Data Drinks: An Inside Look at Death & Co.'s $53,000 Cocktail

March 22, 2018: Originally published in Forbes.

Each time you order a drink at a bar, it is tracked. Over time, many bars build up large databases of drink orders; bar owners know everything from how many times each drink has been ordered to how much revenue it has produced to which brands are most popular and when.

In "Data Drink", a new monthly column, we use numbers to illustrate the story of one cocktail at one bar.

Where: Death & co., in the East Village, has been at the vanguard of cocktails since it opened in 2007. The menu changes seasonally, and while the highly-trained staff can make pretty much any drink possible, most customers tend to order from the menu.

The drink: The Outlaw Country, an Old-Fashioned style cocktail created by Tyson Buhler. Priced at $16, this was Death & co.'s best-selling drink on the 2017 Spring Summer menu.

"This drink pretty much dominated the sales chart from start to end of this menu," Death & co. head bartender Matt Belanger says. "People tend to order the old fashioned-style cocktail on the menu disproportionately more than any other cocktail."

Read the full article on Forbes.