The Pub Show talks to Cocktail Keg Company, one of the exhibitors taking part in the show’s new Distillery Street section. Founded in Belfast, the business makes premium cocktails designed to help venues serve drinks quickly and consistently while keeping the bartender’s finishing touch. The team discusses how the idea grew from their experience behind the bar, why familiar serves remain popular, and what visitors can expect to taste at the show.

Can you introduce Cocktail Keg Company and explain how the idea for the business first came about?

Cocktail Keg Company really came from years of working in hospitality and seeing the same problem over and over again.

Customers love cocktails, but when a bar gets busy they're one of the hardest drinks to deliver quickly and consistently. You've got multiple ingredients, prep, training, wastage – and then six Espresso Martinis land on the printer at the same time!

We thought there had to be a better way of doing it.

So the idea behind CKC was pretty simple: we do the difficult bit, the venue finishes the drink. We make full-strength, premium cocktails using proper spirits and quality ingredients, and the bartender shakes, pours, garnishes and serves.

It started in Belfast in 2017 on a very small scale and has grown from there, but the idea hasn't really changed. We want to make great cocktails easier for hospitality businesses to serve.

How has your combined experience shaped your products and approach?

Massively. We're hospitality people first.

We've spent years behind bars, developing venues, building drinks menus and working with bartenders, so everything we develop gets looked at through the eyes of an operator.

It's not enough for something to taste brilliant in a development kitchen. Can you serve it quickly on a Saturday night? Can a new member of staff make it consistently? Does the margin work? Is there loads of waste?

Those questions are just as important to us as what's in the bottle.

That's really where the CKC approach comes from. We want to take everything we know about making great cocktails and package that knowledge in a way that makes life easier for the people actually running bars, restaurants and hotels.

What advantages do your cocktails offer hospitality operators in terms of speed of service, consistency, staff training and reducing waste?

The easiest way to explain it is probably to imagine making ten cocktails from scratch versus making ten with CKC.

Traditionally you're reaching for several bottles, measuring ingredients, adding syrups and citrus, dealing with prep and relying on the bartender to get every measure right. With CKC, all of that work has already been done.

Shake, pour, garnish, serve.

That means quicker service, much easier staff training and, importantly, the first drink of the night should taste exactly like the last one.

There's a big commercial benefit too. You're reducing prep, reducing wastage and giving operators much tighter control over their cost per serve. Those benefits – speed, consolidated preparation, reduced wastage, consistency and labour reduction – are really at the heart of the CKC proposition. 

And when a venue is busy, shaving time off every cocktail order can make a huge difference.

How do you balance the convenience of a ready-to-serve cocktail with the quality, flavour and theatre customers expect from a bar-made serve?

That's probably the biggest misconception about the category – that if something is convenient, it can't be premium.

We've approached it from the opposite direction. Quality comes first, then we work out how to make that quality easier to deliver.

Our cocktails are full-strength, made with premium spirits and quality ingredients, cold-filled and unpasteurised. We've also won multiple Great Taste awards, so the liquid has always had to stand up on its own. 

And we're not trying to take the bartender out of the equation. There's still a shake, the right glassware, ice and garnish. There's still theatre at the point of service.

We've just done the complicated bit beforehand.

That's where “We Make, You Shake” comes from. 

Which cocktails are currently proving most popular, and what wider drinks trends are influencing your product development?

The classics are still incredibly strong.

Espresso Martini, Pornstar Martini and Bramble are big serves for us because they're drinks customers already know and actively look for when they're out.

But what's interesting is how much the occasions for cocktails are changing. They aren't just something you order in a specialist cocktail bar anymore. People expect a good cocktail in hotels, restaurants, pubs, events and lots of other venues.

That's a huge opportunity for us.

We're also seeing continued growth in convenience and RTD formats, but consumers aren't prepared to sacrifice quality for convenience anymore. That's influencing how we develop the range – different formats for different occasions, while keeping the quality of the liquid at the centre of it.

Can you tell us about your approach to sustainability?

One of the things we're proudest of is actually something most consumers probably wouldn't immediately think about – citrus.

Lemon and lime are everywhere in cocktails, but in Ireland and the UK we're importing huge quantities of citrus just to get that acidity into a drink.

So back in 2017 we started asking whether there was another way.

That eventually led to our ANAM citrus programme, using ingredients indigenous to the UK and Ireland to create an alternative to conventional imported citrus. It also allows us to cold-fill rather than pasteurise the cocktails. 

We use local producers and suppliers wherever we can, and we've also supported tree planting – over 2,200 trees at the point the figures in our brand deck were recorded. 

We're certainly not going to pretend sustainability is ever “finished”, though. It's about continuing to look at every part of the business and asking where we can do things better.

What are the company's ambitions for the next few years, and are there any new products or developments hospitality operators should look out for?

The ambition is pretty big.

We've proved the model in Ireland and now we want to take CKC much further across the UK and into international markets.

But we're not interested in growth just for the sake of putting more bottles on shelves. We think there's an opportunity to change how cocktails are served across hospitality.

That's why we're developing different formats for different operators. We've got our bottle range, Bag-in-Box and keg solutions for higher-volume venues, alongside our single-serve cans for other occasions.

A small restaurant has very different requirements from a hotel, festival or a venue serving hundreds of cocktails on a Saturday night. We want to have a CKC solution that works for all of them.

The next few years are really about scaling that up while continuing to develop new drinks and formats.

Why are you looking forward to taking part in Distillery Street, part of HRC and The Pub Show, and what can visitors expect to discover from Cocktail Keg Company at the event?

Because we can talk about CKC all day, but the best sales pitch we've got is putting a drink in someone's hand.

HRC and The Pub Show puts us in a room full of the exact people we built CKC for – publicans, hoteliers, restaurateurs, bar operators and buyers.

We want people to come onto the stand, taste the cocktails and then understand the operational side of what we're doing.

If you're running a busy venue, we'll show you how quickly you can serve a proper cocktail, how consistent that serve can be and how the different CKC formats can work depending on your volume.

And hopefully we'll challenge a few perceptions along the way.

We're incredibly proud that CKC started in Belfast, but we've got much bigger ambitions for the brand. Distillery Street is a great opportunity for us to show the wider UK hospitality industry what we've been building.

Find out more at cocktailkegcompany.com.