Episode 147: The Business of Specialty Spirits With Blake Riber From Seelbach’s

Photo: Brian Beyke/Seelbach's

March 31, 2026

Read the Episode

Paul Clarke

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe‘s Editor-in-Chief.

And we spend a lot of time in Imbibe talking to people who make drinks. And by make, that could mean mixing up cocktails in a bar or pulling shots of espresso or brewing beer or distilling tequila. You get the general idea. But we don’t spend a ton of time talking to people who sell drinks, whether it’s through a brick-and-mortar store or via an online storefront. And we’re going to change that with this episode.

Because 15 years ago or so, Blake Riber was in a situation similar to many people listening to this podcast or reading Imbibe. He had a career and was following a profession that had nothing whatsoever to do with drinks. But a budding passion for bourbon led to creation of his BourbonR blog. And as these things happened, one thing kind of led to another, and today, Blake is the founder of Seelbach’s, an online spirits retailer that does a little bit more beyond simply selling booze.

I’ll let Blake explain for himself exactly what Seelbach’s does and how they’re doing it. But before we get started, this episode is brought to you by Seattle Cocktail Week, taking place April 19th through the 26th. Seattle Cocktail Week is leveling up this year by taking over Pacific Place Mall in downtown Seattle, turning the entire multi-story complex into a massive cocktail campus. For folks in the industry, the Bartender Circle Summit is three days of high-level education. And for cocktail enthusiasts, the Carnival of Cocktails is a four-floor takeover with hundreds of spirits and immersive pop-up bars. The event’s also partnering with Healthy Behind the Bar to provide complimentary on-site health screenings for every bartender attending. It’s a world-class party with genuine community care. You can find the full lineup and grab your passes at seattlecocktailweek.com.

[music]

Paul Clarke

Blake, welcome to Radio Imbibe.

Blake Riber

Paul, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Paul Clarke

Now, you and your company, Seelbach’s, technically you’re a retailer, but it’s a little more complicated than that. And I’m going to get into your backstory here in just a moment. But to get us started, for folks who may not be familiar with Seelbach’s or what you do, what is it that Seelbach’s does?

Blake Riber

So basically, Seelbach’s started out as just a passion project, as a way to get craft distillers and craft blenders out to more people across the country. You know, I think a lot of what I saw was there’s these big brands with great marketing, you know, great distribution, sales channels, all that stuff. And Seelbach’s was a way to use an online platform just to say, hey, these are some things we like. These are some barrels we like, whatever it may be, and to be able to get those bottles to people across the country.

Paul Clarke

Now, some background on you and Seelbach’s. You didn’t start out your career to be selling bourbon and other spirits, right? You were an accountant who just happened to be really, really, really into bourbon. Is that fair to say?

Blake Riber

That is very fair. And that’s just a nice way of saying like, yeah, I have no business being in the business I am now. But, you know, my joke was always 10 years in public accounting will make anyone want to drink. And, it turns out accounting is a good background to do a bunch of different things.

Paul Clarke

And so you came in as a blogger, more or less, sharing some of the information you gleaned along the way with a larger audience. How did the evolution from bourbon enthusiast to bourbon blogger and then to bourbon retailer take place?

Blake Riber

Yeah, you know, it’s one of those things that it happens over a lot of years. You know, it was never an overnight, okay, let’s flip the switch. We’re completely going the other direction. But I got into bourbon back in, you know, 2011-ish, 2012, which at the time seemed like, oh, man, bourbon’s so popular and but never would have expected where we are now. But, you know, whenever I got into it, I’m in Jacksonville, Florida, not exactly a Mecca of bourbon. So you went online to talk to people about bourbon. And you were in Facebook groups and Reddit threads and all this stuff and essentially started the blog as like a fun way to connect with people and do tasty notes.

It just it was a fun thing to me to do the blog and then got pretty lucky with timing and had a few posts early on, like the poor man’s Pappy post. And then I’d do the Pappy Van Winkle release maps where I’d just take a Microsoft Paint image of the United States and highlight each state as they got Pappy or Buffalo Trace Antique collection. And it really just started that way, you know, building up a following, building an email list, staying consistent with it.

You know, I think that’s one of the biggest things I see is like, yeah, it’s easy to do it for a few times. But I mean, Imbibe in 20 years, like that’s a real testament of being a part of the industry and being passionate about the industry. And so, you know, just stuck with it. Then from there, basically, we were doing some single barrels. You know, private barrels weren’t as big of a thing back then and had a company that was advertising with us that was they were based out of DC. And so I kind of knew about some of the DC laws and everything from them and said, hey, we’re looking to get out. Do you know anybody interested? I was like, yeah, actually, I may be interested in that. I could run some private barrels through it.

And all these things are kind of coming together and it seems there’s a lot of clarity and hindsight. But. At the time, we had just gotten in a Wyoming whiskey barrel. It was about six years old, and this is probably 2017, 2018. I’m like, man, this is really good. Like, craft spirits is moving away from just, oh, it’s all two-year-old product in a small barrel. And it’s like, this is like just really good whiskey. And had a few others that came along like that. It’s like, let’s just, you know, I can also do the private barrels through the retail side.

But I think there’s something to just focusing on these up-and-coming brands. These smaller craft distilleries, they’re never going to be distributed in five states, much less the entire country. What if we could bring kind of that experience you have at a craft distillery where it’s about, you know, learning about what they do, how their process is different, why they use red corn or blue corn or white corn instead of yellow dent corn. And if we could bring that to the online experience, I think we may have something there. And, you know, thankfully, the industry kept going in that direction a little bit where these brands we were working with and we’d be their first retailer outside of their home state.

They continued to grow and get bigger as well as, you know, our audience grew and people got more interested in these things. And so it’s just kind of been that same process of rinse and repeat over the last eight years of, hey, we’re really passionate about this. We really like these products. Let’s develop a customer base and, you know, people that believe in what we’re bringing to the table and kind of match the two up. So, you know, we try to grow our audience as big as possible because that just means a bigger reach once we get one of these brands on that we believe in.

Paul Clarke

Now, coming into this as an enthusiast initially, how does that perspective inform the choices you make regarding the spirits and the producers that you work with? I mean, you know, it would be one thing to have a retailer like, yes, we have, you know, the Buffalo Trees Antique Collection. go in a very particular direction. How does that inform that?

Blake Riber

Yeah, I mean, I think what looks like an OK business decision now. But back then it looked very dumb because it’s like, well, we’re just going to do what we like and what we find exciting. And, you know, I’d been in the blogging world, so I’ve seen enough where my excitement is probably shared by a lot of other people. So it’s really about finding the right people and audience for those products.

And I tell people all the time, like, I’m the worst spirits buyer there is just because if I really like something and I think it’s great, the story is fantastic. It tastes good. All those things like we bring it in and we’ll figure it out on the backside of how we’re going to move it. And, you know, you don’t always nail those things, but a lot of times it does work out more.

Now there’s a lot of stores with people who are very passionate and very into the spirits world, whether it’s whiskey, rum, whatever it may be. But for a while, that was missing at a lot of liquor stores. And so the other big thing is just the online platform. It’s a much better place to tell a story about a distillery or brand rather than just walking by a store shelf and you just see a label.

You know, we have the flexibility to have videos, to have longer form content, to have emails with all the notes that we took when we were at the distillery. So, you know, I think people are into that. You know, we’re not trying to be the largest retailer in the country by any means. But it does seem like people are starting to care more and more about what they’re drinking and why they’re drinking that.

Paul Clarke

There’s one thing I want to explore a little bit. So when we look at the broader spirits retail landscape, you’ve got your big box stores that have anything and everything that’s in large format and largely available. And then you’ve got your more specialty retailers who may feature cool imports and spirits from craft distillers and things of that nature. Where does Seelbach’s fit in on the spectrum and how does that online option give you some flexibility that you might not otherwise have if you were working in this kind of larger scale brick and mortar approach?

Blake Riber

Yeah. I mean, we still feel like we fit into that niche boutique store based on volume or whatever. Maybe we’re bigger than that. But that’s still how we think of ourselves just because of the time and effort we put into every bottle and release that comes through. A lot of these producers we’re close with, we visit them, all these different things. So I feel like that connection is always still there. And what I appreciate about it, as far as how that continues to grow and where the industry goes, I think we’ll just see more of it.

For me because I see a lot of people coming up there now, especially for the smaller guys. Like, it’s really important for them to start building a community and a fan base online because it’s just a direct connection for them to talk about the releases. Talk about how they’re different and all those things. But it doesn’t mean anything if that person they make a connection with can’t get a bottle, you know. ‘Cause not everybody’s gonna travel to a distillery once a year to stock up.

And that’s kind of where I think we fit in that middle ground. Like, hey, if you’re building an online fan base and customers, you’ve won some awards, we have a very easy way to connect you with those customers that can then become purchasers. That’s where the benefit of being in DC comes into play is there’s some different laws. But essentially we can buy direct if something’s not available in distribution. And so that was not a very well-known thing, know, seven, eight years ago. Now there’s more people doing it.

So a lot of the, the distilleries and brands we work with were working direct and others like we have some great distribution partners as well who will introduce us to stuff. But for the majority, we’re going direct and that’s always a great thing, too, because usually the distillery gets, you know, they’re not getting the same margin as they would if they just sold it out of the tasting room, but they’re getting a better side of things. Then if it were to go through a traditional distributor.

Paul Clarke

Now I mentioned in the outset that you came in from the bourbon side of things, from the American whiskey side of things. That’s where your interest level initially and your expertise was when you first got started. But more recently, you’ve spread out a little bit further into other spirits categories And including tequila and agave spirits. What kind of demand or interest level did you see for heading in this direction? And what’s been the reaction from tequila enthusiasts, for example, as you’ve gone into this?

Blake Riber

Yeah. And that’s always been a fun one because I think there are so many categories. But it’s like finding that mix of like, okay, it has to be a viable business. Like we can’t just, we have. But several things, multiple things a year come in where it’s like, we just do this because we love it. And we want to get that out there. But at the end of the day, it has to work out. And tequila seems like one, the category is growing. The enthusiasm is growing. The content around tequila is growing and people are getting way more into the craft side of things, whether it’s additive-free or just smaller producers.

So we ran into also a problem where we’ve kind of made this promise to Seelbach’s customers or assumption to Seelbach’s customers that it’s going to be a lot of bourbon and whiskey. And it’s like, well, we can’t take a list with a lot of bourbon and whiskey people on it and then send them three tequila emails a week. So we did a spinoff site called Nom 170. And so far, the response has been great. And I think that’s the really fun part to me is those early stages of growing, figure out what people are after.

Like, certainly if we had a boatload of Fortaleza, it would be gone in, you know, 30 minutes. But there’s so many good tequilas out there. And just, know, I love getting into the kind of nitty gritty details of what makes things different. Agave, especially, is perfect for that, you know, whether it’s mezcal or tequila or production methods, you know, what kind of roller are they using in, in what kind of agave. So that’s the fun thing to me is just how what seems small details on the production method have a real distinct difference in the bottle after the final production of the tequila.

Paul Clarke

You know a lot about spirits enthusiasts. I have a little experience in that arena myself. And folks who are passionate about spirits and quality spirits and small producers can be very opinionated.

Blake Riber

So that’s the, that’s the, uh, that’s the statement of this episode.

Paul Clarke

I’m being super diplomatic.

Blake Riber

Yeah. That is, uh, the very politically nice way of saying it.

Paul Clarke

Yeah.

Blake Riber

Yeah.

Paul Clarke

What is your relationship like with your clientele and what kind of communications you have going back and forth? Because this is your customer base and they’re, they’re very passionate about what they do, but they want to know that you’re on the same page. So what is that relationship like? And what kinds of feedback do you get?

Blake Riber

I answer a lot of emails, uh, I will say. But no, I mean, I think that’s like when we talk about it internally. It’s like, hey, how is Seelbach’s different from any other online retailer that’s popped up? And it’s like, well, we’ve spent a lot of time in this world. We’ve spent a lot of time learning about it. Like we’re here to answer questions.

And I mean, I think I even had with a tasting I was at in DC. Somebody was asking me about a product and I was like, I think we have one, just send me an email. He’s like, well, what email? Like, just reply to any of our emails. I’ll get it. He’s like, well, what do you mean? I’m like, there’s not a, there’s not like some other person sending out emails as Blake. Like it’s just me on that email. And, uh, he’s but that’s, that’s what I love about it.

You know, we certainly have some who it gets like, we’ll do a barrel pick. And it’s like, well, can you tell me about the barrel? It’s like, yep, char 3 Kelvin. Okay. What about this? Like, man, aside from telling you what I had for breakfast the day before this barrel pick, I don’t know what other information I can. I can give you about this release, but we try to get everything out there. But, you know, I think that’s the fun part, too, because that’s the world I came from and am still in. So, we’re kind of primed and set ourself up to be able to lean into the enthusiast who, who does want to know all those answers.

Paul Clarke

Now, you started off doing barrel picks through this and then you expanded to including things from, from other producers. How has this process evolved into looking at your own label?

Blake Riber

Yeah, for sure. And so we’ll do, man, we’ll probably do 400 barrel picks this year. Some blends, some different releases, you know, that, and that can be a mix. We’re not releasing a single barrel every single day and maybe three at a time or whatever. And really, once we were looking at it, it’s like, okay, we kind of see what people are going after. We see what they’re interested in. And now we have access and I’ve got a really good relationship with manifest distilling here in Jacksonville, you know, capability for them to do some white label bottling for us.

And so about four years ago, we were like, you know, let’s try out our own label. If nothing else, we sell the bottles. It’s really good whiskey. It’s kind of fun. Our first release was a toasted French oak and maple syrup barrel. Because I was on a podcast one time and toasted barrels were becoming so popular. And I, and then maple was kind of coming around. I was like, somebody should do a toasted French oak and maple. And you, you know, like the shtick would be it’s French toast and maple syrup bourbon. And so we, we did that.

Then, we just keep seeing cool, lots of barrels, different types of blends, things people are excited about. But we feel like maybe there’s a little niche for us. And that’s where the private reserve really came through. You know, my goal in the last 12, 13 years of doing this is just try to get people introduced to really good bourbon and whiskey. And the private label is essentially an extension of that.

So, you know, we started out with just online more in distribution. And, let’s see, I guess eight states now soon to be 11. But it’s like, it’s just kind of this flywheel for us where we think we have customers in all these different places where they don’t want to pay for shipping or it may be more of an impulse buy because they’ve been on the seal box email list for a while. And then they see it on their local store shelf and then vice versa, where we have that direct connection with them of saying like, Hey, this release is sold out online.

But if you’re in one of these states, here’s when should see it, you know. Maybe at some time I’ll have a release popular enough where I can do a release map for it back on the Bourbonr blog. But we’re not quite there yet to have the Pappy release map for Seelbach’s. But, but that’s, you know, I think how spirits brands can grow now. And it’s just us kind of proving out our own hypothesis is have really good whiskey, have a connection with a customer and continually do that over and over. And something eventually hits.

Paul Clarke

We’re heading toward the finish line here. As you look ahead into the next few years, where would you like to take Seelbach’s? And what kinds of opportunities and challenges are you running into and are ahead of you right now?

Blake Riber

I’ve always said like, and it sounds bad, but like, we don’t have goals necessarily. Because I think early on, had I set goals, I would have stopped working, you know, in some of those early years halfway through the year, because we exceeded it. And it’s like, no, we’re just going to keep pressing forward. Like, you know, as cliche as it like I wake up 90% of the days, ready to go, ready to talk about bourbon, ready to sell more bourbon. And so it’s just like, how, how far can we push this? How big can we grow?

On the online side, that’s an ongoing thing where it’s like, how many more people can we reach with the audience? If we have 250,000 people on the email list, I still think we’re at 2%, maybe 1% of potential consumers who would be interested in the products we’re selling. And that’s even more potential customers for the brands and distilleries we work with. So that’s fantastic. But it’s just about how do you get in front of those people? And then on the private reserve side, essentially the same, you know, we’re in eight states, would love to be in 20 to 24. I feel like that’s a pretty good number.

Distributions, a completely different world of things in a different business model. So figuring that out is, is always exciting. But you know, we’ve been able to do it and finding the right distribution partners. And it becomes more of a partnership because, you know, we don’t have a sales team out there in the States. You know, we may do some pop-ups, we may do some events. But in general we’re relying on our distributor to help us get into those retailers because hopefully they’ve heard of Seelbach’s from the online side.

So, you know, the goal is to always grow as big as possible. What level that looks like, I don’t know. But, But you know, I’m 40 years old. I have young children. I don’t think any 12, 10, or eight-year-olds have any dreams of being in the whiskey world. But I still think there’s a nice long run there where I love what we’re doing and it’s fun. It’s exciting. Everything has challenges, but just getting as much good bourbon out there as we can.

Paul Clarke

Blake, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m grateful to you for sharing your time and your perspective with us.

Blake Riber

Absolutely. Paul, thanks for having me. This was fun.

[music]

Paul Clarke

You can learn more about Seelbach’s and the spirits they carry by heading online to Seelbach’s.com. We’ve got that link for you in this episode’s notes. And once again, this episode is sponsored by Seattle Cocktail Week, taking place April 19th through the 26th. Find out more at seattlecocktailweek.com.

And that’s it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got tons of stories and recipes for you online at our website, imbibemagazine.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Threads for all our day-to-day coverage. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then let’s change that situation today. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.