Why The Cocktail Renaissance Was Built Bottom-up: Author Robert Simonson on Documenting Cocktail History While It Happens
Author Robert Simonson reveals how the cocktail revival emerged independently across cities through individual bartenders, not corporations. From MAFFEO DRINKS Episode 115.
Your field team just got everyone making the drink. Six months later, nobody is.
Robert Simonson spent 18 months interviewing over 200 people across continents who rebuilt an entire industry from zero. What he found contradicts multiple assumptions running in your business right now.
The Patterns Burning Budget
Field teams activate something. It works while they're there. Disappears when they leave.
Your training program teaches specs and steps. Knowledge doesn't transfer between markets. The innovation that took six months to develop is too complex for anyone to replicate.
You're waiting to coordinate a category strategy. Meanwhile, actual innovation is happening in individual venues without you. The people who built your category are retiring. Their knowledge exists only in their heads.
These aren't separate problems. They're the same pattern.
Strategy assumes you build things top-down then hope they stick. The evidence says it works the opposite way. Things emerge bottom-up first. You recognize traction second. Then top-down acceleration works.
Two Succeeded in Fifty Years
Robert documented exactly TWO corporate-created innovations that worked in half a century.
Everything else failed despite massive budgets. Meanwhile, hundreds of bottom-up innovations from the same period still create value decades later.
The difference isn't investment size. It's sequence.
Why This Moral Exists
This isn't a recap of the episode. This is the gap between what Robert documented and what's happening in your markets right now.
An entire industry got rebuilt exactly once in recent history. Robert spent 18 months writing down how it actually happened. You have the evidence.
And yet brands keep inverting the sequence, pretending top-down creation can manufacture bottom-up adoption when 50 years of evidence says it can't.
This moral exists because knowing the history isn't enough. Understanding what it means for your strategy is what separates brands that build lasting value from brands that burn budget on temporary activation.
Ready to understand why your top-down approach keeps producing temporary results? Discover how movements actually start, how knowledge actually transfers, why simplicity determines what scales, and how to recognize organic patterns worth accelerating.
If the above resonates, it's because you live it every day.
Your stakeholders want numbers. Your team wants direction. Aligning the two? That's where everyone struggles.
I spend 51% of my time in the field. 49% in boardrooms. Both rooms talk to me because I understand what the other one is dealing with.
What follows are patterns from 1000+ practitioner conversations. Things people tell me they'd never say publicly. Principles to navigate your own reality. Not playbooks.
For drinks leadership, serious about seeing clearly. 👇🏻
