E202 Madison Homewood

This week's guest is Madison Homewood, head of Research and Development at Civil Pores. Maddie is an award-winning bartender known for her innovative cocktails and exceptional service. We talked with Maddie about her entry into the industry and her career prior to Civil Pores. We discussed transitioning from working late nights to at daytime gig, talking about Civil Pores Sustainability Initiative, the process and analysis that leads to the products released by Civil Pores, plus a bunch of other topics.

Make sure you check out Civil Pores, suite of products that are available online at civilpores.com or check the show notes for all the links. Enjoy the show. It is the industry podcast. My name is Kep.

I'm a director of the studio at the University of Michigan. How is it going? I'm doing very well. Thanks.

It's a nice hot sunny summer day. How's things going with you? It's pretty good. We got an LCBO strike on our hands.

That's super convenient for all bars and restaurants, as I'm sure you might imagine. I went to the store two or three times last week and I think I've already gone through half of what I purchased. That's a lot of I purchased a lot of booze. I know I thought I was being pretty smart too and I'm almost not sort of at all as well.

Luckily we have direct-to-bar agencies to help us out. It's crazy. I know no one's ever heard me complain about the LCBO on this show before. This is a new one.

My favorite part about this is, essentially, the strike is about the fact that the employers are worried that if we allow liquor sales in corner stores, etc., that they will lose jobs. But the way some of them work in the store, they shouldn't leave their jobs. One more LCBO employee asks me when I pull up with a full cart full of bottles if I need a box. I'm just going to cradle put my arms together.

Just roll them in there. Yeah. My favorite one is just leave everything in the basket, keep it by themselves, bring everything through, and then push it to me at the end of the me bag. I'm like, what's your job here?

Either way, I'm not sure if going on strike is the best way to show people that they don't need booze in the corner stores. Let's make it more difficult for you to buy booze from us. And then why would you clamor for booze in corner stores? It's a good time to go out, support your local brewery and distilleries and wineries.

That is absolutely true. I'm sure we'll come up in our conversation today. Before we get to our guests, Madison Holman is going to be joining us in just a minute here. Before I get too far off the deep end, I actually, your sister-in-law, it was the first time she mentioned it to me that she listened to our show.

She was like, so you really like the LCBO? The views expressed by Kip Saunders on this podcast are his alone and do not reflect any of our guests or even Dan. Yes. I had to cut out a bunch of comments, one podcast, a lot of them actually.

I think I cut out everything I said. So I already had the intro. No. I never had enough to have too many belts of espresso martinis from Civil Force.

It was. It was a little tipsy. Okay, well, we're going to get to our guest in just a second here. Before we do that, let's tell you all the ways you can help us.

I'm sure that's your main concern. If you're listening here, the best way to help us is to subscribe, follow on your whatever platform you're listening to the show on. If you want to leave us a review and rate it, that really helps. It's pretty easy.

Or just tell a friend, just tell one other person to listen to the show and that makes a difference. That does make a difference. And you could also just be like, post a review like, Hey, we hear you just blasted off 200 episodes. Congratulations.

Yes. We'll buy you dinner. Exactly. So that helps a great deal.

If you're looking to be a guest on the show or if you would like to sponsor the show, it's info at the industrypodcast.club or you can DM us at the industry podcast on Instagram where you will find the amazing artwork from Zac Hanna at Zac Hanna.co where he has done over 200 pieces of artwork for our Instagram. So big thanks to him. Yeah. I'm doing shots next time we see him in the bar.

That's right. If you have forgot to stock up on liquor, I still have some at my bars. So swing by and check them out. Sugar run downtown, get to their ad sugar run bar on Instagram Babylon Sisters is the bar in uptown Waterloo at Babylon Sisters bar on Instagram to check out all the fun stuff we're doing there.

Aside from that, I don't know if we have much more else to talk about. Do we? I mean, I can rant more about the LCD. I think people are tired of it.

Yeah. Go here next episode too. That's right. I'm sure the strike will still be ongoing at that point.

No. We haven't heard anything at all from our illustrious premier side of the equation. How do we? Well, he's not looking for this.

So it's also booze in the corner stores no matter what. So I don't think your strike's going to affect that decision making. All right. Enough about that.

If you're looking for it to get booze in a different format, you could maybe talk to our guests today. Madison Homewood is joining us. She is I want to get your title right at Civil Pores. You're at the head of research and development in Civil Pores, correct?

Yeah. Okay. You've heard about Civil Pores many times on our show. They were a pre-sponsored of the industry podcast.

We're super grateful to them. Also, I wasn't just bullshitting because they were paying me. The product is really good. So and we use it about monsters.

Come check it out. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about you and then we get into Civil Pores. How did you come to start your career in the industry?

Oh, yeah. That's honestly a great question and a bit of a long one. I was like kind of the classic starting restaurants when I was 14, started as a host, you know, work my way through, did like serving bartending. My parents told me I had to go to university and I said, okay, well, jokes on you.

I'm going to go to hospitality school and just keep doing what I've been doing. So I went to the university of wealth, got a business degree specialized in hospitality and then kind of having with back since. I thought that I'd have a traditional career, kind of, you know, dual positions, do like a manager, general manager, whatever, maybe one day on my own thing. And then I, as I tried out different stuff, I realized bartending was my favorite and just kind of saw how far I could take that and just have kind of said yes to all the bartending related opportunities and kind of know to all the rest.

Right. And you at one point, end up being named one of the top 30 under 30 in the food service and hospitality industry. So what, by what publication were you named at? It was KML, Cote Tush Media Limited, or I should get this right.

I should probably get this right. I guess that's right. I'm going to Google really. I'm sorry.

I kind of put you on the spot there. Fact is that you were named that. And what bar is specifically do you learn your craft and like, how did you move from starting an industry to like behind a bar to making craft cocktails and to be recognized this way? Yeah, I fortunately got to work with at a lot of amazing places with a lot of amazing people.

I kind of just jumped around and followed, you know, some people that I really looked up to. I got great experience. One of your previous guests, Aaron Hatchle, we worked together at LinkedIn Hall. He's such a force.

So working alongside him was, you know, great for both of us to really like, you know, push our limits and learn and grow a lot. I actually worked with Will of all this well. They're amazing, such cool people, such amazing products. So that was kind of the first opportunity for me to see like the manufacturing distilling side.

I then won a couple cocktail competitions and was very fortunate to be offered a job with Ian and Kelsey from Trash Tiki. We have been supernova ballroom in Toronto. It was a great like, that was one of like the most amazing experiences to really like home in my craft to learn a lot about sustainability to like really dive into Ontario produce and just really think about like how we honour ingredients and look at sustainability and all those things. So since then I've also worked out Chant de Clair in the Fairmont and finally landed myself.

I started my own cocktail subscription company over the pandemic and I've now settled with Civil Pores, which is an amazing ready to pour cocktail distillery. And I'm excited to chat much more about that. Yeah, we were going to get to that for sure. So do you still do the subscription cocktail deal or is that you've left that behind?

I don't do, it's called Drinks on Friday. I don't do Drinks on Friday anymore. I kind of went through this really cool transitionary period in the end of bartending where one is like, I love my company, I love my brand, but I wanted to turn it into something that I could like eat, sleep, breathe and the style of cocktails, you kind of get a jar that was pre-mixed and then you get either like your chopper or mixer and you'd mix them together at home and it was very like hassle-free low maintenance and super fun, but it wasn't really like how I saw myself translating my drinks to the consumer. I really wanted to move it into a canned product and get to the other side and try to create the best sustainable ready to drink, full-strength cocktails through Drinks on Friday.

I wanted these ones to be like, you can take them to the cottage, you can take them on a boat, you can take them camping wherever and selling things in glass jars wasn't really the best format. So I went down the rabbit hole, I actually spent a little time with James who's the head brewer at Burdock and kind of was like, can you show me some stuff? Can I learn for free? Can you teach me about like minimum order quantities and where do you get cans and what does a mobile canning look like and how much is a regular canning line and labels and this that, what have you?

And in this process I was actually introduced to Nick and John and Mary Beth, the founders of Civil Pores and it sort of felt like exactly what I was trying to do landed in my lap a little bit. So it was an amazing progression where your career path and your journey doesn't always look like what you think it's going to be and it was a different idea for me to like take a step back and not have my own thing, but it's an amazing opportunity to get to really like work with a collaborative group of people that we are kind of working for the same goal. One thing to that Mike, Nick, one of our founders always says is if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go bar go together. So it was a really like nice sentiment to kind of be doing a project like this and join their team.

Yeah, it's a lot of fucking work to do those cocktails ago. We were doing them a little bit out of sugar rendering the pandemic as well, but it's like and we wanted to keep it going and maybe make that staple of what we did out of the bar, but it was just like the amount of work that goes into it in comparison to the amount of sales you actually get sometimes it just doesn't feel like it's worth it after a while. But it's a good thing to get that got a lot of us through the pandemic was that idea. I will say one of the breaking points for me was Valentine's Day.

I did a Valentine's Day kit and I like had way over ordered and I was like, I know how my kids I'm going to do my forecast is so good, whatever whatever. I sold no val, like not none, but I sold very few. And then it was so much better than that. Like, Maddie, why are you doing like Valentine's Day kits at like the end of the pandemic?

Like everyone broke up. Like, oh my God, I actually like can see that in my sales because it's staying away from that kit with a 10 foot pole. So yeah, it's also like, I specifically found that like once places got open again, like most a lot of the purchases of the bottled cocktails or can cocktails or jarred or whatever you were doing were almost sympathy buys for the industry where it was like, we know you guys are fucked. So we will come and buy these cocktails and as soon as we were allowed to reopen, then it was just like, well, we don't need to do that anymore.

We'll just go to the bar and have a cocktail. For sure. Yeah. Although not enough of them are still coming.

So please people remember, go, go, go out. So let's talk a little bit about the cocktail competitions because we've obviously had a bunch of bartenders on here who have done the competition. Tell us about your experience with the competitions, which ones did you enter and win and how did you find it? Yeah.

And I'll have to pull from the memory bank because it's been a little bit. I think my first competition was, it was called Barati Kid and it was a super fun speed competition, like knock out rounds where the fastest keeps going on and it was super fun. They just print out a check. You don't know what you're gonna have to make and then you just go in and make them.

That was the first time I really fell in love with the camaraderie and like how like it's just supposed to be fun and you're supposed to enjoy it and like not take these things too seriously. And you know, get to meet bartenders from different bars all over and see their techniques and styles and it really allowed me to learn how to push myself further. Like I started bartending kind of in like the wealth area, then to the kitchen and water loo and spent a lot of time like in Cambridge as well. So the first time I went to Toronto and saw someone like stirring four drinks at once.

I was like, oh my gosh, okay, I have to learn how to do this isn't so cool. So that really motivated me to like enter these competitions to learn. I did the restaurants Canada show, I think it was in 2019 and it was a sustainability based challenge. It was a black box.

They just pulled the spheres we had to use from a hat and they gave us two mystery ingredients and we had to go around the show floor and like create these specialty cocktails focused on sustainability that we didn't have any chance like pre-prepare. That was super cool. Again, it was a sustainability focused competition. Ian Griffith was one of the judges at the time and I actually got hired for my role at Super Nova Ballroom from that competition that I did win.

I got first in that one and then I did another competition the same day, Speedrack and I came in dead last. I went to pick up my bottles and I knocked the tins into the judge. So, you know, it was a nice rise to the top with a very blunt fault. Two in the same day, that's cold.

What are you thinking? Two in the same day? I would never do that. Oh, but you wait too, wait too eager for sure.

I'm ambitious. Yeah. And then I since done the restaurant's Canada show again, I did Sunday Speedway. That was hosted at third place which was a super fun, speed competition kind of like NASCAR themed really like get or done.

It was so fun if there's people in the kitchen already area that haven't tried it or signed up for it. It should come back for another season next year and I definitely recommend it. Well, one of my bar turns recently entered a cocktail competition at Allora Distillery. No, no, no.

Believe it or not. And they also used that black box theme. So that was one of the, sorry, theme isn't the right way to put it, but like it was one of the parts of the competition, the black box drawing. And that's all rid of Allora Distillery.

And I'm just kidding. Allora, believe it or not. Well, you're Laura Ontario. Yeah, Laura Ontario.

And now in the days of the black LCBO strike, what a time to visit allora distillery. Yes. Grains to grass distillery, who sources a lot of degrees from farms in the Wellington County and Waterloo regions. So make sure you go and support local.

Yeah, we'll be serving a lot of it up at Babylon Sisters over the next couple weeks for sure, including our regular feature Friday night gin and tonics with the great expectations Ontario, Toronto gin. That's a truly homegrown Ontario craft gin. Allora flagship brand made with locally foraged botanicals. I suppose last time you locally foraged botanical.

I got a vegetable garden go back. I'm like a rock star, buddy. We used to start making booze. I think I did.

I bought some berries. I forgot to go to the fridge and the other side. Well, we never come up close to the great stuff that they're making at Allora Distillery. In fact, right now, why don't I for you a glass of the royal rum spice black from Allora Distillery?

Tell me what you think. Ah, it's pretty solid. Give a little bit of hints of vanilla. You do.

Yes. And warming spices, I would say. That's aged in new Oak Chard number three Kelvin Cooper sparrows for at least a year and it gets a smoothness from a mixture of three distillations. Ooh.

Yeah, that's a fact. And where can I purchase this? Because obviously they do sell online if you have to live in Ontario. First of all, I was following my Allora Distilling Co.

That's Allora Distilling Co on Instagram or check out Allora Distilling Company.com. And you can do direct orders from there. A lot of these products are going to be available in the LCPO. The great expectations is already.

I'm not sure about the Royal Rum Spice Black. I know it was coming to the LCPO. Not that that matters to any of you right now. But I would go on to the Allora Distilling website and you can order from them directly Allora Distilling Company.

com. Great products. Now's the time support local distilleries. And let's end this LCPO monopolies.

We're going to have to go through this shit. Yes, please do. I strongly feel like the LCPO is never going to be sponsor of the industry podcast anyways. No.

Support local distilleries specifically. In this case, Allora Distilling. Once again, the information is at Allora Distilling Co or Allora Distilling Company.com. Great expectations, gin, fantastic stuff.

Royal Rum Spice Black. Can't go wrong. They also have this apperitivo royal that they've released that we've tried. And it's great for cocktails.

Yeah, it sure is. Yeah. So once again, that is Allora Distilling Company.com. Check them out.

Order directly from them, especially over the next two weeks. This is the way to go. Okay. And back to the show.

So another place to maybe stock up on some bottle Blicker. It is from the good people at Civil Pores. So tell us what you're doing there at Civil Pores. People have heard this talk about it on the show before.

But now we get it from someone who actually knows what to talk about. Yeah, amazing. Thank you. So Civil Pores, we're a cocktail distillery.

We make full strength shelf stable ready to pour cocktails. They're the most hassle-free, ready to drink bar quality cocktails you can get. We're going to be launching DTC right at the right time to piggyback on the CLCBO strike. So you will also be able to get these sent to your home anywhere in Ontario, which is super cool.

I will list off a few retailers we have right now. You can find us in the bottle shop at Langdon Hall. If you're in Kichor and Waterloo. You can find us at Potecanacastro.

You can find us at Edelie. In Prince Edward County, you can find us at Faunover Market. So there's lots of places to find us. I'm born a culture.

I know I'm missing some, but that's a little lack of Babylon sisters. But you guys are selling bottles? Well, we will. If anybody wants, we will sell them.

So yeah, we will sell bottles at the door, but we also use them actually. We shake them right in front of you and use them for the saguaritinis right there. So there you go. Yeah.

So we're really focusing on, I always like to say, diverting and eliminating from some bar programs. So we divert from some so we can eliminate to others. We collect a ton of our fruit for our orange distillate. That's actually in almost all of our cocktails.

We're picking that up from the Fairmont Royal York, which is so cool. So we go on a weekly basis. Yeah. What a question.

How do you talk them into saying, hey, man, can you specifically separate? Will it be like compost normally? How did you establish that relationship? Even get to agree with that?

That seems like an extra step when it's like a busy time. Totally. So we love, I used to work at the Fairmont Royal York. I love that building.

So I definitely have my foot in the door. But what was really cool is, you know, they have amazing sustainability goals. One thing that I always like to say is the reason why we're able to make this partnership and how they have this excess fruit is because they pay their staff really high wages, like above living wage, which is kind of like a different form of sustainability. So it's more expensive for them to have their staff juice the fruit than to just buy it in themselves.

So when they're zesting it for like the boronie's old passions, what have you, it's just creating this kind of waste and it's kind of an unintended consequence really. But to make good on their consistent sustainability goals, they're partnering with us to come pick it up and we, you know, masquerade it and distill it and then turn it into a fully shelf stable, non-perishable orange liqueur. How often would you have to pick that up? Like, do they just freeze it then?

If it's like, no, we pick it up once a week. So typically we'll go on like a Tuesday or Wednesday right after, you know, the weekend has gone by. As most of you guys know, like a orange can last well over a week and afraid or at room temperature without spoiling. So we're pretty consistent.

We will go in once and we pick it up, masquerade it right away. It's like a fresh, beautiful, it's just a zested piece of fruit. Like someone can say that orange for lunch, but I've eaten so many that I don't think I can eat any more oranges like that. That's smart though.

We can think about it because like as Bartender is now, especially with the rise of the whole, you know, the whole world. And then sponsored old fashioned. Like there's so much peeling of the orange and that's a lot of people, a lot of bars just do end up throwing the rest of the orange out and talking, talking also about the Royal York and what they do sustainability wise. They also have like a garden on the roof where they, I thought they were making honey up there for a little while.

Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do. They grow like tons of mint up there too. Yeah.

No, it's a really cool operation and upstairs garden that they've got going on. So talk a little bit more about sustainability. I know you work well with the Royal York, but you also are like basically this whole product prides itself on sustainability. What's the word I'm looking for?

Like a sustainable business practice. Like initiative. Yeah, initiative. That's it.

Yeah. We can flip this around. You can take over and host the show because I'm not doing a good job. You can leave that in.

Oh my goodness. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, you're doing a lot of things that are all sustainability focused. Hundred percent.

It's something we're super proud of. I guess I'll kind of just like highlight three really cool things that I think is amazing. You know, so we purchase everything in bulk spirits. So we're purchasing thousand liter totes of alcohol.

So we're not mixing like bottles and like shipping them in. So that way we can eliminate all that glass from coming into, you know, our environment isn't the right word, but as most people know, we don't know that there's not actually recycling in the city of Toronto. Most of those bottles just end up going to like into the garbage and all of the carbon emissions from shipping them. It is one of the biggest like carbon contributors.

So we're really excited to like eliminate that portion of it. We do our offerings in three different sizes. So we're in 20 liter kegs, 750 mill bottles and 240 mill bottles. So the keg option is our biggest sustainability initiative because it's super cool.

We eliminate 17 to 25 bottles from going into the recycling from being shipped to you and from, you know, having to have all the labor of like dumping them, taking them somewhere else. And then we're in an infinitely recyclable canister. So that's really cool. Once it's finished, it gets comes back to us, gets washed and reused over and over and over again.

We love that. And then yeah, just talking about like the ingredients as well, we are diverting. So to highlight some of our ingredients, the oranges we already talked about, we use cacao husk. It's a byproduct of the chocolate making industry.

It's actually 90% of it becomes waste. So it's like, you know, people are going to stop eating chocolate here. But when you think about how much of that is going, you know, either into the landfill or has no market value here, it's something that we're really excited to able to recoup. There's so many flavors in it, you know, we're able to extract the ethanol and the water so we will flavors out of what's left over and then distill it.

So it's a beautiful, like, chocolatey, like delicious distillate. And then we also use avocado pits. So avocado pits is one of our other ones because we're really trying to look at like what's in our food system already. Like, it's already here and people are going to stop.

What can we do to like, you know, turn weird solid into a beautiful, delicious liquid? That's completely stable. So yeah, I think that's kind of the main cans. Well, and the funny thing is like, for me as a bar owner, I just think it's like, as someone who's worked behind a bar where, and this is what when we were pitching for you, I would always bring it up as like sugar runs specifically and Babylon as well are like high volume craft cocktail bars.

So when you're like, and the espresso martini, no offense to everyone who loves them, it's the most annoying drink to make when you're super busy. So it's like to have this ability to have like a perfect espresso martini and it is perfect. You're not going to get a better one than the ones that you can get from civil poorest. And it's just like literally out of a keg or out of a bottle, a quick shake, the perfect foam head on it.

It's like having that part is amazing. But then you add to the fact that you're also supporting this sustainability initiative at the same time. It's like a home run. Yeah.

And you never get used to hearing people try them and love them and endorse them. It's definitely a feeling that I'm not over. It's so exciting that we've had such a good response to them. I think what's really cool about what you said too is there's space for it in these craft cocktail bars and there's space for it in these high volume bars.

Our whole goal was to take those ones that are annoying to make. We're all bartenders, owner, operators, entrepreneurs. We have made a zillion espresso martinis for a zillion people. We've got the chip that has 12 on it.

We're like, no. You make the first round and then the phones starting to die, and then you're sweating as you're trying to get out the second round. We try to take these bottle neck and drinks that people are going to cold call no matter what and just try to alleviate the pressure. Like, cocktails have never been more popular.

People want them more. They're typically becoming like, I think they say that they're like 30% more popular now, which means a bartender's job is 30% harder right off the bat. You're just making more drinks with this trend. So we really want to make sure we're keeping people's jobs easy.

I'm bartending is not an easy job, but we want to make it easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Take away the five bottle pickups. Take away the egg whites and then we see sour. Like one of my least hair things in the world.

Like the way the dishwasher smells. Yeah. Like there's so much about it. I'm like, let's do this.

Like let's put it like ready on a keg frost off draft like so hassle free. It's like it's a dream. I wish I was bartending now. So I could take advantage of all of these things, which sounds like a total plug, which at half is but also like, there's a lot of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you decide on what flavors to sell? Like obviously that's probably disgusted, but you also talk to like your clients in the end as well to decide what product is coming up next.

Yeah. What's the research behind like are people ordered these anyways? Are these drinks on trend? Like where are we really solving a problem for people?

That's like a huge motivator because if I make you a drink that no one's ordering, then it doesn't make sense for you to have it in a cake, right? Or if I am making a drink where it's just as easy for you to like mix a vodka soda together, it doesn't make sense. So we're really trying to isolate those ones that people are just going to order no matter what like the spicy margaritas, the old fashions, the espresso martinis. Like we often will kind of talk about like part of hospitality is and having like these craft programs.

You have to get people to trust you and try your drinks and like have that portion of hospitality with them sitting at the bar to have that time to walk them through the menu. When a 12 top walks in that wants like six margaritas and six espresso martinis, you've like lost that time to go through all the drinks that you like put so much love and care into and you can sort of like lose that opportunity to really like make that hospitable mark that that always was really meaningful to me and bartending and like you know, you're working out like it feels like a stage and you get to talk to these people, you get to know these people. But if you lose that time, which most of us are just losing out of you know, the spike and the desire for more cocktails and people being more comfortable to just try them and drink them and choose them over wine or beer, you don't really have that time to earn people's trust and like make them know you and like what kind of flavor profile they can expect or those sorts of things. What are you finding more bars and restaurants are ordering from you?

Is it more bottles or kegs? Like because I'm interested in that because like at my bar because it's a smaller seated spot, the keg doesn't really make a lot of sense for us. But like at a bigger place where maybe they have like 200 seats, 300 seats, whatever, then I imagine it would make a lot more sense. What are you finding with the sales on that end?

We're finding I would say like a pretty even split, but there's so many factors, right? Like what's really cool and like I know it sounds like so like they can then totally buy us but there really is so much room for this in so many different places. Like we have places who serve some of them on kegs but they also take the bottles to do bottle service or do they want to do pictures and they just dump a bottle in the picture so they know that it's like exactly six drinks and they're like whatever, this is so easy or we'll have places like you know they don't really have a cocktail menu but they want to put two on so they do the margaritas and martini and that's their only offering so they're like oh we'll just put two on a keg, it's live through these as our only two drinks because people want it. We've actually seen like something really cool that we didn't expect is working with some breweries as well.

It didn't really like take away or metabolize their sales in any way. It just had the people who like maybe don't really drink beer but came to try the place out because they were with a pal who was super excited about it. It's just like brought up their sales which was really cool. So you know it's a variety of settings it can work really well in and sometimes like if you want to do like a happy hour feature where you're like okay we get crushed from this hour to this hour all the time.

Let's throw one of these on the kegs so that way it's the fastest thing that we can like we can put out. You don't want to have like a sweet happy hour and then like have a bottle next so people aren't getting enough drinks like in that window that they want and you're like burning out all of your best stuff in like a two hour window right before a long dinner service. So there's like a lot of cool spaces that it truly can work in either format. Yeah the fact that you offer it in all these different ways is like was really smart because it does allow you to market the product to many different styles of bars and restaurants which is great and then now that you're getting it and we bring it up on the show all the time that it's great if you just want to like if you're just drinking at home.

You're not going to make especially if you don't know what it should about bartending. You're not going to make a better whiskey sour old fashioned and espresso martini then you're going to get in these bottles by a case and just entertain. That's 100% and when I talked about like eat, sleep, breathe in the product before it's like I would never go to a cottage without a margarita bottle now. Like everyone wants to drink margaritas at the cottage but the limes you never have enough limes there's never like enough ice to shake them and to have in the freezer then you have to have two bottles of spirits like it's just like and everyone wants you to make them because you're the bartender and like do it the best and whatever whatever like well now I'm just bringing these bottles I can take them anywhere it's so easy and like it's not so many different ingredients and you know when you put your friends online duty you're like you get a bunch of of limes and they're like we got six limes you're like I will make two margaritas.

We're not enough pitchers and pitchers and margaritas. I'll make you two margaritas or six shitty ones. So when you let you go soon you're going to slide the time but the last question I kind of wanted to ask you was how are you finding your new role in a company like this where you clearly have a love for bartending and being in the service industry and now you're more in a sort of office related job where I know you're still doing sales etc. You still get to go to bars and restaurants.

It's a very different role than being behind the wood. So like how are you enjoying that? Talk to us about the differences in the experience. Yeah what a crazy question.

There's definitely some pros and cons both sides. I do miss bartending. I loved making drinks like they're such a rush. You know when the chats are starting or the chats the chats are starting to stack up.

Actually both of them. Yeah everything's starting to stack up and I don't know for me it always felt so good like crashing through a ton of drinks like I loved that part of it but I think having this life balance I still get to make drinks and make them in way higher volume. I get to still experiment a lot and learn a lot of new ways of manufacturing and the distilling side and there's still a lot of really cool learning. I feel super close to and in touch with the ingredients as well so that's something that I really love about like this side of it.

It took me a long time. My boss is kind of tested this. I started working 11 to 7. I am now a 9 to 5.

It took me an incredibly long time to shift my schedule but I bought there. But yeah I don't know. I drew fine like being so close to the hospitality industry so it's like very rewarding. I feel like I can make a big impact with what I'm doing and it just kind of like I said before I just said yes to all the opportunities that were like about cocktails and flavor building and bartending and I said no to all the ones that were like become a manager wear a pantsuit.

Whatever crunch numbers. So this was like a really cool way to kind of distill down like all the things that I really really like doing in a day and all leave behind some of the things that I don't. And I definitely miss bartending but I think like I would encourage anyone like who is in the field and really finding themselves enjoying like one part of it. Like take that part that you love and like keep watering that seed.

Like keep seeing like how far you can take it. You know I had opportunities in bartending that I never thought I would. Like I once sold the recipe to like a major like I sold the rights to a recipe to like a major liquor brand which is so cool. I'm like this is this is to the experience.

Can you tell us which one or no? Yeah it was for Woodford and it was just like a very interesting like didn't know that was like really an option and that like you know there is a lot of room to like keep working and keep honing your craft and like find these like unique pockets of opportunities in the space that you love and you're good at. So whether it's bartending or whether you like are loving being a host like you know there's there's I don't know I don't have a good example for that because I was not very good at being a host. But I feel like you know when you know what you like like you can get into like those operations and set those puzzles and like know how to see people effectively and like there's a lot of power and being like great at what you do and loving what you do and going like all in on that and like she taking those opportunities that keep you in that realm.

Well yeah it sounds like you found the right role for you so congratulations and congratulations on all the success of Civil Pores. I really truly do believe in the product we think it's great. Let our listeners know where they can find you online for our Civil Pores. Give us all the links for Civil Pores.

Yeah definitely so our Instagram you can find us at Civil underscore Pores. You can find us at www.civilpores.com. You can find me at Maddy Homewood, M-A-D-I. And if you ever have any questions about Civil Pores about bartending my journey whatever.

You can always reach me that way. I think that's it. I think that's all. Well thanks again.

That's something so super fun to chat with you and catch up and yeah best of luck going forward. We're excited to see what comes next looking forward to the DTC products and yeah thanks again. Yeah appreciate you guys having me. Thank you so much.

Thanks buddy.