Adam Torres and Michael Davidson discuss artisanal spirits.
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Show Notes:
How does an artisanal spirits company make their mark in the competitive vodka industry? In this episode, Adam Torres interviewed Michael Davidson, Founder & CEO of Black Infusions. Explore Black Infusions’ flavored spirits and plans for expansion and growth into new markets.
About Michael Davidson
David is a motivated and goal oriented individual. He likes to take a leadership role and focus on communication with customers and employees on a daily basis. David constantly tries to improve and innovate his companies, as to keep up with growth in the respected industries.
About Black Infusions
Black Infusions produces award-winning premium craft spirits from two ingredients: dried fruit and vodka. All Black Infusions products are free of artificial sugars, flavors and colors and are among the highest-rated vodkas ever reviewed by Wine Enthusiast magazine. Uniquely versatile, Black Infusions elevate cocktails – both traditional and modern – across all occasions, even those where vodka traditionally doesn’t play. The company’s three products, Black Fig, Gold Apricot and Dark Cherry, were created by Michael Davidson, CEO of Black Infusions and Boston-area entrepreneur. They were inspired by the old-fashioned but effective method of steeping real fruit in neutral spirits made from corn.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Michael Davidson on the line and he’s founder and CEO over at Black Infusions.
Michael, welcome to the show. Well, thank you so much. And I really appreciate the opportunity to have me on your podcast. All right, Michael. So we’re going to be having some fun today talking about disruptive products and really what you’re doing in the beverage segment. And so I guess, and for everybody, we’re recording this on Monday morning.
It’s like 9am. I’m out here in LA and I’m like, Oh, first thing I’m looking at is black fig vodka infused with figs. I’m like, Oh, this is such an interesting comment or concept. Excuse me. Michael, how’d you come up with this idea? So this is back in around 2013, 14. I was a amateur winemaker for about 11 years and very tedious tasks, but a lot of fun, but I really learned about.
Using, using real fruit in a process of making, whether it’s wine or spirit. And this was actually the days back when they had the, the blueberry teeny, the apple teeny and I don’t know if I had a, a wild moment, but I just had an idea of why can’t. Somebody create a spirit that’s using real fruit as they do as winemakers do when making wine because unfortunately a lot of the flavored products, whether they’re bourbons, vodkas or gins are using a lot of essence and flavoring and artificial.
So I set out on a task to let’s, let’s, let’s pick up, pick up kind of more of an unknown fruit, not the ones that all the big brands are doing. And we pick, we pick figs. And we started infusing figs in a neutral grain spirit which is considered a vodka base for everyone that knows spirits. And we launched it at a small little Mediterranean restaurant.
And the rest, as they say, is the story. We started getting a little help following, found a, found a distillery to Copac and found some distributors. And we started out in Massachusetts where, where I live and we’ve gone there. And now we’ve launched the black fig, which was our first product, gold apricot, and then, and then dark cherries.
So all, all real fruit. All picked in Northern California. There’s two things in our product. It’s, it’s booze and dried fruit, as they say. I’m so fascinated by this space and all, and specifically also how you, how you come up with the flavors and how you test it. Like, how do you get your, you came from wine and now you have this idea.
And you’re saying, okay, I’m going to use them. I’m looking at the website. So I see a dark cherry vodka, a gold apricot vodka. I see the black fig vodka. And I’m thinking to myself, man, how do you, how do you get that taste? Like what went into actually developing the product? Right. So that was really. The hardest and the most fun to do because we had, we had, we had no baseline.
It’s when you’re creating a product, when you’re creating an entrepreneur, you’re like, okay cause you probably went, there were other fruits or other things that you had in mind, maybe. And these, these made the final cut, so to speak. Am I off? Right, exactly. Well, there’s a lot of the fruits. like a blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, peach.
They’re, they’re covered by all the big brands. We wanted to come up with the fruit that was somewhat mediterranean and also food friendly. My whole premise of doing this was I wanted people when they went to dinner To have one of my cocktails, not just before dinner, have it with dinner. So we wanted to be, and if you look at the three products, it’s almost like looking at a charcuterie board.
Fig, dried figs, dried apricots, dried cherries. Oh yeah, you know what it is. I didn’t think about that. I actually have, I actually have a restaurant that does a charcuterie martini. But so that was the first part. But like, like, like I was, like I was saying, we hadn’t no basis to go off of. There was nothing similar.
I couldn’t run down to the liquor store and say, let me buy these four products. And I want to see how they taste compared. There was nothing. There’s no, there’s no one using real, real figs. When we first started out, so. It was every story. Every one of our fruits have a great story behind it. I developed the apricot.
I was sitting in a bar in Newport, Rhode Island on a Friday afternoon, and they needed a final answer. This is I’ve been told the story a lot, and I literally went around to everyone at the bar and said, Tasty street samples, Tasty street samples, literally, Tasty street Literally call my distillery and say, all right, we have an answer.
It was just, I know. If only that group of individuals knew how pivotal they were that night. And that was the apricot. And by the way, the apricot got 96 points on Wine Enthusiast, the number one, quote unquote, flavor blocker in 2021. So, whoever those people were, they knew what the hell they were talking about.
So the cherry look at the cherry was very, very hesitant to do the cherry because a lot of cherry products are very medicinal because they’re not really using real pick cherries. So the cherry was completely done during the pandemic. And it was basically, you know, my family sitting in the kitchen, just going through all variations of cherry.
You know, it’s not just people that aren’t in this industry. It’s not just like, Oh, let’s just use cherry or let’s just use fig or apricot, like you have to use a certain varietal. So when I’m selling my product. I, I start talking about varietals, like that’s uncommon in the spirit. That’s someone that’s a winemaker.
So we, we, I can only use certain varietals cause that’s what we decided to use as the final blend. And the cherry came out great. We actually. very current news. I’m in Florida now. We just got the cherry into Epcot. We’re going into a drink at the Mexican civilian with our cherry with our dark cherry product.
So it’s really it’s been really exciting. For those people that know what a neutral grain spirit is, we’re more of an artisanal liqueur. And a little insight is we’re actually getting vodka off the bottle this year, and we’re going to be putting artisanal liqueur on the bottles. Hmm. For the, so I’m looking also, I looked at some of the recipes and things like that, that you have on your website, which by the way, for everybody that’s listening to this, highly recommend.
So it’s black infusions. Dot com and even if the recipes and all the things that you’re providing there in terms of content great websites I highly recommend going to check that out. But how do you get the the and I don’t even know what they’re called But let’s just say the professional bartenders the ones you see that are you know Really take the craft of of making a great cocktail.
Seriously. Like how do you get them on board? When you’re on this journey and, and, and have them taste this and kind of get them to start, you know, serving it. That’s, that’s literally the greatest thing about these products when you’re selling them. Is there’s no competition, right? So if you bring a gold apricot to somebody who makes a cocktail and they’re trying to make that perfect cocktail and they’re like, What is this?
Like it’s not, well, that’s exactly. Well, that’s exactly what, so this is what I always tell people that are selling our product is, you know, if you walk into, you know, I go to Manhattan a lot, it’s my second biggest market in the country. And if I walk in with another bourbon, another mezcal, another tequila, another gin, they’re going to be like, okay, this is, this is cheaper.
This is better. But when you walk in with these three spirits, they’ve never seen it before. And just like anybody in a craft specialized business, they want new toys to play with. So we always have them engaged. We always have them literally, I could be in a car for two hours and we’ll run through six or seven cocktails.
It just happened in Florida last week. Cause I like to pick their brain. So all the recipes that you just mentioned and the recipes that are on my Instagram and Facebook account are all recipes. From other from bartenders in Vegas, Miami, New York, it’s amazing because people say we didn’t get all the recipes.
I said, get them from people like you, you know, the bartender. You know, I wouldn’t I like right now at one of our hottest drink is a cherry mezcal Negroni. I wouldn’t have come up with, I never would have taken mezcal, Campari, and our dark cherry, but people love to, you know, they love to play with things.
And these are the mixologist and it doesn’t have to be fancy either. It can just be two or three ingredients, by the way. So that’s the most exciting thing is engaging with the bartenders or sometime even the home users that come to a liquor store where we’re doing a tasting, because I think. Well, I don’t think I think I know from, you know, listening to people and talking to people through the pandemic, a lot of people became home mixologists, quote unquote.
They started using Amazon, Amazon sold a lot of shakers. Let’s be real here. Right, right. Exactly. A lot of shakers and a lot of kits and all the big stores, all the big Total Wines and the Bevmos of the, I mean, they, the delivery. So people started to use. Bitters, right? They, you know, bitters was like a foreign thing to them.
People even started, you know, muddling in their shakers. Maybe playing around with making not just a simple syrup, but maybe doing a rosemary syrup. So yeah, so you definitely had people real interested in making cocktails at home which I think has helped the industry. And help people like me as a small producer.
How do you how do you grow this market? So I remember this, this boom, I don’t know when you, I think you said the time period, but I remember at some point when there was like, I don’t know how many different flavors of vodka or this or that, and then little by little you saw them come and then go away.
Like how do you, and they were a novelty, I think they were a new toy for whatever reason, during a certain time period. I remember this. And I see yours, I see it as definitely different. Like you’re obviously not experimenting with flavors. I see based off our conversation, a bit of your vision, but how do you make this thing, how do you make this brand and these flavors like a staple and, and kind of integrate those into people’s palates long term.
Right. And, and that’s the, the, and you know, this industry pretty well, it’s hard as a small niche artisanal producer, because it’s a lot of, you know, a lot of, a lot of big brands are very successful because of a lot of marketing money behind them. And a lot of these little brands that are great brands, high quality, have a great following.
You need the marketing behind them. You need a little luck, but ultimately. You need, you need to get it as my slogan is just taste it that’s on all our swag that’s on all our POS and basically don’t you know you can ask me a lot of questions but ultimately you just need to taste it and I’m trying to go right now we go menu to menu so we’ll get put on a menu get off a menu what what the rate the evolution of a product we want to be always there we want to even when we’re not on the menu we still want to be part of your bar your bar program.
It’s that makes sense. Look, we’re in about 30 great restaurants in Manhattan. We’ve been on 11 Madison’s Drink List. We’ve been on Tao. But ultimately, I want to be in all the restaurants. Even if it’s not on the menu, I want to be in the 7, 000, 8, 000 restaurants just having a bottle or two. That’s how I think you can grow this.
It’s great to be on these great menus. People see about it. But you need, you need the volume. in this industry. And you also need people to drink it at an on premise account and then go buy it at the retailer. What is the, so I looked at your, at your Instagram and for everybody listening black dot infusion, so everybody can check it out.
And I looked at your Instagram and I also noticed this dirty Shirley product. So tell me a little bit more about that. So that so one of our successful drinks with the, with the dark cherry was a Shirley Temple dirty, which is adding alcohol to the traditional dirty Shirley cocktail, which actually.
was a boom last year, if you read about it, New York Times wrote the drink of the summer. So I decided to, to put it in a can, which is an RTD ready to drink. I understood the white closet, truly the high noons of the world. Those are mostly seltzers. We wanted to do a cocktail, right? We wanted not, not to be just a flavored.
water seltzer. Very hard industry. You walk into any of the liquor stores. There’s thousands of them. But ours is really cool because there’s nothing artificial. We use our dark cherry, which is all natural cherries, fresh lime and ginger. And it’s 6. 9 percent alcohol, so much higher than a lot of the seltzers.
And it’s been, it’s been a challenge. It’s been a fun. Right now we’re talking to Caribbean Islands and cruise ships. But it’s also a challenge because we’re not going to get a floor display right away because of the big brands. So we have to find some of the small niche stores that only carry two or three RTDs.
That’s really our target. But it’s but it’s a great product. It’s been fun. The packaging as you saw is great. I would say we probably we already have a in the works to do an RTD ready to drink with the black fig. So I can definitely see going more into that. I know people think there’s so many RTDs.
They’re, they’re, they’re saturated. But honestly, it’s just the beginning. If you read enough articles. This, this convenience factor, whether you’re You know, 22 years old or whether you’re 52 years old, people like the convenience factor. I think right now the younger kids are, the younger kids are drinking the RTDs.
But I think when you start putting some real quality and some cocktails in these cans, you’re going to see another generation of 40, 50, 60 year olds because everyone likes the convenience of let me just grab this, sit out on the porch. Let me grab this, go to the beach. Yeah, I’ve noticed that, by the way, more and more around around different friend sets of that age group that you’re talking about, and I’m like, oh, more and more people are coming up with, and I’m like, what’s that?
What’s that? There’s always something kind of new that somebody’s doing around in that space, which I find interesting, because I agree with you, by the way, I’m on the same side, like, I think that’s, that’s probably where we’re going long term. I hear this, whether it’s around a beverage brand, whether alcohol, non alcohol, it could be coffee, could be a lot of different types of brands, or even just you know, even services nowadays, there’s always a lot, a lot of talk around the idea of building community around a brand or a product.
It, how, if does that fit into black infusion space in your vision? So that, that is one of our challenges and we’re trying to figure out because we know we have a, you know, you can’t, there’s no way to try to make a product go viral, right? Or try to get a community behind you which has happened in several products.
So we’re trying to figure, figure that out what, because we really don’t have a specific demographic with, with the infusions. Some people that love cocktails, some people that love the certain, the fruit that we’re using and also mixologists love it too, but we, you know, the great thing about the product is we can be in.
You know Epcot, but we can also be in, you know, Joe and Sal’s pizza as well. I like that about the product, by the way, though. That’s a great thing, in my opinion, about the product, the versatility. Go ahead. Yeah. So that’s, that’s, what’s great about the product. Honestly, it’s, it’s doing stuff like this, podcast.
You know, this is as many people that might know us really were very we scratched the surface. We’re starting to get people to notice us, but it’s going in small increments. But yeah, I would love to get a certain community, maybe a certain demographic demographic behind us. And the best way to do that is just keep doing a lot of social media.
I mean, we try to make our social media page, as you saw, for those that are going to look at it, we try to make it look like, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re this big company that are tracking all the, all these accounts. And, and we do have the account but we just need, we need, we need distribution. We need, we need to get out there and, and do a lot of marketing because people, Love to go into these liquor stores.
You go in on a Friday afternoon or Saturday all day long, and you see all these people tasting, not just my brands. You see, and you see a lot of cool brands tasting. You don’t necessarily see the big brands because people are going to buy those, but you see a lot of cool liqueurs. You mentioned coffee, so many coffee products.
Now you see a lot of Amaro’s. You really see a lot of different brands. And I think that’s the best way for brands like me to get to the public. where it’s not a huge financial ask to go and, you know, do tastings in liquor stores. Interesting to me. So, and this is, this is kind of one of those I don’t know, it’s one of those, I don’t even know if I would say double edged or that’s pretty cliche, but I would just say, do you ever worry that, okay, if I build up this gold apricot, like, like niche and consumer demand that some of the majors or the big guys are going to come in all of a sudden launch a gold apricot on me.
Like, do you ever get worried about that in competition? I, I actually don’t just based on what I’ve known about this industry. Now there’s two reasons for that. One, I see a lot of small companies like me. Get, get bought by, I’ll just use the Azure for example, that, hey, we, we want this, whatever the product is, it’s a specialty, it’s a niche, we don’t need to, it would be best just to purchase this, or invest in this this company as opposed to us starting from scratch.
And two, I don’t think. You know, a lot of the flavored products that you buy are priced accordingly for what they’re putting in it. I just don’t think people are going to, unless it’s a small entrepreneur, these big companies are going to start, you know, doing contracts with, with farms like we do, you know, picking fruit, using real fruit, doing the infusion when they could skip a lot of steps, price it accordingly under 20.
And sell it on a mass level. So it would be a compliment if they came out with it. But I, I, I don’t, I don’t think anyone’s doing that. But, you know, obviously we’ll see and we’ll see from our end. We’ve had people, you know, talk to us interested, but we’re really small still But we definitely need to figure out how we can grow, how we can scale this which is, I’ve listened to your podcast and whether it’s the booze or some other type of consumer product is selling scale.
Scalability is always a hot topic for entrepreneurs. You agree? Oh, yeah. No, that’s it. And that’s why I asked you that question too, because it’s so interesting to me because I always think about like different spaces we’re in and the good thing is that we’re not, and mission matters, we’re not very we’re not in a saturated market with podcasts by any means.
So everybody that’s listening, don’t hit the subscribe button. It’s okay. So when I think about different industries or different, you know, ways and places that entrepreneurs spend their effort time you know, money, investors, money, everything else. It’s always just pretty fascinating to me because I love.
scene, especially in this case, when somebody does something in a maybe established industry, but takes a different approach to it. Like you’re doing with completely different flavors and really carving out your own niche and carving out and working on something special there. So I think it’s, it’s, it’s interesting.
And I’m, I’m excited that I, that I got you on the show today as, as the brand gets bigger and bigger and bigger, I’m going to be like, Michael, come on, man, I remember way back. You remember back in 2024, I had you on the show. Now you don’t take my call. What’s going on, Michael? Come on. What I, what I, what I will say, and I really, I really mean this you know, I didn’t know really much about this industry.
I sold all my other companies and I kind of was one of those people that jump off a cliff backwards into this. And I appreciate, I appreciated certain individuals that took the time to explain to me and understand me and walk me through this industry. So I always put this out there. If there’s people listening and I’ve come across people all the time, because it’s exciting and people want to, people always say, Oh, I want to start my own chin company.
I want to start my own RTD, you know, my information’s available through the website. I’m always happy for people to reach out because I appreciated when I started out with this industry, people taking the time and talking to me. So if there is anybody out there and they like what they heard, or they even want have questions that they want to get into it, please feel free to reach out to me.
I’ll always take your call or your email. So I just wanted to say that. Amazing. And I think that’s a good way to end it. Michael, thank you for coming on the show for all the audience listening to this website, black infusions. com is the website. And then the Instagram is black dot infusions. If you want to be inspired and you want to see some delicious cocktails definitely check out that, that that Instagram page and also the website with all the different recipes and get some ideas for your own mixology over there.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t hit the subscribe button yet, this is your invitation hit that subscribe button. And if you’re feeling really, really, really friendly, then leave us a review too. We sure do appreciate reviews. That’s how we.
Grow the show. That’s how we grow the footprint in this very unsaturated market where there’s not too many podcasts out there. So again, hit that subscribe button, Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Adam, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it and look forward to continuing keeping you up to date and hopefully be back on the show when I have an update.
