Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Daniel Warren. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Daniel thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

This journey started in 2018 when my wife Liz Sanchez asked me what I wanted to do for my Birthday. My response was let’s do a whiskey tasting with our friends! So we had 30-35 friends to gather for a birthday celebration and whiskey tasting. Everyone had an absolute blast and wanted to keep doing the whiskey tasting. Little did we know this would become the first of MANY whiskey tastings we would host. We started meeting monthly with our friends and initially called the group “Whiskey Helps”. Our first meeting we had 12 people and everyone brought either a whiskey or covered dish. We ate, drank and tasted new whiskies.

Daniel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My wife had the amazing idea to change our name from “Whiskey Helps” to “Albuquerque Whiskey Society”, which became a major step in branding our club. Right after we did our name change we started to get more attendees as friends would bring other friends to our gatherings. Being in the IT world for my career I stood up a webpage and enhanced our Facebook page with our meeting updates. Currently our Brand is very recognizable across Albuquerque and surrounding areas. We have been able to do 10 barrel picks for our group and by working with the local distributors the picks are available in retail across the city.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When COVID hit everyone was so disappointed because we had to cancel our events for a couple of months. So I decided to conduct our tasting remotely. People would pickup their samples locally and then join a schedule online meeting to taste and dive into each whiskey. It was during Covid that people just organically started to find out about our group. I noticed that our Facebook following began to grow at an astounding rate. During this time I was also working on relationship building with some major whiskey brands and distributors here in New Mexico. We started having sponsored gatherings with big brands like Makers Mark, Jack Daniel’s and Whistle Pig. An average meeting we will have 50-75 attendees, catered food and a deep dive into the education of the whiskey presented.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Our business is truly more of a hobby that is 100% bootstrapped. We survive totally on ticket sales and Patreon’s. Our Patreon’s are at different levels and receive many benefits for believing in the Albuquerque Whiskey Society.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://abqwhiskeysociety.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/albuquerque_whiskey_society/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/abqwhiskeysociety

Image Credits
Fullbright Photography