BevNET's Cocktail Showdown 2 - Liquid Fables

Speaker 1 [00:05] All right. Our next, uh, contestant for this edition of Bev Dat's Cocktail Showdown 2 competition is Matthew Green of Liquid Fables. Come on up, Matthew.

Matt Green [00:24] 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 31st 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 Lion and 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 cock 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 hoppiness 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 uh opportunity to talk.

Speaker 1 [05:29] All right, well done, Matthew. Um, You know, storytelling as a point of differentiation, Sebastian, your thoughts?

Speaker 3 [05:37] First of all, I love the energy, man. It was really, and also great shirt. I think we buy from

Matt Green [05:42] the same. I, I think they turned off my microphone because I was talking too loud. No,

Speaker 3 [05:46] but, but like, I can, I can see the passion you have behind it. It's awesome. Um, what was the question, Ray?

Speaker 1 [05:51] I'm sorry. Uh, storytelling is a point of differentiation.

Speaker 3 [05:54] Yeah, I, I love that. I mean, you know. The packaging, the cans, you know, they're all, you know, they're limited choices available right now. So, um, if you look at it, you, 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, they drink and. I want to have some emotional relationship with it and, and there was a great story to tell and you say, oh look at that, telling it to a friend. I think that's, that's great and um 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

Speaker 1 [06:30] 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, uh, as being at the core of liquid fables. Uh, do you see the, the, the three trends that he pointed out as, uh, driving the cocktail category, the craft cocktail, the canned cocktail category forward?

Speaker 4 [06:55] 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

Matt Green [07:18] 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 gonna always make sure we focus on New England style ingredients. So we're actually gonna potentially roll out a sangria where we're gonna 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 gonna 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 to, in order to scale ourselves up.

Speaker 1 [07:50] Tiffany, are folks looking for that farm to table experience in the craft cocktail, the canned cocktail space?

Speaker 5 [07:56] 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, um, one of the great things about some of the spirits companies is that, uh, 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, um, wanting to be successful moving forward in the next 22 years, um, that could, could cause a little bit of challenges. The only cool, not the only cool. But the really cool thing is you have somewhere to place it afterwards that you control because you have your tasting room. So, and I love, love, love that you have a tasting room. You can get immediate feedback. That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in research, um, and that's rare and unique. So dig that.

Matt Green [09:04] Love it. No, I appreciate that. And that was a big reason in New York State. Um, 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.

Speaker 1 [09:16] 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,

Speaker 6 [09:24] 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?

Matt Green [09:33] 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.

Speaker 6 [09:43] 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?

Matt Green [09:53] So we actually have in those 4 cores, I, I, um, 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. Yeah,

Speaker 6 [10:05] alright, uh, dope, because I feel like the one I had, I, 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, uh, catering to only one type of drinker.

Speaker 1 [10:21] All right, great stuff. Thank you so much, Matthew.