Ready To Drink Podcast
The Ready To Drink Podcast is built for founders, operators and leaders navigating the next era of beverage. These are honest conversations with the people doing the work, building brands that last in a crowded and regulated marketplace.
Hosted by twenty-two year adult beverage industry veteran Nate Fochtman, the show pulls back the curtain on what actually drives growth - distribution strategy, regulatory navigation, sales velocity, and consumer trust.
Episodes
83 episodes
Building a THC Beverage Brand at 70 | Mary Bernuth, Pharos Premium Beverages
Mary Bernuth co-founded Pharos Brands with her husband Rhyno Stenchfield, a company built as much on personal loss as on business strategy. Mary's first husband relied on cannabis through a rare blood cancer diagnosis and years later a twenty m...
Wesley Noyd on Building BEV edu and Selling Beverages With Insights, Not Ego
Wesley Noyd is a field sales rep for Monster Energy in San Antonio and the founder of BEV edu, a training platform built to onboard new beverage sales reps and coach veterans who are stuck. No script, no pre-call questions, just two 20-year bev...
Quick Sips: Coaching The Next Generation of Beverage Sales Reps | Wesley Noyd, Founder of BEV edu
Wesley Noyd built BEV edu, a training platform for small to mid-size distributors and emerging brands -
Quick Sips: Why Trust Beats Transactions For Beverage Founders | Henry Mashburn, CSO & Co-Founder of AHG Pay
Henry Mashburn, CSO and Co-Founder of AHG Pay, explains how payments data reveals 14 to 15 signals about a beverage business and why trust, not transaction volume, is what actually scales a payments company. He shares how AHG Pay connects bever...
Beer First. Gluten Free Second. | Otherwise Brewing's Aaron Gervais
Aaron Gervais is the CEO and co-founder of Otherwise Brewing, one of the only true gluten free breweries in the country. On this episode of the Ready To Drink Podcast we get into what it actually takes to build a gluten free beer brand that com...
Cannabis Secret Shopping Exposes Why Dispensaries Are Losing Customers | Tammy Puyear, TPP Services
Most dispensaries have no idea what their own store feels like to a first time customer.Tammy Puyear runs TPP Services, a secret shopping company for cannabis dispensaries and brands in Missouri. She built a business around a blind spot ...
Alex Kllanxhja on Drink Entrepreneurship: Leaving Corporate Beverage Sales to Build Pipeline Autopsy
Alex Kllanxhja spent 14 years in beverage sales, cutting his teeth as one of the first reps at Oskar Blues before moving into chain accounts and national sales at Breakthru Beverage. Then his employer doubled his workload with zero extra pay, h...
From Gym Buddies to Brewery Owners: The Battle River Brewing Story | Toms River, NJ
Gary Morrison, co-founder of Battle River Brewing in Toms River, New Jersey, joins the Ready To Drink Podcast to tell the story of how three business partners with zero homebrewing experience built a 25-tap craft brewery in the heart of a revit...
High Risk Payment Processing for Hemp & CBD Brands with Henry Mashburn | Ready To Drink Podcast
Henry Mashburn is Co-Founder of Alternative Horizons Group (AHG), a payment processing firm built for high risk industries like hemp and CBD. He co-founded AHG two years ago after cutting his teeth in the CBD and hemp payments world for the pas...
Non-Alcoholic Beverage Marketing with Renee Adams: Shelf Placement, Branding and Building the Category
Renee Adams, founder of Renee Adams Consulting and marketing lead for The Little Sober Bar in Woodstock, Georgia, joins the Ready To Drink Podcast to talk non-alcoholic beverage marketing from the ground up.This conversation covers why n...
Torch Drinks' Lucas Dyer on Scaling Hemp Beverages the Right Way in North Carolina | RegulateDontRuinNC.com
Lucas Dyer runs sales and brand development for Torch Drinks in North Carolina. Torch started ten years ago in California in the vape and gummy space. They launched hemp beverages at the end of 2024 and now sell in 16 states.In this epis...
Marine Veteran to Hemp Beverage VP of Sales: Brian Hyatt, Oasis
Brian Hyatt is Vice President of Sales at Herbal Oasis, a hemp beverage and functional beverage brand under the cbdMD umbrella. Before hemp, he served in the infantry with the United States Marine Corps from 2009 to 2015, then spent years build...
Two Competing NC Distributors Unite to Save Hemp Beverages | RegulateDontRuinNC.com
Two North Carolina distributors who go head to head for shelf space every single day just sat down together to fight for the same category. Ed Johnston, President of Tryon Distributing, and Rick Craig, Vice President of R.H. Barringer Distribut...
Dogwood Hops & Crops Owner Kate Hansen on Hemp Beverages, NC Regulation & Funding Schools | RegulateDontRuinNC.com
Kate Hansen owns Dogwood Hops & Crops and Trophy Room Bourbon Bar in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She's also PTO president at her kids' Title I elementary school. Those two roles collide in this conversation, and that collision is the who...
Quick Sips: They Hear You On Hemp, Call & Email Your Lawmakers
Dwayne Carson spent years working Capitol Hill and on a recent episode of the Ready To Drink Podcast, he told a story about postal closures that every hemp beverage stakeholder and consumer needs to ...
Quick Sips: Five Minutes of Kindness Challenge
Five minutes of kindness to a stranger, that's the challenge I give every single week on the podcasts.Put your phone in your pocket and look at the strangers walking down the street. When you're at the gas station, filling up your coffe...
Perfect Hydration's Jared Smith: Building a National Alkaline Water Brand
Jared Smith is President of Perfect Hydration Alkaline Water and Star City Beverage, backed by parent company Golden West Food Group. He sits down with Nate Fochtman on the Ready To Drink Podcast to break down how a private label beverage opera...
Geoff Whaling: The Goodness of Hemp Act and the Fight to Save the Hemp Industry
National Hemp Association Chairman Geoff Whaling joins the Ready To Drink Podcast to break down the Goodness of Hemp Act, the White House meeting behind it, and why the hemp industry is running out of runway before the November 13th deadline.
Four Loko, Convenience Channel & Distributor Trust: Eric Rogers on Building Beverage Brands That Last
Eric Rogers is a National Account Manager for the convenience channel at Phusion Projects, home of Four Loko, and spent years before that with Sierra Nevada and Craft Brew Alliance calling on Circle K, Wawa, and Racetrack. In this episode of Re...
Laid Off, But Still Fighting: Matt Compton on Cannabis Dispensary Merchandising, Career Reinvention & Sobriety
Matt Compton spent years building out cannabis retail and dispensary merchandising strategy, most recently as Commercial Operations Director at Jushi (Beyond Hello), before a June 2026 corporate realignment laid him off. In this episode of Read...
Shy Bear Brewing & Rich Coast Coffee: Jason Ufema on Building a 100-Mile Radius Beverage Empire
Jason Ufema, owner of Shy Bear Brewing and co-owner of Rich Coast Coffee in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, joins Ready To Drink Podcast to talk about running two beverage businesses on the same family property his father built in the 1960s. Rich Coas...
MATE! Vodka Protein Water: Christopher Wolstenholme on Building America's First Protein Alcohol Brand
Christopher Wolstenholme, founder of MATE! Vodka Protein Water, joins Ready To Drink to break down how a failed liquor store idea turned into America's first vodka protein water. MATE! combines 8 grams of pea protein with vodka, no bubbles, glu...
AB Bottle Co owner Tony Piccini on why hemp THC beverages are the American dream, not a loophole.
Tony Piccini has run AB Bottle Co in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina for six years. THC beverages now make up 35 percent of his sales. That is not a side hustle. That is a pillar of his business.This industry is worth billions of dollars,...
The Post Pandemic Wine Market: Jim Silver on Succession Planning and the Bifurcation of Wine
Wine is bifurcating. Massive scale on one end, tiny profitable producers on the other. The middle is getting pressed out. Jim Silver, author of The Post Pandemic Wine Market and former Chief Sales Officer at Wine Direct Fulfillment, breaks down...