Before Bourbon & Banter, There Was Bourbon Club

I was doing some routine website maintenance last week — the unglamorous stuff nobody talks about, broken links, orphaned pages, the digital equivalent of cleaning out a junk drawer — when I stumbled across something I'd completely forgotten existed.

Buried in the archives, dated February 16, 2012, was a post about the founding of Bourbon Club. The predecessor to everything you now know as Bourbon & Banter.

Go read it: Bourbon Club

I'll wait.

I've told this story before — on the podcast, at tastings, over a glass with people who've asked how all this got started. But I always told it in broad strokes. What I forgot is that I actually wrote it down. In detail. Over 14 years ago.

Here's the short version if you ignored my advice to click on it above:

It started on October 27, 2008. The day after the Season 2 finale of Mad Men. Three guys — me, Fes, and HR — were talking about Don Draper and Roger Sterling drinking at their desks like it was completely normal. I made a joke about why we couldn't do the same. HR mentioned an antique globe bar. Fes said if I got one, he'd bring the first bottles and glasses.

Two hours later, I had an eBay win. That Friday, we had bourbon.

And that was it. That was the spark.

A few things from that origina post that surprised me:

We had a Twitter account. @TheBourbonClub. It's apparently still active — I checked — but I haven't had the login credentials in years. The account is still out there if you want to take a look. The fact that it's still alive and I don't remember ever having it is pretty amusing to me, and maybe a sign that the bourbon has gotten the better of me after all these years.

The original club website is long gone. Probably for the best.

What got me, though, was re-reading the names. Pops, Fes, HR, Django, and the Brain. A handful of people in an office, gathering around a globe bar with some whiskey and no real agenda beyond enjoying it. That was the whole thing. There was no brand strategy. No content calendar. No monetization plan. Just bourbon and conversation.

Bourbon & Banter came out of that. The natural overflow of a group of people who liked talking about what was in their glasses.

Finding this post hit differently than I expected, and the timing probably has something to do with it. This July, we will celebrate the 15th anniversary of Bourbon & Banter's debut on Facebook. I'm in the middle of hunting for HQ 2.0 — the next physical space that represents the next chapter of all this — which has me thinking a lot about where this whole thing started and where it's supposed to go. So stumbling across a document that literally describes the origin story, written by me, 14 years ago? Yeah. I'm a little nostalgic.

When Bourbon Club was born in 2008, the bourbon industry was a fraction of what it is today. We've watched the whole renaissance unfold in real time — the craft distillery explosion, the allocated-bottle madness, the secondary-market absurdity, and now the current headwinds the industry is working through. We've been here for all of it. And I've got the bourbon scar tissue to prove it.

October 2008 to now is nearly a third of my life. That's a weird sentence to sit with. A joke about Don Draper's bar cart set off a chain of events that became a business, a community, a podcast, a content platform, tastings across the country, and whatever comes next.

The globe bar probably cost me $120 on eBay. Best investment I ever made.

Go read the original post. It's short. It's a little rough around the edges, which makes sense since I had no idea what I was doing. It ends with a Noah Sweat quote about whiskey that I loved enough to put on a t-shirt.

It remains as relevant as ever.

Cheers,

~ Pops 🥃