You didn’t shake drinks at home, so we canned them for you

When we opened Greenbar Distillery in 2004, we shared a dream with a new generation of bartenders — America deserved better cocktails…and the Appletini must die. Over the next 15 years, they and distilleries like Greenbar worked together to change the cocktails landscape. The public discovered and fell in love with the craft, bartenders became celebrities and all was right with the world…as long as you were drinking at the bar.

Trying to get customers to make drinks at home, though, felt like taking them into the Upside Down from Stranger Things, an alternate cocktail dimension that killed any desire to shake or stir a proper drink. After a while, I even got sucked into the Upside Down, despite owning a distillery and being surrounded by everything needed to make cocktails anytime I felt like it.

Thinking I suffered from industry fatigue, like how most professional chefs hate cooking at home, we soldiered on and did our best to help our customers make great drinks at home with minimal fuss. We added simple recipes on our back labels, installed educational cocktail displays in stores and promoted cocktails online. The needle didn’t move much for us beyond the vodka soda.

Out of frustration, we began hosting cocktail classes at our distillery tasting room to find out what we were missing, thinking that better messaging would solve the problem. Before our first series of classes, I had hoped that class attendees would leave Greenbar Distillery with more bottles than those who had simply come for a tour. After all, they’d have been inspired, learned the basics of cocktail making and practiced a few delicious drinks with our fun instructors.

Nope. Our cocktail class attendees actually bought fewer bottles than those who’d come by for a tour and tasting! I’m not sure why I was shocked.

Attendees loved the classes and had genuinely grasped the ropes of making proper drinks. But they’d also learned that making complex drinks took some time and work, along with tools and bottles of spirits, liqueurs, amari and bitters. This upfront and ongoing commitment proved too great for all but a few.?

Understanding that our customers were just like us (lazy to the core) was what finally convinced us in late 2018 to enter the ready-to-drink canned cocktail market. We concluded that if we were to help everyone drink bar-quality drinks anywhere, anytime, we’d need to turn the experience into one as accessible as drinking wine and beer by making it for them.?

In early 2019, we did just that. It transformed our company and brought the dream of drinking better to many more Americans. More on the journey next week.