0:00 and so it's it's really a treat that on this episode we're going to have one of the foremost whiskey experts in the united states so cheers to you i'm actually drinking a little bit of nika coffee grain from japan oh okay i have that one in my bar as well yeah cheers one of my favorites um this is um this is made on a coffee still and a coffee still um is a special kind of still that has a really kind of a cool history and there's only only three of them i think
0:37 really still operating in the world [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel if you're brand new to the show you may not know it but cocktails and spirits are really embedded to what we do here every day and so it's it's really a treat that on this episode we're going to have one of
1:12 the foremost whiskey experts in the united states robin robinson as our guest so robin has written the complete whiskey course i've taken his course and i'm telling you whether you're a long time whiskey aficionado or whether you're you're new to whiskey you will learn a tremendous amount uh with robin's book in his course so we're going to be working in the play realm of the physical pillar but you'll see that robin has taken this love that he has and it's he's made it his career
1:49 and that's one of the things we're going to talk to him about is is how do you do that so normally i'd mix up a cocktail or we'd have a bartender mixing up a cocktail but in honor of our guest i'm just going to have one of my favorite ryes this is a sagamore spirit rye and i was in washington dc several years ago to be at the retirement ceremony of a navy friend of mine and i went into one of the local liquor stores and i said what's a great local whiskey that you have particularly a rye whiskey and this is what he gave me and i'm telling you i fell in love with it it's it's just got such a great
2:25 nice spicy flavor the way rye whiskey does is distinguish from say bourbon or a wheat whiskey or something like that so i'm just gonna pour myself a little shot i'm thinking robin will probably tease me because i'm not using the right kind of glass but we'll see and i'll see you over in the interview cheers [Music] robin so so nice to meet you so glad to have you on the way to wow show thanks so much my pleasure great thanks for having me
3:00 on kevin i really appreciate it yeah my pleasure so uh you know in your honor i have uh one of my favorite whiskeys this is sagamore spirit rye um i i told the story in the intro that i uh i found it when i was in washington dc for the uh uh retirement ceremony for a navy colleague of mine but it's i love rye whiskey and this one is so good so and it's you know it's out of baltimore and there's a whole lot of naval cross over there in baltimore so so cheers to you i'm actually drinking a little bit of nica coffee grain from japan oh okay
3:36 i have that one in my bar as well yeah cheers excuse me it's one of my favorites um this is um this is made on a coffee still and a coffee still um is a special kind of still that has a really kind of a cool history and there's only only three of them i think really still operating in the world one's in japan making this one one's in um in scotland and one's in canada so this is kind of being made on a very very um unique still so so robin
4:11 i'm going to read a short bio about you and then we'll jump right in the interview okay robin robinson has built small brands for most of his working life and is currently working with small spirits brands across the u.s as a brand sherpa i love i love that term to help them enter and endure a volatile and competitive marketplace previously he helped build the compass box whiskey company as its u.s brand manager and brand ambassador and before that he had careers in tech and in the tech and entertainment industries and so you sir are no stranger to the wicked stage are you
4:46 perhaps robin is best known for his book the complete whiskey course a comprehensive tasting school in 10 classes which i i showed your book in the intro and mentioned i i went through the the course myself i found it incredibly enlightening um even though i'm kind of an old whiskey guy myself as i mentioned in the intro you you we're going to delve into the play realm of the physical pillar and we're going to talk about how you got into whiskey you know really as a career
5:22 um and really made your work play which i think a lot of us would love to do but you know how do you get there so so let's let's start right there how did you go from being an actor to sales in the tech industry to whiskey how did that how did that develop well i i will tell you one thing i mean and i'm going to say this from the perspective of being that we both live in 2021 um i was just damn lucky and i can tell you that i had opportunities that opened up but i was able to take advantage of them you know that maybe
5:59 somebody else may not have gotten um i um you know i started out as an actor and i was grinding it out on the street um for many many years around the country um and in new york city and then i got a modicum of success in new york city uh doing television commercials and so um i wanted to expand on that and so i moved my family out to los angeles and um i took a um i took a uh a seminar from a guy who was a casting director out there for match you know
6:35 and and it was how to market yourself as an actor and um it was a six week course and it literally transformed it did two things it transformed my approach to the industry and it actually opened the door for me to get out um yeah it was it was an ironic uh um end result and at the same time i had been learning all of the new technology that was coming out in the 1980s about computers and desktops and word
7:11 processing and ibm and windows and things like that and i was doing a lot of temp work for that and when i kind of came to this decision at one point where i'm not going to be an actor anymore um i started to kind of see the writing on the wall i had this sort of other skill set that i had developed you know instead of waiting tables or or or driving cabs as a support jump um and um so it i moved from one opportunity into the other until a company in a silicon valley
7:48 company that was really hot big you know nasdaq hut asked if i was interested in taking a position that would move me back to new york city and open up an office in new york city and i said yeah let's do it and so i moved my family back to the new york area again and um and so i was happily being traded back and forth in tech silicon valley companies for the next five or six years going from a customer success position to various sales positions and all the stuff that i had learned on
8:24 the street as a guerrilla salesman as a as an actor was now actually being systematized and a a methodology was being applied to that uh to do enterprise level sales all the time i had picked up this bizarre obsession for something called single mold scotch whiskey back from my acting days and in the tech in my tech days um i had an expensive council i was actually able to indulge myself even a little bit more and um
8:59 in the early 2000s i started a blog i put together like a tasting group of some neighborhood friends of mine who were just tired of me droning on and on and on about whiskey and they didn't know anything other than johnny walker black and i'm talking about single malt scotch and and one thing led to another until an old friend of mine who i've known for many years and who's very high up in the licorice industry had been sort of watching over the last couple of decades this growing obsession with whiskey and he read a lot of my blog pieces and
9:36 came to one or two of my tastings and he says you know what are you doing is selling technology you're in the wrong industry you know you know more about whiskey than the people who work for me and you know one day you and i are gonna have a talk and then one day we actually had the talk and he laid out a position for me that he you know it wasn't just get in the industry it was get in the industry and make a change and that's kind of what lit me up and um and so i did i switched to a third career
10:11 and that's how i started off with compass blogs as their us first is their brand ambassador and then as their u.s brand manager and sales manager for about six years um at that time then i saw this growing growing movement of these new tech of these new um whiskey companies and distilleries that were growing and it reminded me of the tech boom of the 90s and the early 2000s i said oh my god i know exactly where this is going to go it's going to like you know it's going to have nuclear fission and i want to be part of that
10:46 so um i started this you know this consulting company where i'm kind of like a brand sherpa and um and that's kind of like you know how i got to where i'm at today wow so it really you know you said the beginning it was luck but it sounds to me like there was actually a lot of pre-planning there and a lot of ground laying you know they they they say uh i don't know if you've ever read the book uh the richest man in babylon you have to entice the goddess of good luck and that sounds like what you did i i i agree 100
11:21 i and and i think i was doing that subconsciously um um you know it you're always laying groundwork for something else you know you can go back to biblical you know planting seeds and some of them are gonna you know are gonna grow um there's a lot of metaphors you can use the metaphor that i've actually been sort of working on for the my overall life philosophy is that there are two types of boaters out on the water there are power boaters and there are sailboats and they each get from a to b in two completely different ways power boaters believe in
11:57 the force of their own nature and they you know they may actually find a direct way to get there i found out that i'm more of a sail boater and um and so which means i know how to read the wind and i know which winds are going to pick up my sails and get me to where i'm at um a power boater can run out of um they can run out of fuel and they can also you know go into areas where they shouldn't go and on the other hand for sale boaters will hit dead spots and in both
12:32 and where there's no wind at all and both of them have to know what to do with those down times uh in order to be able to actually you know power through or sail through when when that time comes and so yeah i've always been kind of like the sailboater guy you know um that's for somebody who didn't grow up on a sailboat i'm just picking metaphors out of the air here yeah no i think that's a that's actually a great metaphor so i think you know one of the things i've often thought about in terms of turning
13:08 you know kind of a hobby that's a passion into a career is having to do it every day is is it really going to be as much fun as a job as it is as a hobby so how did you sustain your interest when now all of a sudden you're not doing it out of pure passion now now you know it is it's it's your source of income right right oh yeah um i can tell you that um i modified my view right i modified my view of the end product so the end product is a bottle of whiskey
13:43 and um but what i was able to do was sort of take everything that i learned as an actor and everything i've learned as a tech sales guy and push that into whiskey into a bottle of whiskey so in my mind i was transforming things i was bringing an added value and if you're looking for that one thing that allows me to get up in the morning you know and do this over again it's where am i bringing value i'm you know bringing value to the marketplace and bringing it to my client the brand
14:18 uh i'm bringing it somewhere and uh and all the permutations that it takes to do that so for me it's sort of like an elaborate game that i'm playing you know and um it's the value game you know where you know like you know where where where do i have to compete and where can i go and put footsteps in the snow that no one's ever been before and then what's the value of each one of those and then so then what's the strategy behind that and what are the tactics that come out of the strategy so
14:53 i play these mental games all the time and and that really allows me to um to be excited about it um over and over and over again and not get jaded because there's an enormous amount of jadedness in in the liquor industry overall um i i when i was interviewing for the book i interviewed um a man named uh shinji fukuyu who was the chief blender at uh suntory and uh in in japan and i was uh i was out there talking with him
15:28 i asked him so what makes a blender what makes a blender i mean how do you guys in japan the blender is at the top of the hierarchy not the distiller but the blender so i said what makes that and he says well we gather people from all over the the company to come in and and and and learn how to know and learn how to be uh you know learn how to do this and after three years if they still can do it with passion we'll make it we'll make them a blender
16:04 and i said oh that's like fantastic because you have to go through the the slogging and and just like you know the the blocking and tackling and get some enjoyment out of that and i think that's one of the keys is you know sometimes people want to stay strategic on the top and they don't want to get their feet dirty anymore and i don't mind getting my feet dirty um you know um so i'm able to play both of those those areas and it just keeps incredibly incredibly interesting for me
16:40 so um what's the biggest challenge you faced as someone who's you know working in the in the spirits industry oh well in the beginning was establishing my credibility um uh that was that was for me and was interesting because i came in as an older person and as soon as you start seeing gray hair and gray in the beard i mean you know exactly there's expectations that people have on you you know i mean i don't know are you the wise stage you know and that means
17:16 everything that comes out of your mouth has to be the wise sage words of wisdom but in a way we get kind of caught up in that and so i you know i i was an autodidact you know i had read all the books and the blogs that were available on whiskey and i had gone to scotland in the 1990s and visited distilleries back then before it was popular so i thought i knew something but what i really needed to do was prove that and so um i started uh
17:51 there's a place here in new york city called the astor center and it's this beautiful sort of amphitheater classroom where they do like wine and and spirits and cocktail and combination um like classes for for um for consumers and i asked them whether or not they had somebody doing like a whiskey 101 and they didn't so i offered to do it and that ran for 11 years up until code and and with that what i had done was i
18:26 had established my expertise and uh and that allowed me to do something in the liquor industry that uh which it was unheard of then which was to become a thought leader and i came out of the tech industry and tech industry is all processed and and and and there's a huge success um orientation toward it um the liquor industry was completely different it's a very gangster you know if you know gangster post prohibition gangster industry
19:01 so the idea of a thought leader of somebody who comes in with you know with a sort of a philosophy or a thought process or an idea about something and then pervase that out into the marketplace over and over again was not really and and does it freely was not really heard of so that gave me the opportunity to do that and and people started listening to me because it made sense and it fit in with their sense of reality around whiskey and then i just enhanced and grew value for them so
19:36 that was that was one of the biggest challenges for me was just establishing some sort of you know credibility in the industry so last question what do you what advice do you have for people who want to make spirits a serious hobby you know most of us probably are not going to work in the industry but but we can make it a a passionate avocation so what advice do you have for for folks like us first of all do not take it seriously number one this is [ __ ] whiskey if you're not having a good time you're
20:11 [ __ ] up right so that's number one right there and and i'm saying that specifically because too many people are doing the opposite there's you know a preciousness that comes into any industry and i'm seeing so much preciousness inside of the whiskey industry i you know want to stick a butter knife in my ears sometimes you know um i i i it's it's the it it it's the and anthem uh of of what whiskey whiskey is about enjoying it with a friend and talking about some of the cool things that you like about it and then bringing another
20:47 friend in to do it with so if you come in with a sense of play a sense of not taking yourself seriously i've got a one-man show that i do called the story of whiskey 60 minutes of bad stand-up comedy punctuated by drinking that should give you an issue that should give you an indicator what you're what to expect you know and and not only that but that is what keeps you safe it's what keeps you on track it was what keeps you balanced
21:22 and that i respect the brands and i respect you know the making of this and and the stories behind them because i'm a natural storyteller but let's face it folks you know we're this is not brain surgery here and we're not you know saving the third world directly we're enjoying ourselves with a psychotropic drug so let's keep that in perspective well you know what robin on on that note i'm going to thank you very very much for coming on the show you got you got everybody out here laughing you can't you can't see them
21:57 all but they're all they're all cracking up and i i appreciate that very much thank you very very much for coming on the show i think we may need to have you come back again sometime soon okay whatever i love it man hey thanks first of all kevin this series you're doing i think is awesome and and so i'm really really honored to be here so thanks for uh making me uh part of it i i think you could tell that robin had a background in acting but really a truly dynamic performance and you could see the passion that he has for what he does
22:33 in that play realm in the physical pillar i think sometimes we get so involved with our play we forget to heed his advice which is it's about the fun right we can work all day but when we play we need to have fun so go out and have some fun and make sure you have courage at all times my friends marie you're still my bell darling yeah sounds a little bit like zhang
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