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Most new spirits brands never reach 100,000 cases. Skrewball passed three million. In 2018, Steven Yeng and his wife Brittany launched a peanut butter whiskey out of their bar in Ocean Beach, San Diego. Banks turned them down, investors drank for free and never wrote a check, and most of the industry didn’t know what to make of the idea. Within a few years, Skrewball became the fastest brand over $20 to hit a million cases. It reached all 50 states in about 18 months, and in 2023 Pernod Ricard took a majority stake.

In this episode, recorded live on the Park Street University stage at Bar Convent Berlin, Steven joins Emmett Strack to break down how a bar favorite became a category of its own. He tells the story of the first retail account that ordered three cases and called back asking for 500. He explains why bartenders became the brand’s most important sales force, and how a viral moment on the Today Show turned into real repeat purchases. He also covers the fundamentals behind the growth: perfecting the recipe over 164 versions, securing proprietary glass and protecting the brand’s IP worldwide before selling a single bottle. Finally, he explains why doubling down on the hospitality industry in March 2020, when other suppliers pulled back, paid off many times over.

Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands launching and scaling in the U.S. market.

Featured Guests:

Steve Yeng, Founder, Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey

Mentioned in the Episode:

Skrewball Whiskey

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Most spirits brands are built to be sold. Fortaleza was built to win back a family legacy. Guillermo Erickson Sauza is the great-great-grandson of Don Cenobio Sauza, who founded one of tequila’s foundational names in 1873 and is credited as the first to export tequila to the United States. When his grandfather sold the Sauza company in the 1970s, more than a century of family ownership ended. Decades later, Guillermo, then working in aerospace and IT, went back to a small family distillery in the town of Tequila that hadn’t been part of the sale. He brought it back to life piece by piece, using the same tahona stone milling, slow fermentation, and copper pot stills his family had used generations earlier. Today Fortaleza is one of the most sought-after tequilas in the world. Bartenders, collectors, and fans hunt for it on shelves across the country.

In this conversation for Park Street University’s Hall of Fame series, Park Street CEO Harry Kohlmann sits down with Guillermo, whom he has known for almost 20 years, to trace that journey from the original Sauza legacy to Fortaleza’s rise. Guillermo explains why he refused to take shortcuts on volume. He still runs a tahona 24 hours a day, makes every bottle top by hand on site, and has kept the same wholesale price for almost twenty years. He also covers how bartenders and dive bars built the brand’s reputation long before retailers came around. Then he reflects candidly on what he would do differently, including why he would have stayed focused on one or two states longer before expanding, and on why Fortaleza remains proudly not for sale.

Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands launching and scaling in the U.S. market.

Featured Guests:

Guillermo Erickson Sauza, General Manager, Tequila Los Abuelos

Harry Kohlmann, CEO, Park Street Companies

Mentioned in the Episode:

Tequila Fortaleza

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Most founders assume that competing with the industry giants comes down to budget: bigger sales teams, bigger marketing spends, and bigger data departments. Joey Angelo and Wyatt Carder would tell you that a lot of that gap can now be closed for about a hundred dollars a month. Joey is the founder and CEO of Su Casa Mezcal, which in just a few years has grown into hundreds of on-premise and retail locations and surpassed several established brands to become a top-three-selling on-premise mezcal in multiple markets across the country. He's joined by his co-founder, Wyatt, who built the AI system behind their sales operation with no formal tech training.

In this conversation, Joey and Wyatt break down how a lean team can now run the kind of account-monitoring infrastructure that used to require a full operations department. They get specific about the exact tools in their stack, what it all costs to run, and how the system flags accounts drifting from their usual ordering patterns before a placement quietly disappears. Joey also explains how being able to text his sales data from the road changed the way he works the field, and why, for a traditional salesperson, AI turned out to be the opposite of the threat he expected.

Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands launching and scaling in the U.S. market.

Featured Guests:

Joey Angelo, Founder & CEO, Su Casa Mezcal & sipMARGS
Wyatt Carder, Co-Founder, Su Casa Mezcal

Mentioned in the Episode:

Su Casa Mezcal

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