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

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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.

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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

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• 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.

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

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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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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?

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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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“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

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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

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Liminal beers, hoppy hops, green monsters

We’ve written about this before, but are drinks getting to be a bit much? There’s something joyful about the simplicity of just having a beer, or just having a soda.

Iin contrast to this, we’re noticing a lot of early stage bev brands bundling their liquids with extras. For example: ARMRA, a new colostrum soda.

Of course it’s not just the newbies. Legacy brands are also pushing outside of their lane, with Heineken launching Outdoor Brewing – an alc-free beer with electrolytes and Vitamin C. Its tag line is ‘crafted for after’, which feels quite pleasing. However it still seems to float in a strange, liminal space. Are they replacing energy drinks? Sports drinks? Are they for the pub? The bar? The hike? Your front room?

It’s a question we’ve asked time and again: what occasion do these drinks belong to? Do we want to mix our supplements and our drinks? Are we blurring enjoyment and wellness? Is this a good thing? And do these brands have the ability to truly go long-term, once we’re past the horizon of the buzzy trend moment?

Speaking of trends… we know and love hops for their alchemical role in beer, but what about elsewhere? There’s signs that hoppy non-beer drinks are on the move, with HPWTR being acquired by Constellation Brands and Fabric launching their zero non-alc hop water. Of course there’s also Tamworth Garden White Mountain Gin - made with three kinds of hops.

Finally, a message for brands: find your own theme. If you see another, distinctive brand that’s doing very well, it’s natural to feel the stirrings of envy.

You, as a founder or marketer or CEO wouldn’t be human if you didn’t look at another business and think: yes, they’re onto something, why didn’t I think of that? But the reason that brand is doing well is because it’s doing its own thing. The world already has one BuzzBallz and it doesn’t need any more (we’re looking at you, Global Brands, for buying Quadz and you, Boston Beer Co with your Lytt electric coolers).

WE BRING YOU BEER NEWS

-Molson Coors is bringing back value beer brand Keystone Ice - which was discontinued in 2021. Reports suggest it’s a move to broaden its offering.

-Alc-free beer brand Days has been acquired by Sunrise Beverages – a house of fellow beer brands including Efes and Gipsy Hill. Days founder Mike Gammell says they’d always planned to find a partner to help the business scale, and that this collab should bring the brand to “more consumers, more occasions and more places than ever before”.

-ABInbev CEO Michel Doukeris is all smiles on CNBC, talking about rising beer sales and lightly hinting that they might be considering making a protein beer.

-In the NA beer space, Crazy Mountain co-founder Rande Gerber thinks he’s cracked the secret to building a zero-beer company: great distribution, great liquid, and a willingness to tap into people’s rituals without lecturing them.

Speaking of celebrity-founded beer brands…. Bero’s VP of Marketing says that celebrity doesn’t guarantee success, in an interview going into some of her thought’s behind Bero’s brand-building.

OPINIONS PLEASE

-Why is the spirits industry so obsessed with the short term? Why aren’t more marketers thinking about building their brand over the next 30 years, rather than the next three? Zak Oganian, CEO of Origen X, shares thoughts with The Spirits Business.

A HAND FOR THE LEGACY BRANDS

-Absolut’s Tabasco edition really got people excited. The global Vice President of Marketing for Absolut, Malibu and Kahlua (what a job) says they’re pinning their hopes on tabasco vodka for the next three years, and adds that most vodka brands aren’t exciting enough (we paraphrase).

Our take: coming up on The New Rules, we speak with a true legacy vodka brand who also believes the category runs the risk of fading into nothingness.

-The world’s best tequila? Herradura Reposado, according to the 2026 London Spirits Competition. Forbes has more on the story, but it’s worth pointing out that this tequila was launched back in the 70s and was the world’s first commercially available reposado.

-Sazerac continues to snap up brands. The latest? Canned cocktail brand SIPMARGS.

-Say goodbye and goodnight to Schlitz. Its last batch was just brewed.

EVER-SHRINKING BOOZE

-Go into any hip liquor store or bottle shop and you’ll spot them: tiny little tins of cocktails that are pocket-sized but rocket-fuelled. So it makes sense that Diageo is getting in on it, with their own mini RTDs. Can’t help but wish they’d made the packaging a little more exciting.

-Diageo hs also released an RTD version of its Ritual Zero Proof.

Our take: Nice, but why does the packaging look so… pharmaceutical?

-Some brands do tins. ARKAY is doing Tetrapaks.

ALCOHOL FREE, BUT HAPPY

-Margarita-lovers rejoice: Giffard NA triple sec is coming to the UK. Note the part where they talk about how this is made using a traditional shrub technique. There’s growing new appreciation for trad methods of working with bitter flavors and fermentation.

BRANDS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

-Heineken has invented ‘The Clinker’ - a band that goes around your beer can, and lets fellow drinkers know whether you have shared interests.

Our take: One the one hand, this feels fun and novel. On the other, weirdly complicated?

-Who wouldn’t want a gigantic bottle of tequila. Sazerac’s ‘Extra Grande’ edition of Tromba is fun and novel AND, allegedly, greener.

-Angostura now does sugar syrups, and they sound DELICIOUS.

-Brewdog founder James Watt is back, and hes…. launching another beer brand? It’s called Second Best.

STORIES FROM THE REAL WORLD

-Forget the marketing and the branding. What are people actually drinking? Substacker Kate Daykin asked 61 people what their go-to drink is at a fancy bar, and at a dive bar - and the answers are interesting.

-Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Name a trend and it shall manifest. It happened for Quiet Quitting. The Great Resignation. Girl Dinner. Now it seems to be happening for the ‘Boy Martini’.

-Did you know, the first nude poster printed in Japan, in 1922, was actually a Suntory advert for its Akadama Port Wine? Town & Country has a nice piece about the storied history of the brand.

-If you enjoyed reading about Suntory, how about making a coffee and reading about another successful bev brand, but one at a very different stage? Vinepair has the story behind St Agrestis, which sold its Phony Negroni to The Wine Group earlier this year.

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In the crowded landscape of modern tequila, where premiumization has shifted the focus from hype to producer-led craftsmanship, building something that truly stands out is a feat. So many brands start with a formula and look for a story. Sofía Paloma Juárez did the opposite.

She spent nine years building CASA J. It is a project rooted in heritage, meticulous R&D, and the simple desire to bottle a memory. It’s also beautiful.

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The road to tequila

The story of CASA J begins in Jalisco, Mexico. “I wanted to bottle a memory,” says Juárez, who nine years ago reconnected with her dad, a native of the region.

“That memory was driving over the rolling hills of Jalisco for the first time with my father... it was a sweetness in the air that I had never smelt in my life with this fiery, ashy, smoky natural earth and wood.”

Coming from a high-level background in luxury brand building, including stints at Veuve Clicquot and Belvedere, Juárez understood that a great story is not enough. You need the liquid to back it up. She spent years visiting distilleries and building relationships with maestros tequileros before ever going to market.

Something that struck me about this interview with Sofia is just how clearly she has articulated her story. Its tight. I mean, really tight.

The ensemble innovation: old world meets new

While the tequila industry is flooded, CASA J is carving out a niche as an ensemble – a term traditionally used in the world of mezcal to refer to different agave species being distilled together.

CASA J uses an ensemble of traditional and ancestral production techniques. This is a rare technical achievement in the tequila space, utilizing a blend of 93% traditional production and 7% ancestral methods.

• The ancestral soul: The 7% ancestral portion is the brand’s soul, cooked in stone and adobe ovens over wood fire, hand-macerated in hollowed tree trunks, and distilled in copper stills over direct flame.

• The traditional foundation: The 93% traditional portion provides balance, using stone brick ovens, roller mill maceration, and stainless steel distillation with copper coils.

“It’s a marriage of both old world and new world,” Juárez explains. “We wanted to bridge the old, be inspired by the historic, but be a contemporary brand that would be lasting and future-proof.”

A vessel with purpose

Juárez knew that in a crowded spirits market, the bottle needed to be as intentional as the liquid. She wanted a design that bridged historic Mexican architecture with a contemporary, contemporary aesthetic.

To realize this, she partnered with John Gilsenan of IWANT Design, whose work for other female-helmed brands like Wölfer Estate Vineyards and H&H Talea Beer had already earned her admiration.

The resulting ceramic vessel reflects a deeper mission: empowering Mexican artisans. Juárez spent years identifying a ceramic factory in Pachuca, Hidalgo, that shared her values, specifically one that empowers working mothers with flexible schedules and provides full-time roles for individuals with disabilities.

Every bottle is handcrafted by these artisans using natural raw materials, turning the packaging into a tangible commitment to the community behind the brand.

The case for ultra-premium

CASA J enters the market at an SRP of $129, a price point that positions it firmly in the luxury category. In an era where consumers are trading up for products with authentic connections to heritage and additive-free status, Juárez is betting on the intelligent, educated consumer.

Currently, the brand is available throughout New York State and via their website, where they ship to over 40 US states. Despite being in the early stages of distribution, the brand has already caught the attention of experts. Without paying for a single placement, CASA J has secured incredible organic press, including a 92-point score from the Tequila Report and recognition from Agave Matchmaker and Taste Tequila as one of the best spirits of 2026.

“Consumers are now becoming highly intelligent on this spirit,” she says. “It is not something that brands should hide, their production method, but rather be very frank to the consumer about.”

By focusing on the “additive-free” movement and the superior quality of her ensemble production, Juárez is justifying that premium price not through marketing gloss, but through transparency and integrity.

Her thesis is that when you have a story that is authentic paired with a high-quality product, aligned consumers will gravitate towards it.

What’s working?

CASA J just launched. Already, sales are split 50/50 between on-premise and retail, with a strong focus on face-to-face connection. Juárez is a regular at her own tastings, meeting the skeptics who have been “ruined by tequila” in their past and proving that the spirit can be a refined, high-integrity experience.

For the next five years, the focus is simple: keep the integrity high, continue crafting with the maestros, and collaborate with the chefs and mixologists who are shaping the future of the category.

There’s a patience in Sofia’s approach I found incredibly refreshing. With trends constantly shifting, and the spirits market in serious flux, I see a lot of “rush to market” and “rush to prove” and “rush rush rush” all around. Sofia isn’t bending to that. She’s taking her time to do it right.

In New Rules tradition we asked:

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

“It is not as simple as doing business here in the United States for many reasons. I had many agreements that fell through and distilleries that changed their process. You have to be incredibly patient. But if you have that high level of integrity and you really take the time to build authentic relationships, it pays off.”

Is there anything you would do differently or tell other founders to do differently?

“I would tell them to trust the process of discovery. I spent nine years doing R&D and community building. It might have felt like a long time, but it ensured that when we launched in early 2026, we were not just another brand. We were a product with a soul.”

THE NEW RULE

Innovation is not always about creating something brand new. Sometimes, it’s about having the patience to honor an old-world tradition, finding the right partners who share your values, and refusing to cut corners just to get to market faster.

If alcohol has to stand up to any major competitor in the coming years, it’s going to be THC. It’s increasingly legalized around the world (although the looming federal ban in the USA is going to be interesting), it’s increasingly socially accepted, and brands are absolutely ready to tap into that.

Field Trip is one of those. They describe themselves as “a new American spirit”, delivering 3mg of THC per pour, and with messaging that emphasizes gentle, steady connection. Or, as they put it, “feeling good, not gone”.

“We were seeking a drink that offered a little lift in social situations, enhanced our creative thinking, and generally elevated our everyday moments without any of the negative effects of alcohol,” the brand’s Head of Social Content Sam Livingston tells us. “The 3mg dosage keeps things light and manageable, and we liked the idea of a citrus-y, botanical flavor that took the place of gin or tequila in cocktails”.

Field Trip is new. Really new.

We spoke with Sam just months after Field Trip was set up, so we really caught them in the earliest stages of building the business.

However, although the brand itself is newborn it’s benefited from a lot of different experience feeding into it. The team comes from across creative fields – art direction, product development, photo, video, social media, web development – and all of those skills are shaping Field Trip, including its admirably minimal branding.

With a product like this, there are some obvious design directions they could have gone in, and it’s notable that they haven’t. Sam says that’s a reaction to other THC brands that “try to do too much”, either by adopting obnoxious graphics, going kitsch, or hiding behind clinical visuals.

“We think restraint is a form of respect for the consumer that says, ‘we trust you to get it’,” she explains. “When you strip a product down to only what’s essential, what remains has to be true.

“We wanted Field Trip to feel dignified enough to be quiet. The shape, the weight, the way it sits on a table or bar cart: all of that is doing the work. If those things are right, you don’t need to shout.”

Explanation is part of the challenge

It’s not just about avoiding stereotypes, it’s also a messaging job. People know what alcohol is and what it does, but for many, THC is a different beast. There’s hesitation, there’s lack of understanding, and those are feelings Field Trip is at pains to combat.

Sam says they’re doing this with repetitive, and gently insistent language that’s used time and time again to reassure people that Field Trip is a low-dose option that offers a gentle, controllable high. It’s also interesting to note that the brand is being centred around socialising and being creative.

“It allows you to maintain an enjoyable experience socially,” says Sam, “to work on creative projects at home, lounge at the park, and so on, without, say, the effects of an intense edible or several cocktails or glasses of wine.

“That also hopefully comes across in our imagery: we’re sharing craft drink and dessert recipes, and any portraits we post consist of people peacefully spending time together or working on something creative.”

How the brand grows

Field Trip’s launch and growth strategy is, for now, focused on paid and organic social content that aims to show what’s possible via recipes for citrusy drinks, gummies and desserts that people can make at home. Their website and Insta has directions for classic cocktails like Negronis and Palomas as well as Gimlet jello shots.

Events are also an important part of the strategy. Sam says their focus is on popping up in Los Angeles and New York and giving people firsthand experience of Field Trip. Watching them encounter the brand has also given them invaluable product insight. They’d always intended it to be an alcohol replacement – a stand-in for gin or tequila in a cocktail – but Sam says they’ve realised people are equally happy to drink it on its own, over ice.

And although this brand is still fresh, they’ve already learned plenty about building in this space. We asked Sam to reflect on these early days:

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

“Regulations are constantly changing, so we’ve been working on alternate products in the event that we’re unable to sell our current product going forward. We’re incredibly excited about what we’ve got on the way, but it takes a lot of effort and experimentation to stay a few steps ahead in this specific industry.”

Is there anything you’d do differently, or tell other founders to do differently?

“We think of FIeld Trip as a point of view: how people deserve to feel in their everyday lives. The best companies know that when building a brand, what you’re really creating is a relationship with the consumer. The object (or liquid, in our case) is just the contact point. Build the brand like it’s the product – not a label on the product, not a story wrapped around the product, but the product itself. When a brand is working well, it’s not a visual identity, it’s a consistent point of view that will allow people to trust wherever you take them next.”

THE NEW RULE

Branding can be loud and exuberant, but it doesn’t have to be. Understanding what you want to say and communicating it quietly, confidently and consistently is a totally valid way to connect with people – especially if you’re building in a space that’s less familiar.

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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“We don’t want you to drink this in a leather chair. We don’t want you to drink this in a saloon exclusively. Take it and do whatever you want with it. Pour it over ice cream. It’s meant to be fun and meant to be empowering.” ~Charlie Rodman

“The bourbon aisle is a sea of brown liquid, sepia labels, and stories of dead white guys who may have nothing to do with the product on the shelf.” ~Charlie Rodman

For some, this is very appealing. For others, it is not.

In many ways, the bourbon category has an intimidating “culture of connoisseurship.” Between the gatekeeping of mash bills and the reverence for specific spring water sources, many potential consumers feel excluded - and frankly, uninterested.

No Sleep Beverage – an alcohol beverage investment and consulting platform in the United States that acquires, supports, and grows emerging, culture-focused alcohol brands – is betting on a new brand that they recently acquired: Nine Banded Whiskey.

Charlie Rodman, CMO of No Sleep, describes this brand as the “gateway to bourbon, not the gatekeeper.”

Having shifted from minority investor to full owner of Nine Banded Whiskey, No Sleep is bringing to fruition the vision for the brand with an updated positioning and visual identity they built with the brand’s founders.

I sat down with Charlie, (for the second time! See our first interview here: How No Sleep Beverage is building transcendent brands), to discuss how they are repositioning Nine Banded.

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The strategy: rolling up the “iconic”

For No Sleep, the acquisition of Nine Banded was a foundational move in a broader roll up strategy. By taking majority positions in brands that address a distinct brand whitespace in the category., No Sleep can focus on the heavy lifting of professionalization.

Charlie explains that brand is a significant differentiator because it offers a shortcut to pull marketing. In a sea of 4,000 SKUs, most founders over invest in the liquid while under investing in the commercial system.

“We like to think of consumers as rational actors. It’s b*******,” Charlie says. “If you can do the things that help you stand out and win in the four seconds that someone evaluates the shelf when they’re shopping for something new, that’s the easiest chance you have to convert the sale”.

The No Sleep strategy is to identify brands with transcendent potential and then use shared infrastructure to scale them. By saturating local markets (what No Sleep calls “deepen before you broaden”), they create a proof of adoption that is far more valuable to a future acquirer than a wide but shallow national presence.

The move to a single SKU: radical simplification

Perhaps the most contrarian move in this rebuild is the decision to move Nine Banded toward a single SKU model. While most bourbon brands chase growth by lining the shelf with endless variations and details about origin and method and barrels and yada yada, No Sleep is simplifying.

The logic is rooted in consumer psychology and the accessible price point. Most consumers shopping at this level are not whiskey nerds; they’re looking for a versatile, reliable spirit that fits their lifestyle.

By focusing on one flagship product, No Sleep eliminates the paradox of choice. This single SKU is designed to be the ultimate Swiss Army knife of bourbon. This simplification does not just help the consumer; it streamlines the entire supply chain and allows the brand to win the shelf instantly.

The rebrand: from utility to good, plain fun

Truth be told: I’ve been wanting to talk about this rebrand since I first spoke to Charlie about it last July. But I could not. I had to stay silent. I was entrusted with this, and by God, I kept my word.

Well, folks, the time has come.

The bottle’s visual identity, developed with Quaker City Mercantile (QCM) (see our interview with QCM founder Steve Grasse who is amazingly hilarious + spot on), sits at the intentional intersection of a wanted poster and a concert poster.

It swaps traditional bourbon browns for a color palette inspired by the saturated tones of a Texas sunset.

Liquid Authenticity: From MGP to Texas

A critical component of this rebuild is the transition of the liquid itself. In its previous iteration, the brand was MGP-sourced (a bulk supplier out of Indiana). While MGP produces quality spirits, it lacked a unique connection to the brand’s roots.

With a new repositioning focused on inviting drinkers to “show up as their true selves,” it was vital that the brand representing Austin did the same. As a result, No Sleep is committing to sourcing Nine Banded whiskey exclusively from within Texas.

By moving away from a generic spirit and embracing a locally produced liquid, Nine Banded better aligns its values with its promise to consumers. This transition allows the brand to remain authentic while maintaining an accessible price point.

Cha-ching!

The New Rules:

1. Fun leads to engagement; fear leads to avoidance.

Bourbon has become gatekept by expertise, turning a purchase into an intimidating exam. The insight for Nine Banded was to remove those barriers. Internally, the rally cry is “all for fun, fun for all,” emphasizing the individual’s choice over the industry’s rules.

2. Tension creates intrigue.

By taking things that should not work together (like a whiskey bottle and a concert ticket) and binding them through a cohesive vision, you create cool. “Tension creates intrigue, but it’s so hard to deliver authentically because you’re deliberately taking things that should not work together and you need some element that binds them or it’s just going to come across as forced.” ~CR

3. If it only sells when you demo it, you’ve failed.

A transcendent brand must connect by itself.

“If it only sells when you’re demoing it and telling the story, you’re already failing as a brand. You need it to be able to tell the story and connect by itself.” ~CR

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

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Every month we watch what’s going on in the bev/alc industry, and then we serve our subscribers a perfectly mixed dose of news and views from the sector: who’s releasing what, what’s on founders’ mind, big rebrands, campaigns and announcements, where the money is going.

We call it Happy Hour, and we’re happy you’re here to enjoy it with us.

Pre-gamers, ‘better’ booze, kids drinks for adults

Pre-gaming, pre-drinking, pre-loading, getting ready… whatever you want to call it, it’s not a new ritual. HOWEVER, it is having a moment in the sun.

The WSJ recently reported on this, saying that drinks are now so expensive that people are going back to their college era and drinking beforehand. You can see signs of this in some recent moves: Global Brands just bought Quadz – portable, high ABV, colorful in a way that’s very reminiscent of another buzzy brand – and Pernod Ricard has launched a pink Malibu that’s being marketed for the ‘getting ready’ moment.

In a completely different direction, there’s a movement to embed a sense of self-care into the bev space. You’ve got Vodkade, a sports drink-feeling brand that’s just launched a sugar-free line; Future Chateau, a wine brand that sells low ABV, low calorie wine marketed to give you less next-day regrets; and Lucky Saint launching an electrolyte lager.

There’s also the continuing fascination with weird, hybrid booze that is both bad for you and good for you - eg, it’ll get you tipsy, but it’ll also give you electrolytes or nootropics or adaptogens. Esquire’s story on protein cocktails (yes, really) conveys some of the strangeness of it all.

If wellness isn’t your thing, there’s always nostalgia. We’re spotting brands that are building in the ‘kids drinks but for adults’ space, including Popsicle-flavored hard malts, Mirth sparkling fruit juice, and even Monster Energy’s new brand FLRT which, on purpose or not, looks like a teen magazine.

Now, time for your quick-scroll news:

WINE IS FINE

We’ve shared a few stories this year about the state of wine: in short, it’s difficult right now. Semafor reports that China is importing less wine, some producers are holding a lot of excess inventory, and young Chinese people don’t find wine especially compelling.

Bringing in a slightly fresher perspective, there’s Nice – who have a new and very not snobby new brand by Earthling Studio.

Young people love Bordeaux, it seems - perhaps down to pricing, and perhaps down to producers going on a courting spree.

THE CREATIVE STUFF

Creative studio Stranger and Stranger have revamped Martini’s vermouth line. The textured glass, in particular, is quite lovely.

Allora plans to open their own bar in a lemon grove in Italy’s Procida. The design sounds considered, conscientious and intensely on-brand.

Well done to How&How for their work with THC soda and gummies brand Out of Office. The writing is fun, so is the brand, and if you’re a TNR subscriber you’ll know we believe alc/bev brands really need to loosen up.

NO ALCOHOL FOR US PLEASE

Constellation Brands now owns sparkling water brand Hopwtr.

Our take: Mixed feelings about this. Hops as a flavoring are criminally underrated (seriously, try making kombucha-flavoured with citra hops), and Hopwtr is onto something here. On the other hand, they’re throwing a lot at the situation: adaptogens, nootropics, tea... Somewhere in there the message might get lost.

Coors now comes in a 0.0% version

The Wine Group now owns Phony Negroni.

Our take: some of the best NA options are the bitter-flavored bevs (Iessi and Ghia being obvious ones). We predict more moves like this into the bitter end of the flavor spectrum.

It’s barely been five minutes since George Clooney launched his alc-free beer brand Crazy Mountain, and already it’s chugging down investment.

FLAVOR ADVENTURES

People really do love novelty flavors. Does matcha or hibiscus belong with beer? Ceremony says yes.

How about olive distilled vodka from Ammos? (served from an excellently goaty bottle).

Or lemon Madri?

Or, coming in hot in the weird brand crossover category, pickle beer from PBR and Grillo’s?

COLLABS

Saint James Tea just announced a crossover with Tarte Cosmetics, and it makes an awful lot of sense.

Our take: Brand collabs are certainly nothing new, and in the last decade they’ve struck an increasingly fevered attitude, as companies outdo one another to come up with the most bizarre brand combos. That said, bev brands x beauty brands feels right somehow.

EVERYTHING IN A TIN

You can now get your Aperol spritz in a can.

Jam Shed now serves red wine in a can, mixed with cola.

TO BOOKMARK FOR LATER

“So much of human creativity, sex and culture has for centuries been marinated in alcohol. What’s going to happen if that stops?” So writes Henry Jefferys, in a piece that sings the praises of wine.

818 Tequila look like they’re having a lot of fun building their brand. Their ECD shares thoughts on how they’re thinking about world-building with People Brands and Things. (TLDR: they spend a lot of time on the small details, and that’s what makes it work).

Cocktail bars in South East Asia are doing some interesting things – writing in-depth stories about their serves, putting homemade ferments on the shelves and fully embracing local culture. More on that here.

The NY Times dives straight into the BuzzBallz mania.

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

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We’re about to say something controversial: ‘beautiful’ branding isn’t everything. Perfectly matched typefaces, lofty slogans and slick visuals aren’t always the answer.

As evidence of that, there’s a whole world of bev/alc brands making bank with some of the most chaotic, mismatched, un-honed and unfiltered design you can imagine. (BTW, that doesn’t mean it’s not strategic… but more on that later).

While these brands are raising money, winning over young people and changing the sector, there’s a stable of stalwart old bev/alc brands convinced that doing things the way they always have is the answer.

The same old language, the same old selling points, the same old labels. You only have to look at recent rebrands of some of the biggest names in spirits and beer to wonder if they’ve forgotten how to have fun.

Alcohol brands need to loosen up

People drink for a lot of different reasons. Maybe they want to spend time with friends, or mark an occasion, or come back down after a day sent from hell itself. But for most of us, it’s very simple: we want to enjoy ourselves.

Most consumers don’t want to be told: this beer is going to do you good, or this RTD comes with a moral message you can get behind, or this bottle of spirits was made by blind monks in a 500-year-old distillery. For the most part, they don’t care that your crest dates back to the 1920s, or that your slogan conveys some vague but aspirational message that, really, could mean anything.

They want to see something that catches their eye and makes them think to themselves: yes, I’ll enjoy this, I’ll buy it.

It’s a simple relationship, so why do so many drinks brands make it so complicated? In the alc space, the message frequently leans into the blandly smug, while in the NA space it’s often moralising. As Botivo founder Imme Ermgassen recently commented in a post about how playfulness is “achingly missing” from the category:

“Shouldn’t we all be having a little more FUN with non alc?”

As a response, they’ve just partnered with lingerie brand Coco de Mer on a special, aphrodisiac edition.

When Heineken shares a press release about its ‘ultimate’ alc-free beer – no calories, no alcohol, no sugar, you have to ask, what’s the appeal here? What’s the point of this intensely joyless liquid?

When companies make cocktails that have negligible amounts of adaptogens, and build their brand around those apparent benefits, who is that for? When is it for? How much mileage does that trend have?

Why is it that when Elton John, the master of ostentation, released a NA wine it looked like this? How did Tanqueray manage to hire someone as charismatic as Sarah Jessica Parker, and still make this campaign so bland?

Why do so many drinks brands take it so seriously?

Meet the chaos brands

I want to preface this by saying that I’ve written a lot about branding. As the former deputy editor of a well-known design magazine in the UK, I spent years of my life sifting through press releases from agencies and studios. And I’m fully bought into the power of branding; I’m as susceptible to a beautiful label or a clever tagline as anyone else.

But branding comes in many forms. And right now, the bev/alc brands that are winning are the ones that are cleverly chaotic. They’re ‘unpolished’, unfiltered, experimental. They embrace being unserious. And by doing so they appeal to young people still figuring out what they want to drink – and hence susceptible to what stands out on the shelf – as well as older consumers seeking novelty.

Look at Cueva Nueva, who we recently interviewed. Founder Phi Peinado told us:

With Cueva Nueva, we wanted to build the brand we felt should exist, but didn’t. At the end of the day, it’s booze. It doesn’t need to take itself so seriously. We want to have fun and invite other people to have fun with us.

Consider BuzzBallz. This brand is absolutely everywhere, beloved by seemingly everyone, and I think it’s fair to describe their branding as gloriously unpretentious. What about Surfside, named by Forbes as the fastest growing alcohol brand in America, and reported to be selling nine cases a minute across 50 US states in 2025? Look at the cans: rainbow stripes, a lemon sun, and a wave script font that sticks two fingers up at the cult of Swiss Modernism.

Or how about The Original Pickle Shot. Beautifully unserious. Or Whiny Baby, just acquired by Gallo and, visually speaking, a world away the usual staid wine branding. What about Uncle Arnie’s (shown above)? They just raised $7.5m.

I think one of the reasons 818 Tequila is doing so well is because it isn’t scared to actually have fun - eg by making a mini version that clips onto people’s bags. Can you imagine other big name whiskey or tequila brands doing the same?

And if you want to talk about actual heritage brands enjoying themselves - look at how many people are talking about Smirnoff’s tabasco vodka. Why? Because it’s novel, it’s maybe a little bit silly and it’s fun.

Playful doesn’t mean un-strategic

It’s easy to be a snob about branding – and there will always be a place for high-level, super sophisticated, deeply refined visual identities and advertising and general creative execution (for example, Veuve’s perfectly executed partnership with Jacquemus, or this beautiful Penfolds packaging).

But getting that right is hard. It requires a lot of effort, a lot of consideration, and if you veer even a millimetre off that path you become boring and preachy.

Being carefree and loose and experimental with your brand requires an equal amount of effort, and a deep understanding of who you are and what you’re about. Some people might look at the aesthetic of some of the brands we’ve mentioned and assume they’re two years away from hiring a big-name agency and making it all feel a bit more ‘sophisticated’. But I hope they don’t.

Alcohol brands desperately need to loosen up. Consumers want fun. They’re drawn to brands that are fun. And often that isn’t about beautiful branding – it’s about having a point of view, and a willingness to be less rigid, less scripted, less precious.

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:
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Cheers.