Charles Durazo has been popping up on my LinkedIn feed for a few years now, and it’s always been intriguing. He posts constantly, and not the usual founder content.

A rant at FedEx for delivering three bottles “red hot to the touch.” A slightly desperate pitch to get into a rum festival after striking out on email. A full trend forecast calling Cristalino tequila a fad and predicting nobody will say “non alc” by 2030 because “the word Non to start your category name is a deal killer.”

It’s some of the most entertaining content in the category.

Dare I say - a bit unhinged.

On the phone, he told me about his new thing - Blended Blue Spirits and its debut release, Maravilla, a 50/50 blend of añejo and reposado tequila that launched at the end of June. Durazo and his partner Beto both worked at Clase Azul before striking out on their own.

Durazo sent me a bottle after we talked, and it’s nearly gone. I don’t normally buy expensive tequila. My interest is officially piqued.

The whiskey story, replayed in tequila

Durazo’s pitch starts with a category comparison. “It’s very much the whiskey story,” he told me. American whiskey started out straight because that’s what distillers had. Decades later, over 80% of aged whiskey is a blend of different whiskeys.

He thinks tequila is heading the same direction as it matures, and he wants Blended Blue to be first through the door as a dedicated blending house rather than a brand that eventually adds a blend to its lineup.

There’s also a pricing thesis underneath it. Blended Blue priced Maravilla at $125 MSRP on purpose. “Our research shows that people have a hangover from these very expensive bottles,” Durazo said, “even a $500 or $600 bottle. Most people, myself included, that’s out.”

In a category where the biggest houses have spent years pushing prices up toward collector territory, he’s betting there’s real room in the middle for something that’s clearly premium without asking people to justify a four figure bottle to themselves.

It’s a crowded room to make that case in. Durazo estimates a back bar in California now carries ten or more luxury tequila brands, on top of what buyers describe to him as a glut sitting on off-premise shelves already.

Standing out on price and category alone only works if the brand can also get the bottle into someone’s mouth, which is the strategy question underneath everything else he’s building.

Equity is the new rule, not the perk

The most pointed thing Durazo told me wasn’t about tequila at all. It was about what he learned watching Clase Azul’s Arturo Lomeli, build a company that size without bringing other people along as owners.

Blended Blue is being built as the opposite bet. Everyone doing meaningful work for the brand, whether that’s production, design, or sales, gets a small equity stake, generally in the one to three percent range, with room to earn more over time. “You turn people into owners by giving them some equity,” Durazo said.

It’s also how he’s kept the team small: production is handled by Beto and a partner on a few contracted hours a week, a distillery in Mexico handles compliance and fulfillment, and until a few weeks ago Durazo had exactly one other full time contractor. Everyone is compensated in ownership as well as cash.

Win locally before you ask anyone for help

Blended Blue’s entire go to market plan for the next year is contained to California, on purpose. The goal is 250 reordering on-premise accounts and 1,300 cases shipped by the end of next year, roughly 15 months from when we talked. Durazo isn’t interested in expanding the footprint before that, because he’s run this play before.

At Clase Azul, the team built roughly 80 reordering accounts in San Francisco before approaching Southern Glazer’s for distribution, and the accounts did the talking. “What have you done for me lately? Oh, you have 80 accounts. Let’s talk,” Durazo said, describing that pitch. “Southern wants to make money. If you can show them a direct line to that money, they’re going to like you.”

He’s running the identical sequence with Blended Blue: prove the demand exists on-premise first, then go to a national distributor from a position of strength instead of asking them to take a bet on an unproven brand.

That discipline extends to where the company doesn’t spend money. Durazo says most young luxury brands burn cash on things that feel necessary but aren’t, competition medals, expensive festival booths, early retail pushes into accounts like Total Wine that can’t yet make them money. “Ten grand is just a bridge too far, especially in the beginning,” he said.

Tequilas Premium, Inc. had Juan Sanchez when it came to asking if we could spend money. “We used to call him Dr. No. We just stopped asking him to spend money because we always knew the answer was inevitably going to be no.”

He said the quiet part out loud, and his feed backs it up

Durazo was honest that some of his online persona is strategic. “If you’re trying to do a point of view or disagreeing, it seems like engagement goes up,” he told me, describing the advice he gets from social media consultants he says the brand “can’t afford” full time.

His comment history is its own genre. On a tequila founder’s post soliciting investors, he wrote, “Things are going so well yet you’re raising money. I thought it looks bad when you advertise on a social media post for your fundraising activities.” On another founder’s fundraising misstep, he offered, “Let me guess they were a crypto company.”

Getting people to taste it beats any ad

If there’s one thing Durazo keeps coming back to, it’s that none of the positioning matters until someone actually tastes the product. “We’ve been really successful once consumers taste it, converting them into behavior,” he said. “It’s hard to get them to do anything without tasting it.”

That’s shaping where Blended Blue is putting its energy day to day. The brand is running roughly an 80/20 split between on-premise and off-premise, with direct to consumer counted as the off-premise slice.

DTC has quietly been the most productive channel so far, around 100 bottles shipped in the first 60 days, mostly to friends, family, and investors. Paid DTC acquisition starts soon, with the hope that direct sales can help fund the on-premise push rather than the other way around.

NEW RULES FROM BLENDED BLUE

Make the category bet your whole reason to exist, not a line extension. Blended Blue isn’t a tequila brand that also does a blend. Blending is the brand.

Turn contributors into owners from day one. “You turn people into owners by giving them some equity.” It’s also how you keep a team small and loyal without payroll.

Win one market completely before you ask anyone else for help. Prove the accounts exist first. Then a national distributor isn’t taking a bet, they’re taking a deal.

What you post when no one is editing you is the real brand voice. The LinkedIn feed doesn’t match the phone call, and the feed is more honest.

Blended Blue Spirits is currently sold in California, with Maravilla as its debut release. Follow along on Instagram.

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What with all the adaptogenic sodas and protein beers and spiked energy drinks and electrolytes and vitamins and overly earnest, moralising messaging, it’s easy to forget: drinking is meant to be fun.

Some brands seem to be remembering that.

-Diageo launched a new ‘lovely day for a Guinness’ outdoor campaign which is simple, clever and, guess what guys, fun.

-Skrewball released a peanut butter and strawberry jelly whiskey.

-Veuve Clicquot announced a bright yellow LA beach club pop-up, built around the idea of joy.

-And multiple press outlets have been writing about Grey Goose Vodka’s Honey Deuce cocktail (allegedly, one sold every 1.5 seconds at the US Open). People love drinking it. People love talking about it. If we were to consult the critic within, we’d say its success is less about the vodka and more about the funness of having a drink with three cute little melon tennis balls while watching the tennis.

More bev brands need to have more fun. Or get more creative with garnishes?

Or, maybe, they need to have just the right amount of fun? Somewhere between the evangelising about people not drinking and the truth that most people actually are drinking lies a magical land: moderation.

This year we’ve seen more and more brands get into the middle, offering lowered ABV options for the people that want to tamp things down a touch.

Diageo is launching a new mid-strength line, with a set of 20% versions of its classic brands, and the founders of Quarter Proof have also launched a new half proof spirits brand, Demi.

Keep scrolling for the news and views we saved this month.

OPINIONS THAT ARE WORTH IT

-Every now and then, LinkedIn delivers an intelligent and well-informed opinion. It’s worth reading Lofted Spirits’ Peter Marino’s take on the non-alc beer market. He says it might not be the opportunity it’s being painted as, and not all brands should jump to launch a NA extension.

-The LA Times says Gen Z doesn’t want fizz.
Our take: Are demographic generalisations useful? Is this actual behaviour change, or are there just a lot of great young bev/alc brands offering still options right now?

-“Every dollar Campari spent teaching Americans what a spritz is, how it’s meant to taste, when to order one, also taught them the category, not just the brand,” writes strategist Will Poskett. So what do you do when the other brands start surging up the ramp you just built into that category?

-RTD success isn’t just about putting your famous brand in a can, says Tavern founder and New Rules friend Mike Perry.

-Ben Tannenbaum visits Ulaanbataar Cocktail week and muses on what culture and heritage means for drinking, for recipes, for menus, for craft, for hospitality.

IN LESS GOOD NEWS

-Diageo has had a rough time. The Spirits Business reports on its new strategy which, in short means: less premiumisation, less focus on China, more RTDs.

-French winemakers could be facing a historic low harvest after this year’s heatwaves and drought in Europe.

NEW NEW NEW

Sarti is Campari, but pink. Ok it’s not quite as simple as that, but it’s interesting watching how the brand is being launched in the US…. some lavish marketing activity, and a confected sense of scarcity and mystery.

-Dos Hombres has launched a reposado tequila.

-Old Speckled Hen has an alcohol-free version in a bid to “woo younger drinkers”.
Our take: A heritage beer brand, jumping on a trend, late to the party as it is, and hoping that slapping ZERO on their packaging is going to win over younger people. No.

-Baileys is back with another Terry’s Chocolate Orange special edition.
Our take: Chasing novelty for novelty’s sake is a dead end (we’re looking at you protein sodas). HOWEVER, seasonal, limited, for-a-short-time-only novelty can work.

-Everything comes in a can now. And it looks like one of Liquid Death’s founders is hoping to sprinkle some tinned brand magic on the sparkling wine space.

-ChampionSips is a NA beer with 10g of protein.

-Nutrabolt now does beer-flavoured energy drinks.

-Everleaf has a ‘swicy’ hot honey edition.

-Haku Vodka hires Rina Sawayama as brand ambassador for its ‘made to shine’ brand campaign.

-Athletic Brewing and Graza got together and had a baby (a NA pils brewed with olive oil).

BIG MOVES

-Champagne is about to be stronger. You can thank the heatwaves.

-Modelo is going all-in on college football.

-Veuve Clicquot is bringing a whole beach club to LA.

-Cutwater is making $1b of sales every year
Our take: Sometimes it pays to be the contrarian. While a lot of brands are going low or no, or embedding healthy extras, Cutwater is just selling really strong drinks.

-“We’ve created a technology that transforms beer discovery into something far more personal,” says Heineken on the launch of an AI-powered tap that apparently lets people personalise their beer.
Our take: this is obviously highly unlikely to be rolled out to the masses but even so it begs the question: who asked for this? Don’t most consumers just want to be poured a perfectly brewed, chilled, foamy beer, and have it presented to them, without much input?

-Campari hires Alan Cumming to celebrate the delicious bitterness of Campari.

-Brewdog is hoping to worm its way back into our hearts once more – and it really wants us all to know that things are different now.

FORMATS THEY ARE A-CHANGING

-ABInBev says it’s going to make beer more affordable. Details on how, exactly, seem scarce, but Drinks Intel says smaller cheaper formats, and larger better value formats.

-Moët Hennessy is also thinking about packaging, promising to cut down glass and reduce its carbon footprint.

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PSA: there’s no jacuzzi without the plumbing.

Chris Maffeo’s family ran a wholesale business outside Naples for three generations, starting with his great-grandfather in 1884 and ending when his grandfather passed and the business closed after a hundred years and two world wars.

Chris went on to spend years in export roles at SABMiller, Asahi, and Carlsberg, working alongside wholesalers and importers the whole time, before he left corporate to start Maffeo Drinks. His reasoning was simple: nobody was documenting what actually works in brand building anymore, because the people who know are always too busy running the business to write it down.

The phrase “bottom-up” started as one line in a LinkedIn post. People kept quoting it back to him, so he built a whole body of work around defining it properly, mostly because most people who repeat it still get it wrong.

Bottom-up doesn’t mean small

The biggest misconception, according to Chris, is that bottom-up means slow, or one relationship at a time, or staying small on purpose. It doesn’t.

“For me, bottom-up is basically working on the foundations, mastering the unscalable things first before you can scale your brand. If you want a nice penthouse with a rooftop and a jacuzzi, you need the building to have solid foundations and the plumbing has to work, because otherwise there’s no jacuzzi without the plumbing.”

Testing bottom-up doesn’t mean grinding through a hundred bars one by one either. It means working with five bartenders and two importers and three bar owners long enough to actually understand the pattern, then refining the approach before trying to build at scale.

Drinks brands are B2B2B2C, not B2C

This is where Chris sees founders lose the most time. Because the end product is something a consumer drinks, founders build like consumer brands from day one: a strong Instagram, a big launch party, a killer activation.

What they skip is everything underneath it, the importer, the distributor, the bar owner, the bottle shop clerk, all the tiers that actually have to say yes before a consumer can ever find the product on a shelf or a menu.

A beautiful consumer brand with no distribution infrastructure isn’t a brand yet. It’s a very expensive party.

He talked about a recent podcast conversation with Mark Ward of Regal Rogue, titled “When Your Brand Stops Being Yours,” about the exact moment a founder walks out the door with an idea and finds out the market has its own interpretation of it.

The only way through that gap, in Chris’s view, is for the founder to go sell it themselves first. Not because a distributor or ambassador can’t eventually do it, but because a founder who’s never absorbed 50 nos in person has no idea what they’re actually asking someone else to do on their behalf.

The boring math nobody wants to learn

Founders love talking about their thousand-case goal. Chris wants them talking about the first bottle.

He walks through the actual mechanics: how big is the bottle, how big is the pour in that market, how many drinks does that translate to, and what does it take to sell one more drink a night at a single bar.

Twelve drinks in a bottle, on a bar open six nights a week, is two drinks a night. Getting a bar from half a bottle a week to a full one is one more drink, per night. That’s the conversation Chris thinks founders should be having instead of talking exits and case counts they haven’t earned yet.

None of this is about the perfect garnish or an invented signature serve. It’s usually a small twist on a drink that’s already selling in that specific bar.

You can’t outspend the big guys, so don’t try

On pay-to-play, Chris used an image that’s stuck with me: if a truck is chasing you, you don’t try to outrun it on the highway, you duck into the alley it can’t fit into.

Differentiation has to be sharp enough that a $2 price difference makes sense to an importer or a bar owner on its own terms, not because you outspent someone with a bigger budget.

The brands he points to as proof that this actually compounds are ones that never stopped repeating their fundamentals even after becoming famous.

Aperol Spritz took twenty years to become ubiquitous. Hendrick’s, launched in 1999, still talks about cucumber and the gin and tonic serve in nearly every market, over two decades in. Peroni was disciplined for years about serving in the Peroni glass, on draft, nothing else. Guinness still makes you wait for the pour. None of them decided they’d earned the right to stop explaining themselves.

The rule for a down market

Asked for one rule going into 2026, Chris didn’t reach for anything about growth.

“Don’t do anything today that you suspect may jeopardize tomorrow. Opportunities materialize and they look like fast growth, but they can ruin your financials or your brand’s image. I’ve seen many brands fail by being too successful too soon.”

THE NEW RULE: bottom-up isn’t a pace, it’s an order of operations. Master the boring, invisible stuff first. Everything you actually want, the culture, the scale, the moment, only holds up if it’s sitting on something solid.

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A few weeks ago, The New Rules profiled Jess Druey and the evolution of Whiny Baby after its acquisition by Gallo. Jess launched the brand at 22 and, three years later, sold it to one of the biggest wine companies in the world. It’s hard not to admire that trajectory.

What interested me more was what happened after the acquisition. Whiny Baby is now becoming Whiny. The packaging, wines, portfolio and consumer target are all evolving. Jess described the change as a graduation, something that would allow the brand to grow with its consumer.

Maybe it will. I hope it does. But watching so many pieces of a very young brand change at once raises a question I find myself asking more and more in my work:

How much do we really know about what created an emerging brand’s success before we start trying to scale it?

I spend part of my time assessing food and beverage companies for venture investment, and one of the hardest things to separate in a young business is momentum from something that is actually becoming a repeatable consumer behavior.

A brand can be growing quickly, adding distribution, posting strong velocities and attracting retailers and investors. While those are meaningful signals, they still do not tell you why consumers are choosing it, or whether they will keep choosing it once the newness wears off.

Was the growth driven by the product itself? A smart cultural insight? A charismatic founder? Great timing? Retail expansion? Or has the brand started to own something specific enough in the consumer’s mind that people seek it out and buy it again?

When I look at young brands, I want to know who repeats, why they repeat, what occasion the product belongs to and what it replaces. I want to know whether velocity holds after launch support settles down, and whether the company can keep growing without constantly creating another reason to pay attention. Fast growth can make those questions easier to postpone.

They become more important when a strategic buyer enters the picture because large beverage companies are very good at adding things. They can improve supply and manufacturing, open doors with retailers, add sales coverage, invest in marketing and put a brand in front of millions more consumers. I spent years inside large beverage companies and saw firsthand what those capabilities can unlock.

The risk is assuming that because you know how to make the business bigger, you also know which parts of the brand should get bigger with it.

And the pressure comes quickly. Broaden the audience. Make the packaging work harder at shelf. Expand the portfolio. Enter more channels. Build a proposition a national sales organization can sell. Any one of those decisions may be right. The challenge is that a three-year-old brand may not have existed long enough for anyone to know which pieces are simply the current execution and which ones consumers have started to attach meaning to.

Change enough of them at once and you may lose the ability to tell.

That is what makes Whiny such an interesting case to watch. The original name was unusually specific. It took something Gen Z had been called and turned it back on itself. There was a cultural tension and a particular consumer built right into the brand.

Whiny may turn out to be a much better name for a bigger business. It is certainly broader and easier to stretch. But broader is not automatically stronger, and one comment from Jess stayed with me. She said she felt she had outgrown Whiny Baby.

I understand that sentiment. Founders live with their brands every day and naturally evolve faster than the people buying them. That makes “I’ve outgrown this” an important signal, but not necessarily evidence that the consumer has outgrown it too. Sometimes the thing that feels old inside the company is only beginning to become familiar outside it.

This is where I think both sides of an early acquisition need more discipline. Founders should understand as well as they can what is actually creating consumer pull. Strategic buyers should be equally clear about what their capabilities can improve and what they cannot.

There is a natural tendency in acquisition conversations to focus on what the buyer can add. Distribution. Capital. Manufacturing. Sales coverage. Data. But there is another question that deserves just as much attention: What, exactly, is the buyer buying?

Is it a brand with established consumer meaning? A product with strong product-market fit? A founder with an audience? A distribution opportunity? A growth curve that still depends heavily on novelty and attention? Those can all be valuable, but they are not the same thing.

And scale cannot solve every problem. Capital can put a brand in more doors, but it cannot guarantee repeat. A bigger sales organization can win more shelf space, but it cannot create an occasion consumers do not want. More marketing can generate awareness, but it cannot tell you after the fact which part of the original idea created the connection.

None of this means founders should wait until every question is answered before selling, or that a strategic buyer should acquire an emerging brand and leave it untouched. Young brands change, and sometimes the original expression genuinely has to evolve.

A three-year exit tells you that someone saw enough value to buy the business. It does not tell you that either side fully understands where that value sits.

Before everyone starts improving the brand, it is worth figuring that out.

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But before we begin - A quick note:

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NOW, back to wine.

PSA: wine has no legal definition of “natural.” Eric Cusimano (former Whole Foods Lifer) decided to write his own.

Eric spent 16 years at Whole Foods, most recently as director of produce merchandising, before that running the frozen department as the company’s head ice cream buyer. Next week he leaves to become full-time CEO of Red Thumb Natural Wines, a brand he started with two partners almost seven years ago and has been selling in market for four.

The idea came from a natural wine fair called Raw Wine, where an invite to join a friend turned into a business idea. It reminded him of the early days of organic and slow food, before any of it got commercialized - and he wanted in.

Three Guys, one idea, no meaning

Eric’s partners Dave Schavone and Diego Vasquez came with the wine expertise he didn’t have. Dave was the wine buyer for the Beverly Hills Whole Foods and had written a guide to natural wine in LA. Diego ran wine for Wynn properties in Vegas before becoming wine director at Scarpetta in the Cosmopolitan. All three met at Loyola in New Orleans, where Eric was born and raised.

What they found at that first natural wine fair was a category with no actual definition. Nobody could tell Eric what “natural wine” meant, and there still isn’t a legal answer.

“There’s still no meaning of natural wine, and rightfully so. But I’m like, okay, well, let’s create a set of standards. The standard sells the wine.”

So that’s what they did. Red Thumb wines list native fermentation, no added sugar, and the exact sulfite count in parts per million, front and center on the label. Ingredients and nutritionals are on the back. Everything is estate grown and vintage dated. It’s the kind of disclosure most wine brands avoid, because most wine brands would rather you not ask.

And in terms of brand development, the price point came first. Eric ran the math and knew the wine had to land around $20 or under to scale the way they wanted it to. From there, a lucky connection (a friend’s father, recently retired as president of a wine co-op in Languedoc) got them access to growers and winemakers across the south of France and into Spain. Diego tasted hundreds of wines to land on the three they sell today: a Tempranillo, a Chardonnay, a Grenache Rose and a Monastrell added last year.

The part most founders skip

Most brand conversations stay in highlight reel mode. I appreciated Eric’s candor on our call because it hasn’t just been a series of ups.

They launched Red Thumb into 2020, right as COVID hit. Investors who’d committed pulled out, reasonably, and the brand went quiet for years while Whole Foods and every other retailer focused purely on keeping shelves stocked, not testing new brands. By the time buyers were ready to look at something new again, the wine industry was sitting on almost double its usual inventory, and nobody wanted more of anything. Then came the tariffs.

“I’m very bullish on wine in 2027 and forward. I think it’s at the bottom right now.”

Eric was just as direct about where the business actually stands. Red Thumb will do around $500,000 in revenue this year, on a little over $1 million raised across seven years, most of it already spent getting this far.

Hot take on investment in bev right now:

He’s not planning to draw a real salary once he goes full time, at least not at first. And he isn’t precious about who’s good at what: “As a whole, the wine industry has been less business-forward and more dogmatic than I anticipated” he said, including himself and his partners in that. Marketing is the gap he’s most aware of. “None of us are marketing minds. We very much know that we need the help. We’re not doing a great job at that right now, to be completely honest.”

That kind of candor is rare to get on the record. Most founders default to “all good here” the moment a microphone’s on. I really appreciated that about this conversation.

No celebs, please.

Red Thumb has had chances to bring on a celebrity backer in exchange for a chunk of the company. They passed every time. Eric wants the wine, and the actual winemakers behind it, to be the story, not a famous face attached to it.

On the sales floor, that philosophy holds up against something more basic: putting the bottle in someone’s hand. Education matters, but Eric has seen what actually converts.

“I’ll take the Pepsi challenge with anybody. When we put our wine in someone’s hands, they buy it.”

He also thinks the industry is aiming at the wrong drinker. Most legacy wine marketing still leans on rolling hills and spa treatments built for an older, wealthier customer whose spending power is shrinking. Meanwhile the customer Red Thumb is actually built for (25 to 39, mostly but not only women, natural and organic food shoppers) isn’t being spoken to by anyone.

THE NEW RULE: transparency isn’t a label claim, it’s a practice. The brands worth trusting are the ones that will tell you what’s on the sulfite count and also tell you when the last four years have been genuinely hard.

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We spend all month devotedly making notes for Happy Hour – scouring news stories, listening in on LinkedIn, and keeping our feelers out for signs that things are happening.

And there’s one word we kept noting down over the last four weeks: beer.

Is it fair to say that beer has felt a little bit neglected recently? A bit like the person you sit at that awkward table at your wedding that has all the people you don’t really like but that kinda have to be there? Yeah, that guy. Sure there’s brands like Bero and Garage, but the category’s felt a bit unloved and underappreciated of late.

But is the fizz back? Off the back of rising beer sales, ABInBev just launched a whole ‘cheers to beer’ campaign. While it’s a bit schmaltzy, the sentiment is laudable. (editor’s note: as a committed old cynic, I found myself surprisingly enjoying this).

Constellation Brands announced a $100m investment for American farmers that are critical to the beer industry.

Diageo is doubling Guinness production.

And there seems to be a real groundswell of enthusiasm for lower alcohol beers, like Sierra Nevada’s Go Two IPA. (Editor’s note: we did some recent on-the-ground research for this in a very busy pub in London’s Soho, and the 2.5% Small Beer that was on tap was insanely popular).

Booze, pre-booze, post-booze

This month we also noted the growing power of a new bev/alc category: the booze condom. There’s an increasing number of brands being built around the pre-drink moment, promising to help protect our fragile, wrinkly human brains from the inevitable hangover. There’s Pre-Pear. There’s Zbiotics. And there’s UNDO – a gummy in bright pink packaging that has, quite literally, been described as a condom for the liver.

If you forget to take your pre-drinking protection that’s ok, because Brewdog’s James Watts has returned with a new brand: Fool’s Fix. It’s a fizzy electrolyte drink that allegedly helps your poor, broken, desiccated body to recover after drinking.

Lastly, and we regret to tell you this, the venture capital bros have discovered it and the kava brands are coming. Good luck everyone.

Now, enjoy our regular quick-news-scroll (and subscribe for the next one).

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MONEY TALKS

-Cutwater is smashing it out the park, helping AB InBev become the fastest growing company in spirits purely on its performance alone.

Our take: Inc’s analysis is spot on. Cutwater is booze, and plenty of it, and they’re not shy about telling people that. There’s a lot to be said for straight-up brand messaging that doesn’t f about.

-LVMH has sold up its stake in Sir Davis, leaving Beyoncé to take full control of the whiskey brand. If anyone can turn around whiskey’s faltering fortunes…..

-If you want a fancy martini, head to Atlanta’s Roaring Social – which is charging an eye-watering $10k for one that arrives topped with a diamond tennis necklace, a bottle of champagne, a custom sign, and sparklers.

Our take: Is this the kind of rich person behaviour F Scott Fitzgerald warned us about?

-Sazerac just bought AU Vodka.

THE BRAND STUFF

-Diageo has made packaging mistakes, according to their new North America CEO and president, John O’Keeffe. The WSJ reports that he’s been touring the shelves and he’s realised that cheap plastic caps, inconsistent color use (not enough of Crown Royal’s “iconic deluxe purple”) and cloudy plastic are all creating subtle brand damage.

-London beer brand Two Tribes has a new look, created by agency All Purpose. Hidden in this piece is an interesting thought from the brand’s commercial director, who says drinkers are now moving away from the established craft names towards independent, local brands.

Our take: first we had the move from big beer to craft beer. Then big beer bought craft beer. Now we’re seeing a move back to craft, but really craft beer, not big beer craft beer. Got it?

-This goes into the ‘good idea that could have been better’ section. Minus 196 opened a pop-up Chiller Bar, for Londoners toiling away in this summer’s heat wave. The idea is excellent, but the execution is…well……

NEW THINGS

-Another tiny little RTD joins the gang, as Wee Smoky releases a set of canned whiskey cocktails.

-Nice Wine has a new ‘Icons’ range, and the first edition is a 9% rosé.

-Creative agency Quality Meats are building Herb Light: a THC-infused, beer-style brand, with very classic all-American packaging. Gordy Sang, the co-founder, says: “The main reason this product exists is because I wanted it selfishly just for me.” – and that’s a brand philosophy we can really get behind.

-Moët & Chandon debuted a new RTD at the US Open: Moët Ice. It’s delivered in a ball canister.

Our take: this feels like quite a large RTD after all these tiny ones. There’s been some criticism that it’s delivered in plastic packaging which also feels fair, and looking at how much detail has gone into the brand’s presence at the US Open, it’s hard not to wish they hadn’t gone for something that feels a bit less gimmicky?

-GUT HOP (yes, that’s its name) is a non-alcoholic, sparkling hop water and prebiotic fibre drink. Say that a few times after several shots of tequila.

Our take: Is there a naming crisis in the industry?

Our second take: This is playing in a lot of different lanes, and it will be interesting to see if consumers have the mental space to 1)get that and 2)choose that in a snap decision moment when they see it on shelf.

-You can get pickle vodka FROM PRINGLES?! This feels chaotic and minimally branded, in the best way.

FILE UNDER ‘WE TOLD YOU SO’

-As predicted, more Asian flavors and spirits coming to America and Europe. Sazerac is also putting money into soju.

-We said we were moving into a weird world of hybrid drinks that are sort of for fun and sort of for hydration and sort of for sport. Say hello to Sportsballer: a non-alcoholic cocktail with protein and creatine.

-Want another Frankenstein drink that mixes together a few trendy things? Hopbucha is a fermented, alcohol-free drink that’s sort of a non-alc beer and sort of a kombucha.

SOME POSITIVITY

-Diageo is going to double Guinness production by 2029, and they’ve got their eye on “growing premium beer markets” India and Brazil.

-Bacardi is going all-in on ingredients messaging for Patrón (see above), emphasising its lack of additives.

-Diageo is reformulating some of its whiskies and rums for the Indian market, after new laws around added flavors.

SOME NEGATIVITY

-Stoli Group have been a bit naughty with their pepper-infused vodka…

-Unwell is dead.

Our take: celebrity will get you a long way, you might make a fair bit of money off hype alone. But if we think on a longer timeline, hype doesn’t build a brand.

YOUR READING LIST

-Some sensible takes on Gen Z and drinking are finally rolling in and – praise be – this one is from a bonafide person of that generation. This is really well-written and insightful, and every single person working at a major bev brand should spend time absorbing it.

-Is bitterness the last flavor frontier? Interesting thoughts here from Yuzu Kyodai’s Sven Palys that feel very relevant for anyone running a bev brand. “Acidity, astringency, dryness, vegetal notes and medicinal aromas all create the sense of a flavour requiring attention,” he writes.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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A lot of the bev industry discourse, this year, has been dominated by one thing: the RTD. Enthusiasm for small, portable formats couldn’t be greater.

But for this episode of NEWBIES – where we profile young drinks brands – we’re talking about a space that’s stacked with potential and a little bit overlooked: ready-to-serve.

“RTD’s story is largely written – it delivers convenience and variety in single-serve formats,” says Jason Merz, Director of Marketing at Gardenista. “Ready-to-serve, on the other hand, is still early in its evolution, and its behavior with consumers is fundamentally different.”

According to Jason, what’s really driving the big format shift is a renewed desire to share – not just drinks, but moments and experiences. Right now, the RTD category is consolidating, he says, meanwhile RTS shelf space is expanding, and it’s the next growth story. Gardenista is well-poised to tap into that.

From the Colorado mountains to you

Picture it: a dining room filled with a sea of glowing green glasses. It’s the usual scene at Matsuhisa in Aspen, which has become known for its bright green cocktail, named The Gardener.

Gardenista’s founders tried it, loved it, and partnered with the restaurant team to turn it into a bottled cocktail – available as tequila, vodka and bourbon versions, all mixed with the garden herbs, jalapeno and lime that made the original such a hit.

And Jason attributes a lot of the brand’s success to that vibrant green liquid. “You can have beautiful packaging, strong distributor relationships, and the best shelf placement in the world (we’re fortunate to have all of those too) – but none of it matters if the liquid doesn’t exceed expectations.

“We’ve been intentional about getting the product right, even if that means taking more time. We’re not chasing what’s right now – we’re focused on building something that lasts.”

Don’t rush

Jason really emphasizes this point: brands cannot rush. Consumers are far more discerning than they’re often given credit for, he says, and they know when something is opportunistic, or made too quickly.

That behavior has created a situation where a lot of product on shelf is interchangeable - and we’ve written about how chasing the trend high can be disastrous.

“The brands most at risk are those that hurried to market simply to grab early share – cutting corners on ingredients, leaning on existing brand equity, and prioritizing speed over substance,” says Jason. “That approach may drive initial trial, but it wears thin quickly and in many cases it’s already eroding trust with consumers in ways that will take time to fully measure.”

How the garden grows

Beyond the liquid, Jason says the brand has learned a lot about what drives growth.

In Gardenista’s first year they operated on a test-and-learn approach, experimenting with paid, earned, shared and owned media to figure out where their audience was, and where they needed to show up.

Quickly, they understood that large, mass consumer events directed people to familiar and ‘safe’ choices, while the smaller, curated gatherings drew in the more adventurous crowd that would appreciate Gardenista.

Jason credits social media, PR and out-of-home – particularly wild postings – as pivotal in building early awareness. And he says they had a lot of success by sending physical mailers to retail accounts, and following them up with well-timed sales visits. E-comm and direct-to-consumer has also been successful, opening up a national audience, as well as a pool of customer data and insights that a lot of startups can’t access so early on.

“The biggest takeaway so far has been staying open-minded: some of what’s worked best has come from trusting instinct, listening closely to our partners, and being willing to test ideas others might overlook.”

And by the way, Jason knows what he’s talking about. Prior to Gardenista he was at Deep Eddy Vodka, guiding the brand from an early startup, through acquisition, and into a nearly 2-million-case business.

Finally, as we do with all of our NEWBIES, we asked him:

What’s the brutal truth you've learned about building a bev/alc brand?

“You have to be in it for the right reasons. This may be one of the most challenging moments in the industry’s history to launch a beverage alcohol brand – consumers are more discerning, economic pressures are real, and shelves are more crowded than ever. But the truth is, there are always challenges; the list just changes.

What I’ve learned is that good products and authentic brands still find a way forward. If you don’t genuinely believe in what you’re building – and why you’re building it – the inevitable headwinds will expose that quickly. Being in it purely for the money isn’t enough. You need conviction, patience, and a reason to keep going when the easy paths disappear.”

Is there anything you’d do differently?

“It would be building a peer network sooner – connecting earlier with founders who were navigating the same challenges and exchanging real, hard-earned learnings. Somewhere along the way, the idea took hold that you’re supposed to go it alone or follow a single, prescribed path.

What I’ve learned is that there are many routes to success, and most of them are already being traveled by people who are willing to share what they’ve learned – often while looking for that same support in return. The journey gets clearer, and more sustainable, when you stop trying to do it all by yourself.”

THE NEW RULE

Faster isn’t better. We get it, the industry is under intense pressure and hype cycles move at lightning pace – but you can’t speed-run a brand.

Enjoyed this? Now try:

-The brand the wine world needs
-The THC spirit that understands the power of restraint
-The anti-hangover cocktail in a can

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency. Need design support for your brand? Reach out! hi@nihilo.agency

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If you’ve spent any time in wine circles the past few years, you’ve seen Whiny Baby. Jess Druey self-launched it at 22, DTC, California only. By 2023 she’d brought on partners and taken it nationwide into major retailers. Last September, Gallo acquired it.

Ladies and gentleman, that’s a 3-year launch to exit trajectory which we found f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g.

But Jess isn’t chilling, basking in the sweet glow of the acquisition dream on a beach. She’s working. She is now rebuilding Whiny Baby as “Whiny,” in public, inside a much bigger machine, with a brand that’s had one identity for six years and is new getting a new one.

I sat down with Jess to talk about what that rebuild actually looks like.

The rebrand is a graduation, not a pivot

Whiny Baby is becoming Whiny. Four blends launch this spring, up from three, with a new orange blend joining the lineup. The wines are drier than before but still fruity, juicy, and approachable. The philosophy underneath hasn’t moved: begin your wine journey with a blend.

“I found myself feeling like I’d outgrown it,” Jess said of the old brand. “I still love those wines. I still love the packaging and the branding. But I wanted something that could grow with our consumer.”

The target isn’t college kids trying to get drunk cheap and fast. It’s what she calls early career adulthood, people who just got their first job and their first apartment and are figuring out what a weeknight glass of wine actually means. Price point is still being finalized, but her stated bar is specific: approachable enough for a weekly grocery run, elevated enough that you’d feel good gifting it to a friend.

Even the design process reflects the same instinct, expand without abandoning the origin. Jess described a three-way build: Gallo’s in-house creative team, an outside agency that had never touched wine before, and the original designer she DM’d on Instagram seven years ago with no budget to offer. That designer is still on the brand.

She’s using transparency as a defense against dilution

Many founders fear their brand getting swallowed by an acquisition. Jess’s answer wasn’t to shield the brand from Gallo. It was to over-share the process with her own audience.

“This Gen Z consumer has access to more information than any consumer before,” she said. “I’ve been really passionate about being super transparent, super honest. Some consumers care, some don’t, but really showing them that although I’m with this large organization now, it’s actually opened me up to way better quality wine, the most incredible winemakers in the industry, the resources.”

Basically, she’s owning the narrative. Document it and narrate it yourself, in real time, before someone else fills in the gaps. Smart.

Clever idea alert! She’s paying her “taste makers” the same, no matter how many followers they have

This is one worth stealing: Jess built a 14-person panel to weigh in on blends and packaging before launch. Not influencers, in her words, “taste makers,” defined by whether their recommendation actually moves people, not by follower count.

“I don’t care if you have 200 followers or 200 thousand,” she said. “It’s someone who, when they give a recommendation, their community listens.” She sourced them by asking her own audience who they trusted, then vetted the list to make sure it represented different regions, incomes, and backgrounds. One member was an intern who worked the bottling line on her very first production run and is now a lawyer.

Everyone got paid the exact same amount, whether they had 800,000 followers or 200. “We’re not asking them to post. We’re paying you for your opinion.” She said the people with the biggest followings, the ones used to huge influencer budgets, were the ones least bothered by the flat rate. It was the structure itself, everyone doing the same job, that made it feel honest.

She says Gen-Z drinks after all.

According to Jess, this was never really about wellness. It’s about a generation that lost casual mentorship culture, the kind you pick up watching your boss order wine at a work dinner and quietly taking notes. She started drinking wine at 22, during the pandemic, working remotely with none of that in-person modeling available to her. She thinks a lot of what gets labeled generational abstinence is actually a mentorship gap.

She also thinks the tide is already turning. She pointed to the backlash against the Diary of a CEO episode where the host Steven Bartlett said three glasses of wine ruined his entire week, and to the rise of what she calls optimization fatigue, a generation that turned rest and productivity into a second job and is now exhausted by it.

Her evidence isn’t just anecdotal. She cited Barnes & Noble quadrupling its store count in five years as a signal that reading, cooking, and staying in are back in a real way, and argued that all of it is upstream of wine, not competing with it.

She says none of this reads as panic. It reads as a legacy portfolio with decades of stories nobody has told well yet, sitting next to Whiny that still has to prove itself. She’s also fighting a smaller, more structural battle: getting her four blends merchandised together on shelf instead of scattered across a store’s varietal categories, a layout decision retailers control and most consumers are not thinking about.

It’s a rare spot to be in. Jess is working with her brand that’s six years old and already on version two, inside a company with brands older than her parents, proving to both the internet and the wine aisle that growing up doesn’t have to mean losing the plot. She doesn’t treat the scrappy origin and the corporate resources as a tension to manage. She treats them as the same asset, and she’s using one to build the other.

THE NEW RULES

Jess believes in radical transparency. Not as a crisis response, as a default. Tell people what’s happening to the brand before they have to ask.

And underneath that: stop solving problems for a consumer you’re guessing at. Put her in the room, pay her fairly for her opinion, and build from there.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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Someone who loves cocktails, but isn’t a bartender, tries to host a party. It goes badly, not because they’re bad hosts, but because making a proper drink for a room full of people is genuinely hard, and most of us were never taught how.

I heard one version of that story from Michael Handman at Deko Cocktails. I heard a different version from Cy Cain at Straightaway. Two brands, same root complaint: cocktail culture has never made this easy on the people who actually want to participate in it.

I’ve also been thinking about two brands we’ve already featured in this category: Hoste, the ultra-premium bottled cocktail brand turning bar-quality drinks into a gifting product, and Wild Mannered soju. Between the four, you can see a whole category figuring out what it actually is.

NIQ puts the ready-to-drink and ready-to-serve market at $13.9 billion, about 12.5 percent of total beverage alcohol dollar sales. Circana says the category has more than tripled since 2018

Why now

Both founders trace the real inflection point to the same thing: the pandemic (it all starts there doesn’t it?)

Straightaway actually predates it. Cy Cain and his co-founder started bootlegging cocktails for friends and family fourteen years ago, batching drinks in their own kitchens and driving bottles to people’s houses for the holidays. They ramped up R&D significantly in 2013, and Cain left his job in 2017 to launch the company legally in 2018. At launch, Cain says they were one of maybe 30 distilleries nationally built around this idea. There are roughly 2,500 brands in the space now.

“This category clearly fits a need for consumers. You just put a match to it with the pandemic.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

Deko Cocktails founder Ushi Shafran had a similar wake-up call, minus the decade of bootlegging. He hired a bartender to batch cocktails for a party at his house. It was a hit that night. Two days later, the drinks had separated and looked, in Handman’s words, “really gross and ugly.”

Shafran went looking for a bottled alternative and couldn’t find one that met his bar, so he and a co-founder, neither with any beverage alcohol experience, found a small incubator distillery on the North Fork of Long Island and made about 150 test cases to gauge interest with friends and family. That was 2021, when the premium end of this category was basically On The Rocks and a handful of regional players like Straightaway.

It took about a year of momentum before Shafran decided to go all in, recruiting Handman, a fine wine and luxury spirits veteran, to rebuild the brand from the ground up. Neither founder set out to build an RTS brand. They set out to solve their own hosting problem, and only later realized thousands of other people had the same one.

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What it says about how we’re drinking now

This isn’t really about convenience for its own sake. It’s about who gets to participate in cocktail culture, and on what terms.

Handman ran the math on a homemade Negroni for me: a bottle of gin, a bottle of Campari, a bottle of vermouth, close to $150 in ingredients for a drink a lot of people won’t even like. A bottle of Deko Cocktails gets you four cocktails from $20.75/bttl.

Cain makes a related point from the professional side. Nobody expects themselves to make a cabernet or mill hops for a pilsner before serving wine or beer to guests. We just pour it and move on. Somehow, hosting a proper cocktail hour has meant knowing how to bartend, and that’s the assumption this whole category is quietly unwinding.

Deko Cocktails expected a younger, urban, female-skewed customer. Their actual buyer skews older than fifty and lives outside major cities, which Handman only learned once DTC data gave him a real read on who was buying. People aren’t drinking less because they’re drinking differently. They want the ritual and the result without the apprenticeship, and they’re willing to pay a real price for both. And listening to the customer is key.

Four different bets on the same category

Deko Cocktails, Straightaway, Hoste, and Wild Mannered aren’t making the same bet, even though a retail buyer would file all four under one category tag.

Deko Cocktails is playing the platform game. Handman rebuilt the brand with new packaging and creative through branding agency Stranger & Stranger, and a pricing strategy anchored to what a bar would charge for the same ingredients, not to shelf comparisons.

Straightaway is playing the credibility game. They’re a dual-licensed distillery and winery that makes its own bitters, shrubs, and modifiers, originally just to build their own cocktails. In 2022, they branded that back bar as Accompani and started supplying the same house-made spirits to top bar programs, including Violet Hour and Whistler Bar in Chicago and Borgo and Le Crocodile in New York. Their new cocktail bar inside the Portland airport, one of twenty brands to win the port’s RFP, makes that case physically: come watch us make it, the way you’d tour a winery.

“We’re a cocktail company. We’re not a widget on a shelf kind of brand.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

That credibility bet is paying off in the data. Straightaway has led the category in weekly dollar velocity on Circana for more than 20 months straight, eclipsing incumbents like Cutwater and On The Rocks by a wide margin, on a sales team of two and a half people. On NIQ's ready-to-serve rankings, they're one of the fastest-growing brands in the category: fourth over the past 52 weeks, trending into second over the past four.

One buyer put a number on what that means at the register. The head buyer at a notable natural retail chain told Straightaway they represent one in every three dollars sold across that store’s entire RTD set.

Hoste is playing the occasion game, betting nobody searches for “best RTS cocktail” but everyone shops for gifts and better hosting, pricing accordingly at $80 to $150 a bottle. Wild Mannered is playing the cultural-arbitrage game, riding soju’s rising U.S. visibility and translating an unfamiliar spirit into something approachable, with a real ingredient story attached. Four different theories of what people are actually buying: platform trust, professional credibility, occasion, or a spirit’s cultural moment.

The real challenges

Two problems come up in almost every conversation I have in this category.

The first is education. Straightaway spent years building the brand while also teaching consumers that a canned cocktail could be as good as one built to order, even though most of the world’s best bars already batch 60 to 70 percent of what they serve.

The second is price perception, and it’s coming from the wrong side of the counter.

“The only folks that are price sensitive to it are the wholesalers and the retailers.” Michael Handman, Deko Cocktails

Handman's point: consumers aren't the ones flinching at Deko Cocktails price. Wholesalers and retailers are, because they assume the shopper will balk before the shopper gets the chance to. Both founders are also watching the category get crowded fast, with newer entrants prioritizing pack format over the actual liquid, and both are betting quality is what separates the brands that last from the ones that were simply first to a shelf.

What they’re actually trying to build

Neither founder is chasing a quick flip. Handman wants Deko Cocktails to become a lasting platform for cocktail innovation across spirit categories, alcoholic and eventually non-alcoholic, rather than a single product line. He’d take a knock on the door from Beam or Bacardi someday, but that’s not the plan he’s building toward day to day.

Cain is even more direct about resisting an exit mindset.

“Any brand worth its salt is a ten-year overnight story.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

Straightaway has put its capital into production capacity, tasting rooms, and now an airport bar, rather than into sales headcount or marketing spend. They're finally, by their own account, close to profitable, on their own timeline.

The New Rule

This category isn't really selling convenience. It's unbundling the skill of bartending from the desire to drink well, and the brands doing it right have a specific, defensible answer for which part of that experience they're actually selling.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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Two things we’ve spoken about a few times in this newsletter:

1)Gen Z is drinking, despite all the doom-laden headlines about it

2)Chasing superficial trends is no way to build a brand

In the last couple of weeks, there’s been a noticeable shift in the conversation around younger drinkers as people realise that the ‘Gen Z doesn’t drink’ story doesn’t hold up.

It’s a great story. It’s provocative. It’s frightening. It threatens to upend a social behaviour that dates back, literally, 10,000+ years. Of course people paid attention to it. And of course journalists and commentators enjoyed playing on it.

The trouble is, if you’re building a brand - of any kind, really - you have to be more curious about these superficial ripples. It might look like they’re drinking less, but what’s actually going on beneath that? What’s the wider and deeper context?

Are Gen Z not drinking, or is your brand just really boring? Are you working hard enough to appeal to them? What’s the surrounding economic factors? Do these statistics add up? Is this at all credible?

Ok, and if you’re now done worrying about Gen Z, can we put you onto something else to think about?

Stores are building their own brands, and they are putting time and effort into making them look great.

One report says nearly a quarter of all US grocery units sold are now private label. Supermarkets are really investing in boosting their own-label alcohol. And in the UK, Marks & Spencer is absolutely showing how it’s done.

Big name brands, you better step up your game.

Let’s scroll through some news together:

TINY THINGS

-Is it the GLP-1s, is it shrinkflation, or does everyone just love small things? The mini beers are coming.

-Blowfish is betting on two things that feel very of-the-moment: purity of ingredients, tiny cans.

Our take: This is a reminder that there’s another side to the more adaptogens, more ingredients, more benefits, more function, more everything side of drinks.

-Even CNN is writing about tiny booze.

NEW NEW NEW

-Say hello to pickle water. Apparently it’s very popular.

-Then, say hello to pickle HOPWTR.

-Sazerac never sleeps. Here they are with three new (and pretty cute) RTDs, including a hard cream soda.

-Remember CHAOS BRANDS? We love them. Ciggy’s (yes, that is really the name) is embracing that energy.

-Bero releases a special Odyssey edition. Of course.

Our take: Are they successful because it’s a great brand or because of Tom Holland? Send us your thoughts on a postcard. Or composed into 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter.

-Maker’s Mark – love their signature waxy top – has released a set of limited edition city bottles, celebrating NYC, LA, London, Paris, Seoul and other big name destinations.

-THC bevs are coming to Lollapalooza.

WEIRD CORNER

-UK wine brand Folc is apparently hiring a soil sommelier.

-There’s a drink for everything now. The delightfully named Swinger is ‘craft energy’ for golfers.

-Erewhon continues to see just how far they can push it, with $12 ‘Sacred Water’.

-Let’s take another minute to celebrate CHAOS BRANDS, with Malört’s ad campaign which foregoes all the usual high-falutin’ bev/alc taglines and basically says: this tastes disgusting, enjoy it, you pig.

-We knew it was coming… functional NA beer. Yes a beer with no booze but the ability to support muscle recovery and hydration.

Our take: The ‘beer with benefits’ tagline is truly nonsensical. Arguably, all beer has benefits. And anyway, why not just drink water after your workout?

BY THE WAY: we’re writing a feature, right now, on occasions. Do we have subscribers with big thoughts? Controversial opinions? Or a reader who just wants to rant about what’s going on with bev brands and occasions/rituals? Fire us an email please.

-Blue Moon, but SPICY.

REMEMBER BACK WHEN….

-We’re in a real moment of Dirty Shirley, cream soda, and basically anything that gives us the warm glow of our youth, when everything seemed fine. Earlier this month, the Eater wondered whether jelly shots were due a comeback.

Our take: For some on-the-ground, anecdotal reporting, I made some for a birthday party last year and people have never been so happy or so drunk.

WINE TIME

-Jacob’s Creek launches a new campaign: Welcome to the Creek. They say it’s created for an always-on world, full of curation and distraction. It gives the brand a “warmer and more confident energy, celebrating connection without pressure, easy enjoyment, and the kind of unfiltered moments that bring people together.’ Ok.

COCKTAILS PLEASE

-Blackbird Spyplane have announced the drink of the summer: the À La Renaissance. It’s made with Campari and pastis. Is pastis due a buzzy comeback?

-Clever move from Kocktail, serving RTDs in an actual glass with a lid. For those moments when BuzzBallz isn’t quite fancy enough.

-Cutwater’s new ad campaign stars Parker Posey, sitting on a looooooooooong kitchen counter and failing to prevent a prevailing sense of horror from creeping into her performance.

YOUR ASSIGNED READING

-Express Checkout has a smart take on what’s happening with nostalgia in the bev space (scroll down a bit to find it). In short, nostalgia might work faster than novelty when you’re stood in front of a shelf full of drinks.

-There’s no denying that Aperol are getting a lot right. Europe is already theirs, and now they’re coming for all of America.

-This is an excellent piece about packaging, about what belongs to who, and about what happens when a major brand feels very inspired by a small business.

-Celebrity-founded booze brands have grown into a category of their very own. Are you even a celebrity if you don’t have your own drinks brand? VinePair has a different take on the phenomenon: yes, celebrities are still in, but it’s dead celebrities brands really want.

-The story of how bored monks started a tonic wine brand that made $82m last year.

YOUR ASSIGNED LISTENING

-Do we have any THC brand owners in our subscriber list? This one’s for you.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

Need design support for your brand? Reach out! hi@nihilo.agency

And support our work by:

• Subscribing

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Non founder Aaron Trotman approaches taste through a chef’s lens: fruit, tannin, salinity, acidity, and balance.

Every single bottle of Non has to tick all of these boxes, whether that’s by roasting pears until the natural sugars caramelize and adding in olive brine, or by spending 48 hours dehydrating oranges and mixing them with gourmet salt.

Aaron is straightforward about all of this: “It’s important to get the flavor to unlock,” he says, “because it’s not a juice ... I want you to taste everything that’s on the front of the label: the raspberry, the chamomile, the acid from the verjus, the saltiness, the sugar. They have to have those things, but in a unique way.

“We’re doing the extra work, and I think it goes noticed,” he adds. “It’s something that we care about, and something we’re proud to talk about.”

Non isn’t a wine replacement - it wants to build a category of its very own by being absolutely uncompromising about ingredients and process.

Jar people, just a bit

Our conversation with Aaron focused a lot on flavor, and how anything competing with wine or other alcohol has to be offer layers of taste. One of those layers, according to him, needs to feel just a little bit off.

There’s a famous (and likely apocryphal) quote from French perfumer Jacques Guerlain that — and we paraphrase — says perfumes need a scent of something unexpected and maybe not entirely pleasant. In a similar vein of thought, Aaron says he likes to experiment with throwing in surprising ingredients.

“It’s important to be jarring and thought-provoking,” he explains. “It’s not too hard to get the base, but it’s what makes it special that’s the hard part.”

Tasting expensive means looking expensive

Process and ingredients is such a driving force for Non, and that focus has landed them partnerships with some of the best restaurants in the world. But we shouldn’t underestimate the work that Non’s brand is doing.

Aaron says he knew, from the get-go, that he wanted to channel the highest-level brands out there: Byredo, Aesop, Gentle Monster.

He commissioned design studio The Company You Keep to create a super-minimal brand world: a white label, some Helvetica, and space for the liquid to shine. “The idea is that the color of the drink always pops,” he says. “It’s the star of the show.”

Not just the work, but the agency partnership has been a pivotal part of Non’s growth. Aaron says founders are often distracted by a studio’s credentials, and focus too much on past projects – when they’d be better spending time finding the right person.

“They have to be an extension of you. They’re there to pull the ideas out of your head.”

Start as you mean to go on

Non is now served at restaurants in the USA, the UK, Japan, Australia and Korea. And that’s not by accident. Their first account was The Fat Duck – a three Michelin-starred restaurant in England – and their goal from the beginning was to work at this level.

“It’s about being really careful about where you go and how you do it and not rushing it,” he says. “If you can get these things right, you can build a really good business, and a really good brand in the best places.”

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THE NEW RULES

Cutting corners will kill your brand
Yes, people notice, and yes it makes a difference.

Be a bit unexpected
Humans have a complex relationship with flavor. Sometimes it’s ok to throw them off – just a little.

Find your level and lean into it
Want to be stocked in the best places? Build for that.

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A conversation with Ben Tannenbaum of LineLeap on why the old playbook for reaching consumers doesn’t work anymore.

I sat down with Ben Tannenbaum, who runs alcohol strategy at LineLeap (the nightlife platform that lets people skip the line at bars and clubs, currently live in 800 venues across 125 markets, with about two million users, 98% of them under 30). Before that, he ran the alcohol vertical at Fetch Rewards for eight years, and before that he was in innovation roles at NBC Universal and Mastercard, watching how platforms and infrastructure change human behavior long before he ever touched alcohol.

That background is why this conversation didn’t stay on Gen Z drinking less. It went somewhere more useful: why the entire social structure that used to make drinking happen without anyone planning it is quietly disappearing, and what that means for how long a brand should even try to plan for.

The Shrinking Half-Life of a Drinking Occasion

Tannenbaum thinks about alcohol’s role in socializing as a series of eras, each shorter than the last. The tavern held that role for something like 250 years, doubling as the voting hall, the hiring hall, the place news actually traveled. Post-war happy hour culture, the version where you just showed up because that’s what people did after work, held it for about fifty. The craft and identity era, where what you drank signaled who you were, lasted maybe thirteen. The current wellness moment might get ten, if that.

“It used to be that you would have this 10-year planning horizon for what is my brand identity. I don’t think that makes sense anymore.”

He’s not arguing brand equity is worthless. He’s arguing that a brand rigid enough to ignore what’s happening over the next 36 months, in the name of protecting a 10-year plan, is taking on a different kind of risk now.

Why the Conditions Stopped Lining Up

Ambient drinking, the unplanned, casual kind, the run-in at the bar rather than the scheduled happy hour, only happens when five conditions line up at once. Here’s Ben Tannenbaum’s version of them:

1. Temporal synchronization: people are free at the same time.

2. Spatial concentration: people are physically near each other and near venues.

3. Low planning cost: you just go, someone’s already there.

4. Social permission: drinking is expected or has a legible role.

5. Repetition: the occasion recurs often enough to become habit.

When even one or two of those conditions erode, ambient drinking doesn’t happen. It’s not that people stopped wanting to drink together. It’s that fewer of the conditions line up anymore.

For Gen Z, several of these were never fully in place. More than 40% haven’t reached legal drinking age yet. A large share had their college years, exactly when temporal synchronization and spatial concentration used to happen automatically, interrupted by COVID. And a record number of 25 to 34 year olds are still living at home, which structurally suppresses the whole category of occasions this used to run on. This isn’t a generation that decided to drink less. It’s a generation for whom the ambient infrastructure never fully rebuilt itself.

The Causal Chain

Most alcohol marketing still treats occasions as things you sponsor after they already exist: the tailgate, the music festival, the happy hour that would have happened without you. That’s the bottom of the causal chain. You get impressions and an association, but the moment doesn’t need you.

Tannenbaum’s actual advice is to move to the top of that chain instead, to be the reason the occasion exists at all. He gave the example of a bar in Madison, Wisconsin running weekly Love Island watch parties, pulling numbers close to a Friday on a random weeknight. Nobody’s coming out to drink first and watching the show second. They’re coming for the event, and the drinking happens because they’re already there.

A few ways that shows up in practice:

• Backing a trivia night that’s actually building repetition and proximity, not just buying a logo placement on something that already had an audience

• Treating a venue’s recurring watch party or theme night as infrastructure worth investing in, not a one-off activation

• Showing up as the invisible hand behind an occasion rather than the visible sponsor of one

The Occasions Nobody Has Claimed

Tannenbaum also pointed out how much brands default to the same four planning windows (holidays, summer, the Super Bowl) instead of the smaller, weirder occasions that are specific to someone’s actual life. Tequila shows up constantly around Cinco de Mayo, rarely around Mexican Independence Day or Dia de los Muertos, the occasions a Mexican or Mexican American audience would probably rather be spoken to on. The territory isn’t niche. It’s just unclaimed.

Regularmaxxing is a thing.

“Regular” used to be something that happened to you, a byproduct of a work schedule and a neighborhood bar that existed whether you showed up or not. Now it takes actual effort to become one, which is exactly why Gen Z had to invent a term for it (”regularmaxxing”) instead of just doing it the way everyone before them did without thinking twice.

That effort is the opening. The brands that win the next decade won’t be the ones showing up at the party. They’ll be the ones the party wouldn’t exist without.

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Faccia Brutto makes bitter liqueurs that honour their Italian roots while keeping the modern American palate in mind. It’s a brand that’s grown slowly, honestly and with a lot of discipline – thanks to founder Patrick Miller’s background as a chef.

And it’s not just the exceptional taste; Patrick has created one of those brands where the story, the liquid and the visual world feel truly inseparable.

Here’s how:

A chef’s approach to flavor and structure

Patrick Miller came to spirits through kitchens, and that background shapes how he thinks about amaro. “I think about balance,” he says. “If there’s too much fat or acid or salt in a dish, people know instantly.” When he looked at what existed in the domestic category, things felt off-kilter, either too sweet or too bitter.

His intention from day one was to make products that are supremely well balanced. He respects Italian tradition but doesn’t treat it as a fixed formula — for example, legacy Italian brands use a lot of sugar, but Patrick says he’s made a conscious decision to use a more “appropriate” amount. He also adds salt because it brings flavors out.

These adjustments give Faccia Brutto a flavor profile that feels both rooted and modern. It respects where amaro comes from while creating something more aligned with how Americans actually drink.

A brand world built on imperfection

Faccia Brutto’s visual identity carries the same energy as the liquid. It’s confident without being polished, humorous without being silly, and intentionally imperfect. The name itself came to Patrick suddenly. Faccia Brutta means ugly face, which he loved, but he went further. He intentionally mismatched the grammar.

He laughed when he told us: “I’ve received a lot of emails and phone calls asking why the name is incorrect, but it felt right.” That slight tension is the brand. It’s meant to feel human and slightly off in a way that draws you in.

The design came from Garrett Elizabeth Office, a small husband and wife studio that Patrick worked with when they first broke out on their own. He wanted the typography to feel throwback without being nostalgic, and the designers built a system that feels old-world but filtered through a very American voice.

And then there’s the drinking man. Patrick asked the designers to “put Charles Bukowski on the label in some fashion,” which is how the illustration landed on that beautifully imperfect figure. “I found him extremely funny and grotesquely ugly,” Patrick says. “His whole persona really is the brand.” It is not a reference for reference’s sake. It signals honesty, grit, humor, and a refusal to smooth anything over.

Nothing in the Faccia Brutto world feels like it was tested or sanitized. It feels lived-in. That energy is essential to why bartenders and consumers connect with it so deeply.

Building without shortcuts

Patrick’s approach to growth stands apart in today’s industry. There’s no burn rate. No pressure to scale at all costs. And no need to constantly chase new capital.

“I raised money once,” he says. “$150k. Whatever cash comes in is the cash we use.”

This grounds the brand’s most important rule: “We do not do the pay-to-play model. I would rather save that money for payroll.” This is unusual for the category and extremely intentional. If Faccia Brutto shows up on a menu, it’s because someone believes in the product. That authenticity creates a different kind of loyalty, and it sets the brand up for resilience rather than volatility.

Navigating a changing distributor landscape

The distributor landscape is becoming more consolidated and cost-driven. Many brands feel pressure to overspend in order to stay relevant. Faccia Brutto took the opposite path. It built demand first, often one bartender or one retailer at a time.

Launching in March 2020 shaped its trajectory. With bars closed, retail became the entry point. “The only place people could see our stuff was on shelves,” Patrick says. That retail momentum later informed how the brand moved into restaurants.

Today the brand sits at a 50/50 split between retail and on premise, which is rare and speaks to how well the identity performs in both environments.

The bottle stands out on a backbar. The typography carries from across a room. The Bukowski figure is recognizable without being literal. The world-building does real work in a way that very few brands truly achieve. Bartenders see it, pick it up, and want to talk about it.

A brand that grows thoughtfully

Faccia Brutto runs with a small, focused team. Patrick and one teammate make the liquid. Another manages accounts. Another leads communications and collaborations. Their community approach is thoughtful rather than performative. Every January they host a dog adoption event at the distillery. It is small, warm, and very on-brand. As Patrick says: “It is more of a community than just a product.”

This is a company that knows what it is trying to build, why it matters, and what it refuses to compromise on. That kind of clarity shows up everywhere.

NEW RULES FROM FACCIA BRUTTO

Build from real demand
“I raised money once. Whatever cash comes in is the cash we use.”

Let imperfection speak
The wrong grammar, the disheveled figure, the lived-in world. It all signals honesty.

Honor tradition without copying it
Italian roots, American palate, modern execution.

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If your beer, soda or RTD doesn’t have electrolytes, protein, adaptogens, mushroom powder, colostrum or any other hypey ingredient in it, are you really even alive?

We’ve said it time and again at The New Rules, but it’s truly the era of drinks but ✨extra✨. And things are, arguably, being taken too far. We’ve put so much protein in stuff that there is, reportedly, a global whey protein shortage. We’ve raved so much about matcha that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is paying tea growers to transition to matcha production.

Why can’t things just be simple? Why are so many brands being built around a hype cycle?

The innovation hook

To understand why the bev sector is so enchanted with trends, we spoke with Leah Keggi: a brand strategist and marketer with a good decade of bev industry experience. She started out in craft beer at a business that was later acquired by a major brewery, weathered the mania of the 2010s, and then moved over to work in wine and spirits. And along the way she became very familiar with how the drinks industry ties itself in knots over ‘innovation’.

She told us: If it feels like there’s more hypey ingredient focus than ever before that’s because the barrier to entry is lower, the trend cycle is faster, and news spreads more quickly. On top of that, new brands lacking loyalty often feel they need the ‘edge’ of being a bit weird to get attention.

“For a lot of brands looking to start,” she explains, “the growth model is backwards: innovation-first to prove your value to consumers, then reversion to tradition. Look at the Ollipop refresh – they’re pulling back on the overt label call-outs now that they’re established, and leaning into the trust they’ve earned.”

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Innovation ≠ acquisition

The problem is that add-ons can feel like a shortcut to success. They might feel like you’re tapping into a movement – and for a period, you are. But things change fast. And in reality, says Leah, chasing those often-fleeting moments can stop a brand from leaning into an audience and providing value. The trend feels like a solution, but it’s really a distraction. And while lots of young brands think the focus on innovation will pin down an acquisition, we’ve got news.

“People think they’re going to have a Poppi story,” says Leah. “I’ve seen this a lot in whiskey, because people think they’ll just bottle it. And actually, you have to do so much work to be attractive. People want to get acquired, so they give it a two-year run and they stop. That’s not enough time.”

The ‘what’s new’ trap

The trap, according to her, is asking: what’s new? The second trap is assuming that what’s new is what’s going to sell. People hope that innovation is going to help them leapfrog across categories or into consumers’ hearts, and while newness can be appealing, it’s much harder to be new.

“When the shelves were all one brand, you could slot in a new item and it was interesting, so people chose it,” Leah told us. “Now the shelves are packed. But people keep asking ‘what’s new?’ instead of ‘how are we talking about this?’ We’re chasing trends, and we’re asking questions that aren’t what the consumer is looking for.”

It’s understandable. The lure of the trend is powerful. It sings its siren call and brands follow. This is particularly risky for younger companies, says Leah, because often they’ve barely started bedding in with consumers, and then they start following weirdness.

Star Wars is cowboys in space

So how to do it? How do bev brands stay relevant without falling victim to a trend that eventually falters?

Leah says the trick is to take the familiar, and twist it ever so. Star Wars is cowboys in space. Absolut’s tabasco vodka is vodka, but spicy. There’s a hint of novelty; a touch of the unexpected but within a framework that’s still familiar. And it helps to pick things that have a reasonable lifespan.

Stores of the Wild West are classics for a reason. Spicy flavors have been loved forever, for a reason. They might feel fairly novel to the beverage category, and they might be in a moment of interest, but they’ve also got roots and they’ve got legs. And, importantly, it’s a good taste experience, wrapped in exceptional branding.

Take smaller steps

Brands need to think about innovation, yes, but they need to consider what form that comes in. Rather than launching a new addition that no-one wants, work on your brand.

“You can innovate your packaging, you can innovate to a new audience with the same products through marketing. Innovate your brand message or what your brands stands for. You don’t have to innovate product to sell more product. Tide isn’t making hand soap, they’re just making new types of detergent.”

And, perhaps, brands need to take smaller jumps. If you’re an alcohol-free beer and you release a limited edition nectarine version for the summer, that makes sense. The novelty could bring in some new interest, which could bring in new fans of your core brand. BUT, if you hear that everyone at Expo West is talking about tallow, and you’re now wondering how you can release a buzzy beef tallow beer, really ask yourself: why?

Ingredients aren’t competitive

Finally – and we cant emphasize this enough - you cannot compete on ingredients. Unless you’ve sourced something so rare and unusual that only you know where it grows or lives, it’s a dead-end.

”You need to build everything around the ingredients,” says Leah. “If everyone is using mushroom powders, what makes you special? You need to compete on your brand and your messaging to stick around for the long haul, because anyone can access ingredients – unless you’re like David, and you buy up the supplier.”

I think the beer sector is a perfect example of this. In essence, every major beer brand uses the same ingredient list. None of them are telling consumers, ‘wow, we’re made with hops’. Instead, they compete on brand. And beer brands are some of the most tribal and successful examples of branding you can think of.

So put down the beef tallow. Forget about protein, or adaptogens, or mushroom powders in such minuscule amounts that they make no difference anyway. None of that is marketing strategy. Don’t chase the ingredients or the trends, chase the people instead.

As Leah says: “CPG needs to stop trying to be the best in the room with other CPG brands. Start thinking about how you’re the best thing for the community or the room you want to be in. There is a lot of untapped potential in a lot of places.”

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Cheers.

If there’s one part of the bev/alc world that is crying out for newness, it’s wine.

Luckily for you, we’ve spotted a brand that is truly doing something quite different and quite clever: Pizza Wine. It’s a canned, sparkling red wine that’s made expressly for pizza night. Their philosophy is simple: “Drink it cold, bring it anywhere, and don’t overthink it.”

As a product, it’s a brilliant niche. But what’s so compelling is that last bit: don’t overthink it.

“We could spend hours explaining why this pizza and wine pairing works – how the structure perfectly balances the acidity in the tomatoes and cheese - but that’s not our vibe,” reads their website.

It’s wonderfully unpretentious. It’s easy for people to understand. It requires very little cognitive lift. It’s playful. It’s fast. It’s witty.

And it’s run by founders that know exactly what they’re doing.

From bar to brand

Pizza Wine is founded by people that are deeply versed in wine and food: chef Rob Andreozzi and Liz McDonnell – who also co-founded Providence’s now-shuttered Fortnight Wine Bar.

When Fortnight opened, it was one of the earliest natural wine bars on the East Coast, and at the time few locals knew what natural wine was. Fortnight’s way of encouraging people to take the leap was by always having a $6 glass of wine, vetted by bartenders, on the menu as a gateway option.

And it worked; people would come into Fortnight as beer drinkers and leave as wine fans. “That path from curiosity to being passionate is what drove us at the bar, and is what drives us at Pizza Wine,” says Liz.

Sparkling reds

Running the bar taught Liz a lot about how to bring people into wine. It also taught her that sparkling red has a lot of potential.

“It was easy to say yes to, it was novel, and that was refreshing in a world where they were coming out of stuffy wine culture. People were obsessed with it.”

It was only on tap at Fortnight for 12 months but for years after people would ask for it. And when Liz started thinking about her next project she realised: here was the niche.

“We know that it has a long history and tradition in Italy of being drunk with pizza. Go to any pizza shop in Italy and your house wine is a sparkling red, so it just makes sense to folks who are familiar with that culture. But here, it was still pretty new.”

Quick side note here: The reason it’s such a good pairing is because sparkling red is high acid and medium tannin, and the bubbles help break up fat in a way that still wines don’t.

Easy to get, easy to sell

Pizza Wine feels like one of those ideas that’s so obvious, you wonder why no-one’s done it before. As Liz points out: pizza is the favourite food.

“In the US, there was a survey that says 33 million people would choose pizza as their last meal on earth, which I completely believe. And it makes sense for us to be in that space if we want to make this wine as accessible as possible.”

The messaging and attitude is doing a lot of that work, but so is the brand. It’s bright, it’s straight-talking, and it looks great behind the register at pizza restaurants (and burger places too). There’s no snobbery here – no sense that you might be ordering the wrong thing, or asking the wrong questions.

“That’s why I’m so excited about Pizza Wine,” says Liz. “I love wine. I love the industry. But it was hard to break into. And it is really stuffy and judgemental.”

She says the data also tells a hard story. People are drinking and buying less wine, and the wine industry is feeling the creeping tendrils of worry.

For Liz this is deeply sad – as she points out wine is natural, it supports farmers and it’s responsive to the environment. But historically, it’s gone overboard with some of the messaging - leaving people feeling overwhelmed, or excluded. That’s a problem Pizza Wine is dedicated to fixing.

“People just want to know that it’s high quality, it’s made well and it’s not going to fuck up the environment. Just drink it with pizza. That’s our goal.”

Lastly, in New Rules tradition, we asked Liz:

What’s the brutal truth you’ve learned about building a bev/alc brand?

“I thought I had a brand that would sell itself and no brand is going to sell itself. That was surprising to me because it’s simple and it tells you exactly what it is and does. But you still have to get out there, and you still have to tell your story and ask people to support you. And then, maybe, it’ll sell itself.”

With hindsight, is there anything you’d do differently?

“I spent a lot of time in the brand-building stage, perseverating over documents. I did my full competitive analysis and I wrote multiple decks and I think I wasted a lot of time. I could have done that in a few weeks, and then spent the other five months talking to potential buyers and doing tastings. As a first time founder, that process was important, but in hindsight I wouldn’t do it again. I’d blow through it, feel 80% confident in what I was putting down on paper and then go out and hit the streets with it.”

THE NEW RULE

Simple brands aren’t stupid brands. People are overwhelmed by messaging and choice, and the easier you can make it for them to choose you, the more likely they are to do so.

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Welcome to Happy Hour, our quick-scroll guide to the news and views of the bev/alc sector. Subscribe below for the next one.

Humans are creatures of habit - we pick up the same brands, we follow the same routines, and some of the world’s biggest businesses have been built around that truth.

HOWEVER.

People also love novelty. There will forever be a promising little space for a brand to pop up and say, ‘hey, look at me, I’m like that thing you’ve been buying forever but different.’ In the food and bev space, people are even more susceptible, because the promise of a new flavor, or the flash of a new bit of branding on a shelf, can be hard to resist.

We’re seeing bev brands tap into this magpie-like impulse in a few ways: flavor, format, brand. Welcome to the nexus of novelty:

1)Flavor
Spiciness has been a super-trend of the last 12 months. You’ve got Absolut’s tabasco vodka. You’ve got Cointreau Spicy. You’ve got the Orange Blossom and Cacao edition from Hendrick’s. And even Stoli’s new ginger beer is formulated with a hint of chilli. People want potent, interesting, new flavors.

2)Format
The rise of the RTD speaks for itself, but already there’s signs of bev brands thinking about what comes after the standard tin. Companies are investing in ready-to-go shot pouches, tins with sachets attached, and see-through packaging. As more and more companies move toward canned offerings, there’ll inevitably be more slants on the format, to reclaim some of that novelty.

3)Brand
It’s the original differentiator – the way to tap into people’s search for newness You only need to look at our catalog of young bev brands to see how all of them are using it to steal people’s attention’s away from other, more familiar drinks options. The best bit about brand is that it’s both hook and line - get people’s attention once, become familiar, and use brand to keep them coming back for more of what they love.

Now, for the news:

COCKTAIL LAND

Are complex cocktails out? Delish says bartenders are bored of all the garnishes and novelty for novelty’s sake, and are going back minimal ingredient, simple cocktails.

Guys, canned cocktails are such a big deal that The Atlantic has written about them and wow, that’s a headline.

Canned cocktail brand Moth has a new brand platform celebrating “taste, togetherness and the unexpected”.

Moët Hennessy is getting into the ready-to-serve biz, with a line-up of bottled cognac cocktails aimed at Gen Z.

Our take: we like that this feels so refined. While lots of other brands are trying to get that ‘hello there fellow kids’ zany energy, MH has adopted branding that feels dignified without being boring.

Jose Cuervo tequila cocktails, now IN A CAN.

ZERO BOOZE

Arkay is launching an alcohol-free whiskey under its Beyond Spirits line.

Our take: the language and the branding is all over the place with this one. The whiskey world tends to skew premium, and if you want even a little alcohol-free slice of that you need branding that can compete.

To complicate things further, Arkay announced new brand messaging this month, saying, “We don’t sell alcohol-free spirits, we sell happiness.” Read that, then take another look at their NA whiskey packaging.

Suntory continues to expand into the US and Europe, launching Nivo House in a small number of states in America.

Beyond Meat continues to baffle as it pushes ahead with it’s all-trend-everything new drink, which has an ingredients list that feels like a checkbox of every single hyped ingredient (except beef tallow).

BEER TIME

We spotted Cobra founder Karan Bilimoria musing in the brand’s origin story, over on LinkedIn. What’s interesting here isn’t his emphasis on determination, but the way he spotted a very defined moment and ritual (sitting down to a curry), and made something specifically for that.

Can anything stop Bero? Their latest release is a series of alcohol-free shandies with fruit flavors that are, apparently, inspired by Zendaya herself.

Our take: These guys are smart. A novel product for them, but an old classic for everyone else, and with flavors that are just the right blend of familiar and trendy.

Anyone for an apple beer from Keystone Light?

THE MONEY BIT

Whiskey brand Uncle Nearest has had turbulent times, but looks like it’s found a buyer – and they’re pledging to honour the brand’s cultural significance.

RTD aqua fresca brand Bawi just closed a $6m investment.

We noticed quite a few whiskey brands on The Spirits Business’s list of the fastest-growing spirits of 2025.

THE FORMAT PLAY

This RTD is going all-in with its novelty play, serving low-cal fruity vodka cocktails with an attached sachet that includes caffeine and other functional add-ons.

Our take: Fun, but will anyone buy this a second time?

Heineken partners with Heinz for a six-pack of beer that…. also has some ketchup attached.

We’ve seen a lot of people talking about this one: Svedka’s canned vodka water, in a see-through can.

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BRANDING & MARKETING DOING ITS THING

818 Tequila has launched a Best Summer Ever campaign - focusing heavily on fun times, big sweepstakes, and nothing really being too serious.

We’re a little late to the party on this, but quite fond of this extra-long beer pack, made by Long Trail Brewing Co. It’s charming (although there’s always a bit of suspicion around whether these kinds of stunts are actually sold, or just farmed out to the press).

Coors Light also decided to get stretchy, with an 18-inch ‘Tallerboy’ canister that fits three cans inside it so you don’t miss any World Cup action by having to run to the fridge. It’s currently ‘sold out’ on their website.

We side-eyed Asahi a little bit for this brand refresh of Twisted Shotz.

Our take: this ticks a few boxes: pre-gaming, naive ‘who gives a shit’ branding, that BuzzBallz-esque bonkersness. But does it feel like they’ve shoehorned a bit too much in here? Is it a little derivative?

Vodka brand Tito’s unveils its first UK campaign, and it’s going for confident, no-nonsense messaging.

Lagunitas has a new look.

Madonna is now the face of Absolut.

BOOKMARK AND READ LATER

Fellow Substacker Camille Moore has written a great analysis of Grey Goose (acquired by Bacardi in 2004 for $$) and how it’s an essential case study for what brand actually does. As she says: “Bacardi was not buying production capacity, supply chain, or recipe IP. They were buying a frosted bottle, a French origin story, and a perception they could not have built themselves in twice the time.”

Ok, we all know about celebrity beverage. But, bear with us, what about the ultimate celebrity beverage – an endorsement from Jesus himself? The Guardian investigates a budding new bev category: Christian energy drinks.

India has a plenty of wild-growing agave plants. The BBC asks whether it might, eventually, be a rival for Mexico.

Finally, we’re blessing you with not one but TWO new reports about the bev sector:

1)Snaxshot’s State of Beverage

2)Coefficient Capital’s Consumer Trends Alcohol 2026 Report, which asks: is alcohol really the new tobacco?

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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In the agency world, the ultimate asset is usually a beautiful render—getting to that perfect final case study, putting your finest work on the Dieline, and securing the press hits. Most people don't expect their branding agency to do end-to-end execution, including liquid strategy.

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But Mike Perry, owner of the Brooklyn-based beverage branding agency Tavern, wants his clients to know that Tavern does exactly that. As he points out, “no one knows the deep strategy that goes into it. No one knows the liquid strategy, which is what we work on with a lot of our major clients.”

For years, Tavern has operated deep in the trenches of the beverage-alcohol sector for global conglomerates like Beam Suntory and E. & J. Gallo.

Yet, when you’re an agency servicing massive corporate clients, it’s hard to show early-stage founders and venture capitalists that you actually understand the gritty, end-to-end reality of launching a brand from scratch.

So, Perry decided Tavern would write its own brief.

They set out to build a physical product to prove they could handle the entire roadmap—from liquid formulation to distributor pitches. What started as a clever marketing exercise, however, quickly spiraled into something much bigger. They built a product and brand so compelling they had no choice but to go all-in.

The Proof of Concept: Handling the End-to-End Roadmap

To prove to clients and skeptical VCs that Tavern wasn’t just a design shop, Perry wanted a single, highly tactical case study that demonstrated a deep understanding of the entire beverage lifecycle.

As Mike puts it:

“One thing we’re trying to achieve with this is to show that we’re deep experts in this category. We’ve demonstrated that understanding in the past, but this time we’re doing it through a single brand that can act as a case study. It’s not just about liquid strategy and product development, it’s also about getting a brand onto shelves and understanding how to pitch it to distributors.

Tavern didn’t want to just mock up a concept; they handled the logistical heavy lifting. They mapped out a lean distribution framework, proving to early-stage founders that you don’t need massive, wasteful budgets to make an impact:

“You don’t need huge billboards. I think a lot of companies will come in and try to sell you a bunch of stuff you don’t actually need. When you’re a super early-stage brand, what you need is highly tactical, highly effective, strategic work and outputs that can have an immediate impact.”

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself but It’s Rhyming Pretty Hard

Mike didn’t want to just make a random RTD. He built off his understanding of how trends are resurfacing in different forms. I found this interesting:

The Pivot: When a Case Study Rules Too Hard to Ignore

The vehicle for this masterclass in brand building was Hyper Blast, an upcoming 12% ABV RTD inspired by late-2000s alcoholic energy drink culture. Tavern designed a massive, rich brand world around 80s and 90s jet ski culture, mapping out an entire universe of physical, ancillary products like riding grips and fuel jerry cans to show how far a single creative concept could expand.

Originally, the plan was simple, lean, and highly risk-averse: soft-launch the brand, create a killer case study, bootstrap it minimally, and maybe eventually offload the intellectual property to a major client.

Mike openly admits the plan was to “offload it as a PDF more or less.” But then they put the brand into the wild—and the market responded with absolute chaos.

The market reaction was so overwhelmingly positive, and the structural fit between millennial nostalgia and Gen Z’s love for high-octane RTDs was so perfect, that the agency realized they were sitting on a goldmine.

Mike describes the exact moment the strategy shifted:

“It started as the former. We’re like this f***ing rules. It’s so perfect. There is such a perfect time to enter the market with a product like this that it’s like we’d be fools not to just go full blast on it.”

Tavern quickly pivoted from a temporary design experiment to a fully invested beverage startup. They scrambled to build an investor deck, walked away from the bootstrap-and-sell model, and are now moving aggressively toward a summer launch.

Balancing the Agency and the Startup Burn

Going all-in on a liquid brand while running a 12-person agency is a logistical tightrope walk. To make it work without letting client work slip, Perry reallocated Tavern’s internal “design practice” hours—the time the team normally spends experimenting with new mediums and software—entirely to the execution of Hyper Blast asset builds, influencer kits, and campus launch materials.

It’s an exhausting pace, but Perry views the startup burn as an investment that feeds back into the agency’s primary mission. In his words:

“All of this should be in service of making everyone on the team, designer, strategist, even account people better at what they’re doing for our client work. So it serves us, but it also serves the client in the long term.”

And perhaps the secret ingredient to why Hyper Blast is generating so much organic momentum is that Tavern isn’t choked by the typical founder anxiety. Because they have a thriving agency backing them, they can afford to take massive creative risks.

As Mike bluntly puts it:

“Hyper Blast could be gone tomorrow, and that’s fine. Honestly, I think that’s part of why it might work. I’m not so f***ing precious about it in the way a lot of startup founders tend to be.”

By successfully taking Hyper Blast from an internal agency brief to a living, breathing retail product, Tavern didn’t just build a case study to show clients they could handle end-to-end strategy—they actually went out and proved it.

THE NEW RULE

The best way to prove you can do something is to go out and build it yourself. Stop waiting for a client brief to validate your team’s deepest strategic capabilities. Create your own incubator, run the hard yards from formulation to retail shelves, and don’t be afraid if your proof-of-concept takes on a life of its own. True expertise isn’t practiced on a slide deck—it’s proven in the market.

I wanted to share the following video because Mike is really talking about BRAND BUILDING in bev/alc in a super clear way.

For more on brand-building in the bev/alc sector, subscribe.

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The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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“It is forbidden. No new rules.” ~ Tad Dorda, founder, Chopin Vodka

At The New Rules, we obviously are into the new rules. Tell us what you’re doing that’s different. Show us how you did what no one said you could do. We’re always looking for the ways the industry is evolving, and the people and brands that are moving it forward.

But when I sat down with Tad Dorda and his daughter Alexandra Dorda-Marcu – the founding family behind Chopin Vodka – I was aptly challenged in my approach. This industry (myself included) is obsessed with the “pivot,” the “secret sauce,” and Chopin’s strategy is the opposite of that: a radical commitment to the permanent.

For thirty years, the Dordas have played by a singular, ancient rule: make vodka the “good way, the original way.” They are not planning to change that.

The strategy: the war on neutrality

Chopin’s central mission has been a decades-long war against the very word “neutral.” Legally and culturally, vodka has been defined as a spirit without distinct character, the spirit you can mix with anything and not taste.

Tad Dorda views this as the industry’s greatest misrepresentation.

“If it’s a neutral spirit, there’s nothing to talk about,” he explains. “But vodka is not a chemical product. It has terroir. It has a place where it grew, people who planted it, and who distilled it.”

By producing single-ingredient vodkas (potato, rye, and wheat) side-by-side, Chopin forces a conversation that most of their competitors would rather avoid. They are betting on the liquid’s character in a category that has spent a century trying to erase it.

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The radical simplification: scaling the “slow way”

Perhaps the most contrarian move in Chopin’s 130-year history (that’s how old their distillery is!): is their refusal to scale at the expense of season. While most brands chase growth by ensuring 365-day production cycles, Chopin is beholden to the harvest.

Their signature potato vodka is distilled only when the ingredients are fresh during a tight three-month window from September to November. While they could store potatoes in refrigerated warehouses to produce year-round and juice their margins, they flatly refuse.

“Don’t rush it,” Tad warns. “Don’t try to make much more of it very fast because you will have to sacrifice quality. If we change something, we’ll only mess it up.”

Intuitive identity: from Podlaskie to Vera Wang

Truth be told, Chopin looks like a lot of other vodkas on the shelf today. But there’s a reason for that: they invented the look.

Alexandra explains that the frosted wine bottle with the clear window, now a category standard, is a design originally patented by Chopin and created by the factory workers at their distillery in Podlaskie, Poland, in the early 90s.

Instead of hiring a high-priced London or NYC branding agency to define their “vibe,” the Dordas rely on intuition.

This authenticity is what led to their recent collaboration with Vera Wang. It wasn’t a “normal corporate arrangement” engineered by agents; it was a lunch between two people who shared a passion for craftsmanship. Vera designed a bottle – and personally selected the liquid inside – for a brand she had already been drinking for twenty years.

Simplicity as the final achievement

As we wrapped up, Tad returned to a sentiment often attributed to Frédéric Chopin himself: “Simplicity is the final achievement.”

In a sea of 4,000 SKUs and endless gimmicks, Chopin is happy to remain “small and tiny” (I asked them to define “tiny” but did not receive a conclusive answer). They aren’t chasing the next generation of drinkers with a rebrand; they are waiting for that generation to realize that the cleanest, most honest distillation in the world doesn’t need to change to stay relevant.

Kaboom.

The (NOT) New Rules:

1. Standing still can be a disruption. In an industry obsessed with the “new,” a radical commitment to the original process creates a distinct brand whitespace. If everyone is pivoting, staying exactly where you are makes you the landmark.

2. The liquid must tell the story. “If it only sells when you’re demoing it and telling the story, you’ve failed,” is a common industry mantra. Chopin takes this further: the liquid should be so distinctive (like their creamy potato profile) that once a consumer tastes it, they can never go back to “neutral.”

3. Simplicity is a virtue, not a lack of effort. Refusing to add SKUs or rebranding etc. isn’t about doing less; it’s about protecting the “final achievement” of a perfect product.

Last week The New Rules invaded Brooklyn for BCB!

If you caught up with us at Industry City or swapped notes with the team, thank you for making it an incredible week. If you are still nursing the general industry fatigue that comes with navigating today’s volatile landscape, read on because we have some notes for you.

For the first half of the year, the beverage industry has been speed-skating through what feels like a massive, unpredictable curve.

We are navigating a multi-layered reality characterized by distributor inventory corrections, a historic wave of strategic M&A (Molson Coors buying Atomic Brands, Gallo snapping up Four Roses, the list goes on), and a fundamental evolution in how people actually consume liquid.

To get a real, unfiltered pulse check on how independent brands are handling this mid-year shift, I caught up with three distinct The New Rules alums during BCB week to talk about market velocity, Gen Z realities, and where the momentum is shifting for the second half of 2026.

1. Mother’s Milk: The Convergence of “Turning Up” and Functional Wellness

When we last checked in with Jen Roman-Matito and Kristie Kish for our “Newbies” series, they were building out their vision for a coconut-water-forward, anti-hangover canned cocktail. Halfway through 2026, they find themselves sitting exactly at the intersection of the two most explosive trends in modern beverage.

Jen: “Two things that I’ve seen that are really positive for the business is: one, canned cocktails are the fastest-growing category in alcohol - period. Secondary, in the non-alc space, functional beverages are through the roof in every way, shape, or form.”

For Mother’s Milk, navigating this landscape means scaling up with aggressive, deliberate liquid choices. They are bringing two new spirits to market via a tequila and a rum SKU. Currently anchoring the Northeast territory, the brand is mapping its next big move southward, targeting Florida as its next anchor state for late 2026.

2. Wild Mannered: Shifting Toward Sessionability and RTS Economy

For Michael and Perry, the childhood best friends behind the premium soju brand Wild Mannered, the first half of 2026 has been a period of macro-stabilization. Emerging from what they call the “COVID hangover period,” they are watching consumer trends solidify around lower ABV, clean ingredients, and sessionability.

Michael: “We’re all shifting a little bit more towards lower ABV, sessionable, high-quality ingredients—things that are easier to drink, but also a little bit of a different riff on traditional spirits.”

While industry analysts obsess over whether Gen Z is drinking like previous generations, Wild Mannered has found their core traction by positioning their 13% ABV liquid against traditional, heavy RTD incumbents. Looking toward the remainder of the year, Michael points out that the real category breakout to watch isn’t another single-serve can, but the evolution of Ready-to-Serve (RTS) multi-serve glass formats, driven by macro giants entering the fray and a consumer desire for shared, economical social experiences.

3. Little Saints: The Death of “All-or-Nothing” Sobriety

We included Little Saints in our first-annual New Rules of Brand Building in Bev/Alc report, tracking their rapid growth. After a Shark Tank appearance that generated $2 million in a single month on her website, founder Megan Klein has watched the brand settle into steady retail momentum across Sprouts and Whole Foods. Her internal consumer data reveals a massive behavioral shift in how people view the non-alc category in 2026.

Megan: “In 2025, non-alc still felt pretty new to most people, and people were thinking about non-alc like very ‘all or nothing.’ They were either going out drinking or they were like not drinking. The 2026 survey was totally different. People are not counting the days they don’t drink anymore.”

Instead of rigid sobriety rules, consumers are fluidly blending categories within the exact same night out, swapping between standard pours and premium non-alc cocktails. This data aligns with Megan’s production strategy. While their premium bottled non-alcoholic spirits carry a strong dollar value, volume velocity is overwhelmingly driven by packaging format, with 90% of their unit volume moving through cans.

The Takeaway: Stop Looking at the Hinges

As the industry navigates the final stretches of this mid-year shift, it is incredibly easy to get bogged down in the hyper-calculated metrics of distributor contraction or macro consolidation.

But as these three brands show, market validation does not come from waiting for 100% certainty or begging a legacy system for permission. Velocity belongs to the founders who look past the noise of the test, focus entirely on the raw truth of consumer connection, and simply burn the boats to move forward.

Let’s go 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

Need support for your brand? We do:
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And support our work by:
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The New Rules is proud to be the official media partner for the ultimate BCB kickoff party. We are taking over Jolene Sound Room for a Daiquiri Time Out hosted by 2025 Daiq-Off winner Katie Sips, featuring specialty cocktails fueled by Ten To One Rum, Mike’s Hot Honey, and Mothers Milk, alongside live music by Snips and a live stream of the Knicks game playing throughout the night.

The details:

• Monday, June 8th, from 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM

• Jolene Sound Room (353 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn)

• RSVP!

For the first half of the year, the beverage industry has been nursing a massive, post-COVID inventory headache. Distributors are bogged down, consolidation is rampant, and the rumor mill has been insisting that Gen Z has abandoned drinking altogether.

But according to Brian Rosen, Chairman of Investbev, a firm managing nearly a billion dollars of capital for the industry, we aren’t looking at a permanent decline. We’re looking at a much-needed market correction.

To get an accurate pulse check on the industry ahead of Bar Convent Brooklyn (BCB), I sat down with Brian.

His take? The macroeconomic headwinds are finally turning into tailwinds, but only for the founders who understand what the modern consumer actually wants to put in their glass (or can).

The message is clear: Stop blaming the market, stop building vanity brands for an audience of one, and start looking at where the actual liquid velocity is moving.

The Myth of the Teetotaling Gen Z

One of the loudest narratives in beverage right now is that the younger demographic has permanently walked away from alcohol. Brian’s response to that?

“I’m going to give you a beverage specific word. It’s pronounced b*******.”

The narrative was born from a perfect storm of bad timing. The cohort that should have been turning 21, doing frat party keg stands, and learning how to talk to sommeliers was instead stuck in their parents’ basements during the height of the pandemic. It wasn’t a structural shift in human desire; it was a three-year developmental stunting.

Now? They are officially back. Data is showing that Gen Z is currently the demographic hitting on-premise accounts the heaviest, and they are the most open to experimentation and retail recommendations. The drinking population hasn’t shrunk; the curve just artificially dipped from a pandemic high and is now correcting right back onto its linear, pre-COVID upward trajectory.

The Inventory Hangover vs. The M&A Reignition

While consumers are back at the bar, the middle tier is still feeling the pain. Distributors are currently saddled with a massive inventory hangover due to brand liquidations and retail consolidation. If you want a distributor or retailer to care about you in this climate, your product has to be undeniably compelling.

The good news? The major conglomerates like Diageo, Constellation, Pernod Ricard, and LVMH have officially reignited their M&A pipelines after a completely stagnant couple of years. Brian pulled no punches about why these corporate giants are hunting for acquisitions:

“They do not know how to create brands, period, end of story. They need to acquire brands.”

The capital is moving heavily toward alternative categories. Ready-to-Drink (RTD) cocktails have officially overtaken vodka as the drink of choice, a shift that just hit the wires. Born out of the home-mixology movement during lockdowns, the format is now dominating because it solves a massive margin and labor problem for rising weight-staff wages on-premise.

At the same time, all eyes are on the upcoming federal regulatory shifts this November for cannabis beverages, with Investbev portfolio brands like Cann and Willie’s seeing explosive growth ahead of the ruling.

We are also seeing a massive orbital effect in non-alc, with industry leaders like Athletic Brewing factually expected by Brian to cross the M&A finish line soon (interestingly, Brian also flagged RTD brand Carbliss as a prime contender for an acquisition exit soon. He noted you can always tell a brand is prepping for a sale when their social media shifts away from lifestyle and starts obsessing over team, profit, and revenue to pump up valuation).

What to Expect at BCB This Year

Brian shared his blueprint for how independent founders should navigate the BCB floor and look at the market right now.

First, you have to cure your “Executive Chef Syndrome.” The number one mistake independent founders make is creating a brand they personally love, resulting in an audience of exactly one person. You cannot build a business on a hyper-niche liquid that fills a gap nobody else cares about. Build for market reality, not your own palate.

Second, realize that trade shows are not for discovery. Brian has notoriously zero patience for the traditional trade show circuit:

“I have never liked trade shows. I think there’s no ROI. I think it’s b*******... BCB is not where you invent the relationship. It’s where you close the deal.”

Finally, remember that the consumer holds the product remote. The era of big suppliers forcing a brand down the throat of the market through sheer distribution muscle is dead. Thanks to low-cost digital media, the consumer now creates brands through pure demand. If they want it enough, their cultural collective desire will force the market to supply it.

“At the end of the day, you still have to make a good product. You have to make a good liquid that appeals to more people than it doesn’t. That’s how brands work.”

That’s all, folks. See you there!

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

Need support for your brand? Reach out! hi@nihilo.agency

And support our work by:

- Subscribing

- Sharing

- Inviting us to speak at your conference or event on branding/bev/alc/fun

Cheers.