Keeping up with consumer trends, twin brothers and business partners Don and William Ray shifted service at the nightclub and bars they owned in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to focus on craft cocktails made by hand. However, the cavernous rooms and massive bars were built to accommodate far more people than a typical intimate cocktail lounge, overwhelming bartenders and slowing down service time.
“When you’ve got 200-300 people, 400 people in at any given point, making hand-crafted cocktails turns into a nightmare scenario,” William Ray told Brewbound. “Honestly, Don, it was keeping him up at night, because we weren’t realizing the potential of the square footage through sales because we couldn’t get the drinks out fast enough to the consumer.”
Knowing that homebrewers occasionally keg their own beers, Don Ray sought out as much information as possible about Cornelius kegs, the containers popular in the homebrewing community for being easier to fill and clean than standard kegs. Then, the brothers started experimenting with large-scale recipes for Moscow mules, which marked the beginning of their next business venture, Craft Standard, a line of alcohol-free drink mixes packaged in 30L kegs for draft service.
“We went through a couple iterations of it, because when you’re batching, it’s a whole different animal than when you’re making a singular one-off by hand,” William Ray said. “We landed on a recipe we felt was good, it was gonna work, and then we took a couple draft lines off at the bar and put it on and it worked phenomenally.”
Draft cocktails were such a boon to the Williams’ business that they removed all beer from their 18 tap handles and switched to selling it in cans and bottles. They developed batch recipes for their best-selling mixed drinks and began serving them on tap.
As they were preparing to scale Craft Standard keg production with a co-packing partner in Kentucky, the Rays realized they couldn’t transport kegs with spirits over state lines, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s (TTB) standards of fill, which prevents distilled spirits from being sold in containers larger than 1.8L.
To solve that problem, William Ray started tinkering with what ultimately became Craft Standard’s patented spiker (developed through “a lot of trial and error, a lot of 3D printing,” he said) a funnel-shaped attachment that allows retailers to add their own spirits to the non-alcoholic mix inside Craft Standard kegs. Craft Standard kegs can hold 30 liters, but have 20 liters of mix, so retailers need to add nine additional liters of liquid, usually a mix of spirits and more mixers to customize the cocktail’s flavor.
The kegs use U.S. Sankey D couplers and can be tapped on most draft systems. Mixes don’t separate in draft lines, nor do they stain or clog them, according to Craft Standard’s website.
“It’s an open source item, so the beauty of this is they can literally create whatever they want,” William Ray said. “Whether it’s their margarita, they just put straight tequila in the margarita keg. It’s a margarita, but if they put gin and elderflower liqueur in it, now it’s an elderflower gimlet.”
The Rays made their first batch of kegged cocktails in January 2019 and signed with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits for distribution in November 2019. Craft Standard has relaunched after the on-premise industry’s initial tumult during the pandemic and is now with the Anheuser-Busch InBev network, including wholly owned AB ONE distributors.
“Anheuser-Busch, they just got it,” Don Ray said. “They’re super high connectivity, very high touch, and they understand draft. They know where the draft lines are and how to fix those things, and they have an initiative through A-B InBev to do beyond beer.”
Craft Standard has entered 31 states through a network of 71 A-B-aligned wholesalers and is poised to be nearly national within the next six months. Its retailer partners include sports arenas, casinos, concert venues and nightclubs. Since the product’s relaunch last year, Craft Standard estimates 2.4 million cocktails have been served from its kegs, according to a press release.
“The big venues like the MLB – I think we’re in 12 or 13 MLB stadiums – NFL, NHL, concert amphitheaters, they crush it, crush it with this product,” Don Ray said. “Anywhere that you’ve got to move really, really fast and efficiently, this works really well.”
As Craft Standard expands, it has recruited several beer industry veterans for its executive team, including former Pabst Brewing Company president and general manager Matt Bruhn, who serves as CEO. Adams Beverages former GM/VP Mike Vacek is the company’s chief sales officer. Sam Morrison, who managed the Olympia brand for Pabst, is the head of marketing.
Craft Standard’s most popular mix is margarita, followed by lemonade, which gets a seasonal boost thanks to warm weather. Other mixes include mojito, paloma and mule.
Kegs sell for $150 and typically contain enough liquid for 164 cocktails. Depending on how much liquor a retailer adds using the spiker, each drink can be between 8-13% ABV.
“It’s a little more expensive than who we would consider our competitors per ounce, but we’re also using real juice, real cane sugar, filtered water,” William Ray said, adding that Casamigos mix is in Craft Standard’s competitor set.
In addition to saving the several minutes a bartender would take to mix a drink by hand, Craft Standard kegs also cut down on the amount of training required for new bartenders.
“You don’t have to train somebody, especially in these large venues that we’re dealing with,” William Ray said. “They can hire anybody off the street to pull the tap, fill the cup of ice and pull the tap. They don’t have to know how to do anything, so we’ve eliminated any room for error. We’ve increased the speed the control over the consumer gets the same cocktail every single time. It’s not over-alcoholed or over-spirited or under-spirited. It’s the magic beans that everybody’s trying to sell and hasn’t really ever been able to accomplish.”