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May 9, 2026
What it actually costs to build demand in alcohol, told by the Australian who did 150 tastings a year by himself
Watch Episode Here.
Most people think launching a beverage brand looks like this:
Great idea → get a distributor → watch it fly off the shelf.
Clean. Logical. Done by Christmas.
Here is the real version:
Lose 50 grand on a liquor store that never opens, sketch a drink on a napkin at one in the afternoon, then spend 15 grand a month for a year standing behind a folding table by yourself.
That part never makes the highlight reel.
Chris Wolstenholme lived it. And he counted every dollar so you do not have to.
🎙️ This Week on Drink Up
We sat down with Chris Wolstenholme, the Australian behind MATE!, which he will tell you in one breath is America's only vodka protein water.
Eight grams of pea protein per can.
Zero carbonation, because he got heartburn in his mid-30s and took the bubbles out.
Gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, no high fructose corn syrup, two grams of cane sugar. Four flavors. 4.5% ABV.
Here is the line he says hundreds of times a week:
“I didn't start out building a business. I started out trying to make a drink and then I built it from there.”
Before MATE, Chris ran restaurants for 20-plus years, including a 10,000 square foot Buckhead venue doing north of 7 million a year. So when he talks execution, he is not guessing.
💥 Before the Drink, a $50K Hole in the Ground
The MATE story does not start with MATE. It starts with a drive-through liquor store.
Chris missed the Aussie drive-through bottle shops, wrote a business plan during COVID, got SBA funding, found a location, started renovations, hired people. Stock was in the building. Shelves were up.
Four weeks from opening, the state called.
“We made a mistake. You are too close to another liquor store and you can't open there.”
He did everything right and still lost:
$50,000.
Sam's take: this is the part founders edit out of their origin story, and it is the most important part. Chris did not pivot to MATE because he had a brilliant epiphany. He pivoted because he got punched in the mouth, lost real money, and decided to keep moving anyway. Resilience is not a vibe. It is what you do the morning after you lose 50 grand.
🧠 A Napkin at One in the Afternoon
Pizza and beers with his wife, who is from Iowa. She is holding a Miller Lite and asks the question that built the company:
“Why can't I get protein in this?”
Most ideas die at the conversation. You go to bed, you wake up, it is gone.
Chris had enough drinks in him at one in the afternoon that instead of dying, the idea got drawn on a napkin.
Then he partnered with BevSource, and 13 months later out popped a can.
13 months.
Industry context: the TTB and FDA wrapped MATE in red tape for roughly four months with five legal teams working it, and Chris calls that fast. Building something genuinely new in alcohol is not an eight-week sprint. Plan for the regulatory clock, because it does not care about your launch date.
Adam said: on average it is eight months from idea to first can. He has seen people do it in three to four, he has seen people take two years. So when somebody panics that 13 months is too long, Adam's answer is to calm down, because Chris was building a category that did not exist yet.
🛒 Build Your Backyard First
Chris's very first store was his local liquor store. Four minutes up the road. The guys he talked cricket with and bought his own tequila from.
He pulled the owner aside:
“This is going to sound weird. I've made a drink. I need a store. Can you help?”
The owner gave him the realest deal in retail:
“I will give you your shot, but if it doesn't sell, it doesn't stay.”
First three weekends, that one store sold four cases each. Friends, family, the Orange Theory crew. Then he used that proof to walk into the next store.
Sam's take: this is the whole game and almost nobody runs it. You do not start with a national broker deck. You start with one store, four minutes from your house, and you treat it like the golden egg. Shelf talkers, displays, you do not leave until you sell a can. Win the backyard, then go next door.
📊 Ten Stores That Actually Reorder
Chris was a restaurant GM, so he knew every distributor in Atlanta. It still did not help much. Savannah Distributing told him the truth a lot of brands never hear:
“It tastes great, but how do I sell this to a store?”
Then he landed RNDC, a 15 billion dollar powerhouse at the time, and got into two Total Wine stores in Georgia.
First six months of accounts?
Maybe 10. And he means maybe 10.
But here is the number that matters: those 10 stores were each doing at least a case a week. In January. In winter. Off-season for a poolside drink.
Sam's take: everybody chases market-wide distribution. Market-wide distribution without velocity means nothing. Ten stores reordering beats a hundred stores collecting dust on the shelf, every single time. Ghost distribution is a vanity metric. Reorders are a business.
💸 The Math Nobody Does Before They Quit
This is the section to screenshot. Chris pulled apart what it actually costs to build demand, and he did it live.
He did three tastings a week for at least 45 weeks. By himself.
Over 150 tastings in a year.
Add it up per week: two tanks of gas, two variety packs given away, then the part founders forget, his own time. He ran his old GM salary against it, about 6,500 a month.
“You're spending 10, maybe 12,000 dollars a month doing tastings. And you're not paying anyone. That's just me.”
Then it gets worse. He pays the distributor their margin. He pays the rep an incentive, 250 a case, to actually pull MATE out of a bag full of other brands. He gives away 5 to 10 cases a month to charity events.
All in, call it 15 grand a month.
Run that across a year and you land near 200,000 dollars just to build demand in one state.
“I've paid for the freight. I've paid for the product. I've shipped it to a distributor and now I'm paying to be in a store to sell it. I'm also paying the rep. Where do I make the money?”
Adam said: tasting schedules for a brand owner are tour schedules for a musician. He just watched the Noah Kahan documentary, 200 shows in a year, and the parallel is exact. If you are not budgeted and built to be at 150-plus events, you are not actually building demand, you are decorating a shelf.
Sam's take: this is the toll you pay to get over the bridge, and most founders never bring the cash for it. They think getting Breakthrough or RNDC or Southern means the problem is solved. No. The distributor delivers. You build the demand. That is your job, in every market, and it costs real money. If you cannot fund the demand, the distribution is decoration.
📉 The Mistake: Spreading Yourself Too Thin
Sam asked the question every emerging brand needs answered: what is the biggest mistake brands make trying to scale?
“Spreading yourself too thin. And I made this same mistake, which is why I can explain it to you.”
Then he gave the comp that should end the argument:
Mom Water is in roughly 35 to 40 states and does about 40 million a year.
Carbliss stayed in six or seven Midwest states and did 120 million last year.
“Get your state down, saturated, every store, on-premise, everything. And then go next door.”
Georgia to Alabama. Georgia to Florida. Georgia to South Carolina. Not Georgia to New York.
Industry context: Chris is now copying the Carbliss model on purpose, doubling down on Georgia with pickleball, sports, and festivals. Market saturation beats shotgun blanket growth, and the founders who learn it late usually learn it after they have lit a year of cash on fire chasing states they cannot service.
🧪 Where the Opportunity Is Hiding in 2026
Chris was doing protein four years before your feed filled up with it, so when he calls a lane, it is worth writing down.
“I genuinely believe the wellness-adjacent space. Non-carbonated is definitely still the way to go.”
And the warning that comes with it:
“Stay away from lemonades and teas, because basically 10 brands own all of it.”
His real rule is not about the category, though. It is about whether the liquid is good.
“Be delusionally passionate about what you launch. If it's a bourbon, make the best bloody bourbon you can make.”
👀 Reality Check: Fame Does Not Save Bad Liquid
Chris launched the same window Kylie Jenner launched Sprinter.
She just shut it down.
“Yes she had the money, yes she had the fame, but her product wasn't good.”
His brutal scoreboard on it:
“She got 400 million fans to buy it once.”
Sam's take: you can buy the first sale. You cannot buy the second one. Distribution gets you tried. Velocity is the product earning its place back on the shelf. If the liquid is not good, all the followers in the world just speed up how fast people find out.
🔥 Hot Take: Get Out of the 50th-Floor Window
Chris put a LinkedIn post out calling the big players onto the carpet, and he doubled down on the show:
“Get out of the boardroom and into the marketplace. Get out of that 50th floor window and come down to where everything's happening.”
Then he did the napkin math on innovation, and it is devastating.
Long Drink got acquired by Mark Anthony Brands for around 325 million. To make that back at roughly 10 dollars of case profit, you have to sell 1.4 billion cans.
“But if Coca-Cola found 10 of me and bought each brand for 5 million bucks, that's 50 million, behind-the-couch coins for them. If one brand makes it, it pays for all of it.”
Sam's take: he is right, and it is the cheapest R&D in the building. The little guy at the festival that nobody is visiting has already de-risked the product with real consumers spending real money. Big beverage spends a fortune in a lab guessing at what the street already proved. Send somebody to the street.
🎯 The One Idea You Should Steal
We close every show with the same question: what is the difference between success and failure? Chris did not flinch.
“Failure only comes if you decide to stop.”
He was honest about the mornings it almost won:
“There are more times where I've laid in bed and opened my eyes and gone, what the hell am I doing? And you get your ass up out of bed and you keep going.”
Even his definition of winning is grounded: helping his brother and sister buy their first homes, giving the people who bought 1% of MATE a real return, keeping the charities funded.
👉 Success is personal. Stopping is the only failure that counts.
🧭 What This Means For You
If you are building a beverage brand right now, take these straight from Chris:
Win your backyard before you whisper the word national.
Fund the demand, not just the distribution. Bring the 15 grand a month or do not enter the market.
Chase reorders, not account counts.
Focus on who said yes. Stop trying to convert the guy down the road who keeps ghosting you.
Make the liquid undeniable, because fame buys one sale and nothing more.
And the advice he gave a 36-year-old rep thinking about jumping:
“Do everything you can for your own business from 36 to 44. Because at 44 and beyond, if it hasn't worked, you still have time to build for retirement.”
💬 Final Thought
Sam summed up Chris's whole approach as taking off in a plane you are still building:
“You may not have the controls embedded in it or the propeller, but just take the plane off and build it as you go.”
Chris's version was simpler, and it is the line to leave with:
“Just try. You've got nothing to lose but by trying.”
🔗 Sources & Further Reading
🧃 Your Move
If you are sitting on an idea and a little fear:
Stop building a company in your head.
Build the drink.
Then build the one store.
Then the next.
👉 Have a few drinks if you must, but start.
Failure only comes if you stop.
Truthfully,
Sam
