This is how you play the game: Utah ax-throwing business gets beer license by adding pool tables

By.Kathy Stephenson

What does an ax-throwing business have to do to get a beer license around here?

Install three pool tables and some arcade games.After being denied a liquor license last month, the owners of Social Axe Throwing in Ogden added those games to their new business — and it was enough to qualify for a recreational beer license from the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.Last month, the DABC commission denied the Social Axe’s beer license request — as well as a similar application from Salt Lake City’s Heart & Seoul Karaoke — saying the businesses did not qualify as recreational amenities under a new liquor law passed by the Utah Legislature.

The law lists specific businesses that can have recreational beer licenses. Bowling alleys, golf courses, pool halls, ski resorts and government-owned concert venues, for instance, made the list.

Karaoke and ax throwing did not.

Adding the pool tables and games appeased most of the liquor commission. It voted 6-1 on Tuesday to grant the license that allows the sale of beer that is 3.2 percent alcohol by weight (or 4 percent by volume).

Commissioner Thomas Jacobson offered the lone dissenting vote, saying the Social Axe was not complying with the spirit of the law and should change its signs to say it was a pool hall.

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Taco Bell expands its cantina concept, where you can order booze with your tacos

The Chelsea Cantina serves several types of drinks.  Photo Credit: Charles Eckert 

Spring’s annual rite of renewal played itself out on a prime patch of Chelsea real estate, when a booze-infused Taco Bell took the place of longtime tenant Radio Shack. The corporate owner, Yum!, is betting its take on a cantina will become a destination for customers who hunger for libations considerably more potent than the fizzy fountain drinks found on a typical Taco Bell menu.

Situated at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 23rd Street, the Chelsea Cantina joins several other iterations of this tipsy-turvy business model across the city, including outposts at 500 and 840 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan. All three alcohol-serving cantinas in Manhattan are owned and operated by Taco Bell. 

“While suburban concepts with drive-thrus will always be a priority for us, we knew if we created a restaurant format for highly walkable areas, we would be able to further tap into urban markets," said Amanda Clark, Taco Bell’s executive vice president of restaurant experience.

Since the concept’s 2015 debut in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, Taco Bell has opened cantinas in New Haven, Chicago, Orlando, Las Vegas, Cleveland, San Francisco and elsewhere, including a franchise under construction at 545 Sixth Ave. in Manhattan. 

To date, Taco Bell has launched 18 urban-format stores (which include cantinas) across the city. A Taco Bell representative said these outposts are designed with open kitchens, local approaches to design and artwork as well as exclusive shareable menus. The cantinas also serve alcohol. 

And serve, they do, everything from Bud Light to Dos Equis to shots mixed into slushy-style Freeze beverages. 

Blue Point Brewing Co., a Long Island-based craft brewery, did “a lot of research crafting the right beer for that [cantina] concept,” including a visit to the Taco Bell test kitchen in California, said Blue Point president Jenna Lally. That exploration yielded the Big City Bell Pilsner, a toasted lager custom-made for the menu.

“Pilsners in general are pretty well-balanced, beers,” Lally said. “Taco Bell has very pronounced flavors, so we wanted a beer that would not overpower that. When you’re eating a spicy taco, it offsets that flavor.”

During the cantina’s liquor license permit request process, locals expressed concerns that mixing this rich tapestry of Chelsea eclecticism with alcohol would yield a strange brew.

Last call was among the bones of contention when Taco Bell went before Manhattan Community Board 4's Business Licenses & Permits Committee (BLP). BLP recommended the State Liquor Authority deny its application for a restaurant wine, beer and cider license — based in part on concerns from neighborhood residents and businesses that the cantina would exacerbate quality of life problems in an area that already sees its share of litter, loitering, public drunkenness, and, occasionally, vomit.

At the time, BLP co-chair Frank Holozubiec recalled, the community was concerned that "people will go there to continue eating and drinking" after a night out at the area's many bars and clubs.

Still, the state granted the license to the Chelsea Cantina, which started serving alcohol in mid-April.

Customers can order alcohol from 11 a.m. through midnight Monday through Thursday and up until 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, according to a store manager.

Holozubiec said the community board has not fielded any complaints about alcohol consumption related to the cantina.

Bill Borock, president of the Council of Chelsea Block Associations agreed, saying, “I have not heard anything at all about [the Chelsea] Taco Bell.”

Taco Bell stations security guards at cantinas on weekend evenings. 

With Memorial Day in the rear view mirror, summer’s warmer weather is sure to bring more crowds to the Chelsea Cantina, and possibly, buoy the concept's proliferation. 

“The majority of urban markets across the U.S. are still untapped for us,” Clark said, “so we still have a major opportunity to grow where our fans want us most.”

Is Molecular Whiskey the Futuristic Booze We've Been Waiting For?

By BILLY LYONS 

Tasting whiskey usually means enjoying flavors created from the interaction between spirit and barrel over an extended period of time. However, some companies are rethinking this traditional narrative.

Endless West, a San Francisco-based startup, recently launched a spirit made without the use of tried and true techniques, like barrel aging, in a process the company labels note-by-note production. Billed as the world’s first “molecular whiskey,” Glyph is not just a symbol of what happens when science, alcohol, and ambition meet, but what might attract future generations of drinkers to the products they purchase. But what does whiskey made in a lab actually involve?

At Endless West, note-by-note production is a three-stage process, beginning with mapping the molecules that give fine whiskeys their unique tasting profiles. To do this, their team studies the molecules found in currently available whiskey and spirits, analyzing what characteristics differentiate one whiskey from another.

Once specific molecules are identified, the next phase is locating and acquiring them in their purest forms, such as sugar from corn or esters from fruit. Everything is sourced naturally from plants, yeasts, and fruits as opposed to using artificial ingredients.

The final step involves using the chosen molecules along with a neutral grain spirit as a base to build the flavor profile of a whiskey.

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Half-Strength 'Scotch' Is Here to Capitalize on the Less-Boozy Booze Trend

The “light spirit drink” can't technically be called Scotch or whisky.

MIKE POMRANZ 

Light beer went from being a new invention in the 1970s to accounting for nearly half of the beer market today. And as younger generations seek out healthier, lower-ABV options more low-calorie beers — as well as other drinks like wine and hard seltzer — are currently trending once again. So could light “Scotch whisky” be the next big thing? Technically speaking, no, but practically speaking, maybe.

Scotch producer Whyte & Mackay has released the 21.5-percent ABV Whyte & Mackay Light, billed as “a lighter spirit drink from Scotland, made from Scotch whisky married with Sherry.” Not to be confused with “light whisky” — which is a style of full-strength whisky — this “light spirit drink” can’t official be called whisky at all because Scotch is required to be at least 40-percent ABV. But that hasn’t stopped Whyte & Mackay, which already has a name associated with Scotch, from trying to capitalize on the low-ABV trend.Continue reading

Study: Beer is a $2.3 billion business in Tampa Bay

By.Margie Manning

The beer industry accounted for more than 16,000 direct and indirect jobs and total economic output of $2.3 billion in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro area in 2018.

The figures include not only brewers, distributors and hospitality workers, but also companies that make bottles, cans and cardboard cases, as well as equipment and marketing displays, according to  a study prepared for The Beer Institute and the National Beer Wholesalers Association.

“Beer is more than America’s most popular alcohol beverage. The beer industry is vital to the United States, generating more than 2.1 million jobs and contributing $328 billion to the American economy,” Jim McGreevy, president and CEO of the Beer Institute, said in a news release.

The biennial study, Beer Serves America, broke down direct and indirect employment, wages and economic impact by states and congressional districts. Here’s a look at the total impact in Florida’s 12th congressional district (northern Pinellas and Pasco counties), 13th congressional district (central and south Pinellas county, including St. Petersburg) and 14th congressional district (part of Hillsborough County, including Tampa).

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Titos:How Philanthropy Drives This Billion-Dollar Liquor Brand

Taylor Berry, Head of Marketing at Tito’s Handmade Vodka, talks about the origins of the multi-billion-dollar liquor brand and how founder Tito Beveridge’s failures in other industries led him to success as a distiller. Berry discusses how the vodka brand used philanthropic events to spread, the company’s efforts to create a culture of giving, as well as his own unique journey to becoming CMO.

Berry and host David Meltzer discuss the many advantages that brands hold which defy convention, the role of authenticity and emotion in marketing a product and the need to embrace change as an individual in order to grow personally and professionally.

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Nectar’s sonar bottle caps could save $50B in stolen booze

By. Josh Constine

Bars  lose 20% of their alcohol to overpours and “free” drinks for friends. That amounts to $50 billion per year in booze that mysteriously disappears, making life tough for every pub and restaurant. Nectarwants to solve that mystery with its ultrasound depth-sensing bottle caps that measure how much liquid is left in a bottle by measuring how long it takes a sonar pulse to bounce back. And now it’s bringing real-time pour tracking to beer with its gyroscopic taps. The result is that bar managers can determine who’s pouring too much or giving away drink, which promotions are working and when to reorder bottles without keeping too much stock on hand — and avoid wasting hours weighing or eyeballing the liquor level of their inventory.

Nectar’s  solution to alcohol shrinkage has now attracted a $10 million Series A led by DragonCapital.vc and joined by former Campari chairman Gerry Ruvo, who will join the board. “Not a lot of technology has come to the bottle,” Nectar CEO Aayush Phumbhra says of ill-equipped bars and restaurants. “Liquor is their highest margin and highest cost item. If you don’t manage it efficiently, you go out of business.” Other solutions can look ugly to customers, forcibly restrict bartenders or take time and money to install and maintain. In contrast, Phumbhra tells me, “I care about solving deep problems by building a solution that doesn’t change behavior.”

Investors were eager to back the CEO, since he previously co-founded text book rental giant Chegg — another startup disrupting an aged market with tech. “I come from a pretty entrepreneurial family. No one in my family has ever worked for anyone else before,” Phumbhra says with a laugh. He saw an opportunity in the stunning revelation that the half-trillion-dollar on-premises alcohol business was plagued by missing booze and inconsistent ways to track it.

Typically at the end of a week or month, a bar manager will have staff painstakingly look at each bottle, try to guess what percent remains and mark it on a clipboard to be loaded into a spreadsheet later. While a little quicker, that’s very subjective and inaccurate. More advanced systems see every bottled weighed to see exactly how much is left. If they’re lucky, the scale connects to a computer, but they still have to punch in what brand of booze they’re sizing up. But the process can take many hours, which amounts to costly labor and infrequent data. None of these methods eliminate the manual measurement process or give real-time pour info.

So with $6 million in funding, Nectar launched in 2017 with its sonar bottle caps that look and operate like old-school pourers. When bars order them, they come pre-synced and labeled for certain bottle shapes like Patron or Jack Daniels. Their Bluetooth devices stay charged for a year and connect wirelessly to a base hub in the bar. With each pour, the sonar pulse determines how much is in the bottle and subtracts it from the previous measurement to record how much was doled out. And the startup’s new gyroscopic beer system is calibrated to deduce pour volume from the angle and time the tap is depressed without the need for a sensor to be installed (and repaired) inside the beer hose.Continue reading