BONUS: What to expect from Skurnik at BCB

The biggest spirits event of the year is right around the corner. Bar Convent Brooklyn is an annual 2-day festival of tastings and seminars from the best in the spirits business.

In preparation for Skurnik’s third appearance at BCB, we’re giving you a bonus episode inside our spirits portfolio with Adam Schuman (Spirits Portfolio Director) and Amanda Elder (Spirits Content & Education Manager). In this episode, they survey the beverage landscape from the early 2010s cocktail boom to the spike in demand for consumer education during COVID lockdown, and how Skurnik is meeting the moment in a world still dealing with ripple effects from the pandemic and new challenges brought by trends and the global economy.

BCB is held at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn on June 9th and 10th. The Skurnik bar will be open both days from 11am-7pm in Building 7 for you to meet our spirits specialists and visiting distillers. Register for BCB here.

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Transcript

Amanda Elder 0:03

We're lucky enough to partner with really thoughtful producers that are very passionate about the things that they're making. And then we become passionate about the things that they're making and trying to get other people passionate about these things, all the way down to the consumer level, where maybe the more they learn and the more they start to appreciate these things, it becomes something that they really value and love. That's the everyday work, and we're all doing it in different ways.

Adam Schuman 0:31

Today we're going to take a different different angle, a different approach to the Unfiltered podcast. We don't have a supplier or producer with us today. We're going to talk about Bar Convent Brooklyn, which is this gigantic expo that Skurnik will be participating in for our third time now. Third year, triple the space, and triple the effort. It's a big deal and a big undertaking. We're pretty stoked. And then we'll get into a little bit of history of Skurnik, where this thing started, at least on the spirits side, and the evolution of you, Amanda Elder, and me, Adam Schuman, and we'll see where it goes.

Amanda Elder 1:11

Hi, Adam.

Adam Schuman 1:12

Hi, Lobster.

Amanda Elder 1:13

How's it going?

Adam Schuman 1:14

It's going great. My kid's got a 103.4º fever, and the other kid didn't sleep, so I'm running on a large iced red eye.

Amanda Elder 1:23

Ah, springtime in New York. Well, it's nice to be here with you. My name is Amanda Elder. I manage content and education for the Spirits Portfolio here at Skurnik.

Adam Schuman 1:33

You do.

Amanda Elder 1:34

And as I'm sure you're aware, you're my boss. What do you do here?

Adam Schuman 1:38

Uh, that's a great question. I am the Spirits Portfolio Director. I have a second title now, too, called Head of Innovation, which we're not going to talk about at all, which is cool. But we're responsible for stuff. We're growing this thing. We've been growing this thing for a while.

Amanda Elder 1:56

Yeah, so, Bar Convent Brooklyn, not to make a hard turn in conversation here, is coming up on the 9th and 10th of June, and Skurnik has a fairly sizable footprint, as far as booths are concerned.

Adam Schuman 2:10

Three times the size as last year.

Amanda Elder 2:11

Three times the size as last year and as the year before. This is our third time doing this thing, at what has easily become one of the top two or three trade events in the United States. It's a big deal. A lot of people visit from other states, from out of the country, so this is an amazing opportunity for us to show our wares, and we're doing it in a more complex way than we've ever done before, which is kind of crazy because I feel like I remember three years ago, or even longer than that, saying, Do we want to be at Bar Convent? And the answer was like, Well, yeah, of course we do, but we can't just show up with like a folding table and a tablecloth and expect to have a presence at this big trade event where people really come with their best set designs and party tricks. It's all about catching people's eye.

Adam Schuman 3:01

Yeah. To watch the buzz of activity and the gravity that that space creates, and the energy around it, that aura—the kids are talking about aura, right?—when you have bigger brands, conglomerates, these huge, ubiquitous brands, to see a company like Skurnik be able to not just play in that space, but to stand out in that space. You walk in through that door, and there is Skurnik Spirits, Skurnik Wines & Spirits with this amazing wooden bar, with gentleman's rails and a horseshoe in the middle. It's just incredible.

Amanda Elder 3:39

And the idea was that we would try and take the feel of the bar here in our HQ office in the Flatiron District in Manhattan and put it in Brooklyn for a couple of days. For anyone who hasn't been here, you come up to the ninth floor, you walk out of the elevator, and the first thing that you see just down this very short hall is this fully built-out bar with a back bar full of bottles. It's allowed us to do a massive amount of small and larger events, and that was really the intention, to make this a showpiece and a home.

Adam Schuman 4:15

It's a hub. On any given day—you come here on like a Thursday, on a day like today where the sun is shining—there may be one, two, three spirits specialists standing behind the bar, all doing the thing. You've got Tim over here working on cocktails with this account. You've got JLB over there tasting through agave with that account. It's a great dynamic. And when it's on, there is a palpable energy that goes on in this place. When you see the breath of quality spirits in front of you, and you could just reach or ask for any of it, to do that high-touch hospitality that Skurnik is known for, it is something else.

The early 2010s cocktail boom

Adam Schuman 5:03 Amanda Elder 5:03

Let's rewind for a second. You started with Skurnik in 2012. You know, that was right when I was starting to learn about cocktails at Pouring Ribbons, and you were building this portfolio. A really exciting time in the city for cocktailing and mixing. I was working solely in the East Village at the time, so that was really the epicenter of my universe, but it felt like an epicenter of New York's mixing universe in a lot of ways.

Adam Schuman 5:28

I think it was.

Amanda Elder 5:30

Death & Co, Mayahuel, Pouring Ribbons. Saxon + Parole was a place where I spent a lot of time actually, because all of these bars were collaborating with each other. It was all these new bar directors that knew each other coming up in the industry and were really ready to teach and share knowledge, and they wanted to do that with each other. If one of these places was doing a training, they would invite the bar managers and the staffs from the other places. You'd go and have punch at Saxon and then listen to Dave Wondrich talk about how you make punch, which is kind of insane. I know you did stuff over the years at Pouring Ribbons, trainings on Reisetbauer, where other other accounts were invited to come and attend, and we hosted. That was just an amazing time to be learning, and I feel incredibly lucky for that. I feel like Skurnik was a really big part of that because you were really building relationships with people when the spirits portfolio was just coming on the scene.

Adam Schuman 6:34

Yeah. We started with very little. At the time, I think we only had the Charles Neal brandy portfolio. We had Family Tradition Cognacs, we had Reisetbauer eaux-de-vie out of Austria, but that was it.

Amanda Elder 6:49

Skurnik was carrying some really beautiful, heavy-hitting distillates, but not necessarily brands that were really known. And spirits at the time wasn't really Skurnik's priority. Wine was really the name of the game.

Adam Schuman 7:03

Yeah, but it was a particular time. We were a wine company first and foremost. We still are a wine company first and foremost. And it was one brand at a time. The next thing you know, we had El Dorado and Medley Brothers, and then this new company called Back Bar Project importing this brand of liqueurs called Giffard. And all of a sudden, we had a bunch of different samples of different brands, including Giffard, on the table. And we were like, Holy shit, this is bananas.

Amanda Elder 7:32

Literally, there is a banana expression.

Adam Schuman 7:35

You like that?

Amanda Elder 7:35

Yeah, that was great.

Adam Schuman 7:36

Thanks.

Amanda Elder 7:36

I remember when Giffard came on the scene, and some of these, at the time, very niche modifiers and liqueurs, and it absolutely changed the game in mixing. People's brains kind of exploded with the possibilities. I came onto the team in 2017, so we started talking more and more about education. There was this opportunity here to start working on small seminars where we would invite people to the office. We had a lot of conversations in the beginning about like, What did the industry need? If people were going to come to a seminar about something, what would they be interested in learning about? I spent a lot of time thinking, Well, if I had been aware of any of this when I first started diving into cocktailing, what would I have been interested in going to see? And you gave me a lot of latitude to build out seminars based on those ideas and we'd work them out. We would host a lot of people in the office. It was really exciting for me because I was learning about Skurnik spirits—and spirits at large—at just a ridiculously accelerated rate in that first year. It's one thing to know spirits when you're mixing with them and pouring them behind a bar, but it's something else to be in a position where you have to talk about the technical side of things and production on a regular basis. My categorical knowledge was going through the roof. For me, that's actually the sneaky motivation. I love the idea of sharing knowledge with others, but anytime we focus on the education, I'm guaranteed learning something that I didn't

How COVID impacted consumer knowledge

Amanda Elder 9:12

know before.

Adam Schuman 9:13

And then all of a sudden, a pandemic happens.

Amanda Elder 9:17

Yeah, just a little pandemic.

Adam Schuman 9:19

And there there was no bar for a while.

Amanda Elder 9:23

There was no bar, there were no seminars to be had. We very quickly pivoted to doing some virtual. It was interesting because, of course everyone took a hot minute when the pandemic started and shut down was happening, because I don't think any business, no matter what the industry, knew exactly what growth was going to look like or what to focus their energy on. And without an in-person component, and especially in hospitality when people couldn't go to bars and restaurants anymore, that was a major moment of pause for Skurnik and everybody else. It wasn't about, Oh, what's the next thing someone would want to learn about? It was about, Is the person that I know who works at this place going to still have a job in a couple of months? There was this major shift in the industry, but it was also really interesting to see how the amount of content that was being put out online absolutely exploded because it was the only way you could communicate. Every brand was trying to gain mind share and keep people interested in whatever they were doing. Virtual educations were being offered every day by somebody. There was a real moment to stop and think, what's just making more noise, and what's actually needed in this particular moment in time?

Adam Schuman 10:41

Something we struggle with to this day. There's a point of diminishing returns with information and the cadence in which you disseminate it. I think you were coming to the realization very quickly that everyone is pivoting to this thing, and there's going to be this tidal wave of information coming at them, and we need to dial in on what the most important information was.

Amanda Elder 11:03

I certainly don't think I realized at the time that there'd be no looking back once things started to evolve, which feels a little naïve now, I guess. But I knew in that moment that it was really important to do something that was purposeful and not throwing stuff at people. We'd always been education first. And for us, that had really manifested in doing things in person: getting people to taste at the bar, getting people to these seminars, going out and touching tables at the accounts through the spirit specialists. And when everyone was at home and couldn't go out, what was that going to look like? I think part of what the pandemic did was it started raising the level of consumer knowledge in general because everyone had time. A lot of people were mixing cocktails at home, drinking spirits at home. Our retail business obviously became the bigger part of what we were focusing on at the time, and that meant a higher level of education was being sought out from the consumers. They were getting a little bit more savvy. They were asking more questions, and we're based in New York. We're based in these major markets where people are already probably more savvy than the average bear, one would say.

Adam Schuman 12:18

There was a data point for me that really stood out during the pandemic, to your point, which was, we watched the sales of crème de violette go parabolic. It was wild. And if that's happening, that's because of, probably, an Aviation. Maybe there's another cocktail, but a bar spoon at a time is used in that cocktail. To watch it go from somewhere down the list of Giffard to somewhere at the top of the list, it spoke to me that this is what's happening. These are the cocktails. It's a four-ingredient cocktail. Like, that is more than just like a daiquiri, right? It is people getting creative and becoming home bartenders and upping their game.

Amanda Elder 13:10

I love a crème de violette, but I feel bad for all those people that thought an Aviation was the best drink that they could have during the pandemic. That's a different conversation, I feel like, but...

Adam Schuman 13:18

It is. Back to the content for a second. We're known for education. And actually, let's tie it back to BCB for a second. We've been doing this for a few years. I had the pleasure of being on two different panels in year one and year two. The people who come to BCB, they are cocktail and spirit enthusiasts. You have a lot of people coming from outside of New York. Skurnik not only is the local distributor in nine markets—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, California—but we have a national team and we sell to the other 41 states plus Puerto Rico, plus the Virgin Islands. People would come up to me after a couple of these seminars and say, We just want you to know that we use your website and your content as gospel.

Amanda Elder 14:14

We work with amazing producers, and at this level, all of them are massive nerds about the things that they're making. They have great information about all this stuff. A lot of the time for international producers, they are always a little bewildered that we're even asking the questions that we are because someone enjoying aperitivi in Italy doesn't necessarily want to know what the base distillate is. But welcome to New York, where the accounts ask these questions. We do the due diligence of asking the question just so we have it ready to go if someone wants to know this piece of information. It's been interesting to see after the pandemic was in the rearview mirror, people were opening new places, not just reopening old places. But what I hadn't realized right away was that there was this massive shift in staff. The turnover was crazy. And in hospitality, the turnover is always crazy, but you had so many people leave the industry during the pandemic and just straight up change their professions. I think even if they stayed within hospitality, a lot of the great mentors that I grew up with in New York cocktailing moved on to something else, either to a more administrative role or less active, in-person shift management, that sort of thing. So you get all these new people that are working in in places that haven't been taught, some youngster that has just started in a job or is a brand new bartender. Why would they know who Skurnik is? And they probably don't know much about distribution at all. They may know some of the brands, but they may not understand who carries them. And there's going to be a new bartender next year, and a new bartender next year, and a new bartender the year after that. And they may not yet be the buyer, but they're the people that are going to advocate for these spirits.

Adam Schuman 16:04

The retail shop is the same thing too.

Amanda Elder 16:07

Yeah, exactly. Just reintroducing Skurnik to people, getting them to trust the brand, showing them how many boss brands that we work with.

Adam Schuman 16:16

Boss. And I'll say that I've seen more "aha moments" happen with someone who is a novice on the subject. And maybe that's obvious, but I love it.

Amanda Elder 16:29

They're open to it. Sometimes people at a certain level in the industry are afraid to admit what they don't know, rather than just being open and asking the questions. And everyone's pretending to know something they could learn more about. I promise you, everyone. To me, this was a really exciting moment to realize that we had this whole new generation of people working in the industry that were ready to be taught, that needed to be taught. And that will always keep on happening. We're going to keep growing in our knowledge and the nuance of our knowledge with all of these spirits that we bring in. Going back to the basics, and always reintroducing. That repetition of education and the consistency of it in all of the ways that we do it is something that our team really enjoys.

What the Skurnik badge means

Amanda Elder 17:16

What I want most of all is if someone says, "I have no idea what this new spirit is, but Skurnik carries it, so it's probably worth at least a taste and a moment of my time."

Adam Schuman 17:30

I think that's been going on for a long time on the wine side too. People turn the label around and when they see Skurnik, there's a number of other distributors and importers that are held in really, really high regard for all the right reasons, and Skurnik is absolutely one of them and has been for almost 40 years.

Amanda Elder 17:45

It's a quality marker, which is not to take that for granted. Everyone has to work really hard every day to maintain that standard.

Adam Schuman 17:52

Yeah, well, it's not as simple as it used to be to capture the market share and imagination. I mean, what was marketing? How did you get the word out? Maybe you get 98 points on a wine and you sell a container of it, and, like, that was marketing. And now, there's a lot of noise. Everything shifted to digital, in addition to in-person, especially in densely populated areas. But what is it that you can do? What can we do, as Skurnik, to differentiate ourselves from the next distributor? I think it's to stick to the game plan, align ourselves with incredible producers and and partners, hire really well, people who care more than the next person, and show up on time. And then content, marketing, reinvest into all the different ways that we can get out there and the different channels we can communicate with people because there's a lot of noise. How do you turn down the volume and get them to focus for a second on what we're doing? And I don't know if we've figured out the recipe, but I think we are always working hard to hone in on the recipe. I'm not an expert on branding by any means, but when I think about what branding is, it is consistency, and consistency is the brand that is Skurnik's voice.

Amanda Elder 19:12

We're trying to meet the moment. Again, not to belabor the pandemic as this major historical point, in hospitality, but I think it will always be that, and we're still understanding how that influences what we're doing. I think on some level it looks like it's business as usual now. We're all very busy teaching people, tasting with people. It's harder than it used to be, or maybe hard in a different way. It's more complicated.

Adam Schuman 19:39

It's hard. We're meeting the needs. We have quality people and we have quality spirits and wines and non-alc, and even some foods and things like that. We are trying to give the highest quality service all the time and constantly improve on what we do. One of the things that we offer, and one of the things that sets us apart—and one of the reasons why suppliers continue to stay partners with us and seek partnership with us—is we care, and we have a good finger on the pulse of what the various markets are looking for. We're consultants, we provide guidance and stewardship and pricing and logistics and compliance. Few people look under the hood to know what it means to run such a complex organism that has so many moving parts and try to keep it aligned.

Amanda Elder 20:35

Or even to offer the right fit products to the right account. Just because they know they need a thing doesn't mean that they're flipping through our 300-page—I don't even know how long it is now—catalog of available items that all service different needs. As an American market, I think we are very used to being able to go and get strawberries in December in the grocery store. We have a lot of things available to us all the time. And I think it's easy to take for granted how much work it takes to get them here. Distribution is a crazy thing to think about and understand. And even on the level where you're talking about what we do, even before you start talking about how these products get put on shipping containers and sent across the water.

Adam Schuman 21:18

Yeah, it's about building it without being heavy-handed, selling through the lens of education and quality. You vet everything, you taste everything, you say no to almost everything, and then, one at a time, it starts to build. And all of a sudden you become known for the thing, and all of a sudden push becomes pull because these are items that are now built into what the bartenders are used to building in their cocktails. It's interesting, you listen to the conversations and you read the news, and you hear all the chatter about trends and fads and cycles, and we're in another particular cycle. And these cycles happen over and over again. I think people perhaps have a healthier relationship when it comes to alcohol, and that's okay.

Amanda Elder 22:09

Yes, that's great. There's a lot of talk right now about people not drinking the way that they used to. I'm certain that trends are shifting as they always do, but I think it's definitely incumbent upon us now at this point in the industry to remind people about the inherent value of these artisanal spirits that we're selling, to really teach people about them and teach them to appreciate it. We'll show you why the sticker value like is the way it is, that these aren't meant to be mass-produced, throwaway items. There's real ritual that is assigned to drinking culture. There always has been, even when it's lost in the day-to-day. We're lucky enough to partner with really thoughtful producers that are very passionate about the things that they're making, and then we become passionate about the things that they're making and trying to get other people passionate about these things, all the way down to the consumer level, where maybe the more they learn and the more they start to appreciate these things, it becomes something that they really value and love. That's the everyday work, and we're all

What to expect from BCB

Amanda Elder 23:13

doing it in different ways.

Adam Schuman 23:14

Yeah. And I guess that brings us back to what we've got coming up ahead of us.

Amanda Elder 23:19

BCB, three booths, 37 suppliers joining us. Really, this is an opportunity for Skurnik to have a built-out bar just like we do in the office, and to have that bar populated with, if not every bottle that we carry in the office as well, a very large swath for people to taste, specialists on hand to taste those things with them and have conversations about what might work for them, just the way that they would if they had an appointment here in the office. And then you have all these suppliers joining us as well who, in various parts of these booths, will be pouring their spirits so that they can talk with their expertise about how these things are made, why they matter. We're going to have cocktailing components, which is a whole other complex part.

Adam Schuman 24:04

This is a dedicated time and space with people who are there for one reason and one reason only: to taste the wares of the people who make it, the people who know about it. It is an opportunity to educate, to showcase all the hard work that we do. It's one thing to turn the bottle around and see, Oh, Skurnik, it's quality. It's another thing to come to one of our trade tastings, whether that's a Grand Portfolio Tasting or something smaller and more thematic. It's another thing for the people to see us in this environment at BCB. I think it's incredible and really bolsters who we are, what we do, and opens us up to an audience that is broad.

Amanda Elder 24:46

I like that too. BCB always feels a little bit rock and roll. I love our Skurnik tastings where it's only Skurnik doing what we do best, but when you're in this height of summer heat in Industry City, Brooklyn, across many different warehouses with people doing silent DJ sets and beach ball parties in the middle of the courtyard, it's this whole other side of spirits showing its personality where people work very hard, they party very hard, and when they're really showing what they can do, they manage to combine those two things in one space and still get the work done.

Adam Schuman 25:26

And not to brag, but we're really fucking good at that.

Amanda Elder 25:30

Just to be a part of that environment, I think, is always a fun exercise, if even if it does take a lot of work to put it together. See you in another nine years for a podcast recording?

Adam Schuman 25:44

I hope not.

Harmon Skurnik 25:47

Skurnik Unfiltered is recorded at Skurnik Wines & Spirits headquarters in the Flatiron District of New York City. If you found the conversation interesting, please consider liking, subscribing, and leaving a review. You can stay up to date on our show and upcoming events by following @skurnikwines on Instagram and visiting our website at skurnik.com