E173 Devon Trevathan

This week's guest is Devin Trevathan, who joins us from Nashville, Tennessee. Devin is the co-founder and co-owner of Leba Spirits, a nomadic distilling company. Devin has held a wide variety of positions in the industry from alcohol spirits journalist to brand ambassador, bartender, server, marketing consultant, tour guide, wine retail manager, and now she and her business partner Colton Weinstein travel all over the world, renting space in different distilleries to distill their own spirits. It's a unique concept and one you'll definitely enjoy hearing and learning about.

Check out the website at lebaspearits.com. That is spelled L-I-B-A-S-P-I-R-I-T-S.com and on Instagram at lebaspearits or check the show notes for all the links. Enjoy the show. Okay, welcome back to another episode of the industry podcast.

As always, it's Kip and Dan with you. How are you doing, Dan? Doing well. Doing well.

Hey, what about yourself? How are you doing? Everything's great. Yeah, wonderful.

How was that? I always like to ask? How was business this past weekend at Non-Holding Weekend at the bars? Okay, okay.

It's very hit and miss Friday. Friday was one of the first days in a long time where all three bars did well. So that was exciting, but then Saturday they all did terrible. So that's like, you do it.

Very up and down the industry is crazy these days. You never know when you're going to be busy and when you're not. So you just take it when it comes. And then I was surprised to find out that today was a bank holiday.

Oh, because I've been carrying a remember's day. Right. So when I went to check out how much money all the bars made all weekend in my bank accounts, there was no money coming in and I was very distraught. Well, I figured that out.

I was like, what the fuck is happening? But the money will come tomorrow, ostensibly. Oh, we don't need help. Yeah.

So speaking of it, if you're in the kitchen, while the area comes check out my bar sugar rundown. Kitchener is the speak easy. We have a big burlesque show coming up at the end of the month, last Friday of every month, the top shelf burlesque. It's an amazing show.

You want to check that out? Babylon's sister's bar. We are doing Afro beats nights, the last Saturday of every month. Great shows there, DJ Dane, every Friday night, always a fun and Alex price, the second Saturday of every month.

And then the Argyle Arms, we are re tooling the concept. We are, we're just going to give it to you for cheap. It's $15 for everything on the menu and $6 pints and $5 shots from now on. So come to the Argyle Arms and Preston Ontario for that.

Well, we have Zach Gillitt every Friday night. We have trivia every Wednesday night and stay tuned for some upcoming new show ideas as well. But yeah, that's the deal there and Preston. Sounds good.

I'm a Terasic. My own sick six bucks pints, eh? What do you offer? What's that?

Like domestic mainstream or the craft beers or? All craft beers? Craft beers? Six bucks apiece.

That's only about a 10 minute drive for my office. There you go. How you going to beat that? So come check us out there.

As for the show, this is the industry podcast. If you'd like to be a guest on this show, it's just DM us at the industry podcast on Instagram or you can email us directly info at the industry podcast club to subscribe, rate and review the show because that helps out tremendously. I was always a big shout out to Zachana at Zachana.co for all the great artwork he does for the Instagram feed. So big shout out as always to him.

And I think that's about enough about us. Devin Trevathan is here with us from Nashville, Tennessee. I nailed the name. So we're off to a rolling start.

How are you, Devin? I'm doing very well. And yes, you nailed it. Really beautifully done.

Thank you very much. I appreciate the feedback. That's for the show. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, I mean, let's just jump right into it. You are co-founder and co-owner of your own distillery, Liba Spirit.

And so tell us all about that. Tell us how well it's just like what made you decide that you wanted to get into distilling? Well, quickly before even getting into that, I will clarify that I technically don't own my own distillery. Oh, right.

Sorry. You're on your right. Right. Sorry.

No problem. No problem. I mean, I, you know, I shorthand it all the time because getting into it with people sometimes is not always what they want to do. And I get it.

If these are just a thing. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just say this is where they recognize it.

Right. Yeah. We'll throw that out there. And we're going to get into exactly the difference between the owning your own distillery and what you do.

But yeah, so let's just talk and say about you own your own spirits company. Can we say that? Yeah. I think that's accurate.

Yeah. The saying I own distilling company is accurate. But do you want me to reveal? It is.

It is. Okay. So I go by an icon company called Liba Spirits. It is just me and a business partner.

Truly, honestly, I have started saying this recently. I think it's pretty accurate. We are more employees who happen to be owners than what you would think of. I think if you thought of an owner of a distillery.

So, you know, people, I just don't want people to imagine me rolling around like a G-Wagon and being an animal. It's the exact thing that I do. Like I own three bars, but basically I just work for those bars. Yeah.

I just don't take like a salary is what it is. Right. I'm basically a free employee of myself. So to distill my business partner and I, we travel around the globe and we just pay to use other people's distillaries.

Thankfully over the last, I would say, 20, almost 30 years. You know, there's a big craft boom. Wasn't Justin America reached every corner of the entire world, basically. And so there's all these kind of mid-sized distillaries that are not actively producing 24-7.

And we realized that and we knew, you know, we came from a background of production in the industry. And so we sought out to just go right to production, skip all of that having to find, you know, sourcing and resources and funding for an actual distillery. So we just have made it a big part of the company itself that we make all of our spirits in different places around the globe. Yeah.

Okay. So this is very interesting. And I think that you're right. A lot of people don't understand that this happens way more often than people think it does.

In so many ways. Yeah. So many different little iterations of this kind of idea exist out there. Right.

They are a little shady. So I get why people are like, huh? What do you do? Well, a lot in craft brewing, like for beer, like it's a very prevalent there now.

What it's just like, and I think a lot of the reason, correct me if I'm wrong, is because the equipment is fucking expensive, right? Oh, crazy expensive. I don't even realize that like a small distilling system, and this is excluding the real estate that you would need, is going to start at $200,000. Right.

And that's a very small system that you will likely grow out of if you're doing it correctly within a couple years. So you're talking like, I call them still a pot still. That's like a small batch pot system. That's not even a continuous column.

If you're going to continue a column system, that's I don't really think, if you're really going to get it from one of kind of the premier still manufacturers in this country, I really don't think they're going to get that for less than around a million dollars for the system. Right away, that's going to cut off most people's needs. So what I was talking to Dan before that we started the zoom connected here, and I was like, this is a great symbiotic relationship for people now who have a good idea for the stealing spirits, but don't have the capital to build their own fucking distillery. And conversely, these distilleries spend a shit ton of money on it and then don't have the doctor.

That's so much. Yeah. It's a good way to make some money back as well. Absolutely.

And I think especially in the first couple of years, you don't know what your brand is going to be. The shift in spirit strands and kind of the type of spirit that's going to potentially put your brand on the map or your company on the map can be very slow, but also can be very unexpected. And so I think there's always, it's kind of a crazy ask for people. They want to, they're supposed to come into this business and pretty quickly, they're supposed to lay down all the spirit if they're aging it, that they are anticipating will do well in years to come.

Right. That's the other way for that time to pass. That's the other thing about distilling is opposed to brewing beer is you put out all this money right away, but then also, unless you're just making vodka, then you're... I know that he's making vodka.

That system is the most expensive system of them all to do it. Or just for like gin or something like that. Gin. Right.

Yeah. At least you don't have to age it and wait for it. So a lot of those places that have the column distilling method, they'll at least make vodka gin first while they age whatever they want to do. Right.

And everybody did. Right. And between 2010 and 2017, I feel like every craft distillery in the entire country made a gin or maybe made a vodka or maybe throughout a rum and I get it. It was...

I'm not going to... I can't fault anybody for their business decisions. It's a very challenging process. It's super taxing.

It's sad though that a lot of those people I think by their own admission would say that they weren't very passionate about these products and they're just like, we need something on the shelves. Well, I know. People are now that we have canned cocktails coming out because I think hopefully that's kind of a more interesting way of getting product out there in the time between starting your distillery and having access to your age product. Yeah, because it would be difficult to get like you said passionate about making vodka.

It would all do respect those vodka. Why did this come up so early? I have this weird thing where I am always... I swear to God, I don't make vodka.

I don't drink vodka. I for some reason have talked about or written about Indefensive vodka many times throughout my career and I don't know why. And it just like it finds me in conversations that I don't know why. Because vodka is so maligned for good reason, but it doesn't have to be actually.

And if we would embrace vodka, we could have a very fertile category for innovation, especially now that they've back in the United States back in 2020, I believe in March of 2020, changed the TTV ruling or the TTV definition of vodka and took out the part that's needed to bylaw by definition be colorless, flavorless and odorless. It still needs to be distilled to at least 95%, which is obviously the majority, but that 5% leaves room for character, like character, but the cool thing about vodka is that you can make it from anything, you know, no cessation of the base material. And there's not that many officially designed designated categories. Like I wish I could get people to care about O2V, but I don't know.

I don't know how to get the kids. Into something like O2V, it seems really far away. Maybe somebody cool. That's a celebrity input and they'd do something for it.

But we can make that as a product. That's the next thing. The rock. Yeah.

He seems like he's having fun with Terrafana to add to that O2V. That's all he needs. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the spirits that you're actually making through your company.

Yeah. But start with explaining that to us. And then I'm very interested in talking about how you managed to do this all over the globe. Right.

So when you're talking about how I produce, there has been a name for it in the past and how Perris have done it, which is Gypsy Burbank and then Gypsy Distilling. Unfortunately, I think before that even really got a chance to have legs. Gypsy became a term that was not appreciated and it's kind of a slur. And so people, I think, are not using it as much.

And in the wake of that, there hasn't really been an accepted term to put in its place. So I call it nomadic. Other people can have a different take, but that's how we refer to it. So as nomadic distillers, obviously, as much as this whole concept is very like, it's dreamy, right?

It's a fantastical. Yes. But in reality, it's so logistical because we are accessing a lot of cool stuff, but we also have severe limitations. Us wanting to actually do our own distillations, we knew our first couple products.

We're not going to really have any age on them. We weren't going into categories that are traditionally really built. The characters built in the maturation process. So our first spirit that we made was a gin, actually.

Of course. Of course. In the same steps as all of my craft, a brother and before me, I started the gin. But I actually think that our gin is really cool.

And people love it as much as that can be kind of a pain in our ass because we made it in the Austrian Alps. And so to make more as the most costly and time-intensive process. But it's so we went to Austria to this distillary that's been, it's a farm. It's an orchard.

The property's been the same family. Since 1643, it's existed there for longer. Casually, 12 generations back still operating this same property. And we distilled a gin there from some Austrian botanicals.

But really excited. We were really excited about this incredible citrus that we were able to access. That's actually from northern Italy. The distillary itself is only 40 minutes north of the Italian Austrian border.

So we flew in. We drove down to Verona, went to this insane market and picked up Phil de Vann, full of fresh Italian garter lemons, fresh Italian orange, and a fresh Italian juniper. All of those we used in. All of our spirits, we used whole natural ingredients.

So no flavors or anything like that. And brought that back up and prepared everything by hand. But that experience was amazing because it was just a crazy time. This is your first one.

It's your first distillation. So we really went deep end, I would say. But what made you even think to do this or that you could do this? Like that you were going to lie to Austria and like where did the idea spring from?

Casually, I mean, not casually. Traditionally, of course, it comes from relationships. Pre-existing relationships. That's what this industry is all about, right?

You guys are doing the podcast for it. It's all the people that you know and get to meet. And so one of the two brothers, Florian, this Austrian distiller who they run this distillery, he had about five years prior come to Nashville. They were starting to get into whiskey distillation at their distillery.

And they wanted to specifically get into smoking grain. And at that time, my business partner was running the production for Corsair artisan distillery in Nashville. That's where he and I met working there. And he was running the production.

And Corsair was kind of a leader in smoking of grain. They built their own smoker out of a shipping container. They were doing a lot of smoked grain before it was cool and it still isn't really cool. But there was just, at one point there was like three craft whiskies that incorporated smoking and theirs was one of them for sure.

So Florian came and he lived with my business partner for the whole time that he was here studying under him. So they became super tight, just really hit it off at close in age. So when it came time for us to start our company, we knew we needed to cash in on basically all existing favors that were floating out there in the world. And that one was a really cool story and it seemed like a beautiful place.

And I mean, it was even more beautiful than I'd even imagined when I was thinking about it. And it was just such an, it was an amazing experience getting over there. So it was, I think, properly picked a rest and we tried some products that Florian sent us and we're really impressed by stuff from that area. And then also just having access to it was a huge part.

We really always needed access. So like when this happens, like you said, it was a connection for us in Formos. Now this probably opened your mind to like shit, we can probably do this in many different spots and we can probably do many different things. Yes, of course.

Yeah. I mean, now, and I think even more probably than I realized or was in game at it when we first started, now it feels like truly this guy's limit. Although we are, of course, still we're an independent company. So we are limited by our own kind of resource limitations.

But it opened up my mind to how we were going to approach production from then on, which is that now we, which it actually was kind of because our first spirit was this gin. And as we talked about, there's a lot of gin out there. And I think there's been a lot of really good gin that's come out in the last couple of years. But it's also not always a super favorable category as everybody likes to tell me as a producer of gin.

So many people don't like gin. And I'm sure you get it as a bartender. Yeah. That's a little bit like behind the bar.

It came around a little bit like where there was a stretch where it was like coming on. Yeah, it's like cyclical, right? It was a classic, it was a time where it was like the classic spirit and became like the classic spirit for cocktails. And then we kind of moved away from that.

But now with the resurgence of the craft cocktail, grey is gin is right back in everyone's mind again. Naturally, because it's a great cocktail spirit. You can really build a lot and there's such variety. And that's actually part of why we were so intrigued about making a gin was we had seen already the variety of that gin just as one category can have if you expand to include the global market.

Because yes, there are some cool gins in the United States, but I think culturally gin is much more significant in other places. And a huge part of why we decided to start Leba Spirits and approach distilling in our own company this way. It's a trip that we took to Australia back in 2018. Me and Colton, Weinstein, my business partner went out there because we met these Australian distillers.

And we coordinated one to do kind of a collaborative product with him and of course, so they were going to do a distillation together. We went out there and we traveled around and back into 2018, Australia's distilling industry was super new, super young. And so they were kind of in their initial gin phase. But because Australia is influenced so much by Britain, I would say culturally, gin is a lot more of a significant spirit.

It's a lot more typically consumed. It's something that is kind of a standard for a lot of the people who live there. So gin was just having a real moment there. And they had these really cool gins that we tried.

We kind of went to some of the bigger cities in Australia, both Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, I think that's it. But in and around these places, all these surprising amount of facilities considering their tax system is really limiting to facilities. It's really expensive to make spirits there, to sell spirits there, I should say, because of the taxes. But everybody was making these gins and they were making really cool gins, including one that we'd had, which I don't know if it's made anymore.

And I actually was just talking to a chemist friend of mine and found out there's more like this. But it was a gin made in Australia that was flavoured with green ants, like actual ants, because they had a lime, kefir lime flavour. And we were able to go with the distillery to their source for the ants, which is this entire food source company that is called Something Wild, I believe. And it's all foods sourced from the bush, the kind of centre of Australia.

It had all sorts of crazy, unexpected. I got like kangaroo jerky and the ants and lots of cows of variety kind of treatments. And it was a really, really amazing experience because they do a ton of foraging all around Australia for anything edible and flavour, so we were able to try this super cool green ant gin. And we even brought a bottle, one bottle back all the way across, because obviously Australia to the US is a long journey.

Got it all the way back. Colton, my biz partner, had it in a bag with like shoes of his, I guess, that didn't, I don't know why he had it in the same bag, but it was all wrapped up. And you would know the weight difference between shoes and then also just a bag of just shoes and a bag of shoes and gin. But for some reason, the jet lag, he took that bag and he tossed it down the stairs and it shattered.

It was so sad. I just heard it. I'm like down the hall and I was like, Oh, that's the only spirit I think we brought back from that trip. Travel brain.

Yeah, that's a long trip. So that's maybe understandable. But okay, so you have how many different distilleries across the globe are you working with right now? So we've made so far three spirits.

We went to Austria, made the gin. We are working on continuing back to batches of that. Then we made our second spirit, a rum in New Orleans. That was again, a distillery that is run by a very good run bars.

We made more of the rum so we're set on that for right now. And now we make our third spirit, Teartivo here in Nashville. And that one is kind of a little bit of a foray away from our traditional approach with us far, because we make it a distillery that my business partner, again, Colton, he's been managing and running. He kind of built it out so with a contract whiskey facility.

So big continuous column still that is owned by and was built by the same people who own Corsair. So he was hired on to just run that project after we started the business and he kind of left Corsair. So he stayed on. He still runs that.

He still is managing it on site every day. But we also are able to make our spirit there. And what is that spirit? That is our bourbon based upper Tebow.

Yeah, that's the one I saw on your Instagram feed. And I was just to talk about it. Explain it to us. Yeah.

Okay, well, so following our first two spirits, right? We knew right off, we're gonna make this gin. We're gonna make this rum. We did not anticipate a global pandemic.

That was a bummer. That was a real wrench in the chain. I think you guys are the only one who didn't see that coming. I know.

We're just talking about it. But we just were not paying attention. There really was one single pass started the whole thing. Yeah.

Yeah. It was hilarious. Like, actually, I just listened to Robert Kennedy Jr. Get interviewed by Rick Rubin.

According to how it was, what a mad libs of yeah, I know, apparently it was Anthony Fauci went to who went to create the virus. So you're wrong. My dad is on that tip. So I'm hearing about it regularly from him as well.

At least the bat's got a good PR spin. They're out. Well, Americans, yeah, they're not mad at the bats anymore. But it's a layer.

I mean, you could plan for so much when you're writing a business plan and you have to and we wrote an extensive business plan. And then that is just so almost comically, perfectly kind of a huge problem for a travel based business that was gonna affect all of the places where people go to consume spirits or buy new spirits or be introduced really to new spirits. Because of course, as we all know, consumption went way up, it was like comfort brands. There's brands that people already knew.

They don't want to spend their money on a random spirit that they never heard of before. It was fair enough, cool aid on a phone. Exactly. T goes with going nuts.

Everybody else was doing poorly. It was really well for the new brand. So we just kind of went internal, but we had already planned out these two first spirits. And then, you know, coming back out of the pandemic, I don't know if it's the same for you guys.

The industry here, the landscape is different, especially for small businesses, for small distilleries. It is not the same. I don't I kind of feel like personally the time, the era of being able to have kind of one of everything. I feel like we're just crap.

So we make a run here, make a vodka, we make a gym, we make a whiskey. We got three whiskey. I think that that's kind of over. I feel like it's become too a bit too cutthroat.

You have to be focused. You have to have kind of like your flagship. It has to be a bit more specific. And perhaps you can still do that, but it's just not maybe you're not going to see the runaway success that I feel like was kind of sought after and made into like this phenom that existed sort of of craft is always just like being able to be huge off of a variety of spirits.

And they just were people were buying into the distillery itself. That's interesting. So because I kind of think that like for a also for a smaller independent spirits company, like yours, like it almost would have probably always made sense to focus on like a spirit. But you think it's become even more that way since the pandemic?

Yeah, I mean, maybe I just have learned this in the last time. I didn't mean that. I was just like, you know, I didn't mean that. No, no, no, I didn't mean your girl.

I do think it's just so much more difficult. Yeah, it's become more difficult to succeed. And I think to contend with a pretty diverse and kind of concentrated market with a lot of different entrants for just about every category, I think you do kind of have to carve in and be like, this is what I do. Like your own space with a unique brand, like a spirit, because like you said, there's so many fucking people making gin and rum.

Exactly. How do you stand out making gin now? That's if you really want to be just like a gin brand, how do you stand out making your gin, you can make it colorful, purple, I didn't see that coming. That was unexpected, but great for them.

But how else do you really like get people's attention? Because there's a lot of gin out there, even though everybody tells me that they hate it right to my face when I'm trying to sample for free. But there's a lot of gin out there. So I think after our first two spirits, that was I have no regrets because I think that is a really good illustration of what we can do as producers, I mean, in Golden.

And I'm happy to have two things that people understand a little bit more because our third spirit, Tebow, is I think technically the first of its kind. And for some reason, it is very confusing to people. I did not think that that that was going to be the case necessarily, but they are very confusing. I tell them that it's an appertivo made from a bourbon that we make.

So it's quite a user neutral. So we were thinking about way, you know, we enjoyed, we made a gin first, right? And we didn't make all the base of that part of it was just an Austrian neutral. And for anybody who's not aware, a lot of gin is made using a neutral base as a start.

People don't typically make their own base for gin. And then we made a ramen New Orleans that was a botanical ram. So we made the ram ourselves from Louisiana molasses. And we infused it with a short list of botanicals because we were going to keep the ram flavorful.

And we just wanted to add the extra flavor. So I feel like we were knowingly or not inching closer and closer towards this thing that ultimately would feel very much like all those things clicked into place. So we realized we loved making the base ourselves, making the base to this slit. But also we got a huge kick out of just having that kind of secondary addition of flavor through maceration, basically.

And it could be maceration, re-dislation, which is what we've done before, or we could just macerate and not have to re-distill and turn into something that's kind of the basis of lacours and appertivo's, right? You're macerating, you're not necessarily re-disling, you're just filtering it off and then you're speeding it. And you know, you have the wide world of lacours, which has a lot of distinction within. So we decided it would be cool to do an appertivo and to not just make a very traditional Italian appertivo in America to truly make an American appertivo.

And so to do that, we felt like, let's start with the most iconic American spirit, which to us is bourbon. Make it ourselves and then infuse it with stuff that kind of is traditionally pears well with bourbon, because we kind of just figured, why not look at classic bourbon cocktails and be like, what's working here? And build with that. So we ended up infusing it with tertiary, bitter orange peel, fresh orange peel, allspice, cardamom, rhubarb.

We have hibiscus in there, genshin, some conobark, lava droot, rebar root, and be sweetened up with this organ syrup. So it's very different in character from your comparis, your select, your app roll, because it has character from the whiskey base, the bourbon base, it's still there. But also we don't want it to be like crazy bitter, because we felt that was more of the Italian tradition. We thought American palette might appreciate a little bit more imbalance inherently.

And we were able to take down the sweetness of it because of that as well. So it's got a nice really clean finish. There's no, there's no like, clean kind of film at the back of your throat. But I didn't really, some people, people don't really know how the cores are made necessarily.

Which why would you think about that? If you weren't some weirdo who spends a lot of time thinking about how things are made. But it's been fun to introduce something very new. It has a lot of story, there's a lot of there, so we have to talk through it.

But thankfully everybody's been really, really receptive to it. So when it all else fails, I just give them a sample and they try it as well. Well, that's cool. Like, it's cool to do an aperitif, especially an American one, because again, you're not really known for that.

Like starting with a whiskey base is super cool. So it's great, like after dinner, sipper, I'm sure. But is it also something you can use in cocktails? Yes, for sure.

That has been the most challenging part. It is, yeah, it's great. Just kind of like on its own small sip before dinner, after dinner, I really, I think it's really great just with some soda water or some sparkling wine or a combination of the two. But cocktails are where it gets a little bit tricky.

And where I think people who've worked in the cocktail industry will always have kind of a leg up if they ever decide to start distilling or producing their own spirits. Because not all spirits, producers distill with the intention of what it's going to taste like in a cocktail. And with modifiers like liqueurs and aperitivos, you really have to have that in mind. That's going to be in your head as you're making it, because that is typically how people are going to use it.

That's right. Because we've adjusted a bit. And it is an interesting thing. I think aperitivos could be so much bigger.

I think it's happening. Obviously, there's been like a crazy increase in aperal sales consumption over the last nine years. They like, it's up something like 800%, which is nuts. But I think people who are doing that are really sticking to the spritz basically.

100% of all spritzes. Go for it. I mean, why not? Like, why not?

Spritz is a perfect cocktail, basically. It's probably it's relatively light. And the nice thing about peritivos is that you get a little bit more depth with the bourbon. You can actually, that's I think where it shines the most is that it takes a cocktail that can at times feel a little bit flat in some ways.

Like it bottoms out out of place and kind of like, I can feel the bottom of this basically. And having an actual spirit base adds these layers and these shades of flavor and character that are cool. But there is so much more application of aperitivos than just spritz. And there's so much more application of aperitivos than just aperitivos than just compari because so many of our cocktails are built around specifically compari.

And that is like the most bitter that you could really realistically do and also very sweet. So I kind of have to trust bartenders. Also, I've bartended before, but I would not consider my I was not a bartender. I was a terrible bartender.

I didn't like having to talk to people. Nobody does. No, it sucks. Talking to people is only fun if you choose to.

It's only fun if you want it. That's right. It's like so many things in life. It's only good if you want it.

If you're forced to talk to people, it always sucks. And you can't like, I only worked in small bars that were eight seats. There was nowhere to go. And at one point, I was dumb enough to take a job at a bar where the main bartender was like this really showy and kind of like, ooh, these lips.

But he was just kind of a bartender who was known in town and he would talk, he would talk super openly about his life. Sometimes I would listen to him and be like, what are you saying about things that you're doing outside of work to these randoms? And I'm not going to do that, unfortunately. I worked with him in their experience.

I was like, here if you drink. I worked with a lot of people at one of the bars that were different for a very long time who did that as well. They just told the regulars everything about their lives. And I'm like, well, how are you doing that?

That's so fun. But then of course the regulars love those people because they feel like they have a connection to them, right? But for me, it's like, I don't want these people to know a fucking thing about me. And I I couldn't even imagine, I could not even imagine doing that.

Like I honestly would not know where to start. Do you just at some point look at them? You're like, I want to date yesterday. I do think that that's what people do, but I cannot imagine doing that.

Yeah, I found them weird shit about their childhood. I don't like what is happening here. The therapy is supposed to go one way, not the other. That's what I thought.

I was happy to hear their problems. But then something changed. And it was like they expected performance almost or something. I think it's like a certain type of personality like changed over time where then they was like, everybody just wanted to pitch about themselves so much.

They're just like, Oh, this person sitting here, they'll listen. And like, yeah, and then they feel like they've got a personal connection with you. And I'm like, you're supposed to like, this doesn't happen at best by right? Right?

Like there's so nobody else within the entire, even within the restaurant or the bar, like nobody else is going to do that with these people. No, I'm just going to be using their talking about thing that happened to you in your 13 that was haunted you until this very moment. It's like, what are you doing? Well, I imagine it.

We're super glad that you told us a little bit about yourself tonight, despite your obvious inclination to not do that. Yes. No, but thanks for coming on the show. It's super cool to talk about Liba and what you guys are doing there.

Do you have anything new coming up or are you just going to roll with what you're going right now? Yeah, we are. I mean, kind of as you mentioned, we're the use in cocktails was such a big thing that it took us a couple iterations to really get like the Terra TiVo initial Terra TiVo perfect. But we feel very locked in with that.

So that is going to be, you know, something that we kind of are all in on for a bit. But now, and this is also kind of essential. We said, now we are taking the Terra TiVo concept. Our thought is to take the Terra TiVo concept and really expand it globally.

Right? So we made a version that I think is kind of our domestic caretivo with the bourbon base and with flavors that are kind of of this country and flavor history. And then we would like to go to some hope is next to go down to Mexico and make something from a tequila base or a agave spear base and make that into again, also an apertif style liqueur. And then we'd like to go to Japan and make something from like a race distillate base.

And then because this way, it really is just a way for us to make all of these iconic spirits that we always wanted to make and offer them in a package or in a format that feels new. So it's not just us coming to market with another bourbon or another tequila or, you know, we wanted to really put a spill on it. So we will have the tequila, the Terra TiVo family hopefully fleshed out over the next couple of years, which I'm very excited about. Yeah, it's super cool.

Congratulations, Devin. It's amazing undertaking. It's super cool what you're doing. Tell our listeners where they can find out about you on social media or website or whatever.

Sure. Yeah, I'll hit you with the socials. So my social media, I really am just on Instagram. It's at devlovesbev.

I don't think I need to spell. And then the company Instagram is at LibaSVirits. L-I-B-A-S-P-I-R-I-T-S. Please find me on their reach out with anything.

I might tell you something personal about myself, might not, you know, roll the dice. But I am on there. And yeah, I guess our website is libaspirits.com. And that has kind of our history, our story, probably should have more on there, but we're working on it.

Well, it's amazing, Devin. Thanks so much. It's like a super cool story. I think it's awesome what you're doing.

So keep it up. And thanks for giving us your time. Thank you guys so much. I really enjoyed your podcast.

Well, thank you. Thanks very much.