ADVERTISEMENT

Subscriber Exclusive

Reaching New Audiences with Collabs Beyond Booze

Successful collaborations need not be limited to alcoholic beverages. Coffee, chocolate, and hot sauce are among the many products with flavors that may be compatible with your spirits—and with customers who appreciate them.

Courtney Iseman Nov 6, 2024 - 13 min read

Reaching New Audiences with Collabs Beyond Booze Primary Image

Photo: Courtesy Beast Hot Sauce

Craft beverage alcohol is an industry fueled by collaboration, with passion projects often arising out of partnerships—such as a distiller’s connection with a local brewer or meadmaker—that offer potential for each maker to reach the other’s audience.

Increasingly, distillers are also looking to make connections with other creative producers—such as chocolatiers, coffee roasters, chefs, hot-sauce makers, and more—finding opportunities that make sense for their brands, meanwhile allowing their spirits’ flavors to be explored in other forms.

Such team-ups have the potential to grow a distiller’s reputation for creativity while simultaneously attracting new customers. They also require time, money, and resources, but they’re valuable when it comes to authentic marketing that doesn’t require a separate advertising budget.

“We’re a smaller distillery, and we don’t have a lot of marketing dollars to spend,” says Rick Lockwood, owner of Motor City Gas Distillery in Royal Oak, Michigan. “We can get a lot of organic reach [through collaborations] without putting a big investment in. We focus some time and hours into it, learn from it, and [it] creates a lot of word-of-mouth marketing. ... And we tend to reach audiences we wouldn’t normally.”

These collaborations represent ways for a spirit’s brand to appear on restaurant tables or gift-shop shelves, grabbing new eyes. They can also create further collaboration opportunities—such as a barbecue sauce that features your spirit leading to a pairing dinner at a local restaurant.

From distilleries that have done it successfully, here are some insights on how to carry that passion project into a win for marketing.

Access All of Spirits & Distilling

Subscribe today to access all of the in-depth distilling stories & advice you won't find anywhere else (including this article).

Courtney Iseman is a freelancer writer focused on the craft-beverage space, based in Brooklyn, New York.

ARTICLES FOR YOU