At Tales Of The Cocktail, Brands Invest In Capturing Hearts, Setting Trends

Aug. 21, 2023: Originally published in Forbes

Each year, bartenders and other drinks professionals attend Tales of the Cocktail, a boozy conference in New Orleans that functions a bit like New York Fashion Week for alcohol. For brands, it’s a way to identify (or set) consumer trends, but it’s also a chance to make meaningful connections with the industry’s most influential names.

Like the runway show schedule in New York, Tales, which took place between July 23 - 28 in New Orleans, is also a day-to-night weeklong conference for thousands of national and international guests. How do brands, especially smaller ones, break through the noise? How do spirits makers measure success? Is ROI gauged by the number of attendees at an event and a flurry of social media posts or something more ephemeral? In many ways, how brands approach high profile events at Tales illustrates the tensions in bringing corporate strategy to life.

Hotaling & Co., a San Francisco-based importer and distiller of artisanal spirits, staged an event that recreated the atmosphere at Martinys, Manhattan’s celebrated Japanese craft cocktail bar that was crowned U.S.'s Best New Cocktail Bar at the end of the conference. Hosted as a way to showcase the premium Japanese spirit Nikka, guests (just five or less at a time) were whisked into a private room for an intimate cocktail experience and tea ceremony led by Takuma Watanabe, Martinys co-founder. Meticulously served by Watanabe, his cocktail featured a multi-step process that combined cacao, matcha tea, coconut water and Nikka Coffey Grain Whisky. The Tea Ceremony cocktail was garnished with fresh shiso flowers and a Japanese crunchy snack. The whole experience might take about an hour and, set off in a private dining room in the French Quarter’s Napoleon House, the hushed event was a striking counterbalance against a week full of musical performances, dance parties and other large-scale events.

“It really is more about those personal intimate moments,” Hotaling & Co. chief marketing officer Brian Radics says. “Being a relatively small boutique artisanal spirits company, we don’t play the game of the large brands. The Martinys event is very Nikka, and it represents how Nikka wants to make connections with drinkers and bartenders.”

Radics acknowledges that a small intimate event posed a risk, in that the event requires investment and resources. The choice to make the audience for the event small and targeted could be weighed against how much was invested to stage the experience. (Brands tend not to disclose how much events actually cost.) Hotaling & Co. also hosted a range of other events for their other brands, including SF Stirred, a pop-up honoring Bay Area bartenders, and The Corner Store Connect, a New York-inspired grab-and-go activation.

“It is a risk,” Radics says. “We probably reached 40 people. The expectation is that those 40 people walked out of the Martinys activation now have a much deeper appreciation for the brand. It’s highly likely that is going to turn you into a Nikka fan, who seeks out Nikka in bars. Nikka is willing and patient. They will invite you to that event four years in a row. And if you finally start drinking Nikka, they will see the value in that.” The intimate event, which hosted 65 guests overall, effectively illustrates the whisky’s corporate strategy, Radics adds. “Nikka would rather have five people have a deep emotional connection with the brand than reach 500 people or 5000 people at a surface level. They take the long view in brand building. They take the 50-year view of building a brand with the right people. They will be patient and invest their energy and resources to do that.”

Fords Gin, the bartender-beloved brand that is part of the Brown-Forman portfolio, also walks a tightrope between hosting big raucous parties and trying to make meaningful connections with their base. Their 2023 Tales party took place at the Saint Vincent Hotel, staging a dance party with DJ sets by the Black Keys and Dan The Automator, as well as quiet, curated experiences tucked inside the hotel, including a sit-down experience with Washington D.C’s acclaimed barmini.

Fords’ “Music to Drink Martinis To” event swelled to 1500 guests over four hours, with over 30 drinks served by guest bartenders from marquee bars in Singapore, Australia and Manhattan. Even so, Fords’ National Director for Advocacy Tim Cooper admits success is hard to measure. “I don’t know that there’s any real way to quantify it other than capturing an emotional response from people and making sure our brand is looked at in a positive light,” he says. “How much does that cost? I don’t know if I have the answer. We’ve always felt that the best way to hold attention and capture hearts is to do things that feel fun and engaging and meaningful.”

The Fords strategy is about giving bartenders space to shine, Cooper says. “We do that by spreading them out [across the hotel], giving them their own space and letting them showcase what it is they do. We want to champion them, since they are the ones that make the magic with our brand.” Allowing bartenders to show off generates authentic, genuine cocktail experiences, which in turn results in memorable, positive consumer moments, the thinking goes.

For example, barmini, Jose Andres Group’s stellar molecular gastronomy bar, created a sit-down, elevated cocktail experience inside the Fords event. It was several months in the planning stage, and was meticulously planned, down to the glassware and decorations, some of which were personally driven down to New Orleans by a staff member.

“What I hope people remember us for is: How do we quiet the noise around you?,” Daniel Grajewski, Jose Andres Group wine & beverage senior director, says of the barmini experience. “It was important that if we were going to do barmini, we wanted to be an intimate moment.” Barmini’s drinks included a clarified Last Word and innovative takes on the Aviation cocktail and a gin sour. “We chose to feature technique,” Grajewski says. “We wanted to show off a little.” Fine dining techniques included redistilling green Chartreuse to remove its color, serving a “cloud” cocktail where dry ice and a hot hibiscus tea are mixed to create an eye-catching (and social media-worthy) drink garnish and offering a twist on a hot-and-cold drink where a cold gin sour is topped with warm espuma.

Consumers may not know all the effort that goes on behind the scenes to make cocktail and event magic. But as with many of the best culinary and drinks events, the effort is not the point so long as the experience resonates with guests. “The point was to help the consumer to not feel like they were just another event,” Grajewski says. “That they were really transported to somewhere else in the world and if all that work that went into it is never recognized, great, as long as that guest felt that they were transplanted in that moment.”

Launching a new brand amid the Tales chaos brings its own set of challenges. Christine Wiseman, a star mixologist who went on to be crowned 2023 Bartender of the Year at the conference, was tapped to host the coming out party for White Claw Vodka, the new spirit linked to the immensely popular ready-to-drink. Set up as a two-day pool party at the rooftop at the Virgin Hotel, the launch featured multiple drinks from top bar talent across the country. “When you’re part of introducing a new brand, right off the top it’s a success,” Wiseman says. “I think people were really impressed with the product and the event. There was buzz around the event even before it started. I look at it as creating an experience for the people that took the time to be with us.”

In addition to capturing hearts and minds, Tales of the Cocktail events, like New York runway shows, aim to tap into the cultural zeitgeist, providing a peek into the next season’s cocktail trends.

For Nikka Whisky, their event illustrated the consumer’s move towards premiumization. “People are willing to trade up in the spirit of drinking better, not more,” Hotaling & Co.’s Brian Radics says. “The growth is on the higher price points for the spirits category. That’s where Nikka has always played.”

“I’ve been in this industry now for 25 years,” Daniel Grajewski says. “There’s always been this sense of what is old is new and what is new is old. Everything we did inside of barmini that evening was to try to introduce something people are familiar with, but in a way they've never seen. How do we improve upon something that’s a staple of a 100 plus years? These cocktails don’t need improvement, but how can we do it better? Maybe that’s in our technique.”

Tim Cooper notes that savory Martinis and highballs will continue to be a darling with cocktail fans, with more bars experimenting with mushroom tinctures, salt, vinegar and other culinary-inspired flavors and kitchen-driven techniques. “We can have fun with this,” he says “We can take liberties with some of the ingredients. It doesn’t have to be the same old stodgy gin or vodka with this kind of vermouth and this kind of bitters. It doesn’t have to be so regimented as it was in the past.”

More than a specific drink style, Christine Wiseman predicts that the all-around experience (from music to decor to menu) will take center stage. “There’s so many different types of bars now,” she says. “I look at it from the perspective of the full experience. Making it delicious and amazing and wanting people to buy another drink. We’re in a business. We don’t want people to have one drink and then leave. The trend is hospitality, and creativity, in how we keep people in seats.”