Every distillery visitor is a potential customer, and they’re more likely to consume your spirits in a cocktail than neat. That’s why the bar is a crucial piece of any distillery’s planning and why maximizing the guest experience is essential. The bar should be a simple, focused, and efficient showcase of your spirits.
Then, once you’ve honed that program, you can begin applying its successes and lessons learned to the wider on-premise market. What follows is advice from veteran bartenders and experts on how to achieve that goal.
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Tailor Your Bar to Its Place
First, consider your plan for a visitor experience. If you want to welcome guests into your facility, a tasting bar with cocktails is arguably essential. Depending on your state’s laws, you may also face unusual challenges.
In Maryland, for example, you can’t serve any alcoholic products that were not produced on your own premises. So, to serve cocktails, you must be thoughtful and plan a well-crafted bar program. Let’s say you want to serve an old fashioned designed to showcase your whiskey, an expression of your local terroir. You’ll need to make your own bitters and syrup. This is an excellent opportunity to use components and complementary flavors that express your locale.
Jonathan Chittenden. Photo: Courtesy Sagamore Spirit Distillery.
Jonathan Chittenden, bar manager at Sagamore Spirit Distillery in Baltimore, says that because they can’t use bar-staple brands, liqueurs, vermouth, or amaro, he works with the production team to make their own amaro and whiskey-based vermouth. Seeing this as an opportunity, the team makes an amaro that pairs perfectly with their rye whiskey. When Jonathan wanted to add a Sazerac cocktail to the menu, the team developed a fennel-infused white-rye whiskey to replace the absinthe.
“This is an opportunity to not only showcase Sagamore’s rye whiskey uniquely, but to also create a cocktail that you can only experience on their campus,” Chittenden says. “You may know the Sazerac cocktail and drink it often, but you’ve never tasted this Sazerac.”
When Chittenden trains the bar staff at Sagamore, he explains that they must have a specific knowledge set that ranges from the agricultural aspect to production, understanding the various decisions a distiller makes and how that affects the final flavor of a spirit. His staff is there primarily to connect with guests and educate them on the spirits they’re tasting. Education is a vital component at a distillery bar, and Chittenden says he wants guests to learn through connections and relationships rather than lectures. The idea is that a flavor journey via cocktails can be an excellent way to connect drinkers to Sagamore’s products.
Brooke McKinnon. Photo: Courtesy Freeland Spirits.
Think About What Your Customers Want at Home
Brooke McKinnon, who manages the bar at Freeland Spirits in Portland, Oregon, argues that there are three parts to a successful distillery bar program: “It’s the three Gs,” she says. “Good people, good product, good environment.”
McKinnon says that Freeland’s bar has grown sales by considering what entices customers to mix their own drinks at home—namely, by selling cocktail mixers and catering to the home bartender. “We discovered that many of our customers loved our spirits and were looking for a way to mix up delicious, bar-worthy cocktails at home,” she says. “So, I started a line of cocktail mixers called Fresh, and these became really popular and have made it approachable for our customers to mix good cocktails at home.”
McKinnon says that Freeland’s bar doesn’t offer only tasting flights of its spirits—it also offers cocktail flights. “People enjoy learning at a distillery or tasting room,” she says, “so having multiple tasting options and fun ones—like mini cocktail flights—helps guide that experience.” They also design seasonal and themed menus. “We switch up our menu at least every season and also during … celebration months such as Pride, Halloween, Christmas/holidays, etcetera,” she says. “People love a good theme and that we highlight seasonal ingredients in our cocktails.”
When it comes to engaging with customers and the local community, McKinnon recommends getting creative and trying out different things. “Not every community will have the same response or want the same things,” she says, “so it’s good to lean into what your customers enjoy and run with it. I also recommend not allowing your bar program or space to get stale. Keep things fresh and switch it up—but keep your quality of service and product consistent.”
Broadly, stay focused on a concise cocktail program that showcases your spirits in approachable and fascinating ways. Offer approachable cocktails as well as unusual ones unique to your brand.
Lean into Local
Focusing on local ingredients can be the key to success with your core and cocktail products.
In Michigan, Long Road Distillers also came up against the constraint of not being able to serve spirit products that were not made at the distillery. So, the team there created a line of liqueurs, beginning with Long Road Nocino, an Italian-style liqueur made with locally grown green walnuts.
Cofounder Kyle Van Strien says Nocino was an instant hit. What began as an attempt to fill out the distillery bar won over drinkers by leaning into local flavors.
Shannon Mustipher. Photo: Courtesy Shannon Mustipher.
Consider What Bars Are Willing to Buy
Once you have a solid bar program going at your own distillery, it’s time to think about how to translate any successes there to the wider on-premise market. Can you use lessons learned to get more placements at other bars?
It’s essential to understand the differences in the markets you are targeting, says Shannon Mustipher, author of Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails and an award-winning spirits educator and beverage consultant. For example, some markets will focus more on value and price; people there may have smaller margins and tighter budgets, so price-consciousness may be a top priority. On the other hand, other markets want more esoteric products.
Mustipher, who hails from Brooklyn, New York, says that on a recent trip to a smaller city, she noticed many more niche products—and, in some places, wider selections—on the shelves of bars. She speculates that it comes down to lower operating costs in those places, compared to the costs of running a bar in New York City. Even if some products are pricier, a bar can still pour them into a program and not suffer a loss. In major cities, on the other hand—where labor costs, rent, and taxes are higher—buyers may be more price-conscious. That’s an issue for craft distilleries whose products will be at higher price points than larger ones.
There are also regional considerations. In some markets, Mustipher says, consumers tend to gravitate toward specific spirits and products. For example, some markets are heavily bourbon-focused, while some are more agave-focused. A distiller would do well to pay attention to how their spirits work in cocktails and to have at least one bottle in their lineup explicitly designed with cocktails in mind.
Pragmatically, producing a spirit with a cocktail focus isn’t necessarily just about flavor. “It also needs to hit the right price point,” Mustipher says. “If you intend for your spirit to be the base spirit in a cocktail, you need to understand how your price point will affect the end price of the cocktail. Does that make sense for your buyer’s bar program?”
Also, study the portfolios of larger brands. While you’re unlikely to beat them on price, look at the diversity in the lineups of larger producers and at the synergy of the products they offer. How do they read the market, and how do they make their products indispensable to bartenders?
Mustipher says she appreciates brands that send out quarterly emails with seasonal cocktail suggestions. That tells her that the producer is “not just trying to sell its products but is also promoting cocktail culture and cocktail knowledge and engaging the trade that way. It [feels] like a personal touch. … A spirit brand that comes to me and shares that they care just as much about cocktails as they do about their products feels like they care about my needs."
Kala Ellis. Photo: Courtesy Kala Ellis.
A Distillery’s Bar Should Know What Other Bars Need
Kala Ellis is a veteran bartender and current beverage director at Soho House in Nashville; she’s also the founder of the Gospel of Cocktail, which offers various educational services for bar professionals. Like Mustipher, Ellis argues that it’s essential for distilleries to understand a bar’s needs.
“You’ll have more success with variety,” she says. “Have a clout-bringer that is unusual and intriguing and also have approachable cocktails to reach a wider audience.” This is where developing that in-house bar program comes in—and that’s as much about people as drinks. “It’s vital to have someone directing this process that has that comprehension—an ability to design great cocktails with flavor diversity for your distillery bar and potential on-premise accounts.”
When looking at strategies for gaining a presence on cocktail menus, Ellis says it’s crucial for distilleries to communicate support of bartenders and their needs. “If I don’t see that as an aspect of your brand, I’m just not interested," she says. "The market is saturated, and the last thing that I need is another bottle from a brand that doesn’t necessarily fit in my bar program sitting on the shelf without any marketing support, relationship, or tools to add value to my program."
That doesn’t necessarily mean going to spend money in their bars (though it doesn’t hurt). “Some brands have gone out of their way to offer support that left a lasting impression,” Ellis says. “During peak COVID in 2020, an emerging brand donated two bartenders for some shifts, as we were understaffed and struggling like everyone else. It made a difference, and we felt seen.”
Bartenders and hospitality staff aren’t insular, Ellis says. They’re part of the community. “Sales and brand reps are often isolated from our community because it’s all about sales,” she says. “But when you really plug yourself into that community, your brand will become wanted. It won’t just be a case that we need the whiskey in our bar, but we also want the whiskey in our bar because we are all a community, and that’s vital.”
Share the Education
You may discover that bars seem to lack “the talent” to offer cocktails that meet the standards of your spirits—for example, you may notice that your product isn’t doing well in one location while it is selling well in others. Offering staff education is vital, and your bar-program manager should be able to lead regular staff training at your distillery as well as out in the market.
"I think it’s about meeting the talent where it’s at—offering great cocktail recipes and ensuring that these cocktails can be accurately executed in the market,” Ellis says. “If you give your accounts tools to be successful, not only will it help your brand in the immediate sense, but it will also raise the level of talent in your community—which will help your brand overall by creating a better cocktail community.”
Ellis recommends being tactical about which accounts to enter first as you bring your product to the market. “Recognition is critical,” she says. “You want to hammer awareness. Go into places where people will remember your drinks. Craft cocktail bars are great at mentioning the ingredients in their cocktails and being able to answer high-level questions about those ingredients, which raises awareness for your products.”
Cultivating strong and lasting relationships with your local craft cocktail and spirit-focused bars contributes significantly to your brand’s success, and that should be your first focus.
More broadly: A comprehensive program that not only considers the visitor experience at your distillery, but also the market, the needs of bars, and the educational component could be vital to your brand’s success.
