I remember the first time I saw a bottle of WM Tarr. I didn't know much about it except that is was from a company in Lexington and there was well-known football coach supporting the brand. Fast forward a few months and that bottle disappeared from the shelves and was replaced with a new brand called RD1 and it specialized in finished bourbon whiskeys. To help share more of this story, we've invited Barry Brinegar on the show. Barry is a Co-Founder and National Brand Ambassador and gives us the scoop on how their business plan that was only going to focus on gift shop sales got completely disrupted by covid and they had to look at new ways of doing business. We talk about their mission as a company and how they are taking a modern approach to whiskey to find new customers and how a that football coach I talked about landed them a premier placement on ESPN's college football gameday coverage.

Show Notes:

Above the Char with Fred Minnick (@fredminnick) talks about Maker's Mark and the proof change.
How did you get started in the whiskey industry?
How did you get connected with Mark Stoops?
Why release WM Tarr?
How did you adapt when covid shut down your business plan?
What is the goal of how you are trying to be different?
Did your cutover happen overnight and was the plan to switch over already in place?
Why go with a modern brand vs traditional?
How did you land on your core four products?
How involved is Mark Stoops with the brand?
Why have so much transparency when it comes to the wood finishing process?
Why did you use amburana?
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467 - From Gift Shop to GameDay: The Disrupted Journey of RD1 Bourbon with Barry Brinegar