Shaker & Spoon Teaches You How to Bartend... Deliciously

I am a firm believer that no matter how old you get, you never stop learning. Even when it comes to something as simple and delicious as making a tasty drink for you and your friends to enjoy. So, instead of going to a crowded and loud bar to have your favorite drink and try out some new concoctions, why not have it delivered to your door each month and discover something new? This can all be done when you use this phenomenal new service called Shaker & Spoon, which recently launched in the heart of Brooklyn only a couple of months ago.

The concept itself for Shaker & Spoon is quite simple really. When you sign yourself up for a subscription, each month they will deliver a beautiful box that is built around one variety of liquor. Inside you will find three different recipes that cover a different style of cocktail making for that particular liquor. Essentially, they are making this as easy as possible for you to navigate the world of at-home bartending with deliciously made drinks available at your disposal.

On top of the recipe cards, they also provide you with every ingredient possible to make the drink, minus the liquor itself. Something important to know is that they source from the best places possible for ingredients such as bitters, garnishes, citrus and more and all the syrups that are produced are made in house. Pretty nifty if I may say so myself. Also, at $40 a box per month, it is a no brainer.

I sat down founder Mike Milyavsky and his partner in crime, Anna Gorovoy, to get to know about this up and coming brand a little further.

So what was your inspiration in getting Shaker & Spoon started?

Mike: The inspiration is that I love cocktails and Anna and I experimented with making them in our personal lives so we thought why not bring that concept into something that is a little bit more foreign to people. Everyone has dishes that they know how to cook however cocktails are one of those things that people don’t necessarily know how to make. I was trying to create a product around something that I would like, that is my general philosophy, and that is what i am trying to do with Shaker & Spoon.

Nothing in what we are preparing is super complicated, we give detailed instructions on how to make each cocktail, to ease in helping people who previously didn’t know how to make these drinks at home. Essentially, we are giving people the basic knowledge of how to create a better drink with the ingredients you probably already have outside of something really simple like a rum & coke.

Was it a conscious decision from the get go to just include the ingredients and not the alcohol?

Anna- At the beginning, there was research into including the alcohol, everybody else was doing this and that would make it more complete but for a small startup, everything with the licensing became more complicated. As we were looking into it more, there was basically one draw back, someone less convenient is that the alcohol not being present and people having to go out and buy it. However, when we looked further into it it became a positive. For one, we recommend bottles that people can buy but it is just the one bottle for all the drinks. Every single drink can be made with one bottle of alcohol and they can buy what brand they want. It is not getting marked up and shipped to them, they can support their local liquor store in the process. We are also able to ship to every state as some states have restrictions when it comes to liquor shipment. If people want to buy our kit and actually make mocktails out of it, that is something that they are able to do. You can sort of make rum with water, pineapple juice and rum extract. Let’s say you don’t drink for whatever reason possible, you can still enjoy our kit. You are not paying for alcohol that you won’t want to use.

Mike- To add onto that, essentially for every bottle that you get there are endless possibilities with the recipes that we provide for you. We are not just giving you one drink that can be limiting, we are giving you three different drinks in each box. This is really how we show people the range with what you already have. You get so much more for what you are paying, $40 a box, which being in New York and with cocktails running at $10 to $20 per, can be a big help with your budget. With each box, you can make up to 12 cocktails per bottle, so this saves you a ton of money in the long haul while finding new ways to improve on something you already love.

Do you have a box that is a personal favorite for you to try?

Mike: I actually do, but it is a weird answer. Through most of my life, I can’t tell you why, but I hate gin. It is like that first taste of alcohol in college that gets you way too drunk and you just have this weird, negative association with it ever since. Anna loves Gin & Tonic, and I’ll try it sometimes but I don’t think it is for me. The first box that was sent to us by our bartender who helped create Shaker & Spoon was The Gin Box. I kept thinking, “I’m not going to like it”, yet every single drink that we made from that box became fantastic. I have my own standards when I go to the bar, however from how I felt about gin prior about trying the box to how I feel about it now is completely different. It is one of the coolest experiences I have had at this company so far is seeing something that is possible and completely changing my mind on things.

Anna: Yeah, we hope our customers have the same experience. Try a box that you really don’t like or don’t go for and then have a whole metamorphosis with blowing your mind on what is possible.