Drunken UnicornFor bars and businesses
Educated customers buy more, return more, and tell their friends.
Bars, restaurants, stores, distilleries and company teams. We come to you and walk your people and your guests through what’s in the glass.
Same stewards. Built for the room.
- Team and client tastingsOffsites, client nights and celebrations. The same two-hour tasting as our private nights, with a curriculum sized for the room.
- Staff trainingYour team learns to taste, describe and sell your bottles in words customers remember. John spent a decade training sales teams before he aimed that craft at whiskey.
- Customer eventsBar nights, in-store pop-ups and tasting demos. Guests come for the pour and leave with a story worth repeating, with your bottle in it.
- Brand storytellingThe people, the process and the choices behind your bottle, turned into a tasting your customers keep. Shauna leads it: seven years as a professor at West Point and the Command and General Staff College, and a published historian of early American taverns. She finds the story in your bottle and builds the hour around it.
Team and client tastings$79 per person, $500 minimum. 6 to 20 guests, bottles from our list. The same price as every group. Staff training, pop-ups and brand programs are quoted for the job.
Three things.
Educators in the room.
Every event is led by a Certified Executive Bourbon Steward. We are two career educators: between us, faculty at West Point and the Command and General Staff College, and over 50 years in uniform. Your customer tastes, finds the words, and leaves with a vocabulary they’ll use every time they shop.
Travelers by trade.
Store, bar, distillery, festival or private venue, we come to you. Distillery floors, festivals and tasting rooms across the country feed every event. Your audience gets what the road has taught us.
A night they retell.
Every event runs the Five S’s: See, Smell, Sip, Savor, Share. The share is where strangers become people trading favorite pours. They remember how it felt to learn, and they come back to your store, your bar, your brand.
The Executive Bourbon Steward credential from Stave & Thief Society is the bourbon industry’s equivalent of a sommelier: formal training in tasting, production, history and hospitality. It changes who’s in the room, and the room can feel the difference.
We live in this.
The people who lead your room built The Perfect Pour, and report on the business of American whiskey every weekday.
The Perfect Pour
We built the bourbon app that reads your palate and matches it to the bottle. Your Palate Print meets every bottle’s Pour Print.
See the appChasing the Unicorn
John hosts the podcast and writes the American Whiskey Industry Brief, a daily read on the business of American whiskey, every weekday.
Listen90+ stops on the road.
Distillery floors, festivals and tasting rooms since 2023. Every stop feeds the next tasting.
See the roadLet’s talk about your room.
Tell us the venue, the audience and what you want them to leave with. We’ll tell you what we’d do.