Episode 100: The Uncle Nearest Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance With Lucia Creed, Kate Gerwin, and Tiffanie Barriere

For our 100th episode, we introduce the Uncle Nearest Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance, a new platform that aims to match veteran bartenders with upcoming talent for the betterment of the bar community. In addition to Lucia Creed, head of trade advocacy for Uncle Nearest, we’re joined by two of the program’s inaugural mentors: Kate Gerwin, owner of Happy Accidents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a finalist of Drink Masters on Netflix; and Tiffanie Barriere, an Atlanta-based bartender and educator and Imbibe 75 alum.

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Paul Clarke 

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. 

And if you work with spirits companies with any frequency like we do, then you start to notice regular patterns of engagement when talking about things like outreach and marketing. You’ll see carefully polished brand education packages designed for bartenders, maybe cocktail competitions to help highlight the use of your product, and sometimes a cautiously curated history about the original creators of a spirit and how that brand has appeared over the course of history. 

In recent years, that standard approach and the accustomed narratives have been upended in some ways by a relatively new company, Uncle Nearest. Uncle Nearest, of course, is a Tennessee-based company with their eponymous line of whiskeys. But their storyline diverges in significant ways from those of many other spirits brands. We’ve explored the story of Uncle Nearest before several times over the years, in print articles and a podcast episode featuring the brand’s founder, Fawn Weaver, as well as a more recent episode with Victoria Eadie Butler, the master blender for Uncle Nearest. 

And now, starting today, June 3rd, the day this episode goes live, Uncle Nearest is introducing its own approach to bartender engagement and promotion in the hospitality trade, and it’s being done in their own way. Today is the debut of the Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance, a project that brings some of the most experienced and talented bartenders and bar educators from across the country, and places them into active mentorship roles with emerging talent to help create a vibrant community within the bar world and to share guidance and expertise within that community. 

To bring you the details on this new mentorship program, for this episode, we’re chatting with Uncle Nearest’s head of trade advocacy, Lucia Creed, and two of the selected mentors for this initial rollout: Kate Gerwin, the owner of Happy Accidents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a veteran of Drink Masters on Netflix, and Tiffanie Barriere, an Atlanta based bartender and bar educator and an alumnus of the Imbibe 75. 

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Paul Clarke

Lucia, Tiffanie, Kate, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Lucia Creed

Thank you. 

Kate Gerwin

Thank you. 

Tiffanie Barriere 

Hiiii.

Paul Clarke 

It’s great to have you on. Over the past several years, you know, in Imbibe magazine itself and in our online coverage and here on the podcast, we’ve come back to Uncle Nearest and the Uncle Nearest story repeatedly in relation to the work that’s being done not just with whiskey, but also within our larger culture and community and within the bar and hospitality community. Today, when listeners hear this episode, Uncle Neares has news of another program that’s being rolled out, the Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance, that all of you are a part of in one way or another. So to start things off, I’ll ask Lucia to get it rolling. What is the Mentorship Alliance and what’s the goal here? 

Lucia Creed 

So, Raise the Bar is really a first of its kind six-month mentorship program that matches beverage industry leaders with up and coming bartenders to support their professional development and really try and create innovative projects that will positively impact our community. So, you know, we really believe in the power of mentorship to shape the future of our industry. And so our mission is really just to create a really supportive, vibrant community alliance that bridges the gap between, you know, some of the seasoned veterans that we have that have all of this amazing experience and the emerging talent that is up and coming in our industry and foster a culture of continuous learning and growth on both sides of that equation. 

Paul Clarke

And what was the rationale for creating this? What kind of need did you see in the bar community for a program like this? And what kinds of benefits can a mentorship provide people?

Lucia Creed

So I come from a long bartending background. I was a bartender for 15 years and now I’ve been on the brand side of things for over a decade. And after being on both sides, I just, you know, I really believe that brands have a responsibility to invest in bartenders because at the end of the day, the bartenders are the people who are selling your brand. Right? We’ve all heard the saying ‘brands are built on the on premise,’ and that’s through customer interactions with bartenders. So they’re the gatekeepers in terms of recommendations of spirits and cocktails. And I think brands should really be giving back to the bartenders in a meaningful way. 

So when I was given the green light to launch this program at the end of last year, I really started by like spending time looking at what the industry was already doing. Well, what we had plenty of, and then what we kind of had a void for in the larger community that needed to be filled. And many of the larger trade engagement initiatives in the industry are focused on competition, and they already do a really fantastic job at those. There are some really great educational based programs that are doing great things in the industry, but what I saw missing was an in-depth mentorship program, one that was open to all demographics and one that wasn’t connected to a cocktail competition or something, with kind of a different overall focus. So, I mean, I love the idea of incorporating mentorship into some of the big competitions and other platforms, but I really wanted to create an initiative that was built around mentorship for mentorship sake. 

So in terms of those benefits, of mentorship, you know, there are a few key things that I think are really impactful. Increased success rates, right? Mentorship leads to higher success rates by giving mentees the insights and advice and best practices from people who have already been through the things that they’re trying to do. Faster learning curve because you’re already, you know, getting all of that firsthand experience from your mentor and can kind of avoid some of the mistakes that they might have made in the past or adopt effective strategies that they’ve already learned. And then it helps with kind of some bigger issues as well. It helps enhance problem solving abilities, critical thinking and problem solving. If you have a mentor who can help you work through those things, and also at the end of the day, at least in terms of this mentorship program, the goal is to help build internal capacity and personal effectiveness, which are two things that I didn’t know what they were until I started to do a lot of research on mentorship. But really those things relate to your ability to achieve your goals and objectives in a way that maximizes your potential, right? So those things involve setting clear priorities, managing your time effectively, taking actions to achieve your goals. And those are things that I think are really impactful. And it’s one of the key differentiators in this particular mentorship program because we are actually investing in bringing in a mentor development expert to help give the mentors the tools they need to guide our mentees through this process so that the whole learning can be as impactful as possible. 

Paul Clarke

And Kate and Tiffanie, you’re both longtime veterans of the industry and you’re both participating in this program as mentors. Before we get into that part, can we talk a little bit about your own experiences in coming up in your careers and what you’ve seen that reinforce the need for this kind of mentorship program? And how might a program like this have been beneficial to you or to your peers as you were coming up? Kate, we’ll start with you. 

Kate Gerwin 

Yeah. You know, I’ve really been in smaller markets most of my career, and there just wasn’t a lot of mentorship available. I think a lot of what I considered mentorship was really more of a boss. And I learned a lot of good things. And I also learned a lot more bad things, off things I didn’t want to do. I probably learned more from managers who had never been trained or mentors who weren’t really mentoring, but they were just your boss. And I think, know, as a woman, I started to just emulate a lot of the men that I was being, kind of bossed by. And I had some bad qualities as a manager when I first started out. And I think for me now, as I have kind of come around and realized the things that make my team better and make the people that I’m working with better, I realize that I want to take a more active role in making sure that cycles are kind of broken. To be honest, because I just didn’t have a lot of solid mentorship and I didn’t have a lot of people that I could look up to in a way that represent me as a person. So I think now it’s more important for me to realize that I think I may have discouraged some people or may not have done the right things. As a boss and as a mentor, I want to make sure that the people coming up are fostering the next up and coming generation of bartenders so that we can kind of improve as an industry. 

Paul Clarke 

Fantastic. And Tiffanie, what about you? 

Tiffanie Barriere

Gosh, mentoring. Well to what Kate said, it’s really we just had a lot of bad bosses. No shade on all my ex bosses. But, this hasn’t been looked at as a real job for quite some time. And so when you do become a bartender, it’s usually something in between. When we were coming up in the bar game, it was just like an in-between job. And I think if there was better mentorship then, meaning someone that led, you’re on a path to say, Hey, you know, you make this much cash, what do you do? Or, Hey, you’re super creative, you know, the way you jazz up your uniform, you know, what else do you do? There wasn’t enough to anchor to, or even tether to as a bartender it’s just like a one direction. To Kate’s point, it’s just a bunch of guys that we looked at and you just work your way up, be a boss and and that means I did a great job. And sure, some of those skills have gotten us in this new mentor team where we are. But now there’s a chance to have some strategy behind it. And so just being a bartender, now called a creative, now called an artist, we can really just emphasize on that even more and have some conversations about people’s personal preferences and foster them, grow them, you know, take them beyond. It’s, it just takes you more into your creative space. So I’m just looking forward to touching everyone who’s got a bunch of flowers in their head that needs to be watered and just see what this can do. Because that personality and creative space of being a bartender is just where we’re at, the place where we’re so capable of so many things. So being able to feed into that with this program is going to be really exciting on both ends. I want to learn more and I want to share a bit more, you know, some strategic things that I would have wanted going up in the game. So we’re going to all grow up in this space. 

Paul Clarke 

And can we dig a little bit more into this program and how it fits into the brand’s overall “pull as you climb” ethos and the kind of tradition that this fits into? 

Lucia Creed 

Yeah, for sure. The idea around pull as you climb and that ethos that you’re referring to within Uncle Nearest is probably the thing that I’m the most proud of. You know, we have several different initiatives that kind of focus on this idea that it was really challenging for our founder, Fawn Weaver, to get Uncle Nearest to where it is because she’s a woman and because she’s black. Right. There weren’t a lot of people in the beginning that were thinking like, oh, yeah, this is going to be easy for you. You can do it. She had to really push and really battle to get where she is in the industry because most people who own and found successful spirits brands don’t look like her. 

So as she started to gain success, she really wanted to make sure that part of the fabric of our brand and our company was this idea that as we become more successful, we’re going to turn around and share that success and those learnings with as many other people as we can, and especially with people from marginalized communities that don’t have the same access to resources that some others do. So, you know, we have the Nearest and Jack Advancement Initiative, which really aims to create pathways to leadership for people in the BIPOC community, those community members who are really aspiring specifically to become head distillers, heads of maturation, production managers, those kind of more production focused jobs. There’s also a component there where there is mentorship of BIPOC entrepreneurs and there is advancement of like STEM and distilling focused courses within the Tennessee college curriculum. 

We also have our Spirits on the Rise summit, which is put on in conjunction with the Nearest and Jack Advancement Initiative. But that’s really focusing on BIPOC spirits professionals, really helping connect them with other leaders in the industry to help them get a lot of information around things like route to market investment, marketing strategy, product development, all of these things that would take those individuals a long time to learn on their own. We bring everybody together and try and give them all of that information in a three day summit so that they can really jumpstart their development as a brand. 

So with this new program, we’re really just extending that pull as you climb philosophy to the individual bartender, right? Like, I can’t stress enough how important bartenders are to our industry and to the success of brands, so why wouldn’t we want to do something to specifically give back and support their professional development? And our entire brand is based around mentorship, like Nearest Greene is our brand’s namesake. He was the mentor of one of the industry’s most successful pupils, and we all know how well that turned out for him. So it just it only makes sense that that we would continue that. I think our whole company feels very strongly that it’s our responsibility to continue that legacy of mentorship in as many ways as we can. So I think Raise the Bar fits perfectly into that larger ethos. And, it just made a lot of sense when we wanted to figure out how we could give back, that we would do it as as a way to mentor the next generation. 

Paul Clarke

Now, this is a brand new program that’s just kicking off now. Let’s share a few details on its particulars, how it actually functions, what it’s going to cover and how will the mentor mentee relationships work.

Lucia Creed

So the application process is going to be live from June 3rd through September 5th, but the program itself doesn’t kick off until January and then it’ll run through July. So it’s a six-month period that the mentors and mentees are engaging. The mentees are matched 1 to 1 with the mentor who will guide them through the process. And as I mentioned before, one major point of differentiation with this program and with previous mentorship is that we’re really investing significantly in professional mentorship, training and development so that the mentors will be equipped to really guide their mentees through the process of clarifying their goals, defining a project, having specific deliverables that will really help them not only have something to speak to at the end of the six months, but will help them towards their long term goals. 

So that’s one thing that I’m really excited about and one thing that I think will be really impactful in the larger community because, you know, folks will come through this program as mentors and leave with all this knowledge and all of these tools that not only help them do a good job within this program, but will help them when they go back into the community and continue to show up as mentors going forward. But that program itself will kick off with a group of all the mentees and the mentors in January coming out to the distillery. So they’ll get to tour the farm where Nearest lived and was a mentor, and then come to the Nearest Greene distillery to learn more about the brand and kind of get a sense for the history of Uncle Nearest. And then after that, the mentors and mentees will meet twice a month, virtually, and they will work together on this, I’m calling it a project, but you know, kind of the area of focus. The nice thing about this program is as Tiffanie was saying, there’s so many creatives right in in our industry and I have outlined eight different kind of general areas of focus that I, I see a lot of interest in. But I think there’s so much creativity, like there will be amazing things that people come up with that we didn’t even think of yet. 

So, during this process, the mentors will help the mentees understand what their bigger goal is and then break it down into more actionable items so that they can really start to work on getting to that goal will work with the larger group a few times as well, so that mentees can kind of talk through what they’re working on or challenges they’re running up against or, successes that they’re seeing and get other feedback from people other than just their mentors and kind of get additional points of view. And then at the end of the program, we will have mentee presentations to key stakeholders that Uncle Nearest they’ll present what they’ve been working on, kind of where they want to go with it. And two of the people whose projects are seen to have the most potential to positively impact the industry will receive a $10,000 grant to continue pursuing that area of focus. So I’m very excited about that. And the see what larger projects come out of, this beginning.

Paul Clarke 

That is really exciting. And can we talk about the mentorship pool a little bit? I mean, we have Kate and we have Tiffanie here, which I mean is a very good testament to that, to the kinds of folks that you’re putting together for this. What kinds of experience and expertise are you looking for in your mentors and what are some of the characteristics you’re looking for in an ideal mentor.

Lucia Creed

Yeah, so we have a really amazing group of mentors coming together to launch this program. I’m super, super grateful because like you said, this is brand new. This is not something that we have a lot of learnings from. But I will say, you know, there have been there have definitely been mentorship programs in the past and the people who have led those, you know, from nonprofits or as part of these cocktail competitions have been very supportive in sharing their expertise because I think we all want to make as many mentorship opportunities as possible available and make them as good as possible. So I’m grateful for all of the sharing that’s come there. We’re really building this all together, right? 

So I’m really grateful to have all of the participation of these folks. And they come from lots of different backgrounds. They all come from the bar and some of them are still in the bar. They, you know, our bar owners, some of them are moved into marketing, brand building, education, research, industry support initiatives. So it’s really a diverse group, not only in terms of demographic backgrounds, but in terms of their lived experience and professional experience in terms of what we’re looking for in mentors. You know, this is something that I’ve been talking a lot with our director of mentor development about. And, you know, I think the ideal mentor kind of breaks down into a few areas. 

We want them to, of course, have that knowledge that lived experience or expertise that the mentor is actually seeking. we want them to potentially have a professional network that can be tapped for expertise beyond their own range of knowledge or experience and be able to connect their mentee with people. I think that that’s one of the amazing things about our bar community. we all really like each other and you know, if I don’t know something Tiffanie knows or Kate knows or somebody else knows. And so being able to share that knowledge and not have to be the one that knows everything but opening up to the wider community and being able to make those connections, I think is really important. And then the ability to really effectively coach a mentee and help them define for themselves what their goals are, what obstacles they need to overcome, Ihink that’s really important. Our industry has a lot of big personalities, a lot of wonderful personalities, but at the end of the day, this process is not supposed to center the mentor. It’s supposed to center the mentee. So that is a big thing. Having that ability to kind of step aside and see the big picture and be there as a support to the person that you’re mentoring having those skills or being open to learning those skills during this mentor development process. And I think that, you know, that’s what really sets the bar apart because we’re recruiting people with a wide range of skills or leaders and have established expertise, but we’re supporting them with training and structure to make sure that they’re set up for success and they can become true coaches and guides for the next generation. 

Paul Clarke 

Now Kate, you had mentioned a few minutes ago about, you know, the kinds of things that would have benefited you starting out, coming up from a mentor, from your own experience as you get into this. What do you hope to bring to the program, both in terms of like overall contributions? Are there any like practical examples of what you would like to bring in to share with folks in this program? 

Kate Gerwin

Yeah, I mean, I think in opening a cocktail bar in the middle of a pandemic in a small market, I hope that I have a lot to offer in terms of, you know, going from bartender to bar owner, being able to navigate business licenses and lawyers and contract negotiations and applying for, you know, we have a distillers license but city licenses and giving people the confidence not only to do it, but being able to help guide them in mistakes that we’ve made. You know, my bar is called Happy Accidents because, you know, you don’t make mistakes. You just have happy accidents. And we all kind of stumble through things. 

And I think in being able to have someone that, you know, has made mistakes and is willing to be vulnerable and willing to be available and willing to discuss the problems and the and the real hard nitty gritty things, that to me is something that I wish I would have had. Also, for me, one of the things that I’ve realized is that having mentors outside of just the bartenders and people who make cocktails and things like that, like I myself seek mentorship from local entrepreneurs. And, you know, we now work with the Economic Development Resource Center and, you know, Small Business Administration and being able to get bartenders to think outside of the normal, like, let me just find a bartender that I idolize, is kind of a big thing. So I’m hoping I can bring a lot of those things to the table. And, to me, mentorship is not just handing out advice. It’s really kind of tapping into the community and the things that we have to offer. So I’m hoping that those are the kinds of things that I can offer just from my perspective and the things that kind of deterred me, the things that I stumbled on. And hopefully, you know, what I like to think is every generation of bartenders, every few years, we get better and better as bar owners and we get better and better as leaders. And I just hope that the legacy that we can leave behind is knowing that people will have less obstacles than we did. 

Tiffanie Barriere

I think every mentor role model that’s going to be involved in this in general, whether it’s with this program or not, wants to give away something back and not let them take the path that we did. I mean, sure, we can look great right now on camera, but that this took a lot of work there. So I just want to inject some more excitement around the creativity of being a bartender and maybe have them answer questions that I didn’t want to answer then like ‘so what else?’, because I used to get asked that all the time as a bartender. So what else do you do? And I’d be like, you know, I just bartend. So I really want to, you know, really get into these businesses and help them navigate so that they can be seen in a better light and represent with pride. I mean, yes, you’ve seen me on a few things, but let’s get a few other people there. I get sick of seeing myself in certain places, so maybe you want to be on your local news. Maybe you’d like to be on the creative team for a hotel. Maybe you, I don’t know, want to be a designer? I don’t know. But we’re going to figure it out because we’re just who we are as bartenders are needed everywhere. And so take a step above. Raise the bar to be exact. Just stepping out, way out of that bar box, is what I want to implement and just get people excited. I’m a huge cheerleader and I support so much stuff, so I just am excited to just get into somebody in and get them and get them excited about themselves.

Kate Gerwin 

What Tiffanie said.

Tiffanie Barriere

Yeah, I know, what Kate said. 

Paul Clarke 

So here we are at the very beginning of this program, doors are open. What does the timeline look like for this? How would this process unfold in the coming months? And how can people listening to this podcast engage in this? If this sounds like something they want to get involved in, what should they do? 

Lucia Creed

Yeah. So like you said, the program application period is open now. It’ll be open through September 5th, which is Uncle Nearest’s anniversary. So felt like a good, time to cap it off. And then after that, the mentee cohort will be announced on November 1st of 2024, and then the program will kick off with that trip to Tennessee the week of January 6, 2025, and then program runs through the end of June and then the grant announcements will take place in July. So the first six months of the year, and we have a website, to raisethebar.org. There’s an application on there. You can just go straight to that apply online. There’s a couple of different ways you can apply. Again, always trying to be as inclusive as possible. So there’s a written section and then there are questions. You can either fill it out online or you can send in a video because some folks don’t like to write that much and that’s totally fine. So you can submit that application before September 5th. And there’s more information. You, I know not everyone can retain this much information in an auditory fashion. So if you want to go read about it, go to the website. It’s got all the info, it’s got all the beautiful mentor photos, links to their bios. Right now we have a great group of mentors. We will depending on what happens, we may end up adding some more mentors as the program continues. If we see that we have a bunch of people who, I don’t know, want to write a book, then maybe we’ll go and make sure that we have specific mentors to help fulfill that, different folks could be brought into the program as well. But we have a really amazing group of mentors on there that are already committed as well. So you can go and check them out and see all about them. 

Paul Clarke

Fantastic. We’re heading toward the exit here. Any final thoughts you’d like to share? 

Kate Gerwin

The only thing I would say just to the mentees to like, don’t be scared that you’re not ready. Don’t be scared that you’re not the one. Don’t be scared that you like. Just let it go and own it and apply. Because for me personally, I think a lot of times I didn’t really shoot for opportunities because I thought, Oh, well, I’m in New Mexico, or Oh, I just learned how to do this, or I don’t know if I’m ready for that. If you’re still, you know, ten years out from your goal of wanting to open a bar, but that’s what you want to do, start now and don’t be shy. 

Lucia Creed 

Absolutely.

Tiffanie Barriere 

Like what Kate said. Now I’m just really excited. You know, now is a really good time to make change and it can be the smallest thing. And it’s not about taking over the world. It could just be your four corners. So I encourage anyone to just apply just for the process. I mean, it’s going to be a process, but that’s what it takes to take the next step for the future. So do it.

Kate Gerwin 

Absolutely. 

Lucia Creed 

And I think just to piggyback on that, I would say, just to be very clear, this isn’t just for people who work at the coolest bar or whose name is already super known. Like this is really an opportunity. Like Kate said, for everybody to get involved. So this this isn’t meant to be a popularity contest. This really is to find those people who have exciting ideas and want to move the industry forward. And it doesn’t matter where you live or where you work. We’re here to support you. 

Paul Clarke

This is wonderful, Lucia. Kate. Tiffanie, this has been so wonderful to hear about this new program. Thanks so much for being on the podcast and sharing all of this with us. And I’m really excited to see how this program takes off in the months ahead. 

Lucia Creed

Thank you so much for having us, Paul. 

Tiffanie Barriere 

Thanks, Paul.

Kate Gerwin 

Thank you for having us. 

[music]

Paul Clarke

To find out more about the Uncle Nearest Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance, head online to raisethebar.org. We’ve got the link for you online in this episode’s notes. 

And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty more stories and recipes for you on our website at imbibemagazine.com. Keep up with us on social media, on Instagram, Threads, Pinterest and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here is your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode’snotes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.