Right About Now with Ryan Alford - How Brett Berish Built Billion-Dollar Spirit Brands by Ignoring Industry Rules | Sovereign Brands

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Building a real brand isn’t about playing it safe — it’s about testing, failing, learning, and trusting your instincts. In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford sits down with Brett Berish, CEO of Sovereign Brands, to unpack how he built global spirits brands like Bumbu, Deacon Whiskey, Bel-Air Rosé, and McQueen Gin by doing the opposite of what the industry expected. Brett explains why he stopped trying to compete with giants like Bacardi or Jack Daniels and instead leaned into authenticity, taste-first product development, and bold packaging. He compares building businesses to comedians refining jokes — constantly reacting to audiences, tweaking the approach, and evolving until something truly lands From navigating America’s rigid three-tier alcohol system to building brands in over 80 countries, Brett shares hard-earned lessons about flexibility, leadership, and believing in products before the market catches up. This episode covers: • Why no one believed in Brett’s brands at launch • How taste matters more than celebrity endorsements • Why packaging is part of the brand experience • How failure shaped his leadership style • Building teams of self-starters, not followers • Why letting products “breathe” unlocked global growth • Turning personal struggle into purpose If you’re building anything — a company, a product, or a personal brand — this conversation offers a masterclass in resilience, creativity, and trusting what makes you different. Connect with Ryan & Brett 🎙 Right About Now Podcast: https://ryanisright.com 📸 Ryan Alford: https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford 🥃 Brett Berish: https://www.instagram.com/brettbarishceo 🌐 Sovereign Brands: https://sovereignbrands.com Explore Brett’s brands: Bumbu, Deacon Whiskey, Bel-Air Rosé, McQueen Gin, Violet Fog, and Vione France. Subscribe, share, and leave a review to support the show.

Building businesses is like the comedian. When a comedian goes on stage and tells a joke, they get the audience's reaction and then they tweak it for the next time. And then they tweak it again and again and again. And it could be 20, 30 times before they're tweaking that same joke. And it nails it by the end. And to me, that's business. You've got to constantly learn from your audience and what's working and what doesn't work, what the consumer's reacting, how the trade's reacting. And it's constantly evolving. And that's what we're doing. A Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Write About Now.

I'm Ryan Alford, your host. And you know, we like to, we used to have a little moniker. It said if it's radical, we cover it. But you know what? I don't know too many brands and too many people doing more radical things than my good friend, Brett Barris. He is the president and CEO of Solver and Brands. And if you're watching the YouTube, which you should be, you would see the lineup of beauties here on the desk. Brett, what's up, brother? How are you, Ryan? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, man. My pleasure. And just real quick,

on the radical side, you made me think of my brother, who I work with, he says, what you'll get you fired at any other company will get you hired by mine. So that's how I think. It's funny. It's funny. a digital agency called Radical. And our show used to call the Radcast. Now we have the Radcast Network for multiple shows. We didn't want confusion. Literally, when I have meetings with my team and I need to get acknowledgement from here, I go in there and I go, our name is fucking radical.

That's right. You have the license to live up to this name every day. And our clients hired an agency name Radical. So you know what that means? It means they can't call me and go, what the hell were you thinking? And I'll go, you hired an agency named Radical. It works. You say the quiet partner aloud.

This is what you expect to expect it. I love what you're doing, man. I love anyone that's got bravado and doing things a little different and understands marketing. And you got all that in spades, pun intended. For me, with my brands, it's all based on making mistakes and kind of learning. If I'm veering off in my own direction, it's because a long time ago I realized I have to stop being like everybody else in my industry because I can't be them. I can't be Diageo. I can't be Baccardy.

I can't be Jack Daniels. And every time I try to do things the way they do, I failed miserably. I started leaning in, Don, what do I like? Who am I? What do I want to be? And that's when it started working. Why spirits? What got you into spirits? I, like most people, I ended up following what my dad did for a living. My dad spent 45 years in the liquor business. In some ways, he loved it, loved it, loved it, and lived it. At the same time, he hated it for me. I realize this is a parent myself, you want your kids to do something that you perceive as being easier. You perceive as being just something more simple, something that's got more better. He really wanted me to do finance, something and money, which I started out doing.

But I veered back into this, and I have never looked back. I think it's turned out all right for you. I tell this to people. I think there's one type of person who knows exactly what they want to do in life. And God bless, they're the luckiest people in the world. And there was somebody like me who had lots of ideas, and I was the worst one, never picked anything. Because I was always scared that the one idea I'm going to do is not the right idea.

I'd run out of ideas. Therefore, I'm just in kind of nowhere land. It sucked for 10, 12 years until I picked something and I picked this industry and stuck with it. It's been a fascinating industry because you've got the tiered system in the U.S. With alcohol. And I know enough to be dangerous. You can enlighten us further than my brain can probably do it. But the inability forever to not be able to do D to C and having to go through the tiered system,

distributors and all that stuff, I'd love just the business of liquor. Give us a little bit of the evolution from where things started of where it is today. It hasn't changed since forever. vision. Shirley's gotten a little better. We can run ads about it. I'll give you one example, because it'll be come home to you in South Carolina. The industry hasn't changed. It's been a three-tier system and a three-tier system for those of you who don't know what that means is I'm a supplier. I own the brands and I sell to a distributor and the distributor sells to bars and restaurants. I is a supplier, the owner can't sell direct. And then every state's a new distributor. And then

you have some states that are franchise states like the state of Georgia, whereas if you give you the brand to a distributor, you can never get it back. Or a state like Pennsylvania, where, you're the government is the distributor. In fact, they're probably the single biggest retailer in the United States, and it's still owned by the state. So it's fucked up, but it works. But I'll give you one change that's happened in the past 20 years of South Carolina. And if you're old enough to remember in South Carolina on-premise, bars and restaurants, were only able to serve the customer mini bottles, airplane bottles, by law, billions and billions and billions of mini bottles in bars. Because it was the only way to control serve and you get a perfect serve. You couldn't get any more or any less because it was

straight out of the mini bottle. I was in college when mini bottles were still a thing in South Carolina. That made a pretty strong drink. A mini bottles, actually a lot. But it was so funny because people would come into town like, what is that behind the bar? They thought it was a novelty. I'm like, no, that's how you order drinks here. We sell globally in 80 countries. I share that story. People can't comprehend the fact that bars and restaurants sold the little airplane bottles. The industry has not changed except that's been a change. Like these beauties on my table here, everything that you're making and branding, you can't sell direct.

No, I cannot sell direct to a bar or restaurant to retailer. I have to go through a distributor. In the state of South Carolina, we have a distributor. Empires are a distributor in that state. Great distributor. And they take on the delivery, the sales. And we have, call it somebody in the market who supports them and goes out and visit accounts and sells my brands, Bel Air, Bambu, McQueen, Deacon, our brands.

It's convoluted. It's strange. It's crazy. But it works. And the key to anybody's business and whatever industry you're in is you got to figure out how to make it work for you. And that's what we've done. How do you make it work for you? That should be kind of your statement, how you've made it work for you, along with self-made taste better, which we'll get to shortly. I love taglines. I've been the business. It's such a hoity-toity champagne market. Some of these stuff is just so, I don't know, they take themselves too seriously. There's this fine line of taking your brand seriously and having a steak in the ground versus. is some of maybe the irreverent, non-traditional ways that you've gone at it. What gave you the confidence to go there? It's the way I've looked at everything as I look back. It's learning from my mistakes.

I realize I've got lots of sayings I live by. One of them, which is a strange one, is sometimes not having a plan is a great plan. And what that's taught me is if you stick to your plan for a year or two, you're going to be wrong. And you're wrong for the next year or two. And the key is to be really flexible. That's what I've been leading into. That's one example of.

the way we build our business, it's leaning into what works and being very nimble. And that's how I built the business. And it's empowering people. Everyone we've hired, we have a few hundred people in the company. We're hiring based on hiring people who are self-starters, who are leaders who, if they're waiting for me to tell them what to do, they're too late. That's not the person for us. It's lots of things like that all coming together that's made my success. That's huge. And I'm going to circle that for our audience. We have a lot of budding entrepreneurs, people wanting to start their things. or maybe already in their thing, if you have the wrong plan and you don't pivot, then you can get stuck somewhere, spinning your wills for a lot longer than you should have. You don't and aren't flexible to what's happening around you. That is huge. It's an interesting. I have a story that I use. Building businesses is like the comedian.

When a comedian goes on stage and tells a joke, they get the audience's reaction and then they tweak it for the next time. And then they tweak it again and again and again. and it could be 20, 30 times before they're tweaking that same joke, and it nails it by the end. And to me, that's business. You've got to constantly learn from your audience and what's working and what doesn't work, what the consumer's reacting, how the trade's reacting. And it's constantly evolving. And that's what we're doing.

What's the thread for sovereign brands and kind of how you bring any bottle brand to life? It always, always, always, and it sounds canned, but it's the taste. That's going to dictate everything. Because if it doesn't taste good, Ryan, they're never going to come back again. my brother and I decided a long time ago is we don't have tasting groups and sommeliers and all that goes with that. If you were in our office on the day of the tasting, I'd have you taste with us and tell me what you think. And my goal is in the category we're in, it's got to taste better than the competition. If you tasted bamboo, which is the rum with the X on the front there, it tastes better than any other rum in the category.

And that's why the brand today is the number one premium rum in the world. Six years ago when we launched it, it's the one thing, Ryan, all my brand, have in common is no one believed in them no one no one believed in them no one thought they would work they're in sleepy old categories which i love but it's the taste because if it tastes great people are going to talk and you're going to build something from there so it's always that you guys lean in to the influencers the spokespersons the celebrity at if post malone says bumboo tastes great does it matter if it does taste great or not the interplay of that brand recognition and leverage that you get from those celebrity endorsements versus the product itself.

If you want to use the example, stick to the artist. If the artist has a shitty song, it's a shitty song. It doesn't matter who the artist is. There's a reason why if you try to pick an artist of 10 great songs, and that's it. And that's hard to do in itself. But if you can be the single greatest artist, if the song's not good, it won't play. And to me, it gets back to the taste. If the taste isn't good, no matter how big the celebrity is, it's not going to work.

But all the other stuff, don't get me wrong. A package is an example. Your marketing guy means everything, especially at my level. I can't spend the way a Bacardi does and build a brand. I think my packages in the design or the name or the storygo with it matters too. The consumer hopefully will see us on the shelf or they recognize us and pull it and then taste it. And then they'll come back again. But if they don't like the look, they're never going to try it.

So they work hand in hand. Yep. Similar to wine bottles. Consumer packaging is critical. To me, at least, I have to believe in what I'm putting out there. I have to look you in the eye and say, Ryan, you're going to taste the best freaking whiskey in the whole world and there's nothing else like it. And I can look at the eye and tell you why and tell you stories behind it. And you're going to taste you.

You're going to love and you're going to love the stories to go with it. Who's your favorite baby on the table here in general? I have six kids in my house. And if you ask me, who's my favorite? Every day of the week, I got a favorite. And that's just, I love them all. But someone kind of stands up today and it's like, oh, she or he is so cute or, oh, this is the best. Right now it's the deacon.

It's my whiskey. I'm wearing my shirt that says the Deacon. If you like bourbon, if you like whiskey, if you like Irish, if you like anything, this thing is smoky, it's sweet, it's peat. It holds up in any cocktails. You can still taste it, which you can't do with any other whiskey. And it just gets me excited. And I'm probably also saying that, Ryan, because it's the new one. So the newest one, so the newest one always gets more love. I worked with Apple for quite a bit. And the way Apple does one thing is the way they do everything. And this is the details that matter, especially in packaging and design. The feel. of this bottle, the textures, the design, the first thing I pulled out of the box, I'll just say that right now because the copper kind of look, grab my attention. And I'm telling you, a brand experience happens the moment you touch it. For Apple, like, how easy it is to open the box. That's the first thing. But for you, it's like, I felt this. I'm like, okay, must have. And I love the attention to detail in just the overall bottle and everything. That softness of Apple packaging, It's nothing expensive, but it deals it.

It feels a little more expensive. But it's true. And you look at that Deacon bottle, you know, there's a white X in the background behind that character. That's the Scottish flag. It's all over the bottle, which are actually X's. It has to do with Scotland. It says Aquavit on the main label and then debossed in the back. And that has to do with Aquavit is Latin for the spirit of life.

The face has meaning. It has to do with the plague and plague doctors. The goggles have a meaning. The name in Scotland means if you're the best of what you do, if you're the best podcaster, you're the best economist, if you're the best barber, you're the deacon. Everything has meaning to me and I need it to live and breathe in the brand. I need to believe in it. It's showing through. And I think our audience definitely just heard it. And look, let me tell you this. If you're listening, those details matter. In web design, it's like CX,

a consumer experience. That shit matters. And people pick up on it. That's the beauty. I always look at it. If you ask me, who's my target audience? I don't believe in demographics. I don't believe in channels. I don't believe in on-premise, which is bars, restaurants, off-premise, which is retail. I don't believe in cities or states. I believe in selling to everybody. Everybody. Because the consumer who likes it is the consumer. You don't know what you have until you let it go until you put it out there. So I want to sell to everybody. And that, to me, is how you build a brand. They say riches in the niches, and I've fought that my whole career a little bit. You certainly have to have some amount of focus, but you want mass appeal. And word of mouth is like the most

powerful thing in marketing still. I learned from everything around me. And if I use music, which I'm a big fan of as an example, if you ask any artist what their number one hit was, and did they think that song was going to be successful, they'll all say no. They didn't like it. They didn't think it was going to be a hit. And lo and behold, it is. And that tells me you got to try shit. And for me, if I use bamboo, as an example, our biggest single market in the world outside the U.S. is Canada, known for my company's ever been there. We crush it in places like Latvia, Romania, Poland, where rum isn't the thing, but they love bamboo. If I didn't let it breathe, we would never have known it would be like this.

Brett, you're a personal brand. You're carrying the brand of the company, yourself. I can sense you've always had this personality and this sort of gravitas that goes with you and the brand and what you're doing. But when did that light bulb maybe go on that you are part of the brand? brand and part of this story. It happened for me maybe a year before COVID. Not long, not that long ago. And the reason is my brother and I, if you ever asked us, we've always said it's not about us. We don't want to make it about us. It's never about us. It's about the brand. We don't matter. Who cares about who I am? It wasn't until I started doing an interview series called Self-made, where I wanted to hear people's stories. People started coming to me and thinking, I've always been

successful. And my response is no, that's not true. I went through shit. I lost my house. I had the IRS suite by bank account. I lost everything in this business. And I started realizing I want people to know that side because that's the side that motivates me. And I want to hear that side from other people. And then I started realizing, boy, I think I can help. I think I can help my brand. At the same time, I realized I can help people. I wish there was somebody like me when I was 19, 18, 17, 16, where they're telling shitty stories about failure and look at me now. Because I think that's very important. That's the most important story to tell if you're successful.

Brett, I can't appreciate you enough for coming on the show. Let's talk where everybody obviously got the distributor stuff, but where can people keep up with you, the brands, learn more about everything you're up to, and where to get these delicious drinks. On Instagram, Brett Bearer's CEO, the brands, Deakin Whiskey, Bumboo Original, official Bel Air, McQueen, Violet Fogg, Vion, France. hit us if you have questions if you want to be a brand ambassador be part of our team just hit us that's

how it starts and if you're looking to do anything in business the key is don't rely on anyone that's the key self-made tastes better that's right don't rely on brett thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate your wisdom your time and your gifts thank you so much for having me ryan take care everybody hey guys you know to find us ryan is right dot com you'll find all the highlight clips from today links to all of brett's brands And of course, links to all of mine. Thank you for making us number one. This bill's real and number one because we are number one because you made us that way. We'll see you next time.

I'm right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.