BevNET Cocktail Showdown 2 Finals

Ray Latif [00:01] Good afternoon. I'm Ray Latif, the editor and producer of Bevnet's Taste Radio podcast and the host of Bevnet's Cocktail Showdown 2 competition. The cocktail Showdown is a pitch competition that showcases the most innovative and disruptive brands in the rapidly emerging category of spirit-based, ready to drink, and ready to pour cocktails. The event features 10 entrepreneurs representing early to mid-stage brands who will each have 5 minutes to present their business plans and products to a panel of expert judges in the audience here watching and watching at home. Following each pitch, the judging panel will provide 4 minutes of immediate and constructive feedback. I hope it's constructive. No negativity. I'm just kidding. Um, after all the brands have presented, the judges will convene, pick a winner, and we will announce that winner live around 5:30 p.m. Pacific time. We'll also have a short interview with the winner after the announcement. The champion will take home an engraved trophy and the grand prize, an advertising package valued at $10,000. Let's introduce our esteemed judges. Starting all the way to the left is Carlton Fowler, who is the co-founder and managing partner of Goat Rodeo Capital, which is a venture capital fund focused on early stage opportunities in the beverage, alcohol, traditional beverage, cannabis, and adjacent technology spaces. Next up is Tiffany Van Damme, who is the vice president of sales for Q Mixers. Tiffany has over 25 years of proven experience in managing businesses and bringing innovative brands to market. She has deep experience and knowledge within the adult beverage industry, working for Diageo and Bacardi brand portfolios and various startups over the years. In her current role at Qmixer, she's leading double-digit growth, working through and with distributors. Next up is Saeed House, who is the founder of Cocktails by Hawk. Saeed, aka Hawk, has been in the service industry for 9+ years, working at various places from high volume nightclubs to well respected craft cocktail bars in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Listed on Food and Wine.com's 20 Black Mixologists you need on your radar, he's helped curate cocktail menus for multiple restaurants in the LA area. Last but certainly not least is Sebastian Dreher, who's the venture manager for North America for Dollar Ventures, a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in early stage startups operating in the health, nutrition, and lifestyle products, plant-based ingredient innovations, food and beverage, digital commerce and online platforms sectors. He invests in everything. As long as it's good. All right. Let's get to our first contestant for Bavnet's cocktail Showdown 2 competition. It's Kayla O'Connor and James Scully from Island District. Thank you. Please keep an eye on your time, absolutely. Thank you, thank you, judges. We're so excited to be here. Born from another morning of a hangover from seltzers. With malt-based liquor, carbonation, water, ingredients that I can't even pronounce, Kayla, a former professional athlete, and myself, a self-aware nerd, set out to do something different. We wanted to change the world. We wanted to do something real with real ingredients, real simple ingredients. What we wanted to do was become the athleisure of the beverage industry. So we were born Island District. Island District is named for a small little section of the sea coast of New Hampshire which is where we're from. So what is it about Island District that makes us different? What makes us unique? What makes us stand out? We decided that we weren't going to focus on the 4 to 6 hour drinking experience at the night out. We wanted to focus on the pregame. The night at the bar, the night's sleep, and the morning after. Why treat the hangover when it happens? Why not reinvent what we were doing and put it in a can? We care a lot about what we put into our bodies, and we care even more about what we put into our cans. We Oh, thus was born our tagline, Better tomorrows. The reason for this is because we want you to have a great day every day, but one up it tomorrow.

Speaker 2 [04:40] We're tapping into uncharted waters to create a product that people aren't aware that they're looking for and ultimately need. We consciously and confidently chose to pave our own path and took the risk to innovate to create a premium offering unlike any classic cocktail mixture on the market. We didn't just want to be another canned vodka soda, margarita, or gin and tonic. Hydration is engaging the younger consumer now more than ever, where they're consciously making the decisions the night of and what, how that will affect them the next morning. We saw the rise in the functional beverage market as an opportunity to create our hybrid craft canned cocktail, driven by a mindset of proactive and not reactive. We launched with 2 SKUs for proof of concept, and we're confident that we did just that. The first of our SKU is a vodka coconut-based craft can cocktail. Coconut water contains naturally naturally occurring electrolytes, potassium, magnesium. Potassium, magnesium are known to help replenish lost nutrients. The second of our launch skews is tequila and aloe water. Aloe water also contains natural occurring electrolytes. It's a detoxifier and also the only plant source of B12, a vitamin known for energy. So Throughout our R&D process, we were very attentive to the small details, and we knew that these small details were the ones that are going to separate us apart. So perfectly dialing in the carbonation level, the balance of sweetness, and the messaging behind our branding. As you can see on the can, there's a contrast between dark and light, and that, that is everything behind Better Tomorrow is that there's always light after the night out. Gone are the canned pour over canned cocktails are becoming the way of the world and gone are the days of nasty soda guns and weld spirits. Driven by quality. Innovation and experience, hand selected clean ingredients while pushing the boundaries of existing offerings and telling and proving to the consumer why they're buying our products and how our products make them feel the next day. Moving into 2022, our innovation, we're launching a variety eight pack of coconut-based vodkas, craft cocktails, and we're going to have a full shelf of 5 products, 2 wrapped packs, one of tequila and one of vodka, and our variety pack of our 1st 8 pack. Elevating our, our initial success points from launch, May 1st, we've sold over 20,000 cases of Island District, and we look to take leverage our opportunities into new markets because we believe that we can be a national brand.

Ray Latif [07:30] And because of that we're now 30 seconds. Cutting it short. So we want you to have the best day today, tomorrow, and make sure you always one up it tomorrow. We're happy to answer questions. Fantastic. I, I can slide over here. Well done, well done indeed. Um, Sebastian, let's start with you. Um, you know, we heard a lot from Kayla and James about, uh, better for you parts of this product, even though you can't really say better for you, uh, when it comes to alcoholic beverages. Um, how do you think this plays out, uh, in terms of their brand and their trajectory? So yeah, it's, um, I mean, they use ingredients that are synonym for, for, for health and for function. I mean the coconut, the aloe, the, um, honey, right? That is obviously a smart way of showing that you have functional healthy ingredients without calling out a particular anti antioxidant, for example, right? But, um, I think that's, that's a smart way of going around using those ingredients that customers and consumers know as being healthy, so I, I like that part of it. Saeed, did you have a better tomorrow after you drank some Island District? You know, uh, the guava one, the vaca guava, was very delicious, but the one I kept on going back to was actually the tequila with the honey. I do think that the aloe, tequila, honey combination was actually surprising for me because I wouldn't have thought of putting those three things together, but that was the one that I actually kept on going back to and I was able to like get through it, so I did appreciate that. I did think it was pretty tasty. Tiffany, James, and Kayla talked about why canned cocktails could be the future of bars and that people are tired of handguns and things like that, not handguns, it's not a handgun. What do we call those things? Soda gun, soda gun, yeah, I'm sure people are tired of handguns too, but What do you think of that statement? Do you think they're on the right track in terms of maybe canned cocktails, can, uh, place a more or have a more uh significant spot at bars? I think they do. I think that's a surprising trend for people who have thought about RTDs for the last 20 years as I have, so I'm surprised by that, that it is RTDs are finding their way into the on-premise. One of the questions I do have. And just want to understand is your channel strategy and which channels that you're interested in going and which one you're going to go in first as I got your package, I wasn't quite sure which channel was your prominent channel or your go out channel.

Speaker 2 [10:16] So we really want to go deep before we go wide. So in our hometown market, we saw a surprising success on our on-premise partners and for us being a small brand right now, um, we see our on-premise locations as basically as our stadiums. So for example, a beach bar that sold over 4000 cases on-premise in 3 months for us, we invested and built a VIP private area, um, so we branded an all-island district and have a very exclusive area where they can come and rent out the space for the. And we provide product within the package. So we have had some proof of concepts that have really changed our initial thought process of how we would succeed. Um, so we, as we expand every market that we go into, we want to go in deep before we go wide so we don't saturate ourselves, but also we're trying to be a full blown experience that there's more behind just the product, and that's the tagline of Better Tomorrows, and we're trying to create a lifestyle aspect of following in a community, and we never want to be somewhere where we can't put our legs on the ground backing that.

Ray Latif [11:15] And another thing that we did was with our on-premise partners we worked with them to create cocktail menus that included our drink. So one of the things we did was a tiki bowl where it was one vodka, one tequila tipped upside down with fruit juices and more tequila and more vodka. So that was one thing we did. Carlton, you get the last word as an investor. What do you think of the presentation? I loved it and, and to Syed's point, I love the liquid as well, but I, I heard two messages from you guys on the Better tomorrows, um, you feel better in the morning and then also as a as a function of your ingredients, but also uh great taste as a function of the ingredients. If you had to lead with one, what are you? We're focused on the juice first, always. If it doesn't taste good, people aren't going to keep coming back. And so our number one thing is the juice has to be good and it has to be right. And we built a whole brand around the juice because that's where we want it to be. Great stuff. We're out of time, but great presentation. Thank you very much. All right. Our next, uh, contestant for this edition of Bevdt's Cocktail Showdown 2 competition is Matthew Green of Liquid Fables. Come on up, Matthew.

Speaker 3 [12:34] Hi all, my name is Matt Green, and I'm the founder, or some people like to say the chief storytelling officer at Lakewood Fables. I quickly wanna thank Bevnet for inviting us to this opportunity, as well as the judges for taking the time to listen to this presentation. We opened up our doors on July 30th of this year in a town called Beacon, New York. For those of you not familiar with it, it's located in the Hudson Valley, about an hour north of New York City. And due to a recent influx of people from the city, we are actually now pretty much called North Brooklyn. When we opened up our tasting room, we wanted to focus around 3 key pillars for Liquid Fables. The first, that storytelling and drinking go hand in hand. The second, that we wanted to create approachable cocktails with real local ingredients. And last but not least, we wanted to capture new craft beverage consumers and bring them into the market. I don't want to embarrass anyone, so I won't make you raise your hands, but after a couple of drinks, how many of us get that liquid courage, right? And all of a sudden when we're telling a story, the more we drink, the more we embellish, right? If we were fishing last year, every sip that fish gets that much bigger when we tell the story. Or maybe last summer when you're camping out, that noise you heard in the woods, which we all know is a raccoon, suddenly you're telling your friends it's a yeti and you had a near death experience. We want to encourage that embellishment and we do that by making sure that we have great cocktails in our cans. And the way we did that was to focus on local ingredients. We attempt to source as much from farms in New York State and New England as possible, and while doing that, we realized that we could take a different approach to these cocktails. We use stuff like maple syrup and apple cider to sweeten our cocktails, and then we actually took a step back and realized, you know what, let's focus on making cocktails slightly more approachable by using flavor profiles that people are familiar with. But aren't necessarily true to style cocktails. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of amazing cocktail artists out there, and they make stellar drinks when you go to a bar and a restaurant. But sometimes it can be a little intimidating if you don't recognize every ingredient in that cocktail. So we wanted to make them more approachable, and we did that, for example, with rye whiskey. Rye whiskey is a dominant flavor in New York State, and we wanted to not scare off the consumer. So we took it and made two different types of cocktails. The first, Is lying in Love. That is a rye whiskey cocktail with raspberry and maple syrup. You get the notes of rye, but we smooth out that bite or the harshness with maple syrup. And the other one is corn cask, which is what I call more of a punch drink. It is pure Honeycrisp apple right now blended with rye whiskey. It actually dries out the drink. And then you get the nice spicy notes on the back end. And the reason we wanted to be approachable is because we find ourselves at the emergence of three paths. That first path, which we're all pretty familiar with, is the malt-based cocktail or the malt-based drinker. They're the ones drinking hard seltzers, and recently they've traded up two real vodka soda drinks, and we think the next step for them will be premium canned cocktails. The second consumer, which I'm sure a lot of us probably are. Is that farm to table consumer. Although over the last 20 years we've seen a huge focus in people wanting to know where their product comes from and what the story and brand is behind it. It's driven the craft beer market. It's now driven the coffee market, and I believe canned cocktails is that next market. And lastly, this one hits home hard for me, the fatigued IPA drinker. I've been drinking IPAs for as long as I legally can. And bitterness and happiness is what I seeked out, but now I've gotten fatigued. And the other thing that draws me to craft beer is what's next. And we made sure that our portfolio could touch the what's next market. We did that by taking our portfolio and splitting it into two different categories. The first is our core portfolio. Those are the everyday ones that we want consumers to fall in love with and be able to come into our tasting room and buy on a weekly basis. But then we built our seasonal and specialty portfolio. Corn cask is our seasonal cocktail that I touched on already. We take a single apple varietal in New York State, press it down into pure juice, and blend it with rye whiskey on about a quarterly basis. And then we did Untold Fables, which is our pilot batch system. We want, because of our tasting room, we get direct feedback from the consumer, so we released 10 case batch sizes. On a biweekly basis to see what people want and get feedback immediately to see if we can bring it to market. And we're able to do that because of our tasting room. And last but not least, I'm sure they already caught your attention. But storytelling and holidays seem to go hand in hand, and Halloween more than ever. We created 3 Halloween candy inspired cocktails that we launched for the gathering of the goons, and that's something we look forward to doing more of in the future. I want to thank everyone for that opportunity to talk.

Ray Latif [17:40] All right, well done, Matthew. Um. You know, storytelling as a point of differentiation, Sebastian, your thoughts? First of all, I love the energy, man. It was really, and also great shirt. I think we buy from the same.

Speaker 3 [17:53] I think they turned off my microphone because I was talking too loud.

Ray Latif [17:56] No, but, but like, I can, I can see the passion you have behind it. That's awesome. Um, what was the question, Ray? I'm sorry. Uh, storytelling is a point of differentiation. Yeah, I, I love that. I mean, you know. The packaging, the cans, you know, they all, you know, there are limited choices available right now. So if you look at it, you need a kind of a feeling for what am I drinking? Is this an alcoholic drink? Is this an alcoholic drink? So I love the storytelling that you brought up there and I think, as you said, liquid fable, right, like people, they drink and Want to have some emotional relationship with it and there was a great story to tell and you say, oh look at that, telling it to a friend. I think that that's great and I might have started telling fables after drinking all the cocktails yesterday too, so don't call anyone while drinking. It's not a good idea. Just don't do it. So that's actually a very, very good piece of advice. Not that I know from experience, but anyway, um, Carlton, uh, Matthew talked about the convergence of three trends as being at the core of liquid fables. Do you see the three trends that he pointed out as driving the cocktail category, the craft cocktail, the canned cocktail category forward? I do, um, and one question I'd have for him is, Let's project forward and say you're having a lot of success scale, um, you have this wonderful mechanism that allows you to, to put a lot of things out through your tasting room. Once, once you identified the, the actual aspects that are hitting with the consumer, do you have the ability to scale them up with your local sourcing, um, and, and, and using these, these ingredients that are local to you?

Speaker 3 [19:28] For now we do. So a great example is come springtime we're hoping to add a new core cocktail through our innovation pilot system and we're going to always make sure we focus on New England style ingredients. So we're actually going to potentially roll out a sangria where we're going to take grapes from the Finger Lakes and blend it in with some kind of apple-based spirit to make a sangria to bring to market. So yes, we're not going to necessarily launch a tequila or a rum. But we find there are a lot of ingredients that we can take from New York State farms and then the surrounding area in order to scale ourselves up.

Ray Latif [20:00] Tiffany, are folks looking for that farm to table experience in the craft cocktail, the canned cocktail space? Yeah, the farm to table, anything that's, you know, natural, uh, ingredients is, is doing really well right now, um, across all categories outside of, uh, beverage, even, um, one of the things that I was thinking about as you've been talking is that. The amount of variety and supply chain and just thinking through where we're at today and even moving forward, one of the great things about some of the spirits companies is that your turnover is not like a fast moving good. Yours is more closer to a beer, a fast moving good. That's challenging any day, but add in the pandemic and how long that's going to last, extra challenging. And so maybe just something to think about as you're wanting to be successful moving forward in the next 2 years that could cause a little bit of challenges. The only cool, not the only cool thing, but the really cool thing is you have somewhere to place it afterwards that you control because you have your tasting room, right? So and I love, love, love that you have a tasting room you can. Immediate feedback that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and that's rare and unique, so dig that, love it. No,

Speaker 3 [21:15] I appreciate that and that was a big reason in New York State. I know we're across the country, but there's actually a farm distillery license which allows you to have a tasting room and that was a very important thing for us. We wanted to make sure we had that tasting room.

Ray Latif [21:27] Farm Fresh cocktails is one of the taglines that I saw in the presentation. Uh, they fit the bill in terms of taste, Saeed? Yeah, you know, uh, I did have a question. So you said you, you know, you're only, most of your core line is strictly rye whiskey, rye whiskey, right?

Speaker 3 [21:44] Uh, we have 4 cores. One's rye whiskey, but our 5th, our 5th 1 corn cask, which is not core, has quickly become our like 2nd most popular cocktail.

Ray Latif [21:53] So I, I love whiskey. I, I'll drink it, um, but my only thing is like, do you think you find that you might be limiting yourself because you're just a whiskey cocktail?

Speaker 3 [22:03] So we actually have in those 4 cores, I, I didn't fully go through them. Two of them are vodka, one's gin and one's rye, and then corn cask, which is not part of the core, is also rye.

Ray Latif [22:15] Yeah, alright, uh, dope, because I feel like the one I had, I don't think it was whiskey, and I feel like it was the vodka one. I was like, oh, this is actually good. So I think having variety is always great, so that way you're not just, you know, pigeonholing yourself to be catering to only one type of drinker, right. All right, great stuff. Thank you so much, Matthew. All right, just a quick note, uh, someone asked about uh audience judging, people voting from home. We don't have that in this competition this time around. Uh, hopefully we'll have it for the next time, but it's just the judges who are gonna be picking the winner, uh, this time around. All right, up next we have Gianni Otane who is the founder of Red Saint. Come on up. I butchered your name, yeah, close enough. Hello, hello. OK, cool. All right, uh, I'm super excited to be here today. I feel like in many ways this is my life journey has really brought me here, uh, on the stage today to tell a little bit about my story and this brand. Um, you know, I grew up in the restaurant business under the guidance of my father, uh, and now co-founder. When I was 18, I moved to New York City. really chasing what you would consider sort of the major league of hospitality in our industry, and while I was out there, I was lucky enough to position myself under the mentorship of multiple master sommeliers and at 19, I found myself traveling the world studying and really training my palate around the greatest wine and spirits in the industry. And so that actually led me on a path to pass my level 2 smallet examination, the youngest in the country, if you will, just a month after my 21st birthday, and I tell you this because I think it's important to understand the perspective I'm bringing with this brand in that Reds Saint really represents sort of a passion and a deeper foundational ethos I have not only around And spirits, but really the entire culture and tradition around social drinking as a whole, you see, for millennia we really only had three ways to consume alcohol, and that was wine at around 11 to 18% ABV, spirits at the high end around 40%, and that really only left beer for your low alcohol option for 4 to 9% ABV. And that is until about 2016 with the onset of hard seltzer and as that kind of quickly gained wide adoption. I think a lot of brands didn't take a second to step back and understand sort of the macro of what that really meant, and it's our belief that in fact hard seltzer really opened up was the genesis for 1/4 category in hard beverage, if you will, and within this category we're actually going to see multiple customer segments and layers of hierarchy. And so with that we developed Red Saint. Reds Saints based off a 10 year thesis on how we envision this category sort of evolving over the years ahead. And with that we really identified four core attributes that we think have driven the category thus far and we'll continue to sort of frame the category as it evolves. First and foremost, we think low alcohol is key here, right around 4 to 9% ABV. This is really to sort of not replace beer if you will. Secondly, we think refreshing flavor profile is super key, so sort of that summer sipper patio pounder, if you will. A third is sessionability, and this really sort of piggybacks on 1 and 2 attributes and this is this idea of a product you can have 45, or 6 of them in a single sitting. And then lastly is ready to drink, which is both in the liquid and the packaging we think will continue to be key as this category evolves. So the idea was how do we create a brand and a product that really establishes a competitive hierarchy within the category, really taking my expertise in flavor and ingredients to establish and really pull in a customer that was left behind during the hard seltzer craze. I like to call these folks really the Equinox Erwan crowd, if you will. High minded individuals that choose the sport really sort of products of high quality transparency and at the end of the day high moral cause. They have disposable income and they're really looking to seek sort of status and aspiration from their brands. The product itself starts from a herbal tea base we're sourcing from the high mountains of southern Africa, rooibos and honeybush. We're then blending in real fruit purees and botanicals with the idea to kind of create a flavor profile that has complexity and nuance while still maintaining those two core attributes we talked about earlier, which is really a refreshing and sessionable profile. From there we're bringing in functionality into the category with an organic green tea extract that delivers 30 mg of naturally occurring caffeine in the form of L-theanine. The idea here is to sort of stimulate conversation, bring electricity to the buzz, and again harking back to our brand promise, which is really about the pleasure and connection that social drinking is all about. Now I'm not naive to sort of my young age or my inexperience as a founder, and that's really why I've surrounded myself with a group of advisors that are really the top performers in this industry who not only believe in our product but really the greater mission ahead. Ah, we launched 60 days ago here in Southern California with Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits as a distribution partner, and our go to market strategy has really been focused on hyper saturating key affluent zip codes here in Los Angeles, and, and really focus, focusing on like high-end national specialty accounts across channels, really trying to get discovery and organic adoption from our target audience. Here's a few of our early wins right off the bat. And then go back and then really our marketing strategy thus far has all been about supporting these accounts, interacting with the consumers, and sort of getting as much intel and feedback as possible through merchandizing, sampling events, etc. so we can really kind of head into 2022 with greater understanding in Intel to make better decisions in the day ahead. Thank you. Well done, Carlton. Uh, you get the first word. Hey, you pull that right out of your pocket. That's a good place to put it. I like that. It's right there. Yeah. Keep that thing on me. Um, I wish I had like a half an hour to ask you some questions because there's, there's a lot of interesting things to unpack here, um, starting with, you know, the, the liquid was incredibly complex and I could definitely tell the background you have and, and flavor and some. Um, when I, when I look at who you're going after that Aaron, you know, um, what you call it, the Equinox, Aeronon-Equinox consumer, you know, how are you, how, how is the plan to, to move them into the, the frequent repeat and the multiple session ability that that requires that that's necessary to make, you know, a 4 to 9%. You know, a product like this turn quickly because you really need the sustainability and the and the and the willingness of your consumer to sit down and drink a six pack of this. Yeah, absolutely. I think it comes down to use case. I mean this really came as a sommelier. I was always drinking wine, but there's Use cases where you just want something that's easy sipping, if you will, you know, sort of that patio pounder I talked about. So I think it's understanding what is that use case, whether it's by the pool or with a sunset or whatever that is, and sort of showing them that this category does have something to offer them, and we, we deliver a product for them that kind of lives up to their, you know, expectations. What's the price point? It's around $2299 a six pack. Uh, Tiffany, what do you think of the go to market strategy as outlined by Johnny? Go to market strategy is perfect because you've got a little on, got a little off, so as it takes off you can push or pull depending on what's seeming to go well for you. I think when I think about the commercial viability in the off-premise, the packaging is beautiful, the can. I would. If, if you don't mind me giving a bit of a recommendation just on shelf, at shelf it's hard to know what original is when you pass by it. 6 is a lot to ask when you're starting, starting out. 4 is a viable option, right? If you've got 4. I can do 46 or 8 tougher. And then the packaging looks like it's a red wine based product. I would, for me it's so beautiful, it's just that color tells me there's red wine. There and I know it says red. I get that, but it's burgundy color, even it's not even like a bright red, so I know your background and so I'm sitting there. There's so many things that are so wonderful about it. Just consider the product inside and make sure it's congruent with the packaging of it, but it is beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, I'll stay with the packaging for a second. Said, you know, were you enticed to drink this product from the packaging, and when you did drink it, what do you think of the liquid? Uh, I do have a question before diving into that. You said clean alcohol. How do you define clean alcohol? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, going after the hard seltzer craze, you know, the malt flavored beverages. And even a lot of the fermented teas, when you, when you taste the beverage, they have this sort of harsh after finish, and we use a distilled spirit very intentionally because we thought it had a very clean alcohol finish. And in fact this beverage to me was about the tea profile and the fruit flavors and not about the alcohol itself. So it's really easy to mask that in a distilled spirit. That is exactly what I got when I was drinking. I was like if for someone who does have an appreciation. Appreciation for teas and stuff like that. Uh, the one flavor that I definitely was going back to was the original with the vanilla. I felt like the peach and ginger was like, I wanted more peach. I feel like the like, especially when you're working with ginger, you can kind of overpower sometimes. Uh, the, what was it, the straw, is the strawberry basil one that you have one too. That was the, that one came in 2nd for me, but uh I feel like If I'm looking at this and I'm, cause you know, some, like you said, like some of these brands have, uh, they, they say what alcohol it is. I don't know if I'd be like, I don't know what's in this. I wanna, I wanna know the, the kind of alcohol that I'm drinking. Yeah, for sure. I think part of it was understanding that if you say vodka or whiskey or rum, like those are loaded words when a consumer already has an opinion on that, and I really wanted to separate ourselves from that to get them to try first, and that was sort of the thought process. Got it, Sebastian, we're pretty much out of time, but did you get the last word on Red Saint. Um, yeah, I'm. Great packaging, very interesting concept. So you're at Nobu on the menu. Where are you on the menu and what does it say? Uh, not Nobu. Well, OK, well, any restaurant, any restaurant, one of our top accounts right now is Petite Hermitage. It's a private club in West Hollywood. Uh, they're selling us by the can, but we're also finding it's a great canvas to build a cocktail off of. So we're on a few cocktails as well. All right, well done. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Uh, up next, uh, for Bevnet's cocktail showdown 2 competition is Simone Juan from Plant Botanical. Come on up. Thank you. All right. Oh good. And my herbs. Anyway, hi everyone. Thank you, Bevnet and judges. Um, this is a real, uh, pleasure and thank you for this opportunity. Um, so, before I, oh, where's the thing, here it is. So before I go into what Plant Botanical is, I kind of wanted to go to the why because why, you know, if you don't have a good why, those, you know, 100 days of not taking a break and pushing your product can be hard, but I do have a why, and it started in the year of 9/11. Um, I was cooking in my kitchen and a pressure cooker exploded on me. And it was a crazy event. I was at 3rd degree burns and I was in ICU for a month and I was on opioids and antidepressants and I was living next to the World Trade Center, so it was quite a year. So after the year of being on opioids and all of these prescribed medicines and these doctors took great care of me, I thought I needed a different method of healthcare. And so I went and used alternative medicine and I was shocked at how these botanicals could really help you. So I studied botanical medicine, herbology, acupuncture. I did a 4-year master's degree, and then I have been practicing for almost 20 years. Before I started this, I was actually working at a cancer hospital, um. Then how did I get into booze, you ask? Well, actually I was making a remedy and I have one here, um, for stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, and pain. And while I was in another country, I was given a gift and they were spirits and it was amazing. I should be talking to you guys actually, um, sorry. I'm talking to the other people that I've already bonded with. Sorry, um, so I was, um, I was in, you know, they gave me this gift as a spirit. I said, oh my God, what's in this? And they were like, oh, goji berries, ginseng, and I'm like, oh my God, why would you do that? You know, they said, because you don't feel bad the next day. And I just thought, oh my God, all those hangovers could have been prevented. Are you kidding me? So I said, I'm going to go back home, make this, give it to my friends, give it to myself. Really, I like to drink. And that's what I did. So basically, could you make a spirit better like people in other countries do? And Yes, you can. So we launched plant botanicals, cocktails of benefits. We have functional botanicals, powerful adaptogens, and in our RTDs we use fruit puree. We wanted to make something that people could feel good about choosing, not only for their body, but also for their environment. So the plant-based benefits consist of four herbs in every product because we want to have some detoxification, we want to have some immunity, we want to have some stamina, you know, we have goji berries, ginseng, dandelion root, and um. Oh my God. Uh, Angelica, anyway, you, that's right there. Sorry, I've said these four herbs 2 million times. So these plant-based benefits are really what I stand for in spirits. The other thing we're really passionate about is sustainability. We don't wrap our cans. We don't use any plastic. We only use BPA-free lined cans. Our cartons are recyclable, and our sorghum vodka is vodka is made. From 100% sorghum. Three reasons why sorghum is better than corn, wheat, rye, or, you know, some of the other ingredients that most alcohol is made from. One, there's no increase in global warming. So when you use other ingredients, you have to burn like the rest of a stalk of corn, and that smoke goes into the air, gets caught, increases global warming. The sorghum, you use the whole plant, so you don't have to burn anything. So that's awesome. And then 2, there's less pesticides when you have all those extra ingredients that are being burned. Hello, bugs love them, so you know that's great, it's food for them, but we don't want bugs, so then there's more pesticides, and we don't need more pesticides. Then the third thing is water conservation. It's heat resistant, drought resistant. So it takes half as much water to use in corn, wheat, or rye. There's only 9 million bushels of sorghum grown a year, and there's 60 billion bushels of corn grown and used a year. So just choosing sustainable ingredients was a large part of this passion. So we're just trying to be the wellness choice for this category. We want people to feel good about it. We pretty much try to check all the boxes. We're non-GMO. All of our ingredients are non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free. We are kosher even. We are only one carb, one sugar for people who are concerned about, you know, calories, so we're keto-friendly, and we just, you know, tried to make sure that we were checking all the boxes for people because I am a healthcare provider, so I wanted to provide something that people could feel good about drinking. So we just, uh, why are we here, right? We're here about flavor, right? We really care about flavor. Oh my God. Oh crap, well done. Yeah, time flies, but, uh, really good job, yeah, when you're having fun up here, exactly, exactly, um, cocktails with benefits, uh, what do you think of that proposition, uh, Sebastian? Well, it's it's very interesting, obviously, um, very on trend. I remember 5 years ago when, you know, when the total idea of having less calorie cocktails, you know, was was really controversial and that obviously before hard seltzer came out. That's interesting. My question to you is how do you make sure because the dosage for herbs is so important and obviously you have that background, um, um, how do you think about the dosage you can put in there versus the taste? Profile like what's your philosophy on that? I mean, I started, you know, distilling and using we worked for like a year on doing that, so it's, it's about balancing it. It doesn't taste botanical. It doesn't taste like herbs. No one wants to drink an herbal drink, you know, like when they're out partying. So it's about balance and making sure like our vodka, we use lemon peel. We use fresh fruit puree, so a lot of those fresh, high flavor ingredients help mask the botanicals. So but just to be sure, so you have the botanicals in the distilled spirit, or do you add them to the RTD? It's vapor infused in the spirit. OK, that's good. OK, that's good to know. Thank you. Sure, thanks. Saeed. In your experience, are consumers looking for adaptogens, botanicals, things like that in their cocktails? Um, yes, um, the one I feel like for me like when I was drinking all these, I was reminded of pretty much like LaCroix. It's like you had like coming with like the flavor profile and saying that you have passion fruit and pear, even though I didn't get any, like I barely got any of it. It's like the hint. I just wanted more of it. The one that I I did enjoy was the blood orange lime juice or lime just because that kind of reminded me of just drinking like a hard seltzer with some lime like or just not hard, a seltzer with a squirt of lime, so I was like, oh this one I could definitely get through, but the pineapple and lemonade, I was like I want more pineapple. I wanted more passion fruit and I wanted more strawberry and the other ones. I totally hear you, yeah, for sure. I mean we're Trying to keep it also friendly for um we really sell at grocery stores so it's those people who want to drink a lot. We're not really like an intense, you know, one cocktail per package. So um we kept it light because I'm, I like to be keto. Definitely I definitely could go back for like to like go back for another one. Yeah, you're gonna sell more. I mean you're gonna drink more. Well, speaking of selling more, um, it seems like Plant Botanical is in line with uh The Natural Channel, Tiffany, um, and, uh, I'm wondering, do you see it going beyond Whole Foods into places like Bevmo, Walmart, Total Wine, etc. Absolutely. I think the packaging is fantastic. I think the can is great. I think the exterior is great. I think the concept is like he said, it's, it's on trend, all wonderful. I think the only challenge would be assortment, having an assorted pack. You're asking everybody to like this, like 4 different types of flavors, and that it's 8, so that would be an adjustment. That's super easy to change. That's not a, that's not a barrier or something to adjust, but just consider if you wanted to consider that type of thing for commercial viability, it is one of the things we found is challenging for people is number of products and having variety in assortment packs. We actually have 4 packs. Cool, we have 4 packs and we're actually at Target's 7, yeah, because it is hard to go into a variety pack without knowing, like, you know, it it's just easier to pay less in the beginning, I think, and try something smaller, but we are in, um, I'm so glad you said that that really makes me feel good. Um, we actually are in 7 states and we're in, um, Target, Kroger, Safeway, so, um, we are seeing that the buyers like this kind of concept. It's got great shelf appeal. Thank you, Carlton. You get the last word on Plant botanical. Yeah, uh, I'm curious about, um, how your, your breakdown between the spirit versus the RTDs is going as, as you're expanding out in the seven states and like building on that, you, you know, Total Wine comes calling and says, I'll take one, either your RTD or your spirit, like what, what are you choosing? Um, we haven't had, I don't know. That's a good question. Um, really, the RTDs is where the growth is at, but I really support the vodka bottle to differentiate us and those winter months when selters go down. And the vodka and we're making a tequila too and tequila seltzers. The bottles will help support the sales during those off months because they do go down 70% in the winter. Are you, are you seeing the consumer switch over to the spirit like basket level data? Are you able to prove that out? Sorry, the vodka's launching this month, so I haven't seen it yet. We do. Target did buy the spirit as well, so we shall see. All right, well done, Simone. Thank you so much. Please hand your microphone. All right. Uh, just a quick note to folks in the audience. I'm sure some of you would like to try some of these products. We have them in the other corner of the room over there. If you'd like to quietly stand up and go grab one for yourself or 2 or 3 or 10, you may do so. All right, up next, uh, uh, for Bever Nuts Cocktail Showdown too is Josh Meyers of Picnic Brunch. Come on up, Josh. All right. Yeah, I was, uh, I just hit the button. All right. Uh, thank you, Ray. Thank you, Bevnet. Thank you judges for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Josh Myers. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Picnic Brunch, a brand of wine-based brunch cocktails. Uh, started in New York City in 2017 with my brother and a good friend. Uh, in New York City. If you've ever been, you know brunch is a bit of a weekend ritual. Uh, one bright summer day, uh, a group of us, including my brother, sister, significant others, decided to skip the boozy brunch at the bar, head to the park, uh, and have our own brunch picnic. Uh, we stopped on the way, picked up the fixings for Bloody Marys and mimosas, uh, set up our spread at the park, uh, and it quickly turned messy. Our dogs started wrestling, knocked over the Bloody Mary mix, picnic blanket, uh, became a little, uh, filled with red tomato, um. Ironically, someone had brought canned wine. It was 2017, so I don't think any of us had ever seen canned wine, and our first thought was, well, can we get Bloody Marys? Can we get reinforcements in a can nearby? We looked online, couldn't find anything. I think it took about a week, but eventually a light bulb flashed for all of us, and we said, Hey, there's got to be other people that are interested in something like this, and since it doesn't really exist in many places, let's see if we can do it. So fast forward through a couple of years of R&D on the product design and the packaging, we launched to our first market in September 2020 with our Bloody Mary and Mimosa. We added our Bellini in mid 2021. We're now up to 8 markets. In 2022 we'll be launching a direct to consumer channel along with a spicy, spicy Bloody Mary skew and potentially more markets, more product variations in 2022. I think we all know that the ready to drink and ready to serve category is a billion dollar opportunity. What we want to do is kind of own the brunch subcategory. We understand that brunch is an occasion, but it's an occasion that happens in every, every week in every market across the country. We created picnic brunch to allow consumers to brunch anywhere. That means it doesn't have to be in the comfort of your own home, at a bar or a restaurant. It can be at a beach, at a park, at your kid's soccer game. Taking your family on a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, which is one location we're currently sold. Um Now, uh, in terms of competition, we are the only brand that we're aware of that offers all three of the traditional brunch cocktails, which we think is a point of differentiation. Additionally, uh, we use a wine base in all of our SKUs, which means we can be sold in more accounts on-premise. It can be a cafe that has a wine license. Off-premise could be a grocery. Uh, or convenience ready to drink and ready to serve represent convenience, and in our case that means we can help eliminate waste, reduce spoilage, create a consistent pour, and for on-premise during fast-paced bar service, save time and money for bartenders. Adoption is key, I think for all the brands here. We understand that you've got to get liquid on lips. And so for us we've created nostalgic branding. The gingham pattern looks like a picnic blanket, very recognizable. We hope that that goes a long way to distancing or differentiating ourselves on shelves in the future online and driving adoption and creating some customer loyalty. Uh, now we're keenly aware that we do have competition. Uh, a few key points, uh, because there are Bloody Marys, there are mimosas, there are Bellinis. First off, we're the only brand that we know of that has all three brunch cocktails, which I think is important in this case. Our wine base allows us more points of distribution. Uh, and then our packaging is, uh, very much aligned to our brand, which we again hope, uh, resonates with consumers, creates brand awareness, adoption, and that customer loyalty that I think we all need to survive. Um, the beauty of picnic brunch is the simplicity of the brand. These are all well-known cocktails. Uh, we've just simply put them in a can so that our consumers can brunch anywhere. Uh, thank you. Well done. Great job. Uh, Saeed, uh, folks are pretty particular about Bloody Mary's, at least I know I am. Did this one fit the bill for you? I mean, I'm a, I'm a brunch dude. Uh, so, um. I will say the Bloody Mary was, it was odd, but it kept, it made me want to keep drinking it, which for some weird reason I because I was like, wait, this is wine based, so it's like, alright, that makes sense. That's why it has a little bit of like a little bit of sweetness to it, but the uh the Bellini. really what did it for me because that's the like, you know, having to get peach puree or any kind of peach liqueur or whatever that one was one that was like top-notch for me and then also the mimosa was great too because it's like it wasn't overly sweet too, so the perfect amount of tartness for both the Bellini and the um the mimosa. I don't think I, I could do the uh uh the Bloody Mary back to back, unfortunately understood. Uh, Carlton, what do you think about the scalability of this brunch opportunity or brunch centric brand? So in a prior life I used to run innovation for a large Bev O company and the quickest way to get me to shut down a program would be when consumers say, oh, you can take it camping because people actually don't camp nearly as much as they say they do. So I do agree that brunch is a much more frequent occasion than camping, but I think that that is my biggest question. So why do you think this can scale big enough when you are tackling just an occasion as opposed to an entire psychographic? Yeah, I think there's a big enough opportunity, you know, I joke that it's something that happens every week and in every market, but it's something that we've seen and experienced. We're in 8 markets now and I've been out in those markets and people brunch differently in different markets, but in one of our markets in the middle of the country, brunch is big at a local chain of 20 pizza shops, and they put us on the menu. They brought in brunch buckets, you know, it's a good Uh, it's something that happens every weekend, uh, and in our case, I think by, you know, there are some accounts where you might go and maybe it's a football Sunday, and they have, uh, you know, beer specials, 20 bucks for a bucket of 5. We can do the same thing for brunch and be brunch buckets. And I think there's, again, maybe it only happens 2 days a week, but it's something that can happen everywhere and it could be a golf course, it could be at a boat club, uh, you know, I think the opportunities are kind of limitless. Real quick, if I could just, uh, uh, you know, just as a piece of advice too, uh, don't forget that, you know, yes, I think on-premise is gonna be big for you, and, and even as you go into larger scale restaurants and events, probably they don't have exclusives around Bellinis and, and mimosas. So, uh, you know, tactically, I think you're gonna be able to get this in a lot of places that maybe other larger brands have locked up and have paid, um, to play there, and, and you might be able to slip it alongside them. As to your point, you can put a bucket of, of Bellini right next to a bucket of beer. Thank you. Uh, Tiffany, uh, in terms of the competitive landscape that Josh outlined, um, you know, do you think that he's given you enough information to say, OK, this is why we would succeed where others may not? I think what you point out, which is you've got the brunch cocktails and you have that in your portfolio, as long as your sales plan and your go to market plan aligns volumetrically with the occasion and the number of occasions both in the on and off, you nail every part of it. There's nothing about this that doesn't say picnic and it doesn't say brunch. You your target, you're hitting it, nail on the head. He understood the assignment and whoever did your packaging did the same. So yeah, let's stay on the packaging. Sebastian, is this something that you think is going to attract a lot of consumers just from the label, get them to pick it up, trial, go to trial. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it stands out, you know, very a great story too, but the packaging, I think, you know, people will pick it up. Um, my question to you is on the packaging, we see the different can sizes. Why did you decide the 12 ounce and what's the price point? Uh, so the price point, uh, varies market to market, but 10.99 to 12.99 to 4 pack. Um, I'm sorry, can you repeat the first part of the question again? Why did you decide on that, uh, on that size and 12 ounce is on the larger end of the spectrum lower ABV. We wanted it, you know, we understand that people may not drink. You know, I think the Bellini and the mimosa are very drinkable. The Bloody Mary, most people probably have one, maybe two. We wanted it to be a sessionable drink. You can pour them equally or evenly. This can be put in a pint glass if it's on premise. You can dress it up and put celery or olives or shrimp cocktail or crab cakes, whatever you put, but we think it just it fit better and for it can also split evenly into two champagne glasses, which I think is good too. All right, well done, Josh. Thanks so much. Thank you. If you missed brunch this morning and you'd like a Bloody Mary to go with your later day cocktail or whatever you're having right now for a snack, please head over to the side of the room and you can pick one up. All right, we're halfway through Bevnet's cocktail Showdown 2 competition. Right now, I'd like to bring to the stage Hunter Sproll and James Mock of Golden Rule Spirits. Come on up. Oh sorry, sorry, we almost died. Hello, Bevnet, judges. My name is James Mock and along with my cousin, Hunter Sproll, we are Golden Rule spirits. Similarly to many of the other great brands here today, we started this journey with the notion that Ready to drink and ready to pour cocktails could be better and more convenient than what was commonly being sold in the market. I also grew up in the restaurant industry. Ah, and despite my appearance, ah, the restaurant that garnered the greatest amount of attention was my family's Mexican restaurant, ah, To Kill a Mockingbird. Among other things, Tequila Mockingbird was known to have an excellent list of tequilas and an outstanding margarita. We used to joke, if you could only make this margarita to go, you would have a booming business. Well, fast forward to a camping trip many years later. A that set the wheels in motion for this original thought to take shape. We literally could not pack any more beer. Canned wine was just becoming a thing, and trying to pack in all those glass bottles to make cocktails in the backcountry. That didn't work either. Upon return, Hunter and I put our heads together and wrote our first business plan, scraped together whatever funds we had, and a few government shutdowns later, We had our first product on the shelf, the golden rule Margarita Original. And this whole idea began with just wanting a better option and so we knew we needed to start with great base spirits and so we headed down to Mexico to find the the best tequila for the job. And a few distilleries and a bit of drinking later we happened upon our distillery and tequila of choice. And so we actually began importing our own brand of 100% agave tequila in 1.75 L bottles. We coupled that with our homemade triple sec and lime juice. We then followed that up with arguably the second most popular cocktail, the old fashioned, and Again, spirits were critical for this, and so we found a beautiful high rye bourbon at 3 years old to balance out our Angostura, orange and simple syrup. And so cocktails in hand, James and I actually licensed ourselves as distributors, and that allowed that allowed us to get out and really pound the pavement and knock on all doors that we deemed a good fit for our cocktails. And we were able to, we for the first year we really want to prove our market fit and really be out in the market ourselves and so we focused on Northern California and we were able to find our way into over 100 accounts and then we did recognize though that California is far too large of a market for us to tackle by ourselves. So we actually partnered with a distributor in our second year and we're able to just help expand our footprint and so we now find ourselves in just about 400 accounts statewide. And we also had kind of a focus on retail to this point, but we've identified alternative on-premise options such as golf courses, hotels, arenas, transportation, all as being a perfect fit for our cocktails and a huge focus as we continue to expand. And I mean geographically we also have plans to expand into a few new states here in 2022. And so with all that expansion and growth in mind, we of course have some line extensions on the horizon as well, and these will all follow in the same path of being recognizable cocktails that we love to drink. And so we'll lead off 2022 with our espresso martini, a drink that's seeing a huge resurgence in the market today and one that allows us to really focus on our love of great local roasters, and we'll follow that up immediately with our tequila paloma in the spring. It'll be a bit of a different take in that it'll be a still cocktail similar to the rest of our lineup and just different than what you might find on the shelf today. And you'll recognize that we've spent a lot of time on our brand's aesthetic. We drew inspiration from old matchbook art that bars and restaurants used to give out to cigarette smoking clientele and just as simple to go marketing swag. We wanted to capture that imagery on the can of our destination cocktails and also on the 4 pack which we designed to be like a matchbox. Um, and it also was throwing it back to the restaurant days where this idea originally was hatched. Um, so the ready to drink, the spirit-based ready to drink segment has seen explosive growth over the last two years, and we couldn't be more excited to be a part of this. Ah, next time you find yourself out on that camping trip, because people do go camping, Carlton, or just headed to the beach or kicking your feet up after a long day of work, reach for some golden rule and drink unto others. Thank you. Well done, well done. Sorry, Carlson, you know, we'll start with you. Yeah, I couldn't for that. Um, you know, we've seen a handful of brands, cocktail brands in this package, and inevitably they're going to be compared. Golden Rule will be, will be compared to them. I mean, but do you see it that way? Are they competing against that type of package or that type of brand with that package size, or are they? Do you see them as having a competitive landscape well beyond that? I think it's early enough that no one owns this format yet, and they're, they're certainly in the running. Just as a comment, adding the espresso martini, terrific, good, good, great choice. I guess one question I I think we all get the utility of the 100 mL all the way to your point when we're inside that you can take it on an airplane and go after go after Delta, go after United, go after American big. I've seen how big their purchase orders are. We might be talking to a couple of good. The flip side of that, you know, how do you go about educating consumers that 100 mL is enough, you know, once they put it, because it doesn't, I think to a lot of consumers it doesn't feel huge even though it is the proper amount. Those things are dangerous, I know personally. So how do you go about that? Yeah, I think that's a great question. In education is key for us moving forward and I think that all 100 mLs are facing this exact thing. So I know Tip Top and Post-Meridian have been in the same situation. We know Tip Top's on Delta as well, and we see that as a great way to introduce, I mean, what a segment, right? You have a captured audience there on an airline. Oh, these things are good. Oh, you can have a real cocktail in a can, and so we're looking at those kind of avenues to educate the consumer and really enforce our brand as, you know, a real option in the market. You know, it's going to be a challenge. That is one of the things we see going forward is education because we think that the liquid's there, but as long as we can get the consumer to understand that there are real drinks in these cans, I think we have a shot. Sebastian, thoughts on the presentation, and have you been to To Kill a Mockingbird yet? Um, it took me a little bit to get the joke. I'm, I'm German, so please, you know, like forgive me for that, um, but, but first of all, the packaging, the branding is beautiful, right? I think it really stands out, so good job on that. And then just to the audience, I mean we tasted 10 different cocktails um with 3 different flavors, most of them, and then there's a 40% cocktail coming along, right? But the others were 5%, this is 40, so um. Like, tell me, like, like, do you mean that to be watered down a bit because like that's extreme, right? The, the, the, the margaritas are 27, that's a bit more palatable, right? But what's your thought on that, like, like with the 40% and how many people do you think will understand what to do with it? So the old fashioned yes is at 39.5%. It's To the point that you're going to know you're drinking a cocktail. That being said, when you go to a bar, most people don't realize an old fashioned is mostly whiskey. There's a little bit of other stuff in there, but it's mostly whiskey, and so we want to emulate exactly what you're getting in a bar, and then we're just going to give it to people. You pour it on ice, you'll get it watered down a little bit, but don't try and dumb it down too much. The consumer also is a smart individual, so. Easy segue there. Syeed, is what you got in the can exactly what you would get in the bar? Absolutely. Um, yeah, I mean, two of these things, I was gone. Uh, I mean, at least back to back. I mean, Jesus Christ, but I mean, yeah, as a from a bartender bartender's perspective and making the cocktails from scratch, this is so ideal for me is like, like taking this on the plane. I used to take little things of syrup, little things of simple syrup, make my own cocktail on the plane, but now I have the answer. And it's here. I'm stoked that it's here, and I can't, I'm, I'm also a stickler for Palomas, so I'm really intrigued to try that, and I'm very particular about my Palomas, but to what he was saying, good calling on the espresso martini because I haven't seen that yet either. So thank you. You know, I think portability has come up a lot regarding this presentation, but aren't all cocktails portable, Tiffany? I mean, what, what's so special about the portability of this one? Well, you saw him just take it out of his back pocket. They're pocket. Um, and in terms of the presentation, do you have any questions? We're just about out of time. The only other thing I would say is just what is it going to look like on shelf? Are you going to wrap it in plastic? What are you going to do with it, because that, you know, if you for the off-premise, so for off-premise, which has been our focus, we have individuals that we merchandise kind of as add-on purchases near the register, and then the 4 packs let us take up a little bit more shelf space we can merchandise them. Do some POS that allows it to take up again more space. You want to be present on there, but yeah, we're working on that and then off prem or on premise it will be all individuals obviously but we're not going after the bartender by the way bartenders are awesome. They do their thing. We just want to make it accessible for people to take real cocktails elsewhere. Mention you can stack it. Because that's important in the off-premise, yep, that's what I mean. All sorts of ways you can stack for the off-premise. That's a solid play at like at anywhere. The stackability is a big selling point. When it comes time to make some higher end swag, I'm here for the Pez dispenser. If the Pez dispenser comes out, like I'll be the first to buy it. We'll talk. Fantastic. Good stuff, guys. Thanks so much. All right. Up next we have uh Karina Riemer, Shona Patterson, and Maxwell Hawk from Mad Lemon. Come on up. We have with you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 [1:04:36] Hello Bevnet. Thank you all so much for having us. As everyone else is, we are beyond excited to be here and to introduce to you the best lemonade you've ever had with booze in a can, Mad Lemon. So I am Karina. I'm Shona, and I'm Max, and we are the founders of Mad Lemon. We are creatives, visionaries, and lemonade connoisseurs, longtime friends and family. We grew up in the farmlands of central Pennsylvania. After college, we all traveled the country and came back together in Denver to live our lemonade dreams. 6 years ago we started our first company together. We popped up our homemade tent, our hand painted sign. At our first farmers' market.

Ray Latif [1:05:31] We excitedly waited for the uh the crowds to fill in. It was a huge success, and by the end of the day, we had sold out of our fresh. Maples sweetened lemonade. This year,

Speaker 2 [1:05:47] we're feeling that same excitement as we've just rolled out Mad Lemon cocktails to our Denver community, and now we get to share it with sunny California. The world's favorite beverage just got brighter. After years of testing lemonade recipes and getting feedback from those market supporters, we wanted to take that nostalgic, classic homemade homemade lemonade and put it in a can to make the perfect cocktail, and we did. We craft our premium beverages with pure lemon juice. Pure maple syrup, natural cane sugar, foolproof spirits, and signature blends of herbs and fruits. Our first flavor is the Mad Classic, and this is our twist on a vodka lemonade coming in at 7%, not too much, not too little. It's full-bodied, lightly fizzy, and the perfect sip of summer all year round. Our second flavor builds on the OG classic lemonade with the addition of a refreshing splash of red raspberry and tart key lime. It's also finished with vodka and just enough fizz. We have 4 more formulated flavors ready for staggered release next year. Pictured here, the ginger pear palm, uh, whiskey, half tea, half lemonade. We're releasing in just another 2 weeks. We're continuing to develop new fun flavor combinations and blends in our Denver test kitchen. We chose lemonade because it is timeless. It has been and will always be a true classic. Mad Lemon is the wild child of the future of lemonade cocktails with a modern bite. Our cocktails are meant to be savored. They pique the senses and liven your mood. And our vibe goes beyond the beverage. We've really created an experience that you can live and feel through our beautiful art and branding, we get to showcase our free spirit, our wanderlust style, and the madness behind the can. A key element of our mission, um, is to support and be inspired by um the music, culinary and art scenes that surround us.

Ray Latif [1:08:19] And we're doing that through uh numerous collaborations um with art and community sponsorships.

Speaker 2 [1:08:27] So our audience is young urbanites at bars and festivals to hip parents enjoying barbecues and outdoor adventuring. They are conscious about what, about what they indulge in, and they really enjoy the experience of something new and fresh. Denver, besides being our home, was the perfect place to launch Mad Lemon. There's incredible um support in our community and it's really a great base for up and coming products and local businesses. Retailing in liquor stores, bars, restaurants, and venues. We expect to expand beyond Colorado within the next 6 to 12 months. Our brand ethos is Be Happy Live madly, and we spread joy through lemonade and invite everyone to share in this incredible journey. We really hope you all have enjoyed your first taste of Mad Lemon.

Ray Latif [1:09:26] Amen. That. Nicely done. They said we couldn't fit 8 people up here, but, we did. Um, that raspberry key lime, just, uh, yeah, I, there's something about that flavor that just sounds incredible. So did you get to try it? Uh, I did. I did appreciate how you guys are incorporating the maple in there, uh, because that is a unique way of making lemonade with maple syrup. But then I was also curious, like, so if you're using maple syrup. You're also adding cane sugar. What's the reasoning behind both sweeteners?

Speaker 2 [1:10:06] So our big reasoning really comes down to cost. Maple syrup is a quality ingredient, so we did have to kind of cut that a little bit. We also didn't want it to taste overly maple flavored, so the sugar really does give it a nice clean kind of balance there,

Ray Latif [1:10:20] nice little finish there, right?

Speaker 2 [1:10:22] It does help with the stability and consistency of the beverage as well. We wanted to hold on to that the roundness that maple brings. We do think it gives more depth to the flavor. Um, but it does help with stability to have the cane sugar.

Ray Latif [1:10:36] Got it, yeah. A lemonade-centric brand, a hard lemonade-centric brand. What are your thoughts, Sebastian? So, um, I wrote down for packaging, definitely a vibe. That's, that's how I, I put it down. So, um, you're really colorful, really popping out. Um, my question to you is, I mean, lemonades are sweet, right? They have a lot of calories, and now everyone in RTD's is like, oh, hot like, why. and all those companies now drill everyone to 100 calories, right? So how did you approach this? Did you take your favorite recipe and thought about how, how, how much can I go down with sugar? Like how was the process and how was your thinking about the sugar content? And by the way, how many calories does one can have?

Speaker 2 [1:11:13] Um, they range a little bit. Like our half tea, half Palmer is going to be a little less sweet, less calories. I think there's around 280 to 320, so. We kind of our motto is to have a drink, not a diet. We really wanted to be that full bodied cocktail. We wanted you to have a treat, drink one, drink two, but enjoy it. It's natural. You're also going to burn it off if you're dancing or active, um. Yeah, so that is, that's where we want to go with it. We, we don't want to really follow trends. We kind of want to be this classic thing that's going to stay forever, and we feel like lemonade is that. We also really quickly, sorry, we played with some monk fruit and some stevia, and for us, for our palates, it's, it almost tastes sweeter than the sugar, so it really is about that flavor for us too.

Ray Latif [1:11:59] Thank you. All right, uh, Tiffany, in terms of the target consumer that the folks at Mad Lemon outlined, do you think that's the right? folks that they should be looking after? Do you think those are the folks that are gonna be buying this product and looking after this brand? I think now that I've heard the presentation as opposed to just looking at the packaging, it is aligned from what I can see. One of the things that I would wonder, you have 3 different channels. What's your channel mix on general percentage that you think you want to go after in your go to market strategy?

Speaker 2 [1:12:33] I think that it does hold up in both on premise and off-premise. It's an excellent brand to take and go on any activity, but it does look so good sitting on the bar that it's super fun to have at bars, restaurants, venues, festivals. I think it's super versatile, so we're having a lot of fun with that.

Ray Latif [1:12:57] I consider that just just one more quick comment and then I'll be quick. The venues channel is a separate channel in my mind. It's a totally different way to go to approach it from a pricing to a reasoning to a packaging, etc. It's very, very different from venues, and I heard you guys say that. Seems dead on for venues and going after that. It seems like kind of part of what you guys are doing, so it looks like 100% that. So you can do a whole bunch of different stuff than you could do if you were just going after bars and restaurants. Absolutely. Carlton, as an investor, do you want to join the Lemonlution? Well, that's kind of a loaded question, isn't it, Ray? Uh, um, I guess the, the, the, the, the, the one question I'd ask is, um, it's very smart. I mean people forget that Mike's Hard Lemonade is still a billion-dollar brand, um, so we get, I, I, I get the, the viability here. Um, really, really high flavor load, you know, high sugar, high acid. Is it sessionable when, when you talk to your consumers, can people sit down and drink a couple of these, or are they done after one or two?

Speaker 2 [1:13:58] You know what's super fun is that we through the lemonade stand we were able to sample these and through some beer tasting events we've been able to sample these before we were able to launch 5 weeks ago and we did have a remarkable reception so people were psyched on them and they wanted more um so I think that you can enjoy several. Yeah, our friends, um, you know, we'll have little tasting parties. They'll drink 2 to 3, and that's like a really good balance for people. They're buzzing. They feel good, and I know we're not allowed to say health benefits, but I don't drink a lot. I'll drink occasionally, and I do not feel super hungover after these, so I think maybe those fresh, wholesome ingredients do help

Ray Latif [1:14:40] that. All right, well done. Unfortunately we're out of time, but great job. Thank you. Thank you. If you could actually please give your microphone. Yeah, thank you. All right. Up next to the stage is Tom Macy of Social Hour Cocktails. You can clap. There you go. Oh, there he is. Hey Tom. All right, just please mind your time. You got 5 minutes. Um, judges, everyone here, I, I'm so excited to be here to introduce you to Social Hour and our mission to bring craft cocktails beyond the bar. Uh, I'm Tom Macy, CEO and co-founder of Social Hour, and, uh, I'm a bartender by trade. Uh, I bartended for 12 years at the Clover Club in Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn's first and still, still, I believe, premier cocktail bar. For 8 of those years I was the beverage director where I was charged with creating seasonal menus, 30 to 40 drinks multiple times a year. This is where I, you know, really found and honed my passion for creating and perfecting cocktail recipes, sometimes quite a. Obsessively, um, I was hired at the Clover Club by Julie Reiner. Uh, I was a bar back at the time. Uh, she's one of the legitimate pioneers of the modern craft craft cocktail movement. She opened some of New York City's most iconic and influential cocktail bars, and she is also a, uh, my partner in Social Hour. Uh, the premise of Social Hour is simple. Uh, we are looking to take what we do, Julie and I, behind the bar and put it in a can with no compromising quality and fully shelf stable. Now accomplishing this was not easy. Um, just picture like this montage of like obsessive experimentation and like all these prototypes and us trying them and then just like disgruntled and like discarding them. It was a couple of years but we eventually got to where we wanted to get um and we launched Social Hour in the spring of August, uh, in the in in August of 2020. Our first three cocktails were based on a simple highball style concept. Uh, we have a gin and tonic, a whiskey mule, and our Pacific Spritz was a tropical. Take on a pair of TiVo spritz. These cocktails taste out of the can as if we made them from scratch behind the bar. We pull the same spirits that we pull from behind the bar and use in these. That's Perry's Tot Gin and Ragtime Rye from the New York Distilling Company down the street from us in Brooklyn. We are sourcing a rose wine blend from upstate in the Finger Lakes. Perhaps most importantly, these have the same ratio and ABV of a cocktail made from scratch. Our gin and tonic is 11.5%. It's an 8.4 ounce can. You make a gin and tonic from scratch. It's 2 ounces of gin, 66 ounces of tonic water, maybe a little dilution from ice. That is what you're getting. Uh, since launching, we've kept our focus pretty narrow in our backyard of metro New York, mostly focused on off-premise liquor stores. We're essentially self-distributing and it's a sales team of one. For the 1st 10 months that was me hustling around in that time we've opened 130 accounts. We've sold 2500 cases in the last 12 months. We have about a reorder rate of around 80% and all our accounts carry an average of Three of our SKUs. Speaking of multiple SKUs, I have been along this this whole time I've been very busy in what I call the cocktail lab, and this summer we launched 3 more cocktails. We were emboldened by what we learned through that rigorous R&D process the first time around and really wanted to push the envelope with these. So, um, we've got the Suunnkiss Fizz, the Prize Fighter, and the strawberry rhubarb spritz. With this we wanted to lean into that idea of discovering something new which I really feel like is like the magic of cocktail bars. You know, I, I love classic cocktails. They're classics for a reason, but you know, when I explain the Suunnkiss Fizz to someone and I say it's a vodka fizz variation with yuzu, peach, key lime, and like a touch of jasmine, and they're like, Oh, that sounds really good, you know, like that spark of excitement, that's like what we're looking to capture and bring to market in a can to, you know, any venue or or occasion where a craft cocktail someone's unwinding with a drink and a craft cocktail might be a nice option, but a craft cocktail bar is not feasible. Those, those moments are when it's time for social hour. Um, we've been very fortunate to have some amazing feedback of food and wine, wine enthusiasts. Washington Post have all named us one of the best canned cocktails. Um, at the Ultimate Spirits Challenge this past year we took home Best in category. All of our cocktails scored 90 points or higher. Our gin and tonic scored 97 points, um, and I, I just can't help but mention that the, it will. It was number 18 in the entire spirits field and I can't help but mention that number 19 was a 31 year old bottle of scotch. Um, so, but we have not slowed down. I have stayed in the cocktail lab through this, this whole time and we're actually launching next week our first limited seasonal offering in collaboration with George Dickle whiskey. Um, their bottled in bond expression. This is 13 year old whiskey. The harvest whiskey sour is a whiskey sour variation with maple, cinnamon, a touch of cardamom, um, Honeycrisp apple Meyer lemon. It's 20% ABV. This is, it's not carbonated. It's a huge step towards our mission of bringing a craft cocktail experience, uh, to anywhere outside of a bar, um, so. You know, we're opposed for some really big strides in 2022, but I think what I'm most excited for is just this category and our opportunity to contribute to it. You know, it's a unique moment for RTDs and the RTD category, and I feel like Social Hour cocktails has all the right ingredients to meet it. Thank you. Well done. Um, Tiffany, let's start with you. A classic cocktail centric brand social hour. What are your initial thoughts on what you heard? I love the packaging. I love the product inside. I love the packaging nails it. You see, you see the cocktail. You know what you should be delivering it inside of when you try to do it on your own, that little part, the little, the little, little part you have to do left when you're at home, put it in the glass, etc. All great. I think the last thing which is really on trend is working with a major spirit brand. That's a key trend as far as where some of the growth is, as far as when you look at the category and you start splitting it up, being, if you look at some of the most popular products out there, yep, but it's also having that key brand. I'd be very interested to see how the dickle does. Me too. I know it's going to be great. I worked on that brand when I was 27. A 6 pack and assorted again. I already said it on other brands. 4 packs. OK, cool. And we cannot do, well, whatever, we'll talk about multipacks at a party. It'd be great if it's not at a party, it's 4 packs and people break them up. Yeah, yep. Uh, Carlton, you know, I think I saw some pretty interesting ingredients, at least for ready to drink cocktails in here. Fernet was one of the ingredients in here, yeah, er, yeah. Do you see these types of ingredients as scalable? Do you think that there's a broad mainstream opportunity for some of these products? First of all, I'm definitely ready to back a specialty facility that'll make variety packs if you want to, because you seem to be very variety pack centric, so that I'm willing to sign on. Right now, adjacent technologies, right adjacent technologies, I do think this is broad enough and I think that the really nice thing about this is that you touch on the classics and you touch on a little bit of, you know, a walkabout if you will, on some of the others, and I think the only thing you have to be careful with is getting too broad and doing too much skew rationalization just because you're going to have my CFO were here he would be like, Tom, you gotta remember to rein it in. No, I, I take that, and yeah, it's like I have too many ideas and I know that, and, but for sure, focus, focus, focus. A slightly higher ABV than some of the cocktails we've seen, slightly lower than others. Sebastian, I mean, where do you see this sort of this type of product as fitting into this the growth of the RTD space? How do you know the question I wanted to ask? I actually wanted to point out the higher ABV content. Um, what's your calorie count on those on average? It's like around 200, 200, OK, because like that's the point, right? The variety we're seeing right now is, is, you know, we're going from 5%, 4.2% in some cocktails up to 40% with golden rule. I think it's interesting to have. Higher ABV because it's coming closer to the cocktail experience, right? And I will say like I wasn't like I'm going to make a 10% RGD brand. It was like I'm going to, I'm going to make the best damn gin and tonic I could possibly make in a can, and it just turned out that that, I mean that was like actually raising the ABV was kind of the aha moment. It was at 10 and then we raised it to 11, 11.5, so it really it was just like Following what the path of deliciousness was really our mission and that's great, but because ultimately we're looking for some kind of differentiation in the marketplace with so many brands, and I feel like as Saeed knows there is so much education and so much different understandings of what cocktail actually means and what it doesn't mean. So I like the fact that you're having, you're different in terms of saying, you know what, we do good cocktails, and that means that we are like slightly higher ABV content. I like that piece. Thanks. Saeed, uh, Tom mentioned he was trying to make the best gin and tonic he could possibly make. Uh, did he come close? Did he suc I don't know if you didn't get to the gin and tonic. I didn't get the gin and tonic, but I will say, I can only give you 4. I wanted to get. We'll change the rules for next time, sorry, please. I will say that whiskey mule was very spicy and that's exactly what I wanted in my whiskey mule is that ginger beer spice. Uh, also, I was very, very, very, very appreciative of the spritz that you did as well, like that strawberry rhubarb one. That one, it obviously rhubarb is very perfumi, but it's like if you wanted something like an Aritivo style cocktail, that was it. And then also the, um, the, the Sunkiss one was top notch as well. I'm really curious about this, uh, this brette one though because You know, it was bartenders. I know, man. Yeah, yeah, we'll get you some when I get back to New York. No, the frenet one's super cool and it's like the nerd cocktail for sure. Yeah, I'm into nerdy things, right. Well, thank you so much, Tom. Great job. Thank you guys. If there are folks looking to taste, uh, some of social hour cocktails and all the cocktails represented here as part of the showdown, just head to the side of the room for folks watching at home. FOMO for next time. You should be here. All right. Uh, Next up for the showdown is Eric Truhart and Samantha Franklin of Black Yeti Beverage. Come on up. OK. Hi there. I think I have. Does this work? Yes, OK, greetings, Earthlings, friends, Bev Netters, everyone in between. I'm Eric Truhart, animation writer, comedy writer, and producer of the Army of Drunks Cocktail podcast. Hi there, I'm Samantha Franklin, former pro punk bassist gone psychopharmacology grad student. We're incredibly honored to be here among so many uh accomplished drinks makers, and we are Black Kitty Beverage, a brand new indie and award-winning, uh, company local to Southern California, and we have just launched. Grizzlies Cosmic Black, first in a line of 2-year aged high rye bourbon and gourmet cola RTD cocktails. We imagineered our creation during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. The idea was to combine our love of craft cola, high quality bourbon, and psychedelic pop art. Our greatest hope was to bring some much needed joy and transcendent fun to our currently healing world. So what are we? What are we? We are an elevated bourbon and cola experience with tasting notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, caramel, toasted marshmallow, and a pinch of heat compliments of a flavorless chili oil. We use a premium hi rye bourbon and we are a zero sugar added cocktail, clocking in at 120 calories per can with a 6% ABV and a retail price of 1599 cents per 4 pack. As you may have noticed, we are a Space Yeti themed company, and our packaging with its proud, fluffy, whiskey bearing mascot exists at the nexus of sci-fi and rock and roll. Our box is an all Pantone black light reactive matte and high spot gloss piece of total eye candy. The can is a standalone piece of art and the perfect Instagram ready cosmic accessory. We have a deep appreciation for the interplay of spirits and art, and we strive to reflect that throughout our brand. Tiger. So why bring this to market? There is currently a whiskey and cola shaped hole in the RTV RTD2 marketplace. Lovers of margaritas and mules have dozens of options, but there's not really an elevated whiskey and cola RTV-D. There are just a few big Acme brands. Also, if the popularity of hard seltzer has taught us anything, it's that there is a demand for lower calorie, no sugar added beverages. And finally, we created it because it's fun. Um, we're a couple of arty weirdos and this is the fruit of our pandemic stir crazy, so come partake of our fruit. Airport So in addition to our fruit and that airport, big picture, what is the appeal? We're an interesting dichotomy of creature comfort familiarity and decadent indulgence. It's a cola, but the complex flavor profile makes it appealing to epicureans. It's a cocktail, but the ABV means a. Drinks like a beer. It's counterculture and offbeat while also being friendly and approachable. When you looked at our artwork, were you thinking the Muppets, Star Trek Tribbles, Bootsy Collins, perhaps, because we were thinking all of these things, and these are very happy thoughts indeed. So Eric, what's up to bat next? Well, Samantha, Um, we are proudly a line of just bourbon and cola drinks. So upcoming skews include Cosmic Bliss, a toasted marshmallow flavored cola, Cosmic Blood, a blood orange flavored cola, as well as some sassy seasonal skews. Corporate headquarters So success and beyond, uh, we've only been on the marketplace for 5 months. We have not yet pursued a major distributor in favor of hitting the streets dressed as Men in Black carrying a furry briefcase, and so far it's worked. Uh, we've partnered with the Raailly's Market chain. We're also in select Total Wine locations. Uh, we're going to be partnering with Taproom.com as a flagship RTD for them. Uh, and you can currently order us online via e-commerce across most of the US. Uh, we've also won awards at the 2021 Cannes Challenge and the Proof Awards. So far we've been conquering our home market of SoCal with an effective punk rock DIY guerrilla approach to sales acceleration and brand positioning. We're a happy, easygoing, grateful company and we want Grizzlies Cosmic to be a source of fun and success for all involved. So in conclusion, what makes us special? No one has approached the whiskey and cola RTD from a craft cola perspective, and that's where we really differentiate ourselves real age bourbon and insanely good cola. Grizzly's Cosmic Black is a whole new creature on the market, the only arty artisanal bourbon and cola line brought to Earth by transdimensional space yetis, and we stand by that. Roll the video. How do you end it so perfectly so that the video ended right as soon as it hit 000 on there? I have no idea. That was impressive. I really thought I was like, well, we can't gong a video, so they, that was a good move actually, um. So out there but friendly and approachable, uh, Sebastian, I mean, what do you think of that approach to this, uh, this emerging category? I mean, It is Kitschy, as some might say, but it's also really interesting. Yeah, first of all, trying to be funny on stage in front of a comedy writer that I didn't didn't see that coming. So, well done, great presentation, and, and I love, I mean, you know, I love the colorful and I love the story behind it. Ultimately, we are all investing in a brand at the end of the day. So brand is important, story is important. I mean, the question is always, you wanna make sure that people still understand they're drinking a bourbon Cola, right? I mean, you, you need to be careful not to push it too far in one direction, but I, I really, I really like that, that piece of it. Um, my question to you is, did you actually craft a cola first, or what do you try to add, you know, use flavors and, and, you know, like sweeteners in order to complement the bourbon, or was it the other way around? Like how did you approach that that formulation? Well, for starters, we're the beneficiaries of living in proximity to an old timeyla shop where every single Craft cola that you could possibly imagine is curated and they even have a make your own cola bar so that's kind of fundamental. That's sort of a fun hobby that Eric and I engage in and so we took that and we brought that to the home kitchen where Eric made lots of cool tins. Yeah, we made tinctures, we made nutmeg, we made hard peppercorn, black peppercorn, we made cinnamon and we sat. And we experimented with that at the same time we tracked down bourbons that we liked and we experimented with those, so it was basically a kitchen operation to craft that cola and then marry it with the bourbon. I would even use that story more because you know the question is, do you come from a bourbon side and add a cola or do you come from the cola side and then the bourbon? And since you have that great story, I would add that more and the product is really good. Yeah, thank you. Story is important. So is the taste, Saeed, um, does this fit the bill in terms of this classic pairing? Uh, well, just to go back to this packaging, I like loud things, obviously, so this was really dope, um. Uh, but as far as taste goes, yes, uh, I do, I did appreciate the kind of craft cola vibe that you guys are going for. The one note that I wanted from it or like that I wanted more of is just more carbonation. I just wanted more carbonation because I feel like when I put this drinking out of the can and then letting it sit for, you know, 5 minutes, I was like, I go back for it and it wasn't as carbonated as I want it to be, um. That was just like my only kind of note, but other than that, taste was amazing for it being a, you know, homemade cola. Thank you. We'll, we'll note the bubbles. Tiffany, what do you think about this in terms of, uh, retail and distribution? They're in Raleigh's right now. um, how far can this brand go at retail? Uh, the packaging has to be adjusted to be a little bit more retail friendly on, uh, just take a look at it. You have to have some, some obvious things that aren't quite there yet. I can, I can tell, um, discuss that later if you're interested, but, uh, the cola, it has sugar in it. No, so the cola doesn't have any sweetener in it. No sugar. It has an artificial sweetener, but no sugar. So careful when you're talking to the retailers and you say zero sugar, but you have an artificial sweetener in there. It's just a tricky spot right now and people are super in tune with it. And you don't want to look inauthentic or that you're not being fully transparent. Just a little hint and it tastes fantastic. So I don't, I don't want to take away from its taste. Just be careful that you're authentically. really communicating what's going on. Thank you. We say no sugar added. We try to be careful about that language, but thank you. Yeah, careful. We do prominently list our ingredients. We're a very forthright company. We don't want to hide anything. We're a happy food product, not a health food product. Good. Carl, you get the last word. What are your thoughts on the presentation of the brand? Nothing to add. These guys did a great job, like very well done and a little bit more carbonation. I think the product's almost there. Thank you very much. Great stuff. Thanks so much. Time really does fly cause we are down to our final contestant for this edition of Bevnet's Cocktail Showdown. These are Cece Derosier and Reed Derosier. Come on up to the stage. Hello. Thus, I'm Cici and this is Reed. We are the married couple behind True Beverage Co. Before we get started, just wanted to say a big thank you to the judges who sat through all this, the audience, um, most of whom is over at the bar right now that you guys can't see online, but we all trust Ray to save the best for last, right? So we're in good shape. OK, so this probably isn't the best way to start off at a pitch competition entitled Cocktail Showdown, especially coming last after 9 incredible cocktail brands, but 2 years ago prior to starting Troop, Reid and I were complete cocktail amateurs. We had very boring desk jobs and like most people with boring desk jobs, we spent every waking moment thinking about our social lives and how we could get together with our friends. For us as the go to host, we quickly learned that to change an everyday occasion into a celebration, you had to have the best cocktails in town to keep your friends at your place other than the bar. So we figured we had to learn how to do that. We started reading books on the science of cocktails. Thank you, Dave Arnold. Uh, we subscribed to newsletters like Mark Brown. We talked to bartenders, but most importantly, we started making a lot of cocktails, um, and we bought a mini keg named Kevin who you can see proudly featured in our slide. So, um, then, We, uh, we started making drinks for our friends and our friends of friends who we started to call our troop, and, uh, we're a married couple. It's not everyone's idea of a honeymoon, but we, we put in the hard work to figure out exactly what our troop wanted from our cocktails and we learned a couple of things along the way. We learned that the troop loved drinks that were spiritual. For and packed with flavor not only from the spirits but the real ingredients that go into those drinks and we believe, as you can see from our can right here, a cocktail should be small because it's a special occasion and when there's some scarcity in that liquid that you're consuming, that makes each sip one to savor. And most importantly, you've got to be sharing it with your troop, right? And when you can focus on sharing that great drink in the moments that go into it rather than mixing the drink, that's even better. And we wanted to share this time with our troop. We were in the other room making cocktails, so we thought, well, I guess we're just going to do this ourselves a little bit naively and as a newly married couple, but we're still together, so I think things are going OK. And then troop was born, so we make full flavor, full strength cocktails that level up your libation. We craft these drinks for a new class of drinker, those who care more about belly laughs and quality time versus tastemaker bars or drinking games, and we have a list of five spirit-based cocktails that we're going to walk you through tonight. With the vodka lemonade with tart lemon and basil, the tequila palama, a taste of Jalisco, the sprinkle of salt, the rum mojito, bubbly, dry, zesty, you might find yourself dancing in the streets, the gin spritz, our take on a sparkling negroni, and the bourbon smash, the love child between Arnold Palmer, the drink, not the man, and a mint julep. All of our cocktails are made with real spirits, like we said, fresh squeezed citrus juices, herbs, botanicals, homemade amaro, simple syrups, just the good stuff, no chemical flavors and no preservatives go into these. They're lightly sweetened to give you that bit of sweetness that you're looking for in a cocktail, but they're about 125 calories. So they kind of check the boxes for consumers. And on the format, why did we pick this 200 mL can here? Well, it is 10% ABV in a 6.8 ounce can. That is a shot and then some of spirits, but it is properly diluted and perfectly balanced to consume right from the can. There is no need to pour it out and pour it over ice. And that's what helps us stand out from the competition. It's a crowded field. On the one side we've got the hard seltzer competitors of the world that are at 5% ABV. On the other side we've got the higher ABV cocktails that require pouring, prep, or sharing. We're the Goldilocks of canned cocktails. We're just right. That's right, because they're balanced. You can consume them right out of the can, and they maintain that in-hand occasion that's really important for customers. And at $3 to $4 for each individual cocktail or $13.99 dollars for the four pack, there are premium accessible options so you can have these damn good cocktails without breaking the bank. And we've seen this prove out in the market. We're currently sold in two states, California and Texas. We're in over 500 accounts ranging from stores like Whole Foods all the way to Total Wine and everywhere in between. In hospitality, we're upgrading the pool areas in minibars in the room from those airplane bottles and Coke cans to a perfectly portable and premium cocktail. Fareed and I, TROP has always been about how we can bring our group of friends together and create a better social environment, and our troop agrees. Across the hundreds of dinner parties, living room happy hours, and backyard barbecues, TRO has elevated these everyday occasions into celebrations, and we're excited to celebrate with you all tonight. So cheers. Thank you. Nicely done, Carlton. Let's start with you. True Beverage Company, what are your thoughts on the presentation? Um, really well done, really polished both in the product and the presentation. Um, really kind of narrow question How is it doing at at some of the larger accounts you mentioned like Total and like Whole Foods, for example? Yes, so Whole Foods is actually that's a good one to start with. It's our best account. They found us pretty early on because of the ingredient quality. They're very strict on the type of products that can come into their store, and we've really developed a great relationship with their Northern California buyer who's now taking over all of California and. OAC. Um, so for us we've seen great velocities, growing velocities. Um, we just came out with two new SKUs, the vodka lemonade and tequila Paloma, so we're launching those in there in January, and so we'll have 5 SKUs across all of California as we grow sort of towards the south and southeast. Yeah, so did you get to try everything and uh what are your thoughts on troop? Uh, Paloma was great. Uh, I was thrown off by the bourbon smash. I wasn't anticipating tea because when I think smash, I wasn't thinking necessarily of a tea, so that tea was, uh, threw me for a loop. Do you mean my favorite drink? Yeah, it was good, don't get me wrong, but and I was like, I just was like when I'm, when I'm, when I see something and it says smash, I already have this kind of like, kind of connotation in my head knowing that I'm gonna, what I'm going to get. And when I sipped it, I was like, oh. Interesting. Yeah, well, thank you for the feedback. We developed these drinks with feedback from, uh, that troupe that we talked about, hundreds of interviews with people and trying those drinks, and you're part of that now that you've tried it. So thank you for the feedback. Well, we totally take the note. With all of our drinks, we try and take a relatively classic drink like a bourbon smash which has lemon, mint, usually bourbon, sometimes sparkling, sometimes not, and then add Little bit of a twist. So the vodka lemonade, there's a bit of basil in there, bourbon smash, we throw that tea in there, which we think adds a really nice balance with the bourbon and kind of that's how we approach each of the drinks that we make. Now that plog was great though. Good work on that. Thank you. Can I say how much of a boss move that was? Oh, you mean my favorite drink? Crack that open and drink it. I had to keep it in the back pocket in case I was getting nervous or, you know, a frog in the throat. Very nice, very nice packaging and presentation in terms of the 4 pack and the cans. Tiffanie, what are your thoughts? I love the can presentation. Especially I think the only thing that I would say is the word troupe is really hard for me to see. It's big, bigger than so big that I don't know that it's troupe. Almost. That's the only downside because you don't know how to call for it or you don't know what it is as long as you see the package, you're good. Love the branding. I love that it's clear. It's a vodka lemonade and it's super clear. And and that's that's unique. So your packaging, everything's nailed it. Just the name brand's a little harder to see. And then sugar and carb on the pack, the pack I got, I don't know if it's on the pack, the sugar and carb, but I saw on the pack on the can it was, so I don't know if that's just a different version, but having that on the pack too because it's a strength, you'll want to make sure that you show that strength on the actual outside packaging. Yeah, that's great feedback. Not trying to hide anything when we've heard that customers are always searching for it, so we're doing some upgrades on packaging now. Great. Sebastian, you get the last word on troop and the last word for the showdown. Um, for real boss move, the can should be empty by now. I just wanna, I just wanted to add that right now. Um, I would love, like the, the packaging is amazing and also the, the shipper it comes in, you know. The shipper it comes in is also great optimized. You open it up, like the audience can see it. Also the homepage is all very polished. It all looks great. It looks like a cocktail, so that's all awesome. And yeah, the last word for the show and it's a big burden to take right here, I think we saw a variety of products and like those are all very good and yeah, well done. Well done indeed. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Uh, this is our 2nd time doing it and, you know, it's just incredible to see the variety that's happening, the, the excitement, the passion that we're seeing in this emerging category of ready to drink cocktails. Congratulations to all of the contestants. Really, really well done. As my microphone is about to roll off the bar, uh, we're going to go and convene. We, as in the judges and I, uh, they are going to pick a winner and that winner is going to be announced at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time for folks in the audience. Please be back in here by 5:25 or 5:20 or just stay in the room. There's plenty of cocktails because it's going to be a really great announcement. I also just want to say real quick, thanks so much once again to the judges. This is an outstanding judging panel right here. Fantastic. All right, 5:30. Be back online watching us at 5:30. Be back in this room at 5:30. Thank you. Right, as promised, I'm Ray Latif, the editor and producer of Bevnet's Tas Radio podcast here with the winners of Bevnet's cocktail showdown 2 competition, Hunter Sproll and James Mock of Golden Rule. Congratulations, gentlemen. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Couldn't, uh, couldn't have expected this. So, uh, I really appreciate you guys hosting us and being here. When you heard the announcement, you weren't expecting it. No, not really. This is an amazing field of competitors. So I mean, it's pretty humbling to have seen our name up there. I mean, we're really excited to have partaken, but yeah, we weren't expecting it. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult because it, it was a tough competition. 10 brands, 10 great concepts, as the judges pointed out, liquid packaging, route to markets, uh, potential for these brands, all great. Um, let's start from the beginning. Golden rule for folks who may have missed your presentation. What do you guys do? Sorry, I missed, I missed the end of the room. Yes, for folks who may have missed your presentation, golden rule, what is it that makes you different? What do you guys do? We do ready to drink cocktails that emulate what you would get at a bar, so everything is to-proof, working off of our own recipes. So our margarita is 27% alcohol. It is as straightforward as it gets tequila, triple sec, lime juice, our old fashion is orange bitters, a high rye bourbon. Everything is meant to be exactly what you would get at a bar. Again, just proper cocktails. And great packaging too, you know, one of my friends knew that I was going to be judging this competition and happened to see your, your can here of your old fashioned, and he's like, Is that an Eames chair? That is really cool. It's a style of an Eames chair. Don't go too into that one there. Yeah, OK. Oh, I see, I see where you're. OK, so it's not exactly an Eames chair. It's there might be an extra leg on there or something. I don't know. Um, how did you come up with the packaging? How did you come up with the branding because it is very distinct? Yeah, so the idea was really off of matchbooks and I grew up, as I said, in the restaurant industry and my dad's restaurant had this. Basically a box of matches that people at the bar would pick out of and they would write little notes on them and they put them back in for other people to find and as we were developing this whole idea of the golden rule and everything and sharing things, it was like oh these matchbooks, they're so synonymous with bars and restaurants and they were always a thing like what if we could Capture that imagery and really have that as like these are our to go little cocktails. Take them with you. Take them wherever you go. You kind of have like a destination to it as well. So I mean it's a family recipe from the margarita and kind of where that recipe came from and that's part of where the imagery came from for that margarita. And then you know you get to the old fashioned and I think it was just a conversation. It's where do you like to enjoy an old fashioned and a style of Eames chair came to mind. It's, you know, kicking back after a long day and just put you in that kind of destination for where you might like to enjoy one of those types of drinks. Camping can be a destination. The forests, yeah, you get to hang out there in the hills, beaches, forests. Camping is something people like to do. Yes, indeed. Inside joke if folks who may saw the entire competition. A destination is also something that's interesting. The word in that there was some talk about where this package can go um and talking about airplanes, talking about cruise ships and things like that. I mean, have you already talked about, have you already talked to some folks in those types of travel industries? I mean, what's the plan? So yeah, we've, we've approached them. We're, we're trying to get into that. I mean one of the things is education. We see no better avenue to educate people on the 100 mL size of cocktails than airlines, right? You have such a captive audience and I think people can still be a little skeptical on the ready to drink segment in general. So if we have a captive audience, this new style of cans. It fits. I mean, you could walk through TSA with it. It is 100 mL, so you could get through. They might as well just have us on board anyways. And so there's a lot of things that work for us in, in those segments, and yeah, we're hopeful and we're pursuing those as avenues to to really sell the, sell the drinks. Absolutely. Last question, you know, I think some people wonder like, Once I get a product that has resonance that people appreciate, um, would you change anything? When you're talking about your business strategy, what have you learned to this point? Because it seems like there's a lot of appreciation for what you guys have created, but what are some of the learnings? What are some of the lessons that you have to incorporate into the future of your company? I mean, again, I would take it in that yes, we definitely are incorporating things throughout, right? We're so young, we're still getting our feet wet in this industry. We came out with things that we like and we want to continue to come out with things that we like to drink because we think they're fun and it's engaging, but you know if that some people have said already, it's like you're old fashioned strong and like we can take that as a wink wink like maybe take a couple proof off of that or something. We're continuing to evolve. We know that. This is going to be a journey and we're kind of in just the infant stages of it. We're excited to see where it takes us with new cocktails, you know, evolving. The margarita recipe we're probably pretty stuck with because of our family, but there are some other things that we could evolve and we're excited to see where that takes us. So yeah, and not wanting to, you know, overextend ourselves too soon. I mean we wanted to start with, we started with the margarita first, followed up with the old fashioned, a couple of just classics, and I mean, of course, as we alluded to, want to extend the line a bit but not get too far ahead of ourselves and continue to take feedback from the market but stay true to just what we like to drink, as James said. For now, enjoy the day, enjoy the evening, right now my question is how many of these can you fit inside the trophy? I mean, like let's say if you pour 2 ounces, that's probably at least what. 6070 ounces you could get it would be able to be shared amongst everyone I will say that. So maybe, maybe we don't try that right now, but we'll experiment. No, probably post COVID really post COVID we can try something like that. But in the meantime, guys, congratulations again. It was an honor seeing you on stage. It was an honor seeing all the brands participate on stage, but you guys are the champions. Golden Rule once again, champions of Bevnet's cocktail showdown 2 competition. Uh, just a reminder to our live stream viewers, we're back on here at 8 a.m. Pacific time for the semi-final round of Bevnet's new beverage showdown. You don't want to miss it. In the meantime, just saying thank you so much to our amazing team at Bevnet. The behind the scenes folks have been working their butts off, and I think it shows that they are real professionals and signing off with the amazing folks who participated in our competition. These guys are awesome. I'm Ray Latif, and we'll talk to you next time.