mai Tys, we tested mojitos, um, and we tested uh painkillers. Um and and we kind of tested those against the how we wanted to kind of see how it rumbled, you know, how does it mix with herbs like mint and and so forth and sodas and play with coconut and pineapple, you know, those tropical notes. Dacquiri is just what does the rum taste like? You know, so those were the four big ones um that we tested, and you know, in my opinion, it makes one of the best daiquiries I personally has ever had. It's just a one-to-one rum. Like no anything else, you know, I'm not adding anything weird in there or another rum, just one rum, lime and sugar. Um, objectively, one of the best dacqueries I've ever had.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So those were the the hallmarks for that. And then for the premium skew, the idea was like, okay, how do we want consumers to have this? And then how do we want consumers to drink our product and why? You know, what what's the what's the draw card? There's a bunch of good rums out there. Why this not that? It's always the big question. So one of the one of the hallmarks for this is we wanted to bring mature age spirit drinkers from other categories over to us. Right. So we use like a, I can't, I'm not sure if I can name the distillery, but we use an Isla whiskey barrel on the on the rums as well, um, as well as the bourbon and so forth. And it most people who try our rum go, this doesn't drink like a typical rum. It doesn't taste doesn't not taste like rum, definitely tastes like rum, but it also tastes like, you know, a bit brandy-ish, a bit whiskey-ish, and you know, it's a cigar rum, you know, it's uh sipping rum. And and that's why we developed it. We wanted to bring other categories over to us and not just the rum aficionados. Did you put an age statement on it or anything like that? Um we didn't put a straight age, we have a minimum age statement, but we um we didn't put a straight age statement on it, no.
SPEAKER_02:Because it's it's it's blended and from and were you able, uh, I'm sure the answer is yes, to get both the products, and this is you know another key part of formulation, at the cost of goods that will fulfill. Yes. Their destiny, as it were. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:And that's just as hard as anything else. Is you know, can I get these cost of goods? Can I develop this brand, bottle, cap, everything, with a with a price tag that is affordable and approachable by buyers and consumers alike? It's hard because creating the best product isn't just about picking the best things, it's about making it affordable and approachable. And it's it's a hard task when you start getting a nose to the grindstone. You're like, well, what if we add this really eccentric thing to make it taste like this? And you're like, yeah, you can, but now your bottle's, you know,$100. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And rum's a hard category. It's just rum's a very hard category. It's just a really hard category. I mean, I mean, the joke we all have inside is like, this year's going to be the year of rum. Just like the last 20 years. Just like the last 20 years. So, you know, what we're not saying that this is going to be the year of rum. What we're trying to do is bring people over from other categories. We're trying to open up the category. Um, we want to support rum as a category, not just by rebellion. It's it's it's a bigger fish than that for us.
SPEAKER_02:So, how did rebellion bring you to this? Hello, hello, and distilleries.
SPEAKER_01:So uh one of the gentlemen that worked on the team um was working for Purno Ricard at the time, and he was um part of developing these um micro distilleries all around the world. So Purno Ricard had, I think, seven of these micro distilleries around the world. Um London, uh, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seattle, I think. Seattle, LA, here, Miami, that they were developing as well. And um, you know, we got to know each other over the course of a year and a half working on the RUM. And he had got on the team how? Did he know the gentleman from Dos Hombres? Or um, no, he got he got um recommended through a mutual friend um that used to work on another guy that we worked with, uh Andrew Breimer. Um he he's one of the partners at Four Walls. Uh and he's he was uh part of um uh Bacardi for a long time. So there was like uh everybody knew each other and then you know they they formed this magic team. And so yeah, we we got to know each other, and then he called me randomly one day and he's like, hey mate, you want to buy a distillery? And I was like, mate, I'm not that rich. And he's like, uh I was like, where is it? Because I'm like, I'm not moving out of the city, I live in Manhattan. I'm like, I'm not moving to the countryside, dude. All right, and he's like, it's in uh it's in Manhattan. I'm like, where? He's like in Chelsea. I'm like, I live in Chelsea. I there's no there's no distillery in Chelsea, mate. And he's like, Yeah. So he gave me the address, and um, yeah, that's that was the uh first initial contact. Um, and I was it'd been here for seven years before we took it over, and I didn't even know it existed, which is a crying shame in my opinion, to have a distillery um in the middle of Manhattan and no one knows about it, especially someone that runs bars. And it's the first legal distillery since Prohibition in Manhattan, and they spent a lot of work. The the blueprints for the FDNY on how to build uh a distillery in Manhattan comes from this place. There was no laws before this place.
SPEAKER_02:So Perno spent an ungodly amount of the program, yeah. For anyone who doesn't know, is called Our Vodka. Correct. And if you haven't heard of it, that's why the distillery is for sale. Correct.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, and then it's it was just uh a long process, you know, taking the the lease over and the legalities that come with that, it was no easy feat. Um, it kind of came with a lot of a lot of um red tape. Um, but you know, we I got a team together, you know, when we when I found out, and um some like-minded individuals with different skill sets. And we seen the vision for what it could be and what it can be and what it is, and so we kind of just you know put the work in after that. It was a roll up your sleeves and let's get it done.
SPEAKER_02:So talk to me about hello, hello. Yeah. From you know, oh, we're buying a bar with distillery attached or a distillery with a bar attached, uh, a blank slate, obviously, because the bar was just like a tasting room. Yeah. Um what did you start with? How did you come out at hello hello?
SPEAKER_01:Um, yeah, so I uh I've you've seen it when it used to be and it was I actually was in. I'm one of the very few people who came out of the world. Oh, yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_03:The Hour vodka distillery.
SPEAKER_01:Look, I don't want to speak badly of anything, but in my opinion, it was a very ghastly um interior design. Like it was just very unwelcoming. There was nothing in here that spoke to people or or welcomed people or you know, anything like that. Um, so the first thing was like making it somewhat inviting, making it warm, you know, hence hello, hello, even the name, you know, we we kind of just wanted to bring a little bit of hospitality to this kind of section. And we're we're in between two worlds, right? We got um Nomad, you know, one block up, got Chelsea one block below. And this is kind of like this gray area in between. So um we kind of want to design a bar that was welcoming, that was, you know, wasn't charging out the arm and the leg to buy a drink, um, that was hospitality focused and forward. I know everybody says this, you know, that that's the mantra of every bar that ever opened. It's like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna, you know, make good drinks and we're gonna, you know, uh be really hospitable and you know, everyone's just gonna love this. I'm gonna open the doors, I'm gonna be full. I mean, that's that's the story of everybody I've ever ever seen or been a part of. Um here was like, you know, we have a distillery and we wanted to kind of like build momentum, not start high, finish low, you know. So it's been like, okay, we're gonna open the doors, we're gonna see what the clientele dictates to us, you know, um, and then kind of like tease everything out very slowly, very organically, and then kind of build up to the crescendo. So, you know, we're very we're very much, you know, we don't have a kitchen, there's no kitchen, we're not allowed any fire in the building because we have a bomb essentially. Distillery. Distillery. Um so there's no open flames or anything like that. So we had a little bit of you know, roadblocks on certain things. Um, but we had to we did workarounds for everything. Um and then we wanted to be music focused. Um, we wanted you know, people to come in for a reason other than just good drinks and good food. Um so we have DJs every night that play vinyl um you know pretty much strictly. Nice. Um and then we wanted to build out the program, and so the program you know is is coffee focused. You know, we have the cafe during the day, and and now you know that was a bold move.
SPEAKER_02:It was like opening in what, eight o'clock, seven o'clock? Yeah, eight o'clock in the morning. That's a bold move because it is obviously the desire of everybody who pays rent is to get 24-hour day value for money, but it's really difficult to transition from a coffee vibe to a bar vibe. So how do you sort of manage that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's you're right. That the hard part is the transition. Um, we haven't found it that difficult thus far, which has been lucky. Um, but it's it's how we've started incorporating certain things inch by inch. So, you know, we were very coffee focused, all coffee all the time, espresso martinis, blah blah blah. I'm sure we'll get to why soon enough, but that was our focus. And then now we're you know uh one of the owners and the um the bar manager Luis Hernandez and I have been like integrating tea. So now it's coffee and tea in every drink, and how we incorporate that. And we are tea connoisseurs now. We've tried every brew and every minute, every second, and strained and you know, percolated and done everything we can to tea to stress it out, and we're figuring out how we incorporate tea and coffee into everything and and how to manipulate the flavors of everything. So that's how we're integrating slowly but surely now um until we get to our our next level up. You know, um, we haven't the bar hasn't even touched our Rudd of apps or the still for its personal use yet. Um, so like I said, first step was just creating you know a drink and and bar program that works unto itself before we start flexing, so to speak, too hard about what we can do.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean it's it it puts me in mind of my dear departed friend Gable Lorenzo. I don't know if you knew him. No, he uh and his dad founded Hudson Whiskey. Oh wow. It's the first one in New First New York State uh since Prohibition up in Tuttle Town. And uh first William Grant bought a chunk of it, then they bought the whole thing. Yeah, and everybody got a bit of money. And Gable had like the perfect life. Uh he explained it to me. We did a seminar once, uh only only about a year before he left us, and he said, So I've got a mate and he harvests like fruit, typically apples in Hudson Valley. He's got these massive tipper trucks after he's crushed them, and like the bit he can't tip out is still a couple of hundred litres. So he says, Gable, come along. I said, I drive over there with like a holding tank or a still in my truck, and I fill it up and I distill it. So he made you know O de Vs and vodkas and stuff like that. Uh he said, then I drive to my tasting room, uh, right, this bar that he has, which is also a shop, and uh I fill up the bottles on the back bar. Uh my mum designed the labels, yeah, right, with a block print, and you know, it makes a decent living, but you know, I get to take my daughter to school in the morning and I get to pick her up at 5 p.m. and I don't have to go on the road, you can only buy the stuff here. There's no distributors, there's no export, no external sales. Like he had he had the perfect life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. I I think it's as simple as that, man. Like it's I think there's a lot of romanticism with distilling. I think uh every bartender has this romantic idea. Um, but I try and tell out all the stuff here. I'm like, look, it's a lot of hurrying up to wait. Um, and then you want distilling should be boring.
SPEAKER_02:If if yeah, if it's exciting, it's dangerous.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly right. Like, it's gonna blow. So yeah, we we we try relationships. Yeah, yeah. You want it to be boring. No, you don't want to be dating Angie and a jolly. Every time you come into the room, you shouldn't be scared.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, it's it's a bit like that, but yeah, I you know, it's not for everybody, but yeah, I mean having the distillery here, you know, will eventually be, you know.
SPEAKER_02:Um and how do you square it with all the various licenses and compliance and having it this I mean that's a lot. Do you have some complicated corporate structure?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so uh all the licenses we had to well they were grandfathered in the contract that we got in, and then we had to square them away and and you know we took yeah, we took them on um took them over. But I mean we have the A1 distiller's license, we have a farmer's license, so we can just we can sell over the bar, um, like takeaway which is huge, which is huge. We have a distribution license as well, so we can self-distribute. Um, and then we have um a liquor license, which you know distilleries shouldn't have a liquor license because it's you know against the three tide law essentially. Um, but you know, Pono, being Pono, worked around that somehow, and we grandfathered that into.
SPEAKER_02:I'm gonna have to get my my mate Reuben Maduro on the podcast. It's funny, it's so funny, he just texted me today. Uh he took over the Aravaka distillery in Amsterdam. Oh nice. Which is you know, a short stroll from Amsterdam Central Station. It's now the home of his brand Spirited Union. Okay, and he is the guy uh who came up with the the entire concept and terminology for botanical rum. I didn't know so his whole range, uh he now I think has some actual straight rums as well. But his whole range is botanical infused, they sell really well. You can now buy them at Whole Foods in Austin, Texas, if you happen to be in Austin. I would love to try them. And eventually, no, they're really, really good. Yeah, yeah. But you know, they do cocktail classes and they too. You know, I I think the the compliance is a little laxer in the Netherlands than it is here. Yeah. Uh but that's a remarkable thing. So you've got the bar open, you've got somebody great, you know, well, great people like Luis and Janice and all that kind of thing upstairs. Yeah. How's it going? It's going good. I mean what what did the neighborhood tell you? Because it's a bit it is a bit of an odd neighborhood here.
SPEAKER_01:I'm I'm kind of bit relatively rarely down here. Yeah, and and it's it's kind of funny because we're not so far from Penn Station, we're not so far from Madison Square Garden. Um, it's not like we're in no man's land. You know, we're we're kind of like central to everything. Um, but it is a weird neighborhood because it doesn't lend itself to anything specific. There's not a ton of bars on this street. Not on this street, but again, you know, you have ivory peacock, you have shins, you know, there are a stone throwaway. I could throw a tennis ball and hit them. Yeah. So it's we're only we're only one block away, but it tells you like what Manhattan's like. Oh, yeah. You know, one block means everything. Um, but it is a growing neighborhood, and we do like the neighborhood. And you know, the neighborhood kind of told us like you have the ivory peacocks and the shins of the world, the upscale kind of like you know, very shishy kind of bars. Um, and we kind of wanted to be that, you know, in-between bar. That the bar you go to before you go to a sit-down dinner and do your whole hoo-ha. Um, we want to be more localized, we wanted to be that, you know, local spa. And and we kind of are for the best part.
SPEAKER_03:Is there a lot of residence here?
SPEAKER_01:Is it just a lot, there's like wholesale textile businesses and stuff like that? But but there are like a lot of like residential hotels around here as well, and that's kind of what we tapped into. And there's a lot of like, you know, um store wap businesses, you know, like so like the the Swedish Institute, which teaches maps, we see those folks all the time, you know. Um, you know, local bars and that around here always come in for a drink pre and post-shifts. I don't know if they're allowed, so I won't name them. Um, but yeah, but we're kind of like a you know, a who's who of of bartending, hospitality people coming in here. Um and then a lot of like residential hotel people come in here as well, but just looking for a local, you know, looking for somewhere to sit for.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's it's really welcoming. Um, there's a a huge sense of fun, right? In the menu, and the drinks, and the people. And you just did like talk to me about the four walls uh Christmas pop-up that you did.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you know, Andrew Brimer and the Four Walls crew from Always Sunny friends, you know, we've worked on projects before. And so I'm in the business, as I said earlier, friends helping friends. Hey man, how can we help? How can we help four walls in this sense? Um, so um I don't know the show, but Luis is a big fan of Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Okay. So he was like, hey, let's do an always sunny um Christmas because they have that part of their show. So this is like what, an episode in the show or something? Yeah, or multiple episodes, you know, over seasons. All right. So they have an always sunny Christmas, and there's certain thematics that go with that. All right. And so like a bloody Santa. And so, you know, he we brought a Sanner and bloodied him up, and then there was like this whole storyboard, and then there's like a man in a green suit, so we put all these decorations. We spent three or four days, five days putting all these decorations up. Um, and it was kind of like uh, you know, a nod to Always Sunny in Philadelphia show, and you know, hidden gems and Easter eggs of the show as you looked around the venue.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we were just talking to Luis, and he was like, There was like fan clubs coming from New Jersey, from Philly. Yep. Yep.
SPEAKER_01:I know so um and and the guys from Always Sunny were were big supporters and you know very thankful. But yeah, I mean it was just one of those fun things to do that we don't see, you know, we we didn't see anybody doing anything like that. Friend owned a brand, let's help out. Did you have any like bespoke vessels or yeah, we we did so we did some unique drinks for them. They have um fight fight juice, I think they called it, um, which is like a a drink they say on the show. Obviously we bartended it up because if you listen to the drink, you're like that can't be drinkable. Um, but you know, they did a great job. So we we did stuff like that. We took um some themes from the show um and created drinks from those. Yeah, so it was it was a fun time. We played some some theme music to it. Um we have a lot of people that are just fan club people. We had tours come through and check it out. It was it was a whole thing. We're gonna, I think, I don't want to speak too early, but I think we're gonna try and do a bigger one next year, even. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's almost become de rigueur to do it. Yeah. And a a lot of the backbone of it is obviously the miracle bars, yeah. Of which I think there's now 200 every year on a franchise system. And a sort of a not exactly new, but it's definitely come up over the last few years, which is that you pay the franchise fee and you get the playlist and the spec sheets and the help and the instruction, and there's videos, films, and and all this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_02:But you also get to buy the merch, and nobody else can buy the merch. As a franchisee, you get the right to buy it and then sell it in the bar.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02:Right? So, all that stuff you can't, as far as I'm aware, otherwise buy, or at least for the duration of miracle bars. And there are a lot of bars, especially the kind of better-known cocktail bars that do miracles, say that their sales are almost matched by the merch sales. Because people want to buy, you know, the Christmas Saurus that you drink out of, or the Santa's head shock glass, or the shock glass with the reindeers fucking each other. That you know, that so the merch is the thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and we found that just with our with our merch that we have for hello hello, that you know, we had the originally we just had them for staff, you know, and and a few people. Um, but the moment we started uh, you know, walking around in hello, hello hats and shirts and stuff, everyone's like, can I buy that? And yeah, it's it's been like that's what those boxes are there. We've got cupboards full of them over there. So like you sell hats, shirts, whatever. Hats shirts, um, we've got some um uh sweaters coming in, and then we have a bunch of like stickers and stuff that we give away to people. But yeah, I mean, it's just good, it's it's weird and surreal to see people just walking around in in your gear kind of thing. It's it's people get into bars.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know if you've ever been to the restroom of employees only in Los Angeles. Yeah. No. Yeah? Yeah well the inside the entire restroom is photos of customers who have employees only tattoos. Yeah. And there's dozens of them.
SPEAKER_01:There's probably more now. I it's it's funny what merch does. I was at the employees only in LA and I was wearing um, I used to work at a bar called Choo Choose in uh in Perth. It's a fun, there was a fun, divey kind of bar, and it had um one of the Simpsons carrier on the back, and it says I choo-choo choose you. Right. And this random guy came on touch me and touch me on the shoulder, he's like, hey mate, are you from Australia? I was like, Yeah, he's like, I love Choo Choos, great bar. And I couldn't be any further away from that bar if I wanted to. You couldn't, it is the most remote city in the world. So you know, a guy in a random bar in LA, just like, I know that shirt, I know that bar. You know, um, I'm gonna go approach them. So it it speaks volumes for what merch does.
SPEAKER_02:It's also gotta be good merch. It does. Like there is so much slop. And you know, the the world capital of it is obviously Tales of the Cocktail, which is like merch city, like Compari. Have you ever been invited to the Compare suite? Yeah. So they take a couple of hotel suites and they basically turn it into a free shop. Yeah. And they've got amazing stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Like Ray and Nephew sneakers and it's I find it weird because I find that the liquor merch is either hit or miss. It's very rarely gray in the middle. But for companies that have a good source of income and can tailor anything to anything, I'm surprised they miss on a lot of their merch. Like a lot of it's just not good.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you don't know what you don't know. Sure. And if if anyone listening is thinking of developing merch, apart from hiring me or Brendan, one of the smartest things you can do is actually come to Tails because you will see this is great. It's almost like a merch convention. A thousand percent. And there's somebody, uh I don't know who started it, but a year or two ago, they've started on like um either the the last or second last day of Tails, Wednesday or Thursday. They host an unofficial get together at a bar, and it's a merch exchange. Like bring the stuff you don't want that somebody has literally pressed on you. Uh and and and maybe leave it behind or swap it for something else. Well, it it also shows you what people want.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good point. And what they don't want. Well, what they want to give away, and be like, ah, that's not for me. Yeah, it's it's hard, it's hard knowing what people want and also what speaks to your brand, you know, and and who you want where even you've always got to be in the lookout.
SPEAKER_02:Like again, me and Mrs. Duff, um we do a home exchange, so we move to Spain, and somebody moves to our apartments in um in New York. And the we live in this little beach town called Villanova Ila Geltra, it's like an hour south of Barcelona on the coast. It's lovely. And there's like about five beach bars on a series of like three uh uh beaches, and they all use the same kind of tip tray to give you the check and for you to pay or put your credit card on. And they're they're circular, nothing wrong with that, but they've just got a little arm with a slightly weighted end that holds the bill down. Okay. And I saw that, and I literally said to my wife, who you know buys a lot of merch for Heaven Hill, I'm like, this is fucking cool, you should get a branded version. This is the better mouse trap. Yep. You know, it's such a little thing, and you wouldn't think if you'd asked me to improve in a tip tray, I wouldn't be able to do it.
SPEAKER_01:But but it's the simple thing, and it's the things that buyers or buyers want. Like you have to think about that. Like, what makes this exciting to give away? Like what we're doing that with you know the brand that we're making here is we're in that we're in that mode now of outside of the normal, like the the sweaters and the hats and the swag, what's the giveaway that speaks to our brand and no other brand?
SPEAKER_02:Well, not even a giveaway, but you want you can also engineer something for people to steal. Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Like well, we used to have a pen that said this pen was stolen from yeah.
SPEAKER_02:There was a bar in my hometown, the Black Raven, uh, which had now we're talking 1986, uh, their pen said stolen from the Black Raven. Yeah. There was a whole article actually in uh something like Spirits Business a few months back, and it was about merch that gets nicked. So people steal so much of the miracle merch that they start selling it. Yeah. Uh famously the absolute uh elixir copper stuff was nicked a lot. But apparently, sexy fish, the UK-based uh footballers' wives bar restaurant, amazing cocktail bar, amazing have one in Miami. They have these little um things you rest your chopsticks on that say sexy fish, and like some ridiculous amounts of them have been stolen, like 20,000. And I think they they almost engineered it that way, and then they got more publicity by having an amnesty. Like if you came in, they give you a five, you know, return, they'll give you a fiver off a cocktail. That's really next level of thinking. Uh yeah, I love that engineer the stuff to be stolen because then people have a real emotional commitment to it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And well, we do that with something as simple as like the menus of bathtub and newspapers, and you know, uh we date them and you know, um, they've got articles inside. We actually you know manufacture them. But people like the first like most people just steal them. They're just like this going in my bag. But some people are like, hey, do you mind if I just take this? And you're like, no, take it, of course. Um, but we manufactured that to be stolen. Like we knew people were gonna take them. But you have our menu and it's it's a it's a placeholder for you, it's a memory for you, especially bars that have like a transient um clientele, you know, that that are tourist-based. You know, you you want to be that memorable bar that people are like, oh, if you're ever in New York, gotta go to Hello Hello, you've got to look at their, you know, uh their Rolling Stones magazine menu kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, that that's something where a little bar, an independent bar, can compete with the biggest ones. Yeah. You just have to be more nimble, maybe more edgy, more agile, more, you know, reactive to the zeitgeist.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. And and you can be, and I think that's like like you said, you can be nimble as a small bar, and you also have to swing for the fence more. You know, you you kind of can't play it too safe too much. No. Um there's things you should play it safe on, you know, that that go without saying, like good hospitality, blah blah blah, good training, blah blah blah. But there's things in in terms of decor and and what you're offering, you kind of have to swing for the fence because otherwise it's it's much, much the same. You end up in this like white noise kind of situation where like, you know, as we spoke about you know a while ago now, is like, why us not them? If if you can't distinguish that, then you kind of get lost in the noise. I mean, I say this to a lot of people, it's like there's 6,000 liquor licenses in Manhattan. That doesn't include bars and like the restaurants as well. It's it's not an easy market to it is a drinking town. It is. But they're also very loyal drinkers. You know, like a lot of people don't go outside their barrow often, you know, unless it's a special occasion. They often visit the same bar every time, or a bar they know uh of through mutual friends, and you'll very rarely and then if they do come to a new bar and they want to come check it out because it is due and they're not afraid to, you kind of have to hit out of the park first time. Otherwise it's a no from them and they'll move on from you as quick as they look at you.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's because there's so many options. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's different to operating a smaller market like say Savannah or Charlotte or something.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you can be okay and uh and kind of get away with it a little bit more.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you can grow slowly. Yeah. True. Here, I don't think you only get one chance, but you definitely don't get more than two. Yeah, that's fair.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and also like you you don't the expenditures are higher, so you you don't get a long runway unless you've got a big war chest that you're kind of coming in with. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. You need you know, six months of expenses and you need a budget for PR. Like I saw an Instagram post recently, and it's somebody I I'm pretty sure I know him, but I'm not entirely sure. And it's him talking about, oh man, I've you know, worked in New York for so many years, saved up all my money. Me and my mate, we just opened a bar, and you know, and he's walking in, you know, I actually know the space, believe it or not, it was another bar there before, and he's like, and we opened it's I don't have any money for marketing, don't have any budget. We're just doing the best we can, making delicious drinks, one of Well the News. And we opened at six and it's nine, and we haven't had anyone, like nobody, like not one person. But in the video, he didn't even say the name of his fucking bar, right? Or where it was, like in marketing terms, like there's no call to action. It's like, what is this? A therapy session? Come on, man. It's it's okay to have no money for marketing, then you've really just got to be creative and edgy.
SPEAKER_01:Correct, correct, right? You can absolutely do that. And how you use the resources around you, like other bars or brands or any kind of activation, you just have to be resourceful. Um, and the more resourceful and the edgy you are, you know, um sometimes the better the result. Because if you don't swing for the fence and you go and you end up closing the bar anyway, then you didn't take any chance. You didn't find out what was on the other side.
SPEAKER_02:One of the problems with that, I find, um, and this applies to craft spirits as well as independent bars, is you're you typically are chronically underfunded. Yep. And sometimes having too much money can be as bad as having too little. You know, case in point, pronouncar, absolute elixir, power vodka. But having way too little is a genuine problem. So you're running around trying to fix all this, you're exhausted, you're not sleeping well, you're not eating well, you're not working out enough. It's pretty much impossible to be creative in a situation like that. So we can say, oh, you should be edgy and creative, you know, smoke a joint, write down 10 ideas. But it's it's very difficult.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I think you you it's one of those things where you just can't be reactive too much. That there has to be a pro if you know you're gonna come in with a very limited budget, and a lot of small bar owners do this, right? Is they come in with a very limited budget, you have to know where to exercise that creativity and where you're gonna swing for, and and what market you're gonna swing at. So you don't have to hit it out of the gate immediately, but you have to know what you're trying to aim for. Um, so those ideas shouldn't be coming alumino. They should be like, okay, we're gonna try and do this. This is what we're aiming for, and let's figure that out. And also having a good team around you, though, Phil. Like it can't be a one-man band, you know, um, understanding your limitations of what you do, and and that's kind of why we have the team here. You know, um, everyone has an overlap, but there is very distinctive skill sets. And where would you place yourself in terms of the distillery? Oh, so like I work the distillery every day. Um, that's that's what I do most of. Um, I'm more of a Swiss Army knife, so you know, Luis and I work together, you know, looking at the bar, he's baby, you know, I'm here to kind of like catch. Um, and we've you know just started developing drinks together now. Um, but my main focus is distillery and then um formulation outside of products that we just make. So, you know, we're working on uh an RTD for another person right now, so we do consulting for formulation as well, um, so we can sell for other people and developing products for the future as well. So we've got, as I mentioned, three apparatives that we're working on under this umbrella, um, as well as another one that we're developing other than uh the said product behind me.
SPEAKER_02:Well, so let's talk about that. Let's have a tasting of it actually. In fact, let me just uh leave it to all right, peeing completed. Now it's time for tasting. Beautiful. We'll talk about the bottles in a second, but why is this your first product? And what is it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so this is a coffee liqueur. Um, it's our first product. Um, it was very intentional, Phil, to do this one. Um, as our first product launching out of this distillery. And um mainly because I tasted a lot of coffee liqueurs. Coffee liqueur isn't going anywhere, it's not one of those things that it's gonna suddenly like, oh, no one's drinking espresso martinis or using coffee liqueur anymore.
SPEAKER_02:But the espresso martini did go into hibernation for a long time everywhere except Australia.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was gonna say in Australia we never seen a dip. And it was it was funny because you know, I we don't do we didn't do cold brew and and we didn't do like uh drip coffee in Australia. Everything came from an espresso machine, which is how we did coffee. So when we were doing espresso martinis, you know, I was telling my my partners here, I was like, we were pulling fresh coffee every time somebody asked for an espresso martini. I'd have a bar back standing at my espresso machine, which is a lot, yeah, and we were pulling an e probably at least 200 shots of coffee a night in a very small bar because that's what people wanted.
SPEAKER_02:It's we have a coffee culture, so it was something that I was that's like there's there was a huge amount of Italians, but also something that isn't why widely thought of outside Australia. Um there's a huge number of Greek people there as well. Correct, yeah. And that kind of Mediterranean thing. Yeah, I mean like as my friend Jason Crowley says, Australia is a country where a truck driver will return a cappuccino if the foam isn't thick enough.
SPEAKER_01:Correct. It's that they love coffee, they're pretend we're pretentious pricks about it. Um a's on this, by the way. Thank you so much. Um, so yeah, it was one of those things where you know we thought we could do a job better than somebody else, you know. Um not to say that anybody was doing it badly. Um everything has a home. We didn't see what we do with this product, we didn't see it on the market, you know, readily available anyway. So, what did you want to do differently with this? I wanted to taste like coffee, Phil. Right. And I know that sounds weird, but we tasted a bunch of coffee liqueurs uh uh as a standalone product, and we realized very, very quickly that when you taste them by themselves, they don't taste like coffee often.
SPEAKER_02:Um they take coffee is a very broad It is right. There's there's your Dunkin' Donuts, there's people sure you know dump in the sugar and milk.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_02:There's you know a delightful, slightly earthy espresso from the best place in town. So it is a wide understanding.
SPEAKER_01:It is just like strawberry. Sure. I I I don't disagree with any of that. I I think you know, when people you don't have to be a coffee connoisseur to know when something is a good coffee and when something's just an okay coffee. All right. So if if you go to Starbucks, you're like, okay, that's a that's a reasonable cup of coffee. Like it's not the best cup of coffee I'm ever gonna get. It's standardized, it is what it is, and they do it very specifically to them.
SPEAKER_03:Fine.
SPEAKER_01:Not the best, not the worst. But then if you go to a small boutique coffee shop that pulls good coffee and uses good coffee, you're like, that's good, subject objectively, a good cup of coffee. However, you drink it, whether you dump a ton of sugar in there or not, if the if the milk's percolated correctly, if the coffee's nice and bright, if it mixes with milk correctly, you know that's a good cup of coffee and it's been done well. So ours was to make a ladder. It was to make a good coffee liqueur that tasted more like coffee in its purest form than it did adulterate. So you know, the moment you know this coffee, for instance, we we went ahead and kind of well the most common, the most common feedback we get is like, oh, this tastes like uh sweet colberry. You know, it it it has it, it has like a colbero kind of like just you know okay, yeah. So it didn't start like this either.
SPEAKER_02:But do you think if I can just interject that that's because they're drinking a room temperature something that does have an amazing and delicious coffee flavor? And the nearest comparison for them is cold brew because you can't drink hot coffee and have the same experience. So 100%.
SPEAKER_01:Is that where it comes from, do you think? Yeah, I I think a little bit of that, and then all the all the archetypes of you know cold brew, you know, if you're just getting it black and you're just kind of crushing it, it's kind of you know, refreshingly coffee, you know, that there's not a lot of like bullshit in there. And cold brew is usually done with very specific coffee, you know, it's not done with anything, not everything turns into a good cold brew. Um, so there's a lot of that is that uh in there as well. Um, and when you're getting other coffee liqueurs, there's also a bunch of other things in there than coffee getting in the way. Um, where this is coffee, sugar, water, alcohol. That's it. There's no colouring agents, there's no flavoring agents, it's just that. So it's the closest thing you're gonna get to Cobra on that metric.
SPEAKER_02:And that said, so basically, first of all, remove anything extraneous, so coffee, sugar, alcohol, water, and then what? Like what uh what base did you choose and why, for instance?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we chose uh a New York-based um GNS, so it's coming local, um, from a from a good source of um pure GNS, like but we tested it to make sure there was no crap in there. Not all GNS is the same. Um we chose it as a as a corn base as well. Corn, yeah. So New York corn? Yep. So everything's within reach. Uh the coffee comes from Brooklyn. Um, everything's within arm's reach for us. Um, and then the the three major things that we found started separating, you know, flavoring profiles for us was methodology and how and when, and then blend. Um those were well talk us through that methodology. Yeah, so you know, to to get you to go back to the formulation part, we did. There's only me and another distiller here, Sama. Um we did over, I can't tell you how many exactly, but over 150 bench tops. Um, and where we started was nowhere near where we finished. We were going for that single origin, we're gonna use one coffee and blah blah blah. And then, you know, happy accidents, you know, um, we got the wrong beans one time and we started doing bench. We're like, you know what, this one works a bit better. And then we blended them. Like, actually, together they make really good coffee. And then we're like, okay, these are both similar roasts. Let's what if we use a different roast? So we use two different origins, so two different countries, um, and three different roasts. And I can tell you changing one of those roasts by less than one percent of total volume is like two different products. So the ratio had everything to do with it for us.
SPEAKER_02:And have you what was the first run? How many of these have you made?
SPEAKER_01:Uh we are in batch number 15. So we're done 15 runs. What's a batch? Uh 100 cases.
SPEAKER_02:106 packs? So 600 bottles, so 400 liters. Right. So you're if you're on number 15, uh, you've made 6,000 bottles. Is that right? And how how has it been keeping the consistency?
SPEAKER_01:It's been it's been good. Um there's been the only major roadblock, you know. It's lucky that you you've been in the industry long enough, you know, uh Phil, to know like you don't ever expect it to run smoothly, especially over the First five to ten. You're like, okay, we're gonna have to figure something shit out here. And this distillery was not made for coffee liquid, it was made for vodka. Yeah. And it's wildly apparent once you start distilling it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well that means it just doesn't have the things you need.
SPEAKER_01:It's got all the basics, but filtration systems, you know, like you know, um maceration, um, blending, mixing, like their mixer moves slower than an hour hand on a clock. It is crazy that it there's no point of it even being in there. But they're only mixing vodka and water, so they only need to agitate it. So yeah, we had a lot of things going against us, just facility-wise. Um, but the only inconsistent thing that we've had, well not inconsistent, the only hurdle that we had was with the filtration system. Um with the with the microns transferring from blending tank over to fill station. Um we just had you know, one run, we were getting like no clogs in our filter. It was like seamlessly running through. Nothing changes. Next back, we get a clog halfway through, it just doesn't want to pump through. We're like, oh okay. So but we've remedied that. What was it? Um it had a lot to do with uh temperature in the room. Interesting. You would never pick it. Yeah, yeah. Um well it's it's the little things that count. Uh I remember when we were doing the mash at hippocampus, we were getting two warts, you know, fermenting at two different stages, and they started at the same time. And Lex was doing some tests, and it was the time in which he put it into the tank. And it was a crazy thing. So it's the little things that you just don't account for, but that was it. And now we're, you know, seamless. Um, we could do, we thought we were going to struggle to do one run a week. Um, we can get we can get three pallets out in 10 days from start to finish.
SPEAKER_02:And let's talk about the other choices that you made. Uh, what sugar? What sweetening agents?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we use um uh vegan white cane. So, you know. Is there non-vegan white cane? Yeah, because um they can't um some places can't account for bugs being and bones being in the um in the sugar. So when they mill the sugar, they can't account for for bugs being in there, so they can't they can't uh say that it's what if they're mechanically milling versus hand cutting the cane?
unknown:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but as is a hundred percent pure cane sugar. Is it is it bonsucro certified? Yeah, it's all the all the bells and whistles.
SPEAKER_02:That appears to be quite legit. In case you don't know, so bonsucro is a kind of a anti-slavery, anti-trafficking, everyone's got a fair payment supply chain certification for sugar, including obviously sugarcane and the last.
SPEAKER_01:The coffee's the same. Fair trade, um, has all the rainforest ticks of approval, kosher, all the bells and hope it's not for Venezuela because your supply chain's gonna be fucked up. We luckily didn't go that far. Yeah, no, we we we chose um we chose a little bit more local than that. But um yeah, so so that that was um that was the the only real hurdle we hit, um, luckily enough. Our methodology was good going into it from table. We did four pilots before hitting um actual production, um, and they came out on par. Um, yeah, so really happy with the product, really happy with but every time you made it, I assume you put it into an espresso martini. Yep. Yep, without failure.
SPEAKER_02:And this is the winner.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. Did you test it with any other drinks? We tested with a bunch of other drinks. Um what I I don't I think it maybe it's hit the states now, but in Australia for maybe 20 years, tonic and coffee have been raging. It hasn't really come over here, yeah, but it's a great drink. It is a great drink. So we do this, we do this with um with some tonic. I tell you another hit that we just have, um, thanks to Luis. Um, coffee liqueur, ginger beer and lime.
SPEAKER_02:Interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I he he he said it to me one day. He's like, dude, I'm gonna try it. It's really simple. Coffee liqueur, ginger beer and lime. I'm like, does it have a name? Uh it doesn't yet. It needs a name. Yeah, yeah. We're doing it for the launch. So like I was sitting there, I was like, that's crazy. But yeah, the delicious. Um the the other thing that we we were really big on trying to do, Phil, when we launched was make this an at-home product and not make it like just, you know. Can I say Mr. Black? Sure. Yeah, quick. So Mr. Black did a really good job going after bartenders. It was a bartender's hand. Yeah. Of going after bartenders and making sure that if you were using good coffee liqueur, you were using Mr. Black behind the bar. It was nearly like a rite of passage from like, and that's fine. They give, like you said, superb job doing it. I wouldn't know bar about it. I wasn't attacking bartenders, even with the pedigree that we have. I wanted at-home consumers to drink this and feel comfortable drinking an espresso martini and not have to go through all the okay, how do you make a simple syrup again? Do we need to buy, do we need to buy uh white chocolate liqueur for this? Like how we so you know the recipes on our bottle. It's three ounces of this. Oh, there it is. Yep. Three ounces of this, one ounce of coffee liqueur. Uh sorry, uh espresso.
SPEAKER_02:That's it. And uh two more questions. So 23.5% ABV, so 47 proof.
SPEAKER_01:Uh why that? That's the best flavor. Um, you know, as again, if you're adding GNS or you're adding alcohol, you're you know, you're adding a certain amount of dilution to it as well. Um so the flavor-wise, you know, you know, with all spirits, you know, the the rum that we work on, you know, we tried it at 40, we tried it at 43. You know, it tastes like two different rums, you know, when you're trying them at that at 25.
SPEAKER_02:Did you ever consider like a higher or lower percentage for this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, we we tested them at 25, you know, we went up as 25, 26 ABV and tried it at that. We went as low as like 21. Um, this was the sweet spot. This is where this coffee liqueur tastes best for us.
SPEAKER_02:And it's 750. Yeah. Uh a lot of people would have gone for 700.
SPEAKER_01:So true. Um, we knew we were going to stay in the States for a hot minute. Um, and we weren't gonna leave. You know, we have endeavors to to go everywhere, but you know, we're a small little distillery in the middle of New York, you know, 750 was was um the regulation at the time, and you know, we're we're happy just giving more, you know, more espresso liqueur to as as many people as we can. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And the cost engineering, so yeah. What price did you come out with? Like, for instance, in New York, what is the the so-called frontline, the wholesale price to a bar for a bottle?
SPEAKER_01:Uh$22.99 with two cases and uh just two six-pack cases, so twelve bottles. Yeah. It's$22 were cheaper than like Mr. Blacks and the Borgetis of the world. Uh we did that strategically. Um and then uh I think for a single, I think we're$26.99,$2799.
SPEAKER_02:And this would retail then for what,$35,$32,$35, 32, 35, yeah, depending on uh your um retail. And you've got your own distribution here. Yeah. So how does that work? You've got the license, and but have you hired like sales staff and logistics staff? So how does that work?
SPEAKER_01:So we came when we we organized the team. Um the s the strategy was having somebody who that's their specialty, and that for us that's Rob Nieves. So, you know, he came from Bacardi and he he's one of the uh um uh North American ambassadors for 10 to 1 Rum.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay, great.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so he's been in sales for as long as I've known him, so plus 10 years, and he's very good at it. He's your atypical salesperson, he's just a really charming, lovely guy. And so, you know, he was one of the first people I reached out to when I got to distillery because um much to everybody doesn't want to hear this. The juice is very secondary to sales. You really need good salespeople, you need boots on the ground, you need people who can sell your stuff, um, just as as much as you need good packaging. The juice ends up being one of the last things that actually matter because by the time they look at the bottle or they're getting sold the bottle and the relationships that are formed with those things, that's how people end up tasting it. But if you don't have a good salesperson, a good sales team, knowledgeable, um, as well as good packaging, then they're like, eh, no, I'm okay.
SPEAKER_02:Especially in New York, you are inundated. Oh, 100%. Like way more than I ever saw in London with armies of sales reps just trooping in unannounced every day, everyone's got a little six bottle bag.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, brands you have never heard of as well as the ones you have, of course. 100%. You know, I and even I'm still a buyer.
SPEAKER_02:Um and how does how does it work? Like, how would somebody uh order this? Like if Carl from Ivory Peacock wanted to put this in their Espresso Martini, they make an amazing espresso martini.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, how would it work? Like so it's a twofold system for us, Phil. So we initially end us still with Park Street, um you know, as an entry level, like most people, like MW or Park Street, that's your rite of passage. Yes, it is. Um, or you can come directly to us and call us and we can drop it off to you. So it's an either-or situation.
SPEAKER_02:Um so people who are already signed up to Park Street can just order this by sending an email. Correct. And Park Street will deliver from Western carriers, etc. Thousand percent. Or they can order direct from you guys. Yes. And we'll and we'll drop it off for you. Oh, but who will? Like, I mean, you've got a van driver. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So we have people that we have on staff that you know have have a van and drop it off for us. Um, it's you know, we're in our infancy, so we don't have a lot of like full-time drivers that do that. Um, a lot of the people we know are in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so it's it's not a big deal for us to get to thus far. Um, but yeah, well the other problem is more problem, but the other thing that we seen to have a second primary distributor was a lot of buyers don't want to go with a new distributor. Yeah. So as soon as you go, hey, you just seem to have a new credit app, they're like, I'm done. Yeah, the blank look goes over their face, they're like, I don't, I'm not signing up. Very, very important thing. So most most venues have Park Street because you know, at some point along their their timeline, they've found a new brand that they wanted. Um, so we went with Park Street, plus we self-distribute, so it's an easy sell for us, you know. Um, but yeah, those are the main two ways to get 11th hour. And what are so far the flagship uh on-premise outlets for 11th hour? Um Harry's downtown. Harry's, excellent. Harry's is flying, they do a spiked affogato with us as well. Nice. Um, and they do the espresso martini, but they're flying through it. Um obviously Bar Sub Gin, you know, where we're uh doing more cases than we can count. Um and then there's uh you know, I know I know Sip and Guzzle are using it as well. Um Marcio Honeywell's uh flying through. Oh, I saw Marcio on Monday actually. That's a huge pair of parties. And we really love that. You know, we we really pride on just being a very localized distillery. And you know, the benefit of us is if you run out, you know, midnight, I'll uh I'll Ubi your case. No problem. You know, we're we're a 24-hour delivery system. So um yeah, happy to help out as many hospitality venues as we can. Cool.
SPEAKER_02:Well, is there any other cool stuff we can uh taste? Um I have rum upstairs. Oh, we should definitely try some rum. Come on. I'll pause this sucker. What do you think? Alright, so talk me through these two samples.
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, these are the um samples that we spoke about earlier for the rum. So again, entry level, and then we got the the premium or you know, the next level up. Uh I think we I think we coined it as declassified terminology we use for these ones. Um so as I mentioned earlier, the um the entry level one is is designed for cocktails exclusively, not exclusively, but primar primarily. Um and five barrels, it's double-aged in Barbados in France in Cognac. Um, and then what we where we blend um and bottle there. So uh the idea is the flavorings behind them kind of like bring what you would find from rums all around the world without actually having to travel. So, you know, Barbados for me makes really premium-style rums, they're very butterscotchy, very rich kind of rums. So we had to add some you know esoteric kind of flavorings in there, and that's kind of where we started choosing the barrels very specifically and then blending them at a very specific ratio, just like the coffee liqueur. It's all ratio, it's all very specific regionality. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So this one, the you know, entry level will be the Swiss Army knife. So use it for everything. Every basic rum coke. Yeah. How is it a rum and coke?
SPEAKER_01:It's a big drink. I'm not gonna lie to you. Fucking delicious. It was it was one of those we didn't think about trying, and then we were sitting around a table one day and someone's like, Have you tried a rum and coke? And I'm like, no. And then we did it, and it tastes like it nearly verges on a spiced rum and coke. Like that's how much flavor it has to it.
SPEAKER_02:It does have a very spice nose. You know, it's like a lot of nutmeg, cardamom, some vanilla. It does nose like a spice rum.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And when you think about it, that it doesn't have any additives or actually any sugar, so no dissage, no added sugars or anything. It's just yeah, there's a lot going on there.
SPEAKER_02:I could see this being very versatile.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Um, yeah, it didn't come without you know, exhausted. It's it's not a sipping rum. This is a rum to be put to work. 100%. It's it also drinks well in my opinion. Like, I don't know, I'm I'm not gonna sit there and have a cigar with it, but it's like a lot of white rums that I've I've tasted, or like, you know, uh entry-level rums I've tasted, I'm like, okay, I'll mix this. I don't really want to drink this um like by itself. But that one, I love nosing that rum. It's a beautiful rum on the nose. Um, it has a lot of character to it.
SPEAKER_02:Um, which I'm gonna go out at what 42.6% ADP, is that right?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Again, that's the sweet spot. You know, when we taste it at 41, okay. 43. 42.6 was the sweet spot.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um in what important ways does the premium uh SKU differ?
SPEAKER_01:Um older aged rum in there is the first thing. And then the cast types that we're using as well are much more um uh you know expensive, if you want to you know use uh basic terminology, yeah. Uh it's a lot more premium um rum and aged rum in there.
SPEAKER_02:And the same ABV?
SPEAKER_01:Uh 43.1, I think. Right, it's a little bit more. Yeah. A little bit more heat on that one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you see immediately my reaction is that this is something you want to get to know better when you taste it.
SPEAKER_01:And without sp spoiling the end of the book for you, yeah, you'll get that campfire isla on that on that back end for you.
SPEAKER_03:It really only is in the very finish.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's it's remarkable, isn't it, rum? Um I've had this conversation a lot lately. I I had it with Ian Burrell and Matt Pietrich, and we talk about like if you like barrel-age spirits, the best value for money is rum. Yeah, no question. Better than any other product out there. So why has rum not you know regained its once dominant global position? And the only hypothesis I have, and it's weak, it's a weak hypothesis, is because the category has everything from vodka-like, you know, Bacardi or whatever, to the most delicious ultra-aged rums you could ever have, that it's hard for people to put a label on it. If you compare it to whiskey, yeah, there essentially isn't any market for unaged whiskey. White dot, not really. 100%. All whiskey is grain-based and it's barrel-aged.
SPEAKER_01:That gives you something really firm to hold on to. No, I agree with that. I I think you know, when we were talking about the category and and we were looking at the marketing and how we were going to brand, um, it felt like rum was a caricature of itself. You know, it was a party drug. You know, when people look at it, they they think of it as at a good time, you know, the chubacardian cokes and so forth. Um, what one of the analogies that I use was like, you know, if someone comes up and gifts you a, you know, uh Glen Marangy 21-year-old, you're like, oh, thank you so much. I'll put this away. And only at the very best of occasions we're like, we're like, yeah, pour a sip of this dram. But if someone comes up and gives you a 21-year-old bowl of rum, you're like, let's crack this open. Great, brilliant, hand me the color. Yeah, exactly. Right. But and it because they don't view it as like a serious, you know, spirit to to contend with, because you know, it's it's contagious of pirates and and partying and and beach cocktails and so forth, you know, which the cocktail world doesn't help run because everything is like, you know, we've got a lot of panache and and just not taken as seriously.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the trop tropical, you know, what we used to call tiki is a big part of that. Correct. You know, and it was escapism. Uh during Prohibition, it was escapism post-World War II. Um, and the reason I called my hypothesis weak is because the most red-hot liquor category in the world is agave, particularly tequila, and that's got everything from you know the most neutral barely tastes of agave mixtos to the most incredibly delicious, ultra, ultra extra enejos out there. And here's here, well, actually, I want to put this to you, obviously coming from Australia. In America, if you were to just go around all the large cities, right, especially the coastal cities, but any any big city, you would be forgiven for thinking that nobody drinks mixed out tequila at all. You see it so rarely, certainly in bars. Um, but if you just hop over the Atlantic to Europe, it's very evident that it is still being drunk in huge amounts. And mixed out tequila is still growing in America. You know, I would argue it probably outsells. Continues to outsell 100% uh blue agave, right? But there's a whole culture of connoisseurship about tequila in America. And who, this is a very long way of getting to a point. Who is a connoisseur about rum? Well, there's the tiki guys, right? Which is a lot of boring old white guys in Hawaiian shirts like me, right? And there's, you know, the odd spirit, and I was like, oh, Uncle Dave, he likes his rum, he was in the navy. But that's it. Yeah. You never meet someone who's like, oh, rum's my thing. Yeah. Ever. You meet people who are into tequila, you meet people who are into uh whiskey, you meet people who are into vodka, you meet people who are into gin, but not rum. Yeah. Not like a a normal person, no normal people who are into rum.
SPEAKER_01:No, that's a that's a that's a fact. Um, you know, like even when you think of agave, we we have like agave experts in Australia, Phil Bailey. Yeah. Um, and and you know, um the guys from uh OK Cantina.
SPEAKER_02:Okay Cantina.
SPEAKER_01:You know, like that, and we take, I think you'd have to fact check me on this, but I think Australia is the second highest purchaser of agave spirits in the world. Um from my reading. So maybe per capita.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, uh, I don't even know if it's that.
SPEAKER_01:It's that they treat Australians treat booze very seriously, they treat it like coffee. So, yeah, rum doesn't have the same kind of you know reverence that every other spirit has. And I can't put my finger on why. I I think you know, going back to formulating and tying it all together is one of the reasons we developed this is especially when you look at the premium skew, it doesn't drink like a rum. It it has that whiskey kind of or a different mature age spirit on it, on the back end of of being a rum, which is why we ended up putting in the Isla barrels and so forth. Was what we kind of wanted to allure other mature age spirits over to us. It's why the bottle is so ostentatious. You know, we we wanted, yeah?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So what we wanted to, we wanted people to take it seriously and to have kind of like a serious kind of like idea of what this category is. Um and it, you know, it's it's a party drug right now, and everyone treats it as such. So the reason for getting in the market, you know, going back to the original joke, it was gonna be the year of rum, is like it's not so much gonna be the year of rum, but we want to start making those those um steps for people to take it seriously as a category and not just pullside cocktails, not something that's gonna be overly sugared to give you a headache.
SPEAKER_02:But at the same time, that is an underlying and maybe even subconscious thing that will get people drinking rock. For sure. Right? Like whiskey doesn't really have a fun element to it. I say this from the country that invented it, but you know, and you're not drinking whiskey pool side. No, no, you're not at an Irish swimming pool. No, um, but tequila has that. Yeah. Right? Tequila, whatever about people like, oh, I got wrecked on tequila when I was 15, can't smell it now. Um, it's got a huge fun element, and arguably rum has even more. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and I think it is a little bit more. I think the difference with the tequila and the rum conversation is, you know, it's it's the plant. You know, people take agave seriously, you know, and it has so many, oh, you know, and and that's why mezcal has become popular, is because like same plant, different style, you know, and you're buying the plant, which is kind of the age statement of agave. You know, that's what that's what uh Tobala means. It means that it grew for this amount of time. So so there is an age statement implied, and there is an education implied of premiumization of that kind of category. When you're looking at rum, it's like, well, it's sugarcane, and people don't even think of it as molasses, which is not the same thing as you know, as uh sugarcane. That they're not looking at it as like, well, it's got some it's got some like you know uh exclusivity about it. It's like oh it's just sugarcane. Do you think people even think of it on that level? No, of course not. I don't think so. But but they don't they don't take it seriously because they think it's just readily available. It's this readily available thing. It has no real that there's no mystery behind sugarcane, you know, where whiskey has a mystery to it. They don't know, you know, the the op the operations behind it, the age statement makes it worth something. Um with tequila, you know, the agave makes it worth something in my opinion. And I think that's what people, and it's you know, it has a region. You can only get it from this one region, it's the cognac. It's the same reason like when you look at Armagnac versus cognac. Armagnac's been around longer and it has more variety to it because I can use 10 grapes instead of three. So why does one sell 250 million cases and one sell eight? I do actually know the answer to that. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02:In case you're wondering, please. And it was worked out by better informed people of me. Okay, historically, all the cognac houses, and certainly the big four, were owned by foreigners who created the export market.
SPEAKER_03:Makes sense, right?
SPEAKER_02:They were all founded by non-French people or first generation from places like Scandinavia or Ireland or Jersey. Yeah. And whereas Armagnac was always French owned.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And French people drink it. And French people drink it, which they don't drink cognac. They don't drink cognac. Yeah. So it's that, like cognac was always an export.
SPEAKER_01:Especially with Kimpari um buying Cavosier of um of uh beam Centauri, yeah. Yeah, 1.3 billion? Something like that. It's a pretty penny for Cavossier. I don't know. I think there's a lot of brand value there. Maybe. I mean, I I don't know what they're gonna. Kimpari does a great job of revitalizing what they did with Wild Turkey was amazing. You know, with the Russell's reserve stuff situation, that was that's true.
SPEAKER_02:And um, you know, Cognac's a long-term play. Yep. But you know, one of the interesting things about Rum and all spirits is that whenever somebody wants to bring out a premium of Spirit X, and this could be everything from Baijo to Pisco or Cachasa or Geneva, um, they put it in a barrel. Yep. And what's the commonest, cheapest barrel in the world? It's an ex-bourbon barrel because of American legislation that says you have to use a fresh barrel every time. And there was an article by uh the drinks writer Jason Wilson a couple of years ago, I think it was on a Substack, and it was, I think it was about the bourbonification of cognac and Armagnac and things like that. Okay, because they had been listening to uh people in the States uh or say, oh, you should try, oh, bourbon's really hot, so you should try and get bourbon drinkers to drink this. So you're making a Calvinos or an Armagnac and a cognac kind of drinks like a bourbon. Yeah. And that defeats the purpose to some degree.
SPEAKER_01:It does, but there has to be a gateway drug, you know, especially for you know getting people who are so you know regimented in what they buy. Like uh you've worked in bars long enough to know like if somebody comes up and goes, Can I get a Jack and Coke? And you're like, Oh, we don't sell Jack Daniels, but we've got George Dickle, it's you know, equal to their like, have vodka and soda or have beer. That they will not change. That's because their attachment is not rational, it's emotional. But but whiskey drinkers live in that irrational universe where if it's not this, then it's a beer or a wine. And it they won't even stay in the category something. So I guess not all the time. I'm making absolutely Well no, they've got like five brands in that.
SPEAKER_02:It's like if you asked a random person walking down the street, okay, what what shares should you buy? They go, uh, Amazon, Google, Tesla, right? It's the same. And if you ask the guy in Wall Street, he'd be like, no, that's all bollocks. You need to invest in the you know, this obscure stock you've never heard of.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. But that it's these people have religiously been drinking the same thing and have very little interest in changing. And trying to get them to not change a different brand, you know, like I said, going from Jack to George is hard enough, let alone going from, hey, instead of whiskey, drink a whole different category for me. You know, it's it's a really hard task.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the switching costs are huge. Yeah. You need to, you then need, first of all, you need the strength of character to explain to your friends that you're drinking, what's that? George Dickle never heard of him. Um, and then you need to learn about that category, like, Jesus Christ. And you have to know why you're saying it. It does take a special kind of person to do that.
SPEAKER_01:I agreed. And and so, you know, for for this, you know, specifically brand, we're trying to encourage that, you know, which is why we design the bottle a certain way, which is why we design the juice in a certain way. It's it's all entailing to go, hey, this is a premium category, you know, because like like you said, the best value for money in matured spirits is rum, and it's not even close. A 15-year-old whiskey versus a 15-year-old rum, it's not even in the same ballpark. Not at all. Um, so yeah, I mean, what we're doing to this to this rum, if we were to do it with a whiskey, you'd have to put a price tag above you know a couple hundred dollars on it. But because it's rum, you're like, okay, we can charge.
SPEAKER_02:Incidentally, this is not at all linked to uh our current discussion, except tangentially, but we like a bit of politics here in the Philip Duff Show. If Cuba collapses, I mean Savannah Club is fucked. Correct. For people who've been hiding in a cave for the last few weeks, the uh dear president of America uh abducted Venezuela's leader about two weeks ago. You know, insert all the jokes you like. Like, you know, it's the first time he brought an immigrant into the country. Nicholas Maduro, he was in Brooklyn for 24 hours and he turned up to court in like a car heart work jacket. He's already been hipsterized by Brooklyn. But Venezuela was propping up Cuba with oil, of course, uh, which which Cuba lacks and sorely needed. Sure. And I don't know who else will sell oil to Cuba, but if Cuba collapses, then we lose Havana Club, which is Yeah, and and I've always said the the Havana Club Maestro is one of my best value for money rums in the world.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah. I Celestial's maestro's. Oh, it is so freaking good. I I if whenever I see it, I buy it. Yeah, they've got different expressions now as well. They've got a couple. It's it's such a wildly good good category. But I mean, yeah, choosing the category is you know as important as the juice that you make, you know, um coffee liqueur, rum, apparatus.
SPEAKER_02:But think about it. You were mentioning whiskey just now. Whiskey got, pardon the phrase, it's shot in the arm because of phylloxera. Yeah. Right? Uh gin got its shot in the arm uh largely because of prohibition. And also this mysterious around 1900, mysteriously, everyone began demanding dry things, dry from it, dry thin. Nobody knows. I'd love to know why. If anybody knows why, please write in. That's a good filled up show. The Espresso Martini is the reason you're making this liqueur now. It's the reason Tom created Mr. Black, and it's the reason Kalua and even Tia Maria are back from the dead. So without that drink, which by the way, toodled along for 30 years, like it had its peak in London, I was there, and then it was just eclipsed by other drinks. And then I remember being in Australia, I think probably 14 years ago, maybe, maybe a little bit less than that. And I went to the St Kilda Hotel, the legendary rock and roll venue. I played it the Saints. Yeah. And um and they had espresso martinis on draft. Yeah. And I remember saying to the bartenders, like, wow, do you like make them house? She's like, no, mate. And she showed me like kegs, absolute kegs of espresso martinis. Yeah. Uh being supplied by presumably Pernaricar Australia. Yeah. But maybe what categories need is these black swan events.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I I totally agree. I think um it's hope, hopefully, rum will have it shot in the arm somewhere along the way.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, maybe if we get like a barley blight or something like that, or like vodka fungus.
SPEAKER_01:No one can get whiskey anymore. Um, but yeah, I don't know. It's it's hard, especially with today and and the way the the liquor industry is running, it's it's hard to put your finger on, you know, people drinking low ABVs, and you know, the industry is is definitely changing direction somewhat, you know. There's a lot of talk though.
SPEAKER_02:So when did you open a low low? We opened in June. Right, so June. So you've had a bit of time. Yep. So just forget about January. Obviously, January, dry January. It's freezing cold here in New York. Um, but in the run-up, so from June to December, what did you notice about how people were drinking? Are they really ordering the low and no ABV drinks?
SPEAKER_01:We've we have like subcategories for them at the bar, and we make a point of doing them. Um, yeah. People are ordering low ABV and asking about AB. Like more than in the past, in your experience. In my experience, yeah. But you know, I I come from that pedigree where no one asked before, no one cared. Right. You know, it was like this is your cocktail menu and I'll drink a martini, which isn't one of the booziest things I can have.
SPEAKER_02:Your experience with uh bathtub gin, yeah, like there's been low and no on the menu for a while there, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, for at least four or five years.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So has the uptake on those no and lows picked up?
SPEAKER_01:It's picked up in the sense people are asking for more options. I don't know if we're selling more of them, but the question is getting asked, what else, you know, like what other drinks do you do? Because we have three or four, right? Um, which is not the biggest or smallest menu, but we put a lot of effort into them. Like we treat them like a cocktail. Um, like one of our um no ABV cocktails is you know a soda that we make from scratch. Um, it takes up two days to make, and then we carbonate them and we sell them. We can add boost to them, obviously. Um, but yeah, we put a lot of effort into our our non-alks from we treat them like cocktails. And we still get asked, yeah, but do you have more? Like four four cocktails in a menu of 16 is a lot.
SPEAKER_02:Um well, one of the things that I notice, uh, and I kind of have this myself being in dry January, um there's more and more non-alcoholic cocktails out there and low-alcoholic cocktails. There's very few non-alcoholic or low alcohol without added sugar. Right? And I think that's an opportunity, or at least added, you know, you can have sweetness, but the added sugar is what kind of uh can be a turn off, I think.
SPEAKER_01:100%. And the amount of like I don't know if you know consumers are wildly aware of this, but the amount of sugar that you have to add to compensate a lot is is quite high when you're doing non-alcs. It's it's quite high because you have to add acid bases and then you have to get volume from somewhere, you know, to pair out your drink and however you want to do that. So you have to power out the amount of citrus and and acids that you're putting in there with usually a sugar component. So I would say there's a lot of extra sugar in non-alcoholic cocktails than I would the regular cocktails because they already have a good amount of volume of booze in there. Um the other thing I'll say is like a lot of people are asking for you know low sugar cocktails as well, um, you know, and and or at least you know the questions being raised now, like can I get is there a no-sugar option? Something we're doing at Hello Hello that you know Luis and I are working on now is putting a lot of cocktails on tap and you know stabilizing them. But what we're doing is we're not adding alcohol to them on tap, and we're giving people two or three options of booze that pair with that cocktail. So we've we've designed a cocktail to add to the cocktail or have the side? To add to the cocktail. So if you come up and you go, hey, can I get, you know, I think we've got like a bellini spritz kind of thing that we're working on, can I get that cocktail? We have it with like an ap roll or a gin recommendation, but we've made sure that the flavor components work with most things. And and we're giving two people two or three options of the things that will work best with it. Um, just to give it some some brevity of people want like half or a no alcohol kind of base to it. Um, we we have that option. Uh, I think those are the lengths you have to go to in today's drinking to help um keep people there, um, give people what they want. Um, I think bars are still a social house and we want people to socialize. That's you know, it's the lubricant. So to do that however they want to drink, I I don't care, as long as you don't make me drink it. I have no opinion on how you drink. Um, no ABV, low ABV, sweet, non-sweet. You know, for the coffee liqueur, and we call it the recipe on the bottle is our skinny marguer, uh skinny marguerite, skinny espresso martini. We don't, there's no added sugar to it. Right. So there's no extra syrups that you're adding. There's no hidden sugar. You know, we use low sugar as it is to make that and kind of taste it. Um, you know, when you when you taste the actual liqueur, you're like, oh, this isn't overly syrupy, it doesn't look overly syrupy. Um, we don't add a lot of sugar to it. So there's no extra booze to it, and there's also no extra sugar to it. So we call it a skinny espresso martini. Um, we also make it so like you know, easy to use ingredients now as well. You know, I think people are drinking at home more, you know, we're seeing a lot more, especially in New York, um, a lot more people coming out not the moment 5 p.m. hits, but that's 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m. kind of starts now. Um, so we're seeing a lot more at-home use as well.
SPEAKER_02:9 p.m. makes sense because you know, if you work till 5 or 6, then you have to go home. Shower, yeah. Most people have at least a 30-minute commute. Yep. So, you know, if you're back out at 9, like someone's coming at your bar at 6 or 7, they're coming from the office, or they're coming from Yeah, or you know, especially in New York.
SPEAKER_01:A lot of tourists. There's just a lot of people walking around finding things to do. Um, and and we get a lot of that here. I mean, like I said, we're we're you know moments away from Penn Station and that is Square Garden. We got people just looking for a bar, looking for somewhere to come in, um, looking for a hangout in between, doing something to something else. So yeah, it's we're finding the the traditional drinkers though, the the locals are coming out nine.
SPEAKER_02:And what are they drinking? Like, what have been the hit drinks of uh the first six, seven months?
SPEAKER_01:Uh here we do we do a vodka Red Bull on tap. And it's not your typical Vodka Red Bull as all things. You know, we put clarified apple and cucumber in there. It still has Red Bull notes in it. It has actual Red Bull in it. Actual Red Bull in it. We tip Red Bull into a keg, we marry it with a bunch of other stuff, and you can get it on tap. Um, we have a porn star daiquiri, so we combine the um the pornstar martini and the uh the daiquiri those have been the two big hits uh thus far uh tiramisu it's given a good good run for its money as well as a porn star do you uh do you have like a ritual serve with yeah um we we we pour beer to top it up instead of uh champagne um but usual martini it's a passion fruit base with rum but is it a one glass thing or do you have like a shot yep a one glass thing yeah beer goes on top yeah I know it's m it's easier from an operational point of view but the Instagram ability you know the original porn star with the shot of champagne and the little uh passion fruit on top which should have been set alight yeah yeah you know yeah well it's that's why we pair them together and but you're right the the Instagram ability is what matters um much to my dismay I'm not a big Instagram person. You can like it or not it's it's part of the industry now. It is it is uh social media is as ingrained into our industry as drinks yeah if if you don't have a good social media following and good posts it's really really hard now and you have to spend a lot more time on it it's not something that I grew up with in bars.
SPEAKER_02:We didn't have but it is like the you know my stepdaughter is turning 21 in May right she has never not had social media in her life. She's never not had a smartphone. It's crazy. So those kids are going to be running the country in a few years.
SPEAKER_01:So I I'm it's one of those things that I have I have to learn on the fly. I I listen to people outside of of um this space and I take their advice and and work with them and we have people coming in to do it especially because it it's a it's a facet of bartending now it's a facet of owning a business. If you do not have good social media um it's as bad as having bad drinks.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah but I mean largely in terms of drinks in the bars it's about having really good lighting so that even people who are shitty photographers which is most of us can take a good drink.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah lighting temperature music all three things have to be on point when you walk into a room yeah they'll kill you.
SPEAKER_02:Well it's the things that people don't realize and this we should never realize they exist. Yeah well you notice them if they're not right but that's the responsibility of a great manager. If a great manager is doing his or her job you don't notice everything just runs.
SPEAKER_01:Correct it's it's one of the when we're going back to talking about training managers it's one of the it's one of the things that I tell every manager is like the three things that you can control in this room are lighting temperature and music. You can control those things. Most other things you can't control they're like how people are going to act within that room to a certain degree and what drinks are going to be ordered and how busy and who calls out and all of those things are going to be you know within limited control. But lighting temperature music you can control those things. They should never be recognized you'd never go it's bright here. Oh it's chilly in here. Oh it's quite loud in here.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah I went into a non-alcoholic bar the other day uh on the my the first day of my dry January but a friend had driven down from Canada and he was not he doesn't drink. So he said Phil let's meet up in a non-alcoholic should meet up in an alcoholic bar and the bar was great the bartender was really great he made lovely non-alcoholic drinks for us but the bar was really bright. It was otherwise perfect it had kind of had a a weird sort of supernatural slash divy vibe to it was perfect.
SPEAKER_01:It's cool but it was just too bright. Yeah kills me every time I I I have to exit the room when things like that happen. Like I just like I just can't be in it. Yeah the lighting is is hard to get right but imperative to making a bar work in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02:I would say that you know you can have some influence on the guest. You don't know who's coming and you don't know when and you don't know what they ate or drank before they arrived and you don't know what happened to them before they arrived. So you're you're you know you're kind of digging yourself out of a hole there. But if you as the manager can greet people when they come in and just say hi and lead them to the bar, lead them to the table that's the battle half won instead of leaving it all down to the bartender or the server. A thousand percent I I think you know who are doing other things.
SPEAKER_01:100% because you you're chasing your tail after the fact you know like if you don't set off on a good note every how a guest critiques your bar is going to be vastly different than if you if they're warm and welcoming from the from the get-go. They're already at a positive mentality. It's hard to give be start being negative if you come in positive. But if you come in a little bit flat or you know you got something bad happened to you just before that's the mindset you're walking in. So you'll you're looking your brain is looking to critique everything and everything has a bad taste. It's hard to come back from a loss. So to your point I totally agree if you greet somebody hey how's your day like basic conversation basic humility.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah bring up to the bar that's all that's all you need to do.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe you bring them the water maybe but like just yeah grab a seat at the bar somebody's gonna be right with you yeah we've got your seat come over here it's very basic human interaction um is needed and it comes off and it will pay dividends it will pay it's a difference between someone giving you a bad review versus someone you know not giving you a review or giving you a positive review. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:No, I mean a very good example is Steve Schneider at Sip and Guzzle you know he commands the room at Guzzle which is where you enter and every time I've been there he's there. And I'm quite sure if I went five nights in a row he would be there at least three of them and maybe five. Yeah. You know and everybody regardless of who they are gets a welcome gets a hug bring them over a little drink you know that's you know it sounds so straightforward and yet we are talking about it like it's a big deal because it doesn't get done as often as you think.
SPEAKER_01:And it can make a huge difference.
SPEAKER_02:Like it's the cornerstone of uh well most famous bartenders' career people like Doug Quinn or Salvatore Calabresi or Dale de Graaff Yeah it's yeah it's I I always say I'm like I'm not a very good bartender but I can hold a room you know it's just good chat just just give people a little bit of attention just be hospitable.
SPEAKER_01:I know it seems it's in the name but it's it's as simple as just being a little bit hospital being humble and polite about how you're doing things being courteous and it's going back to that bar backing analogy when we first spoke about pre-predicting people's behavior and needs. It's like before you need to ask for something yeah gotcha no problem. Yeah do you want you know all of those things make a difference make it it feels like you're being paid attention to and and and that's the minimum of what people want. It's just a little bit of your attention.
SPEAKER_02:Well the next level up is when you're trying to bring it to the next level uh you know you're trying to make all the guys feel like Don Draper and all the women feel beautiful you know and that's that's more of a tightrope it just it generally just got requires patience. So you know once somebody has come back once or twice then you can tentatively start taking it correct to the next level and getting to know them like um salvatore told me a story about um who was it some the scion of a famous Italian fashion family like Versace or something like that. I don't think it actually was Versace but someone of that nature Gucci. Maybe it was Mr. Gucci and he would come in to uh Juke's hotel where Salvatore used to run the bar. A lot of people don't realize Salvatore created the Duke's martini the direct martini and it's a really small bar. I don't know if you've ever been no it's like the size of where we're sitting here you know like four tables and stuff like that. Jukes is a very exclusive little hotel in London. And he would just sit at the bar and Salvatore would serve him a coffee or something every now and say is everything all right yeah sure fine and this would go on and on like by the time the guy's been there for like six times visiting London. And then eventually Salvatore got him talking and they became you know very good friends. And he would talk to Salvatore at the time when he wasn't giving any press interviews and you know reporters would want Salvatore to disclose what you know Mr. Gucci was saying and he said oh I can't I can't do that.
SPEAKER_01:You know yeah it's you never know who's sitting across from you but you know creating rapport with people even on a basic human level is just important. And and you know the hierarchy of needs isn't a lot when you first meet somebody it's can you be polite? Can you be courteous? Can you give me what I need at this moment? And that's just paying attention and you know wraps behind a bar obviously yeah you pick up certain cues for when to engage when not to engage when people are just happily sitting by themselves sipping a drink and they don't really want their decompressing or they're on a date you know and they're trying to schmooze each other and you interacting is just disrupting that that chemistry. So yeah it comes with experience but you know you get better at it with time but again greeting somebody saying hello facilitating basic needs of water and well it sounds easy but obviously while you know you're running around as the manager and the toilet's blocked and you need change for the tills and you know the barbacks cut themselves so you have to haul up a case of sure but like if you come in with the mentality that all these things are going to go wrong before they go right and you go okay you know delegation I think is a paramount part of being a good manager is knowing who your captains are in the room and how they work and then delegating okay here's my hierarchy of needs right now like toilet's clogged blah blah blah okay this is what we're gonna do this is how we mitigate that risk this is who we have to comp a drink to because of A, B, and C. Like that delegation can happen seamlessly and it should be like a duck on water. Like cruise to everybody else everything restaurant's working perfectly didn't even know there was anything wrong. Like you said meanwhile the basement's flooding and the toilet's blocked you know those things have happened in real time to me where like I have a real basement flooding and I have a real toilet block and everyone's like I'm like yeah yeah no problem. Meanwhile I'm like trying to duck out of the back trying to get a plumber in ASAP and I'm trying to snake it with a coat hanger myself to see what I can do. It happens you've just got to like roll with the punches expect that those um those you know Goldilocks moments of a perfect shift are ever going to happen and when they do you just don't take them for granted you know well there's a guy uh I I think he was from Morocco maybe and he opened a tiny little bar in London called Momo's okay and uh it became the hottest place in town like Madonna would have her after party there this tiny little place and you know he eventually built that up into the empire that is sketch in London.
SPEAKER_02:Okay but it all started off in a tiny bar like the size of hello hello yeah and I remember reading an interview with him once in the English press and somebody says how do you do it you have all these celebrities here Madonna comes here you know why how do you do it he says well one night a month it's just perfect the staff are in a good mood everything's right the music's great maybe some celebrity comes in all our customers are in a good mood there's a little bit of you know moonlight a little bit of magic it's amazing he said the other 29 nights we just pretend could have said it better.
SPEAKER_01:Because that's what it's like because you know when you've got 20 staff working a shift and you know 20 people can't be having the perfect day every day seven days a week 365 days a year. That's an impossible everybody has a life and when I talk to most people they're like how's things oh you know someone's got a monkey on the back about something you know and when you got 20 of that going on plus you know let's say you got however many guests and they've got all got their own issues going on maybe their whole day's not working out having an art it's it's impossible to have it all run seamlessly it just has to look seamless yeah and and the the facade has to be kept and you know I I know the old adage was like oh leave your problems at the door you can't leave your problems at the door your problems are still your problems you know they're gonna follow you around but what you need to do is like learn how to master them and go I'm not the most important person in the room right now. I am when I leave but right now everybody in this room is a little bit more important than me and that's my job. I'm here to make sure they're having a good day. Because if I can't have joy outside of this place I'm gonna give somebody else joy you have to have a bit of humility about it. Be humble about what you're doing for that very brief moment of your day you know so yeah you can't leave your problems at the door but you just have to mask them long enough to get through it.
SPEAKER_02:But you can also escape from your problems if only for the duration of your shift for sure. You can just say fuck all that I'm here it's warm I'm dry I'm getting paid and I get to interact with people which is something you only appreciate if you stop bartending.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah you suddenly realize like wow I could go all day without talking to somebody I I form right here and I'm I'll be sitting down in the lab here and I'll be I'm like I haven't said a word in like hours but like but you also romanticize bartending like I remember bartending and like some days I'll be like oh man like I cannot wait for this shift I I cannot make another drink. Tired I've been on my feet for 12 hours just I just have this has to end you know before you know you're gonna be back here in another 12 hours just to do it all again. And you know it's it feels daunting and just overwhelming. But the moment you don't bartend for you know a good period of time you're like I used to love bartending I was so good I talk to people and yeah until you sit behind the stick for more than a couple hours again you're like oh that's right I remember this yeah you know it's it's a rotending is a romantic idea and I think some people have a real affinity for it and then they and I admire them utterly utterly it's bartending is a is a hard it's mentally and emotionally and physically draining job. And uh for those who do it day in day out you know I take my hat off to you it's uh I I don't uh I don't envy it anymore. I don't think my back could could uh withstand doing 12 hour shifts anymore.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know about that. But there does come a time when it's no longer exciting for most people because maybe you've mastered it.
SPEAKER_01:That's a long stretch. I don't know if I mastered it. To your point though I think you're right. I think I was most happy bartending when I was at a place like the 18th room where every day was creating a new cocktail menu because you didn't know what you're going to get across your table so you had to flex your brain a little bit and it became interesting again you're like oh I didn't even think that that combination would work but here we are having fun and the the it's it's very engaging. Without that if I'm making recipes like your standardized cocktails that are on my menu and it's just a color by numbers it's it's hard to stay in that really like energetic place for it.
SPEAKER_02:Oh some people get it just from the interaction with the guests but at a certain point I certainly experienced this and it is relatively common. You're just like and and then two things happen. You'll either kind of grow a carapace you see this with a lot of the older New York bartenders they're like nothing phases them and but they don't really connect with guests anymore. Maybe they've got some old school regulars they've had for years but they don't really connect with you. That's why Doug Quinn at Hudson Malone is an excellent example and an exception. Yeah or it's time to move out of your safe harbor yeah and it's time to move up to something new which might be management or ownership or moving into sales or advocacy or something like that. Because you know it is learning moving out of your comfort zone you know that's what we're born to do. It's healthy.
SPEAKER_01:It's very healthy. It's healthy getting that challenge it you know it feels uncomfortable but that's a good thing. You know you you want to be uncomfortable and and you want to be growing and and stretching and you know I that's why I love doing this position is you know in in terms of formulating and and doing the distilling part it's half engineering half manual labor half scientific analysis and you know when you combine all those things for me personally those three things it becomes very engaging you know like um having to create all the things that we spoke stabilizing and then growing somebody else's brand and helping and designing I I couldn't be happier. This is a vocation that I kind of found um a lot of joy doing. Oh you've created it.
SPEAKER_00:So um yeah you know if you create your own job yeah yeah and yeah I created my own job title suck if the job you created for yourself was shit.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah I don't know why I did that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah I I absolutely and you know I get to work with you know Louise and and Rob and Dave and they're all good good folk and I you know I couldn't have a better team around me but you know it's it's also fun when you get to dabble you know like I get to hang out with Louise and create a few cocktails and you know talk shop and you know have a little bit of fun and then I'm like oh it's like handing somebody else's kid back. You're like oh there you go I don't actually have to do it for that many yeah good luck with that good luck with the other 19 drinks I've contributed three yeah yeah good luck doing that look at that prep you got in there geez yeah um so tell us what the next six months look like for hello hello and for uh the distillery yes silent alibi yeah the um for hello hello again we're we're kind of hitting our new strive like I said we're developing a very rigorous uh tea program with our cocktails and and that's going to be the innovative kind of like ideology for us interesting so we really want to like hone in on that um like I said earlier as well we're looking at doing multiple facet um bases for our cocktails and not just being regimented in this is tequila, this is RAM this is what this is we want to explore how to do a universal base and kind of contribute that which is what a lot of cocktails are you know like a gimlet versus dacri like well we we started splitting hairs a little bit so we're trying to find universal flavors that we can contribute to like two or three you know spirit categories that work so it gives people options uh about how to drink with us um but more importantly we we want to explore tea and coffee um because we do coffee liqueur back here and you know we explored like I can't even tell you how many types of coffee and I think I overdosed on coffee when we were developing this I can't tell you how many cups of coffee I had um just trying to hone in on flavor and profiles. So for hello hello you know that's the direction that we really want to undertake you know our music program and our our vial is is taking off and you know we're looking at doing two and three DJs a night sometimes and really like you know giving somebody to to kind of come and have that really old school vintage kind of like you know um experience here. I know Louise has got some pop-ups coming up um with it with a few folks in the near future so we're doing that um I have an invite for you actually we're doing the the launch for the official launch for 11th hour nice this month on the 26th so we're gonna be doing that um and then for 11th hour um it's really just you know focusing on this year on growing the brand um you know growing the market market outside of you know New York as well and and seeing what that looks like and you know hopefully people are attracted to what we do and and they're enjoying what 11th hour is and you know as we spoke before it's it's a different level of coffee liqueur it's it's it's the same category but it's not the same same thing and and we really want to you know showcase what we're doing there. We have uh Lemundi coming out from Silent Alibi as well. So we're we're launching Your Tif yeah we're launching with um that style is we pick countries of origin. So we chose three countries um so we're launching Japan um out the gate so what did that mean we chose Tewa so we wanted to like hone in on flavors from those countries and then develop an aperitif based on that country um so you know and and we wanted to when I was developing it what I didn't see a lot in aperitiffs and and maybe you know um you've seen them probably more than me Phil is having a high a really single high note in an aperitif so when you taste it you're like oh that tastes like that flavor with a lot of you know back notes like so when you take some aparol you're like what does that taste like you're like tastes orangey you know grapefruity something tastes tastes like something but there's no like oh that tastes very specific flavor. So when we looked at doing this we had you know I tier them out into first second and third categories of flavoring profile so that when you tasted it you know that we're using you know to give you some inside track here I don't think anyone knows this but um we we chose Momo Peach um from Japan to be the top note. Interesting we have like the Sanchi green underneath and we have some whorehound and burdock to round off some bittering agents in there some other other yuzu as well. So but when you taste it you're like I can taste peach. Ah I can also get the green tea and there's some there's some yuzu. Okay and then you kind of like develop it. So you know if you're having a spritz with it and again with I I really want people at home to be able to drink and feel easier about using products especially liqueurs and aperitifs and all the things that we said they're hard to make we want universal usage out of them. So if you're using a in a soda or a spritz or on the rocks or something or a negroni you can do all those things and and it you know you can get a lot more flavor out of it.
SPEAKER_02:You don't need to be you know these amazing bartenders who know how to develop these flavors behind the scenes by doing lactoferment and and all these concentrates and macerations you can just use this well the thing about that approach is uh something that's mentioned on almost every single episode is we are 30 years in 32 years this year to the second golden age of cocktails which kicked off in 1994 in London. And we have how many modern classic cocktails? 10 maybe 12? We should have hundreds and we don't sure and a lot of it is because so many bars are making amazing cocktails that simply cannot be replicated outside that bar because they're making homemade ingredients and they're not publishing those recipes.
SPEAKER_01:Whereas if you think about all the modern classic espresso martini the paper plain the naked and famous the uh bramble etc these are the penicillin these are they're they're what I call plus one recipes you only if you want to make it you only need to buy in one extra ingredient like you need to get uh candy ginger for a penicillin you need to get blackberries for the garnish for a bramble you don't need to buy a rota yeah you know something like this is helping bridge that gap yeah and and I I couldn't agree with you more and that's been my mentality you know for a long time I I when I teach bartenders it's it's half of what I tell them I'm like hey you should be able to get a cocktail here that you can't make at home because otherwise why wouldn't you but on the back end of that there should be some really digestible easy to like follow drinks as well that that you don't need a rhodovat for you don't need a centrifuge for like that there should be easily digestible cocktails but you also need really good components to make that happen Phil and that's kind of what we want to offer is like you know what we spoke about coffee liqueurs before if you were to use Kahlua as a three to one component to make an espresso martini you would have diabetes in a day. So or you would have to have vodka plus some maples plus some other ingredients to kind of round it all off. So now you just have this and most people have an espresso at home the other thing I try and tell people espresso martinis cold brew never make an espresso martini with cold brew if I can offer you any advice please use espresso andor instant coffee. It's the best thing you'll ever do instant coffee makes the best espresso martini word to the wise the pro there's not enough proteins in you haven't heated your proteins in your coffee in cold brew to make them sit and form that beautiful head so that's why instant coffee and espresso is the best but that's why we're developing these Lamundis and 11th hours so you can make beautiful bartender quality drinks at home without 50 steps 20 broad broad ingredients that we you'll never use again trying to find out how to make a two to one demarera simple syrup so you can get the best quality it's just it's becoming with the the amount of distilleries that are around today it's unit should be unnecessary to make a really good you know interesting drink without having to buy 50 things well that's the thing people are still so reticent to mix at home we had uh a little Christmas party in our apartment for um the people in the building and the sort of mums and dads that we're still in a WhatsApp group with you know our kids went to the same school before and in one room I had a bunch of whiskey and we had batched old fashioned and batched Manhattans all I used to do was pour them out they were in like frozen ice sleeves and stuff like that people barely touched them wow right we had uh and by the way there's like recipes up on the wall in another room we had uh batched margaritas tequila ocho margaritas and we had like a visual of how to make a paloma okay right no not that many people made one like it it's like and these are people who know us which means they generally are way ahead yeah in mixology knowledge so that's where we are I think there's some people who will like you know their party pieces like oh come around to Dave's he'll make an old fashioned woo yeah but we still I think overestimate the extent to which people are or rather we underestimate the threshold people have to surpass in order to make a drink at home. Agreed I and I I think you know it's because we have everything instantaneous now like you once upon a time you had to go to a shop to buy something. Now you just order on Amazon. You can get anything there right if you want anything you want to look up how to fix something you can look it up on your phone. Everything is instantaneous and I think you know drinks went the opposite way it's hey this drink takes us three days to make you know um it nothing is like ready set go. Everything is time and there's too many conflicting voices.
SPEAKER_02:You know it's like Dua Lipa making fucking uh Negronis and there's you know so how do you know like there's more information online than ever before but how do you find your way it's it's almost more confusing than when there was no information.
SPEAKER_01:Of course it is it it there's an old psychological um experiment they did and they they they used genes as the analogy and they're like when when there was only like three types of jeans there was like a boot cut a flare and then like a straight leg let's say and they were like you went in you knew what kind of like style you wanted you knew what color you wanted you walked down you were happy. You were happy with your choice because you knew what you were getting and you definitely didn't want the other two because they were nothing like the other one. Now that there's like 30 types of jeans when you buy it you're unsure if you did the right thing because that one that was slightly like this one it's close maybe you made the wrong decision so you leave with like a lot of apprehension about making the right choice because you had more choices to have same thing goes with today you know it's it's it's a curse having more choice is a curse. I try and you know tell people like when people come to the bar you should tell them what they want to drink. Find out how they want to drink first like hey I want a gin and then just tell them what they want. Like take that option out of their hands because they're gonna feel better about it. So you know with developing products like this you don't have the option of having it you know you can add half an ounce of of sugar syrup to this no three to one don't worry about it. It's gonna taste good you know don't worry about having portions right no just add that you're gonna be fine you don't need an orange twist to go with your Negroni now has peach you're gonna be fine. So it's about taking all of that hoo-ha out the way this is what it is this is how it tastes best drink it at home.
SPEAKER_02:You want the freedom of just drinking without all this subjectivity of missing out yeah and I I think that's whether you're selling a product like 11th hour or uh you're operating a bar it's about cultivating trust that people trust you to do that because unfortunately shitty places and shitty products say the same yeah you know everyone's had the experience of going into a bar like the classic example I've gone into bars all around the world and ordered a stir gin martini and had wildly differing drinks come out like everything from something containing two ounces of olive juice to it invariably being shaken to you know it's made with vodka whatever it doesn't really matter uh and and that's the problem how do you communicate to a guest that you are to be trusted that you know that this brand is to be trusted apart from obviously building a a rapport one by one and maybe you know what do you think do you think that guests come in with more trust if there's external validation like you've won awards or been nominated or gone on list or is that a poison chalice?
SPEAKER_01:It's look I think it's a little bit of both. I would say it's more the former than the latter. I think a lot of people you know they don't really follow the awards but if you have something that says you won something there is a certain amount of trust you know I think EO did a really good job when they put all of their staff in in chef jackets you know it there's a certain like wearing a uniform like that has a certain amount of like you know rapport with a guest like it means something to them right so how things are presented for it for a guest is as important. That's why uniforms are really good sometimes it goes okay I know who you are you're the bartender you should make good drinks I'm gonna trust you and then that first drink is really trusting right that that's the that's the how it's the shit secret handshake in here. So I think awards help because it's it's validating someone has validated you if not them but someone the double edged sword is they're gonna critique you a little bit harder because you should be good you know um so if you're the best bar in the world and come in and you're like oh this isn't the best drink I've ever had in the world though um so it it can cut both ways um but I think you know how you reach people with trust is having a stable consistent product having something that's reliable having something that they can attain having something that they've seen at places before that's why getting you know um getting your product into other bars that are notable you know if you see a product in a bar you love you like okay they use it always that's what Mr Black did that's what brand steals that's what brand still did that's what you're doing I mean the the problem with the awards and nominations and press generally is it does lead to a great deal of it's almost like you're a zoo creature.
SPEAKER_02:People are trophy hunting they go to Super Bueno and it's like oh must get the green chili tequila martini got to take a photo of it you know meanwhile they're not actually interacting with the staff and the space yeah yeah it's not their fault and especially you know if it's hard to get in it's really busy or you've got to queue up yeah you know it's difficult.
SPEAKER_01:It is what we try to remedy it at hello hello by taking away servers. So I found because we don't have a lot of servers in Australia unless you're at a restaurant if you're at a bar you have to go to the bar 90% of the time. It's that's what Australians want to do though we do want to go to the bar. We do want to go to the bar. But in saying that it's good because like you get to interact with the person making a drink and if I've got a question you know I get to have a look it's it's in it's more interactive. And so the the way we overcome a little bit of trust is okay we're gonna we're gonna introduce you have to talk to the person making you drink you get to find out who's making you drink and and from there you know you can build that rapport with them. You know you can find out you know what's happening behind the curtain a little bit rather than sitting at a table and then waiting for this mysterious thing that you don't know where it came from.
SPEAKER_02:Many people even in New York have basically never sat at the bar. I know which is crazy to me. Right? Well you know if you don't know yeah and I think we've now got as we're probably in the second or third maybe definitely the second generation of people you've got kids now who are in their mid-twenties and their parents didn't sit at the bar right so they don't know how to do it. And you know this used to be something that you would be explicitly taught about. Yeah okay you know like how to behave in a bar. Like I don't know if you know but one of the the the reason Dale deGroff is the world's most famous bartender uh is that his brother worked for an ad agency that had the account for restaurant associates. Now restaurant associates built Windows on the world the rainbow room the form of the 12 seat all these amazing like multi multi-million dollar restaurants back in the day busiest in the world and I think it still exists by the way okay and uh so they had that account so the ad agency every afternoon they would go out to lunch at like a restaurant associate's place and they'd have lunch and then they would stay there the whole afternoon and you know they'd get phone lines brought in they'd have creative meetings client meetings admin secretaries taking notes I mean they weren't just boozing but they were drinking steadily and you know Dale you know started off as in the mailroom and he said that's literally how I learned how to behave in a bar how to respect the bartender and all of that and then one day somebody called up the ad agency and said we need somebody to help with a catering gig at Gracie Mansion you know the mayor's uh the mayor's mansion and Dale went to another of their bars and he got the bartender to write down like six recipes to bring us back to like the six classics you need to know. And that was his first ever bartender gig wow but he had already learned how to behave in a bar because it had been explicitly taught to him.
SPEAKER_01:The education that we got in Australia like it's like it's it's more of a pub culture is like hey like don't fuck around you know sit in your seat um and then you know make sure that you know you don't get caught taking a sip of your your parents beer um but it was always engaging you always went to the bar yeah there was never any of this table kind of manners or anything that went out the window it was like hey just sit in your seat you know and uh always bring your glass back to the bar like I remember as a kid you'd like see how many I could stack from the table to the bar and then the you know bar button I'd be like oh thanks but yeah it was never uh it was never a culture of not going to the bar and you know coming to the States was a big eye open I was like you all just get you're missing the entertainment you're you're missing the best part of being at a bar in my opinion it's not the service it's it's the conversation it's the what happens and and how the theatrics work and you know asking the question of like what's that like how did that work?
SPEAKER_02:Well obviously for more than like three people a table makes more sense for sure and you might want to have a thing and it might be having a meeting and you might be on a date something absolutely but but but but you can still have a table and go to the bar.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah and and and that was the bit I was I was unintuitive of you know and you know we we we bridged that gap because we want you to talk to them we we we want you to find out the information if you query or like oh did you know like they do the thing with the the Red Bull comes straight off tap like blah blah blah. At Bathtub for instance you know one of the ways we remedied around people not knowing what they were getting was we started using all the old gin bottles that we we have like 150 something gins we're rotating and out and people didn't know what kind of gin they were getting they were just picking up from a menu and going I'll get that gin so we started using them as water bottles. And so we have we have the old Duff Jennifer bottles there and so when we pour it people like and we're like no it's the gin that we use on that drink there. Or we've had this and and you know Phil comes in and he he makes this and it's from this and it's part of the gin family but not it's it's how we kind of create dialogue with people which we find really really important at what we do for service.
SPEAKER_02:But for the people at the tables I do think especially in a cocktail bar it's really important to have some show at the table because if you're sitting at the bar it's a macase even if the bartender is just pulling pints and making the odd martini it's just a delightful thing to watch somebody else work their arts it's just it's just movement as well. And for that guy I find it delightful after you know approaching 40 years in the business and I know all this stuff. So for a regular person it's amazing it's mesmerizing. But if you sit at the table you don't get any of that. Right? So when there is you know a way to finish a drink at the table a garnish a uh a flame a spray a spritz something like that like the best got guest chips I've seen uh take account of that and they make sure that somebody from the uh bar that is the guest there runs out the drinks makes a special garnish something at the table so you get this a good experience at the table.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah I I totally agree with you I I think interacting with your table if you don't have like up to the bar service and it's just all table service, I think having that interaction is imperative. I think there needs to be some kind of dynamic happening one way or another whether it be entertainment you know however you want to spin that um I think it's a lost thing I think a lot of bars I've seen recently especially is are just relying on well we make good drinks. Okay it's it's New York every everyone kind of makes good drinks and it's kind of subjective as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah it's like good food there's really good food everywhere here yeah and which is not the case in Ireland or it wasn't when I was growing up. So doing good food in Ireland was a plus. Here it's like, well, you know, you everyone's got a nice.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Right? Exactly. So, yeah, I totally couldn't agree with you more. I think there needs to be some kind of dynamic behavior happening, um, one way or another, and and however a bar chooses to do that. Um, yeah, for us, it's you know, we spin vinyl every night. We've had people come in and play saxophone with the vinyl. We you know, we want you to interact with the bartenders. Um, you know, all of our food is made at the bar as well. So like you can see the you can see the hot dogs being made in front of you. Um, everything kind of happens in front of you. That's why we want you to go to the bar.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's because that's where that's where it's happening. It's a small room, obviously, so you can kind of see everything from there. But I I agree with what you're saying. Um, we we just approach it like that. You know, we do um the freezer martinis now where we just bring you the when you order them, we bring them to your table and then we just pour it at the table. Nice, you know. So that again, to your point, something's happening. Here's the perfect martini that I've pre-done for you in my freezer. Oh, oh, there you go. I'm gonna fill it to the top.
SPEAKER_02:But again, that's a batch cocktail. So you've got to bring on the pizzazz. Yeah, you've got to really sell it, whether it's verbally or you've got a lovely presentation at the table and something.
SPEAKER_01:But you you can't just like leave it up to, oh, I know what's happening in my martini over there, you know. Um bring bring the excitement to them, you know. And and I want people to be excited when they come in. I want them to go, you have to order the freezer martini. If they come to your table and pour it, and this is what happens when they do um something, have a conversation. It has to be a point of contact, why us, not them?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, and I think this is something that should be in every pre-shift meeting, and that everybody, in the same way that we encourage bartenders, you know, the best cocktail bars, they have an RD session once a week or once a month, and everybody brings an idea. Oh, I'm working on this, you know, from the bar back to the head bartender, oh, it's an idea I've got for a garnish. I've been doing this in fusion. But, you know, I haven't heard of any team saying, hey, I've got a new way to greet people. Here's here's something I've come up with for when a couple are arguing. Yeah, right, which me and my wife have given many bars the opportunity to develop over the years. We eventually have to come up with a let's not argue when we're drunk in public rule. Uh but you know, but they should, or like, oh, you know, this guy was getting a bit aggressive, so here's how I calmed it down. So that you know, the bar becomes a hive mind. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, I I totally agree with you. And I I think, you know, the focus becomes on the drink and not the experience. And for me, the drink, you know, as we expressed about the juice inside the bottle, it's nearly secondary to what people actually observe. It has to be good, it can't be bad. Absolutely. But so long as it's adequate, but but yeah, exactly. It just has to be in that in that that medium zone, right? Because like you know, somebody's gonna really gonna love something and somebody's not gonna like it. And that's fine, you know, everyone's got different taste buds, but the experience is what's happening around you 90% of your experience. The drink is 10% of your experience.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I've seen bartenders get way better at their drinks. I'm talking like classic famous old school bartenders that you know I got to know in the early 1990s in places like London and New York. And, you know, they were king of the hill, but you know, their martini, their Manhattan was not as good as it is today. You know, people were shaking Manhattans and all sorts of nonsense. But you know, now the glasses are colder, the ratios are better, the garnishes, you know, like Salvatore invented the refrigerated garnish trip. Oh my god, like why did nobody think of that? Right? And now and now that's standard, but yeah, well, of course. Why would you make the iciest cold martini and then drop three enormous olives that have been sitting there for a month at room temperature in? You know, and we know now you don't shake Manhattans and you don't use Canadian Club, you use something like Rittenhouse, you don't use Martini Rossi, you use something like, you know, whatever, Delan or Method Vermood. You know, so I've seen these people, their drinks got better. These guys were and are at the top of the heap. So that's proof, were it needed, that everybody can always improve.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and I think we have more information at hand now on how to become make a better drink, you know, and and and the rationale why. You know, like you're used a great point for you know, cold garnishes, you know, you got a okay, cold drink, cold glass, warm garnish. You know, like there's information about the how to do and how to how to be better in your practical application. Uh, I I think you know, where people fall short, and and I think you brought it up a couple of times now is how to become better, you know, verbally and as a person, you know, and and all that soft kind of you know bartending styles. Because the the drinks, yeah, you know, there's a hundred and one ways to do a better drink and and you know how to infuse and distill and all that kind of stuff. Um, but getting better on how to talk to people and how to you know execute um you know tough situations behind a bar better, that doesn't have a lot of rhetoric. And I I think you know, um, to your point, people should be getting trained a lot harder and and a lot more feverishly. I mean, it's something we concentrate on at Hello Hello and Bath Ub with Greedy, you know, but we we just made we just implemented pretty much what you said. We have the manager now, like standing at the door giving giving menus out, you know, um, because we just found it that was the best scenario. Like we we wanted to give you a little bit more information as you came in. You know, we we found that people weren't reading the menu as we designed it. So, okay, we changed the menu design and we're gonna tell you a little bit about it. And it's working a treat. So just like little touches like that, yeah, that human touch is is much, much better. And and those are the things that we work on the most. I I find drink making simple. Am I allowed to say that?
SPEAKER_02:I find it's straightforward.
SPEAKER_01:I don't find it overcomplicated.
SPEAKER_02:It might not be easy, but it's straightforward.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't find it overly complicated. But it's everything, all that minutia around it, like how to keep people in a room and how to engage and how to make that room better, those are the things I care about way, way, way more because those are the things that you know um you have to tailor to to the venue. The drinks will come.
SPEAKER_02:The the well, every night, and just as you never step in the same river, because it's not the same river and you're not the same person, you're never the same person on A shift. The guests are not the same people, your colleagues are not the same people, so it's constant adjustment. And if you do it a lot, you get to be, you don't even think about it anymore. Yeah. Correct. You know, you're just gliding along like a swan, and you don't even have to paddle like fuck underneath.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Yeah, I I wish there was more of that conversation going on about how to help people, you know, dictate uncomfortable, you know, scenarios in a bar and how to talk to people a little bit better. Yeah, I think it's it's a lost art. I think there was a hyper focus on creation of cocktails. And somewhere along the lines, um people lost the humanity and conversation of bartending. Um, not all the way, but a lot of the way. But it was the first thing they got taught. Make sure you say hello to everybody, make sure you say goodbye to everybody, make sure that you know you're always like topping up their water. Like if I'm bartending at a bar that you're in, I will drown you in water. I cannot stop topping up a water glass. It's it just lets you know that I'm here.
SPEAKER_02:Hello.
SPEAKER_01:I'm here. Yeah, but you see, it didn't used to be water glasses, it used to be ashtrays. Yeah, ashtrays and lighting people's cigarettes. I used to tell people that I was like, I used to, I was so good at like I wasn't a smoker, I'd go through and I'd I'd clean up the ashtrays and I'd always have like uh a special rag where I'd wipe the ashtray out for them and give them away. And the fact that you wipe the inside of an ashtray for somebody, oh, they were in amateur. This guy.
SPEAKER_02:Well the thing is, back then, uh if we'd always look for people who are about to light a cigarette because the movements of somebody who is about to light another cigarette, the whole thing, are the same movements they make when they're about to order a drink and pull out their wallet. So if you can get ahead of the drink order by 30 seconds, yeah, you can absolutely command your whole shift.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And if you are 30 seconds late on every drink order, you will be fucked. You will be in the weed all night. Look, we've gone on for way too long here. Tell people where they can find you online, the distillery, the bar, and uh the consultancy arm of this.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you can find 11th hour on our website, you know, 11thhour.com. Uh drink 11th hour is our handle uh for Instagram. Um, hello hello bar and cafe on Instagram as well. That's a long handle. I know, I know. It's we couldn't shorten it. Um yeah, I think that's it. And as far as uh consulting, you can uh inquire through our website at hello hello uh bar and cafe.com and and we'll if you're looking for formulating or anything distilled, please come and say hello, send us an email, send us a line.
SPEAKER_02:Where would they send that email to?
SPEAKER_01:You send it to hello, hello bar and cafe.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, info at hello, hello, bar and cafe.
SPEAKER_01:That's the one forgot the info bit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And uh you find me there, we'll we'll answer you and get amongst the uh get amongst the booze for you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:All right, well, Brandon, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Phil.