Why Farming Beats Hunting In The Drinks Trade | Philip Duff | Bottom-up Cut #008
So a lot of people lump the drinks industry in together. The wine, beer, spirits. But I always feel that wine and beer are very similar and very different to spirits. Well, what do you think are the differences and similarities between beer and spirits?
Chris Maffeo:I I see it from a slightly different angle because I see beer and spirits to be much more similar than wine. I think wine is the one that is like standing out a little bit. But the biggest difference between beer and spirits, I would say it's the shelf life. The shelf life is a driver of a mindset difference. I think beer, it's a real FMCG, so it's a fast moving consumer goods.
Chris Maffeo:It's about volume. It's smaller margin per unit, but bigger margin as a a whole. And because you are having a shelf life, so a keg can last like nine months in the shelf life. A bottle is nine to twelve months, depending on the beer. And once you open the keg, you have to get rid of it within three, four days if you want to keep quality.
Chris Maffeo:Of course, you can keep it longer within a week, but I wouldn't recommend it and I wouldn't drink it. So I think that was the biggest, let's say, gift coming from beer for me to move into spirits, which I'm dealing more with now, my mindset is about creating rotation before moving on to the next bar. So I'm much more of a farmer before being a hunter, because I believe that if you hunt one bar and then you need to, you know, ensure the rotation before you move on to the other bar, otherwise you basically get a bottle dusty on the shelf, which
Philip Duff:is great. It's a great phrase, farming versus hunting, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me. Obviously, freshness. Do you know what else freshness is very important for? Possibly the newest addition to most backbars is actually these nonalcoholic spirits.
Philip Duff:Yes. Because they don't have obviously, they don't have alcohol to stabilize them. Yes. So they do change. Yes.
Philip Duff:And and it can be quite a lot. And I think a lot of people we have something like 12 nonalcoholic liquor stores in New York now. It's quite funny. And very often, people are having a party. It's Christmas.
Philip Duff:It's the summer. It's a picnic. And they're like, oh, I need something for alcoholic uncle Philip. He can't drink anymore. And they buy it, and they have it, but then they don't see alcoholic uncle Philip, I don't know why his name is Philip, for a year, And then the product has changed.
Chris Maffeo:Exactly. Exactly. And that's the, and that's the downside of these things. It's if you don't, I mean, there's also like other categories that are like sitting in between, I don't know, vermouth as an example, that you need to ensure that depleted or drink it in quite a fast time compared to a gin or any other more alcoholic beverage in terms of ABV. And it's always very difficult to instill that mindset into spirit salespeople because they're not in a hurry.
Chris Maffeo:They are basically saying, okay. Made a deal. It's sitting at Philip's bar. It's there. It's been there, like, for five years.
Chris Maffeo:It's the same bottle, dusty. He he wipes it off a little bit, but I've got a distribution point. But you basically don't have it because it's just like sitting in somebody's back bar just in a useless kind of manner.
Philip Duff:Sales staff are like sharks. You can't get angry at a shark for being a shark. And if you tell them, get me 20 distribution points, they will. They'll put one bottle in 20 different bars. And if you say, hey.
Philip Duff:There's a sales incentive, and it ends on June 12, they will sell up until midnight on June 11. And then they will just turn to the next thing. It's just how it goes.
Chris Maffeo:Yes. And that's the challenge with with, yeah, spirits versus beer.
Philip Duff:Yeah. It is volumes. It is boring deals and tap handles. But also, inherently, because there are people who write columns about beer, columns about wine, there's wine clubs, and there's wine on TV. That's true.
Philip Duff:And we don't really have that for spirits, so consumers don't know. The joke this was told to me as a joke. I thought it was very funny. And then one day, I was in a bar, and I actually heard this happening. The joke was that people don't know what they're drinking, and somebody would come in and do that thing where they're looking at the back bottle like a meerkat.
Philip Duff:So it's either a consumer or a sales rep looking for their or a brand manager. And as the bartender, you're there to help. So the way it would go, someone would say, oh, do you have Grey Goose? And the bartender would say, no. I'm just about to explain all the other amazing vodkas that they have, and the customer says, I'll have a Macallan.
Philip Duff:And I laughed about this for several years, and then I one time, I heard it over my shoulder in a New York bar. I literally heard that order. Because those are brands most people don't know anything about spirits, and those are brands that you won't get laughed at. It's safe. Yes.
Philip Duff:It's if you're buying a car, a Mercedes is always a good choice. You don't need to educate yourself. A Mercedes is Macao. There's lots of other cars out there. Some of them might be better or better value or different or cooler, but a Mercedes is like a safe choice.
Philip Duff:And I feel that people gravitate towards safe choices
Chris Maffeo:That's very true. It's a very difficult business that if you are spending all your days and nights on the product, you are very familiar with it. But the average Joe doesn't know what a peated whiskey is or doesn't know what the botanical and how many botanicals there are in the gin. And, like, they don't know. They know gin and tonic.
Chris Maffeo:They may know Negroni. They may know the difference between Scotch and Irish whiskey if they're lucky or but majority of the people, as you say, don't know. And even people that claim to be. Oh, I'm into Scotch and I have a lot of friends who are like that. They have a cabinet full of scotch.
Chris Maffeo:And then when you ask them a single malt or differences with this within these things, like, they have no clue.
Philip Duff:One of the interesting things about what consumers know and don't know about spirits and how we, as an industry, communicate it to them. People aren't stupid. You give somebody a book about whiskey, they might like the book. They might read the book about whiskey. They like visiting distilleries.
Philip Duff:Distillery tourism is way up. You know? People are crowdfunding brands and and all that sort of thing. But I think a certain degree of connoisseurship has increased because of COVID lockdowns because people were stuck at home, They started reading books and watching YouTube and listening to podcasts. And I keep hearing from bartenders, people are coming in, and they're more well informed on cocktails and spirits than they were in 2020.
Chris Maffeo:I can imagine. And I noticed it as well. And especially like the the classic cocktails, like, there there's been a bit of a rebirth of classic cocktails during the lockdown and and and so on. There's I think there was a trend of, like, reassurance. Like, people wanted to go back to what they knew.
Chris Maffeo:Like, in a in the uncertainty, I want to look for something certain, and an old fashioned or a Negroni can play that role in that sense.
Philip Duff:The Martini is going off.
Chris Maffeo:Well.
Philip Duff:Holy shit. I'm gonna tell you now, there have not been, never in history, as many martinis hored in New York City as now, and there have never been better ones. This whole town, which is quite a small place, really, if you think about it, has gone martini crazy. And every bar has to have its own martini, which brings me to a question. Right?
Philip Duff:So I believe it was my friend Robert Simonson who wrote recently about this. He has a sub stack. He writes for The New York Times. He writes for Vine Pear, Punch, everything. Writes his own books.
Philip Duff:Amazing guy. And he basically saw every single bar in New York is now doing its own martini, some kind of a twist on a martini. They add a bit of this, a bit of that. They pickled our onions. He's this is where we went wrong twenty years ago when everything in a martini glass was called a martini, whether it was blue or green or yellow or chocolate or vanilla.
Philip Duff:And he said, we've gotta in this new popularity for the martini, we've got to keep the martini front and center because it takes a special kind of self confidence and humility to say, this is a gorgeous gin martini. That's how we make them here. You know? That's true. Not worried that you're not gonna get the press or the fame or fortune for Marissa's pickled ramp Gibson or somebody's.
Philip Duff:No. We're making a really good classic martini. Yes. And that's the thing that maybe I don't think is so much the case with spirits, so much the case with wine or beer, which is the product gets in the consumer's mouth pretty much as the person makes it, if it all works out well, and it's nice and it's fresh and it's good. But increasingly, spirits are not going straight into people's mouths.
Philip Duff:They're being mixed in cocktails. And that's where, as a producer, you don't have the same control.
Chris Maffeo:That's very true. And I think there's two ways when I'm working with spirits brands. There's some brands that are obviously, if you take whiskies, for example, like, that's the typical one, the best ones are not made for cocktails. You can mix them with cocktail, but they are made for sipping. They're made for drinking neat.
Chris Maffeo:And some other brands and some other categories are more made for cocktails. So some if I'm stereotyping, gin is made for mixing mostly. Yes, it is. An 18 year old Scotch is not. Of course, you can drink a gin meat and you can have an old fashioned with an 18 year old Scotch.
Chris Maffeo:But roughly speaking, that's what they have in mind when they market it. So I think that's the first kind of like polarization between two brands. So some of them are more into the beer kind of experiences. I'm pouring it into a glass and that's it on the scotch side. And then the other one is more okay.
Chris Maffeo:It's either like a gin and sonic, and then you can play with the ritual, with the garnish, with a perfect serve and so on. As what as much as beer, because also beer, we have been trained in thinking a beer is a beer and a glass is a glass. But then there are some beers that are treated differently with foam and with Pilsen, Rockell and Guinness are the top of mind examples since you're since you're having one now.
Philip Duff:Have you ever been to the Czech embassy on the Upper East Side Of New York? No. I haven't. It's actually used for events. In the Czech embassy, they've got a bar.
Philip Duff:Of course, they've got a bar.
Chris Maffeo:Of course.
Philip Duff:And they serve Pilsner Urkel with three different levels of foam. Yes. Like, it's perfect. It is a literal perfect serve. Like they do, there are Pilsner Urquel draft bars in Manchester.
Philip Duff:Claus' Beerkeller, where I've been, is amazing. They've got the tanks, the whole thing.
Chris Maffeo:Albert Schloss was my
Philip Duff:That's one. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is. And that place blew my mind.
Philip Duff:I think they're opening one in London.
Chris Maffeo:It's just big note. Here, the pouring is part of the beer. It's not just like a random person pouring it. It's just it's a proper skill. The bartender is just just does that.
Chris Maffeo:They don't wait tables. They just stay behind the bar. They just wash glasses that they are brought to them. And then they just pour the beer. That's what they do.
Chris Maffeo:They don't move from behind the bar.
Philip Duff:That's how it should be. People have always done it. But in the general sense, you can make your cocktail sorry. You can make your spirits to be mixed. That's what I do.
Philip Duff:I designed Old Duff Genever to be mixed in cocktails. And it's always a bit weird when I get interviewed by the press, and they're like, how do you like to drink Genevero? I drink it straight, but most people don't. Right? In the same way most people don't drink English shin straight.
Philip Duff:And then, yet again, things like mezcal tequila that were always pretty much drunk straight being really mixed now. And from the high end, cognacs, armagnacs, calvados, even single malts saying, hey. You can mix us because you've now got million case scotch single malt brands like Glenlivet and Glenfiddick, which is the first one. And at the same time, the price of other whiskeys, especially including American bourbon, has gone up so much that Scotch single malt is a good deal.
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