Nelson’s Green Brier is one of Nashville’s most historic distilleries. And every May, this iconic producer releases its Belle Meade Bourbon Honey Cask Finish to statewide fanfare.
Last year, over a thousand people showed up to grab one of these special bottles, putting the distillery and its employees under serious strain.
When the time came to organize this year’s rollout, AJ Soldo, Hospitality Manager at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery, wanted to find a way to move everything online.
After exploring a variety of options, AJ eventually leveraged Oznr to bring the launch to life.
We sat down with AJ to chat about the challenges of releasing a highly desired bourbon and how the Oznr app helped facilitate the distillery’s largest release of the year.
GW: How did you hear about Oznr?
AS: I was introduced to Oznr by Matt Griffin from Untappd. I met Matt through Clubhouse. We were in a room chatting. It was perfect because I was in the room to learn something from the beer industry as far as how to change how we do special releases.
Matt said, I have a great solution for you! You should talk to Jon Childress from Oznr. He made the connection because I told him about some issues we were having with special releases. I knew Oznr had the beer side of things figured it out because so much a part of what they do are the special releases.
So I talked to Jon and that’s how this journey started. It was perfect the way it all worked out.
GW: You mentioned that you initially went into that Clubhouse room because there were some issues you had around special releases. What were those problems that you were looking to solve?
AS: Right before the pandemic hit, we sort of had a really big release. We were really excited about it. We put a bunch out on social media. We promoted it a ton. And it was a mess.
We had 450 bottles to sell. We thought, This will be great. We’re going to sell out in an hour. Well, the day before the release, 1,000 people showed up and camped out. We realized we couldn’t have 1,000 people showing up and lining up at the distillery, especially after COVID. So we needed another solution to manage the flow of people coming through.
We were like, Great, let’s start doing this online. We tried it with a release, and the first time we did it through a JotForm on the website. Through that platform, we were able to do some cool things, like schedule times people could come, but it was very thrown together. It’s also JotForm, meaning that it's not meant to facilitate that amount of traffic we were getting. It’s just a form. You can tell the form to stop collecting after a certain amount of submissions, and it did tie back to our Square account and payments ran through Square, but it certainly wasn’t perfect. And it didn’t look good. It wasn't pretty.
We tried it again with an even more popular release and this time we used our scheduling software. That worked great in a sense that it was perfect for scheduling people to come in at a specific time. We created slots and people could pick a time they wanted to come. But again, that system was not set up for that type of traffic. It’s set up for slow and steady, not max load, where a bunch of people hop on at once. The system didn’t crash, but it looked like it crashed to the outside.
So even though the scheduling platform kind of worked, we knew it wasn't a long-term option. We thought we’d try an online release one more time and looked at Shopify, but luckily the connection with Oznr came through.
GW: Were there any other problems you were experiencing around releases?
AS: We have a private whiskey club called the Coopers Club. And we were trying to give club members a really easy way to get their bottles first, or at least separately. Before Oznr, we tried setting up a 48-hour window during which members could get their bottles. We’d close it at a certain time and then open it up to the regular public.
However, with that method, it was hard to let members know the Coopers Club window was open. We didn’t ever feel like we had a handle on getting the club a cool way to get cool stuff. Or even a way of segmenting the club so members could only buy one time and not buy again.
The last big thing we needed to solve was making releases fair. We knew people would get pissed when they couldn’t buy a bottle, but as long as we’re fair and it looks fair to everyone on social media, then those people get drowned out by the positivity.
Doing Oznr’s Random Draw was just fair. People can’t complain about it. There is nothing they can say. And they didn’t, either.
GW: Those Random Draws were the first time you used Oznr. Can you walk me through the process?
AS: We set up Random Draws for the Belle Meade Bourbon Honey Cask Finish release. The product derives from traditional bourbon, but we finish it in honey casks. We also do vanilla, Madeira, sherry, cognac, and brandy versions that we finish in bourbon barrels, but this one is by far the most popular.
Basically, with this release, we had two different versions. The massive part of the release came from a 7bbl blend, so around 1,300 bottles. And then we had a single-barrel version of that, which we left just for the Coopers Club.
The main drawing was that 106-proof blend. We put 120 bottles aside for Coopers Club members, so we had about 1,050 bottles that we released for 6,800 entries. It was great. I was really surprised at who got a bottle.
For the Coopers Club, we had 120 bottles of the single-barrel version. We put a cool medallion on the bottle where it said, “Coopers Club Exclusive.” And it came in a wooden box with custom foam, a custom Glencairn, and some of the actual honey that was aged in the barrel. It’s just a really cool package. We sold that for $225 per package.
And then we threw in another 120 of just the bottles to the Coopers Club as well. So really, the Coopers Club had 240 bottles that they had a shot at. There were about 1,000 members and 670 of them registered for the release. So if you were a Coopers Club member, you had a 1 in 3 chance that you might get a bottle, whether that was the really nice commemorative package or the blend. Either way, there was an advantage to being in the Coopers Club because you were getting in on a smaller group of people than in the main drawing.
I don't know how we would have done it any differently. We really thought a lot about it and for this release specifically, the Oznr app was perfect.
GW: What did you like most about using the Oznr app?
AS: Oznr easily had the most plug-and-play stuff we needed to make that Belle Meade Bourbon Honey Cask Finish release happen. It would’ve taken too much work to get Shopify up to where it needed to be. It didn’t have everything integrated that we needed. Oznr doesn’t have every little thing either, but it had the most tools that we needed to do the release somewhat quickly.
It worked great.
We also pushed really hard for folks to sign up for the app and subscribe to our location on Oznr because you’ll get notifications when we drop something. It’s better than email, better than social. Big complaints we’ve always gotten in the past are that people have a lot of opinions on how we should announce drops. We shouldn't do it through email because everyone doesn’t get their email at the same time, or you shouldn’t do it through social media because I’m not always looking at social media. With Oznr, you can just sign up for this app. We did it for the Honey release so you know we got the most people we could to sign up and subscribe. At this point, if we drop a few on the Oznr app and people complain that they missed it, I don’t know what to tell them.
GW: How many new subscribers did you get through Oznr? And how many new subscribers did you add to your newsletter?
AS: From this release, we had 4,347 subscribers on Oznr and 6,800 people entered the Random Draw.
As far as new newsletter subscribers, I have to look. I actually don’t even know if I’ve sent that over to the web team yet. I forget that a huge part of what was cool about this was seeing if we got new people on the email list.
I will say the lady who does our social media noticed that we got so many new followers to our accounts. We have one for Belle Meade and one for Nelson’s Green Brier, our parent distillery. We got tons of new followers. It’s definitely worth noting for sure.
GW: How do you want to continue using Oznr in the future?
AS: I’d like to try the Pre-Sale. I don’t want to say we’re going to do a Random Draw all the time. For Honey, it was perfect because that’s our most popular product, so it made sense for that release. But our next few releases are smaller, so do we want to use Oznr? We’ve had some great success with Gift Shop drops. For a smaller release or “never-done-it-before” products, we’ll drop it in the Gift Shop, post on social media, and see how that release performs.
At least for the rest of this year, if we continue to use Oznr, I see it being just for the club. Even if we drop it somewhere else, maybe we throw 50 bottles or 30 bottles on Oznr for the club just to say, Hey guys, we didn’t have that much, but here’s something for y'all. The folks who benefit the most from those drops are local because people hear about it and its first-come, first-served. It's also like all the next releases we’re doing this year are all stuff we’ve never done before. It wouldn’t make sense for us to plan these big huge release events because we don’t know if it's going to be popular. We have to see if it's worth it.
In the fall, we do have one coming up with a calvados finish that has a little bit more for us to play with. We’ll probably do something on Oznr. Maybe not Random Draw, but when we drop it, I’d like to throw some on Oznr to see if folks who are not local have a chance at it, too.
We’ve talked about facilitating our Coopers Club through Oznr for new openings. People want to get in the club all the time, and they ask me, How can I get in? I tell them to watch our newsletter for when we announce open slots. They’ll tell me, I didn’t make it, or I didn't see the email. I don't know what to tell them. It’s a really popular club and you just have to try your best. How much more fair can you make it? With that in mind, we know the club is about as popular as anything we have available, so why not do that through Oznr to make sure that it's truly fair as well? Right now with the club, when we open up slots, it's just JotForm, and it's just so basic that I think there’s a better way to do it.
GW: Anything else you wanted to add about using the Oznr app or you think we haven’t covered?
AS: I would say that overall, everyone was really happy with what the app offered and what it accomplished for us. And even fans were all very gracious about the fairness and the way we did it. I’m excited to see if we can continue the partnership.
I actually had a friend who reached out to me. He runs a whiskey app and a CPG product around whiskey. He asked, Why are you using a beer app to release your whiskey? I told him, Dude it works. I’m telling you, yeah, it's a beer app, but it hit most of the things we need to accomplish. It did it for us. Yeah, it's a beer app, but I don’t know; there are no whiskey apps out there doing what they do. He said he could build it for me, but I’m like, I don’t know, man. Oznr is kind of crazy robust in what they can do. So, I’m excited to see Oznr get more into the spirits world.
Hopefully, what we did here is a launchpad for the spirits world to realize, Hey we can utilize this even if it's just craft.
