Mixing Business and Pleasure
I think I want to do some "business of booze" breakdowns...
I am trying to think of things I want to write that fit in a drinks-focused newsletter when I’m simply not drinking as much. The downside of having spent so long building out a great standard home bar is that my default decisions are so much easier to make. I have to think a lot less about what single great cocktail I want to drink, which puts a bit of a damper on the actually making drinks creativity.
I’ve also been trying to harness that specific creativity for more than 6 years, which is way longer than i expected to stay at this! It’s not that I’m burnt out, it’s just that I’m (at least temporarily) out of gimmicks to give this thing a throughline.
I’ve gotten hopelessly into watches over the last 2 years or so, and I keep thinking of trying to do cocktails matched up with watches in my collection. But i really don’t know how I’d do that, and it frankly sounds like an expensive addition to an already-expensive hobby…
I’ve thought about diving a bit deeper into wine, looking for a house red, white, and rose. And I think that could be really fun! But wine doesn’t hold like spirits, and tasting a whole bunch of them when you’re not drinking much just inevitably leads to waste. Maybe I just need to host a party and get a wider array of takes…
But my last post was far-and-away my most read ever. And it was topical and business-adjacent. So maybe there’s something there. It was also very idealistic, which I’m not sure I can regularly replicate, but still…
I’ve been doing a lot of simpler company strategy and market breakdowns for work lately, and it’s stuff that I generally enjoy. I have never worked for a booze-adjacent company in any way, and I’m frankly not likely to, so I’m curious what applying that kind of work to my hobby industry would look like. And I think I can have some fun with it here in a way that I can’t quite pull off at work.
So, here’s the schedule:
Next week, I’ll do an April roundup - my Q1 roundup was also popular, so that’s going to be a monthly feature going forward
After that, I’ll do an overview of a public booze-adjacent company that’s going to get a full profile
For the rest of May, I’ll post regularly in shorter bursts with different pieces of analysis - financial breakdown, market map, growth avenues, macro environment, etc
If that all goes well, we’ll do it again in June!
Any companies you’re particularly interested in? Or any general thoughts on this temporary pivot? Let me know in the chat!
