We recently connected with Carlos Ramos and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Carlos thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I’d had the idea for Up Elevated Cocktails a couple of years before I actually launched it in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. Having been a mixologist, in the beverage alcohol industry for 10+ years and being a cannabis advocate/consumer doing one off events with a cannabis supper club, I saw the missing niche in the culinary cannabis experience, and thought that cannabis cocktails and mixology could be successful in mainstream spaces but as a safer/healthier social alternative to alcohol. So I started ideating and writing a business plan for Up Elevated Cocktails while I was working in a craft beer/spirits sales role and moonlighting behind the bar in the West Loop.
With the impending “legalization” that was coming to IL in January 2020, I read the writing on the wall that people who looked like me probably weren’t going to be able to participate in the industry in terms of ownership. (Which is exactly how it’s played out over the last 5 years, by the way.) Of course, in March of 2020 the pandemic happened and the world of bars, restaurants, hospitality, and social gatherings shut down suddenly. That forced me out of my role in beverage sales and the bartending job I was also working at the time.
In those first few months of the pandemic, not spending my time in bars and restaurants trying to sell/rep a brand, I was reevaluating my relationship with alcohol, and if i wanted to continue in the industry. By that time, cannabis had been legal for almost 6-7 months, it was deemed an essential medicine and was made highly available during the pandemic. I honestly didn’t want to be a budtender, working for big/corporate cannabis, because I felt the industry didn’t reflect or represent me. And having lost my job due to something beyond my control, I wasn’t adamant about just going and trying to find another job. However, I figured that a service based hospitality business would be something unique I could offer to the industry, for those who are canna curious or are interested in cannabis but not interested in the archetypal cannabis settings per se, i.e. rooms filled with weed smoke and reggae music. So I merged my passions for cannabis and craft mixology/cocktail culture and came up with Up Elevated Cocktails. It really is my Covid hustle that ended up working out, and has grown/is still growing into a brand that is known for high quality hand crafted infused beverages and an expert caliber of service that lends an air of sophistication and elegance to the cannabis experience.
Carlos, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Well, I have a long and checkered history with cannabis. Obviously, it only just became “legal” here in 2020, but my experience and relationship with cannabis spans a few decades at this point. Most people know me as the cannabis cocktail guy, or as the cannabis run club guy. Oh yeah, I run a 420 centric run club here in Chicago as well. But what a lot of people don’t know or normally is that I’m a former cannabis justice impacted individual. In Illinois, I’m considered a “social equity applicant”. But for 13 years of my life, society simply labeled me as a felon.
In the fall of 2007, I was a 19 year old sophomore at Purdue University. A week before finals, I was arrested for selling cannabis on campus. I was charged and later would be convicted of 3 felonies. As a first time offender and college student with a 3.7 GPA , I was given leniency and served minimal time in jail and 3 years of home confinement and house arrest. All the while I had enrolled back into school, and graduated with a business degree from Indiana University in 2013.
Despite having a degree, my felony status continually proved to be a roadblock in my career pursuits, which is what lead me to becoming a bartender. I had worked retail and other odd jobs but bartending was a job that wasn’t very stringent about criminal backgrounds, where I was able to have some fun and make decent money by serving drinks and being personable, which was a natural characteristic I possessed. A year after moving to Chicago post college, I landed front of house job with Lagunitas Brewing, which was a very openly 420 friendly brewery from NorCal. I spent just over 4 years with Lagunitas, working up from front of house all the way to marketing and events, before leaving for a sales gig at 18th Street Brewery. Having spent over a decade in hospitality and beverage alcohol, I picked up a lot of skills that I realized could translate very well from a cannabis experiential perspective.
The Up Elevated Cocktails experience is similar to the experience you get from a classy cocktail establishment. You’re able to engage and ask questions and learn about cannabis, cannabinoids, terpenes, just like you’d learn about spirits, liqueurs, and bitters in a standard cocktail setting. The set and setting are very similar, but the experience is completely different because it’s cannabis and not alcohol. And yet, it doesn’t feel like cannabis because there’s no smoke clouds or reggae music.
What started out as a highdea(high idea) that I thought people would be interested in, has become a well known brand and experience that’s wowed people from coast to coast and has aligned with some of the biggest brands and esteemed organizations in cannabis. And that is something I am very proud of. But what I’m most proud of, is that my mom – a little old Mexican lady who for the longest time thought cannabis was bad and dangerous and put her son in jail – now benefits from cannabis daily when she uses the topical pain relief salve I make to manage her arthritis and enjoys sipping on cannabis cocktails made by her ‘entrepreneur son”. To go from cannabis felonies to cannabis LLC’s, and turning that traumatic negative experience into a positive outcome is very humbling and gratifying.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I think that answer is twofold. First, I believe that my story is one of authenticity and resilience, that a lot of people can relate to or empathize with. I’m aware that my background story isn’t unique, as unfortunately a large number of black and brown men have had their lives upended by the war on drugs, but the tenacity and risk taking and having to pivot to entrepreneurship in the height of a global pandemic are all elements of a really great underdog story that you don’t often hear about in cannabis, since the industry is very corporate and white male dominated in terms of ownership.
But also, the creativity and outside-the-box thinking it took to develop the specific business model, framework, and trajectory that Up Elevated Cocktails has taken to stand out and offer a unique and novel cocktail service experience, unlike anything seen in cannabis really, as opposed to becoming just another cannabis beverage CPG brand. We aren’t one of the hundreds of cannabis beverage brands that’s popped up in the last two to three years since Minnesota’s craft beer scene opened the floodgates for low dose hemp beverage, we’re a trailblazing hospitality brand that’s bridging the gap between the cannabis consumers and canna curious people and the wide array of infused beverages options that are available, and making the interaction with those brands and products more of an experience than just cracking open a can and sipping it.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
As I mentioned before, Up Elevated Cocktails is really like my Covid hustle/pivot that’s still growing into a well established and widely known experiential brand in cannabis. I’m fortunate to have grown my community and network in cannabis by always engaging with people and showing up in these spaces as myself, representing me and something I’ve built up from an idea and then those amazing people in my network thinking of me or mentioning my name in conversations I’m not in, because they know a guy that offers a really unique and attractive service and experience that elevates any cannabis event. Through these types of professional friendships/relationships I’m blessed to say that Up Elevated Cocktails has offered our cannabis cocktail experience in over a dozen states from the coast to coast, the south, all around the Midwest, working with some of the big names in cannabis and cannabis beverage. Another big milestone that’s on the horizon is I’ll be leading a wellness event through Runners High for the cannabis unity coalition community in Washington DC next week, and later that day I’ll be speaking on stage at the cannabis freedom rally taking place at the White House. So again, seeing as how this was a desperation pivot during the pandemic, to now this has led me to speaking for cannabis justice at the White House.. Truly a surreal full circle journey in cannabis.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Upelevatedcocktails.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/upelevatedcocktails
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/cjramos688
Image Credits
Elanta Slowek, Carlos Ramos, Jesus Montero, David Austin