Wayward Distillery Drunk Hive • Photo Credit Leila Kwok
For the past year, the expectations of your potential customers have been raised: they’ve been shaking, stirring and mixing their own cocktails at home. But there are only so many Old Fashioneds a budding bartender can stir without wondering if that’s all there is. That means “it has never been a better time to get people to reach for artisan spirits,” including seasonal and limited releases from your distillery, says Victoria Walsh, the Hamilton, Ontario-based co-author with Scott McCallum of A Field Guide to Canadian Cocktails.
Bespoke craft cocktails are a way for distilleries to drive awareness, marketing and sales of their spirits, tasting rooms and cocktail-friendly products. Even a micro operation can collaborate with an expert mixologist to develop bespoke cocktails that can drive repeat purchases of multiple distillery products, grab social and media attention plus build links in the local drinks community. If your distillery make unusual or niche products—a boldly flavoured spirit or liqueur with garlic or chili, tea or exotic spice—a custom cocktail helps create a need for those bottlings.
That also applies to the pandemic-born opportunity for distillery cocktail kits, which can not only bundle up multiple products, it can “also be an opportunity to sell branded glassware or bar tools,” says Walsh. It’s a way not only to gain new admirers, she says, but for customers who are missing your tasting room or cocktail lounge, “It’s a chance to remind [them] of your experiences” until things reopen, she says.
When Tory Manywounds set out to create unique bottled cocktails under his Original 403 brand, the veteran of the Southern Alberta craft liquor scene knew exactly where to turn. “My goal was to create a unique cocktail that reflected a piece of my culture,” he says of Wicked Rabbit cream cocktail (with rum, coconut, nutmeg, ginger and carrot) that’s based on a Jamaican carrot juice recipe. “Highwood Distillery in High River, Alberta, was instrumental in helping me with the process,” he says.
Not only do creamy drinks have unique shelf-stability and mixing challenges, Manywounds wanted to use a locally crafted spirit base. “Those who want to stay grain-to-glass are being pushed out of the market due to cost,” he says. “Trying to introduce a cocktail with a reasonable margin is work.” Collaborating with Highwood, a known artisan spirit brand, is also useful in a market where “It’s a tricky balance of creativity and familiarity to get customers to try something new.”
Collaborating with other brands or producers can be “key to growth,” says Manywounds. “Finding complementary businesses that highlight your product can only bring a more diverse demographic.” And while hiring a cocktail expert has value, Manywounds says that in some markets, “the lack of qualified experts is the issue.”
Enter consultants like hospitality industry veteran Shawn Soole of Soole Hospitality Concepts, which creates a small-batch cocktail of the week for his BC Spirits platform. Soole takes a broader, marketing-savvy vision for the drinks he designs for clients like Bruinwood Estate Distillery, Shelter Point Distillery, Esquimalt Wine Co. and Rootside Mixers and Bitters. He favours a combination of classic cocktails along with bespoke creations.
First, Soole focuses on Search Engine Optomization (SEO) for distillery cleints’ websites, “creating a mix of [cocktail] classics that are regularly searched to build on the discoverability of the distillery in the first place,” says Soole. Next, he focuses on some easy-to recreate bespoke drinks. Like Manywounds and Walsh, who also “loves to see inclusions of local, carefully crafted products when building a signature cocktail,” Soole favours incorporating complementary local brands, which can introduce complexity and sophistication to a drink that’s still within the home bartender’s grasp. “With so many syrup and shrub companies, along with [cocktail] bitters companies in Canada ... you can do a lot with a little.”
Walsh says a bespoke craft cocktail should be relatively simple and thoroughly tested, and flexible enough to work with the most basic, widely available ingredients—even if you happen use commercial or niche products in your own version of the cocktail. “So it’ll be delicious, even though [customers] may know it’s ‘almost perfect,’ leaving them to start planning their next visit” to your distillery.
Consultant Soole cautions against investing in what could amount to “just a bunch of nice cocktails with pictures that sits on a computer deck.” To get real value out of a craft cocktail program, he encourages distilleries to understand how they’ll use custom cocktails long-term—on tasting cards, for QR code activation, social media posts, overall marketing strategy—before they invest in commissioning bartenders or experts to start mixing.