Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Higginbotham.
Hi Adam, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The craft cocktail renaissance took hold here in Austin just as I and my two partners (one of whom is my identical twin brother) were wrapping up college and kicking around ideas for a business venture. None of us had any experience in business, or even had studied business in school at the University of Texas (I was an Econ major, my brother Robert was a Government major, and our partner Chris was a Bio major), but we had an itch to try our hand at an entrepreneurial pursuit while we were all still young and with relatively few responsibilities. After graduation, Chris took a lab position at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, and Robert moved to DC to find a job in government and eventually go to law school. I stuck around Austin for a couple of victory laps before wrapping up my degree. Our collective love of good food and drink followed us to our respective new homes, and we stayed in touch, often sending each other things we encountered at the bars and restaurants we had discovered.
At some point, Chris enjoyed a Gin and Tonic at a bar in Lawrence that featured a homemade tonic syrup that intrigued him. The syrup utilized the raw bark of the cinchona tree for its essential quinine, along with various aromatics and botanicals selected by the bar to complement good gin. The result was uniquely delicious, and Chris thought I would be interested! Eventually, Chris ordered some of the bark to toy around with his own syrup and had some sent to me as well. We traded recipes back and forth over some months, eventually arriving at our own recipe that we most enjoyed. At some point, it clicked to us that this might be a product that others like ourselves might enjoy, and we kicked around the idea of bottling and selling it to local liquor stores in our respective markets. In high school, I had worked for a business in my hometown that bottled and sold cosmetics, and shipped them directly using an e-commerce site, so the working nuts and bolts of the business model weren’t intimidating as I had seen a similar model built from the ground up already. Robert was interested as well, and he had the best job at the time so was able and willing to fund our first round of supplies needed to scale our recipe up to a larger batch. The last piece fell into place with Chris’s neighbor in Lawrence who was the executive chef at the local convention hotel. She offered to let us use her kitchen space to produce our batch and suggested we then sell the syrup back to the hotel bar.
With everything in place, Robert and I flew to Lawrence to meet Chris and produce our first batch. After 8 long hours and lots of fumbling around throughout our very first time in a commercial kitchen environment, we emerged with ~20 cases of product that we could offer for sale. Liber & Co. was born! We took the cases back to our respective markets and sold them into stores we thought would be receptive. Our first case was sold by Robert on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, where he knew of a specialty foods and gourmet store who fell in love with the product and our quest to offer a handmade product. From there, we continued to bootstrap and reinvest profits from each batch into the next batch. That was 11 years ago and we haven’t looked back! We continued to refine our lineup of syrups as we grew, zeroing in on the syrups that craft bartenders around the country, from San Francisco to NYC, relied on at all times for their beverage programs. The goal originally was to offer these same syrups to home bartenders who wanted to replicate the wonderful cocktails they experienced at their favorite bars but lacked the high-quality ingredients that these professional bartenders made in house, and were instead stuck with low-quality commodity mixers that would always hold them back from making the best tasting cocktails.
At some point, it became clear that those same bartenders could also use a high-quality solution for their syrups, and in most cases, they only made their own syrups in-house out of necessity. That opened up the on-premise bar and restaurant markets to us, which has grown into a huge part of our business. Today we sell to thousands of customers, from home bartenders looking to improve their at-home drinking to professional bartenders looking for the highest quality and most consistent solution for their beverage program. At the end of this year, we’ll be moving from our 7,000 sq ft dedicated facility into a ~21,000 sq ft facility complete with custom manufacturing and a development bar.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
We chose to bootstrap from the beginning, not wishing to give up equity in exchange for money and faster growth. We felt this would ultimately limit our ability to learn along the way. In other words, we sort of chose to ‘learn the hard way’ from day one, and this approach invites some inefficiency and extra work. We’ve grown into a semi-automated production line (still very small, still very much handmade product), but in the early days, we filled and capped each bottle by hand. Production always leads to some disasters, and when you’re making syrups your disasters are particularly sticky and messy. Chris and I spent 17 hours one night in our first commissary kitchen here in Austin.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Liber & Co. crafts a line of syrups that echo the style and quality of the syrups made in-house at the world’s best cocktail bars. Matching the quality of the world’s top bars starts with our obsession over raw ingredients. The quality of our products depends directly on what goes in them, so sourcing the best ingredients possible is paramount. From world-renowned Texas grapefruit orchards to a sustainable Peruvian ginger cooperative, we seek out the best suppliers and foster great relationships with them. Sourcing ingredients is only one side of the coin—crafting them into world-class bar syrups is equally important. Since there are no how-to books for making craft cocktail syrups at scale, we scavenged ideas from breweries, wineries and chocolatiers, tested them and created our own blueprint. The result is our custom processing facility in Austin, Texas that lets us turn real ingredients into the best-tasting and most authentic syrups possible.
For the at-home consumer, this translates into the best-tasting cocktails at home available. We also think of ourselves as a resource for at-home bartenders. Our website features hundreds of delicious recipes, sortable by base spirit (or alcohol-free), syrup, or even season. We love when customers of ours master a cocktail like the Margarita, Old Fashioned, or Mojito and then experiment with their own dialed-in recipes or variations on the theme. We love when people fall in love with the quality of our products!
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We’ve actually had this very conversation many times over the years. To launch a business and try and build something with a team is an inherently very risky thing to do. In that sense, I guess we could be described as radically risky! But in our business development, we have chosen a steady approach to our growth that probably reflects a risk aversion in our personalities. We have a natural protectiveness around our quality and our brand, which we believe our customers have grown attached to. Growing faster at the expense of either is something we’ve been very cautious about in our lifespan as a business.
Pricing:
- $11 for 9.5 oz bottles
- $17 for 17 oz bottles
Contact Info:
- Website: www.liberandcompany.com
- Instagram: /liberandco
- Youtube: Liber & Co.
