From Pitch to Pour to Purchase | We Help Beverage Brands Land in Bars, Restaurants & Retail | Distributor + Customer Strategy + Field Activation | Just…
February 21, 2026
Amy Yanzer on the taproom flywheel, the 53-accounts-in-six-months grind, and knowing your cost per can before you sign with a distributor.
Most non-alc launch stories you read on LinkedIn go like this:
Clean brand deck → influencer drop → DTC waitlist → "we're now in 500 doors."
That is not what happened in Wausau.
What happened in Wausau is two people moved north for a job that fell apart,
opened a non-alc taproom on a one-way street,
hand-canned their first SKUs in the back,
and drove cases between funeral stops on the way to 53 wholesale accounts in six months.
That's the version of the story I want to talk about.
🎙️ This Week on Drink Up
This week's guest is Amy Yanzer, co-founder of Forward Beverage — a Wisconsin-based non-alcoholic functional brand built around two parallel lines: clean soft cocktails (real juice, electrolytes, no artificial sweeteners) and a hemp-derived THC line with adaptogens like rhodiola and lion's mane.
Amy and her husband Paul are owner-operators. No outside investors. A local loan. A taproom downtown. A co-man relationship they didn't have when they opened. And a 2-year renewable distributor contract they negotiated down from five years on purpose.
If you build beverage brands for a living, you should pay attention to how she's running this.
🧠 The Setup Nobody Tells You About
The origin story is annoyingly Midwestern: Paul gets sober, orders water at dinner for the umpteenth time, and asks the obvious question.
“Wouldn't it be great if there was something local and non-alcoholic that we like to drink, right?”
The deal was simple — "if you make the drinks, I'll talk about them and sell them" — and that division of labor is still the engine. Paul is the formulator. Amy is the operator. Most husband-and-wife founder teams blow up on exactly that line; theirs has held.
The non-obvious move: they didn't open with cans. They opened on art festival weekend in September 2023 with kegs Paul was mixing in the back and $5 aluminum tap cups walking around downtown. That weekend was their entire launch campaign.
👉 The launch wasn't a brand. The launch was foot traffic.
🛒 The Taproom Was the Marketing Plan
Here's the part most non-alc founders are sleeping on. Amy is blunt about it:
“This Tap Room has done more for marketing and advertising than any amount of paid social or paid TV ads or radio sponsorships.”
Think about what a physical, branded, non-alc storefront actually does on a one-way street downtown:
It anchors the brand in a real geography.
It generates a built-in sampling program with zero CPG-sample budget.
It pulls distributor reps in off the sidewalk — first the local sales rep, then the regional director, then the guy from Green Bay, then the Director of Spirits over non-alc and hemp at Frank's & Badger.
It captures an email list at point of sale that you actually own.
It lets the formulator R&D in public ("everything he's created has been a home run except one — he tried to make a Manhattan and he used bone broth").
There's a reason Athletic Brewing's Stratford taproom and BrewDog's pubs matter more to those brands than any media plan. The flagship is not a revenue line. It is a demand creation machine — and for a non-alc brand specifically, it's the only place a curious consumer can actually taste before they commit.
If you're a non-alc founder trying to grow with paid social and no third place, you're playing the hardest version of this game.
💸 Knowing the Number Before You Sign
The single most underrated moment in this whole interview is when Amy answers a routine question about distributor margins and casually mentions she's worked her cost-of-goods backwards from a $19.99 four-pack.
She knows her landed can cost is roughly a buck. She knows what she's giving the distributor (~30%). She knows what's left for the retailer (~30%). She knows what comes back to her DTC out of her own cooler (the full margin). She knows e-commerce is essentially neutral at $8 flat-rate shipping.
Quote of the day, when I asked if most founders know their COGS:
“We had our three-year go-to-market plan that we looked at.”
That sentence is doing a lot of work. Most founders I get on the phone — yes, even ones who are already in 200 doors — cannot tell me their landed can cost within 25 cents. I've seen brands at $2.75/can wondering why nobody wants to take a six-month bet on their portfolio. The math is the brand strategy; if you can't tell the story in pennies, you can't tell it on a P&L.
👉 If you don't know your cost per can, you don't have a business — you have a hobby with a logo.
🧪 Two SKU Lines, One Regulatory Hedge
Amy and Paul launched with eight SKUs across two product styles for a reason that should be tattooed on every functional founder's forearm: regulatory optionality.
The hemp THC line is 60% of the business. The clean soft-cocktail NA line is the other 40%. If the Wisconsin hemp situation goes the way Amy thinks it will (ban in November, regulation by April 2027), they pull the hemp out of the cans, lean harder into adaptogens and terpenes, and keep the brand alive on the NA side without rebuilding distribution from zero.
That's not a vibes play. That's the same logic that let RTD operators survive the 2024 hemp-bill scares in Minnesota — the brands with parallel non-cannabis SKUs kept their shelf space; the single-line operators got de-listed.
There's also a quiet detail in the formulation that matters: Paul makes his own all-plant emulsion in-house instead of using Sōrse or Vertosa. The reason isn't ideological — it's that commodity emulsions ship with bitter-blockers that flatten the aromatic bitters and extracts that make these drinks taste like cocktails. So they built their own. Vertical integration as a flavor strategy, not a press release.
👉 If your formulation is the brand, owning the formulation chain is not optional.
⚙️ The Nitro Can — and Why On-Premise Math Is Different
Live on the show Amy demoed Forward's nitro non-alc cocktail: a 10oz drink in a 12oz can, no widget, no liquid-nitrogen dose at fill time — a co-man cryo-doser does it in-line now, but the original protocol was Paul and Amy hand-filling cans in the back and stamping them. Shake for 20 seconds. Let it sit. Pour. Foam head rises. Tastes like an egg-white cocktail out of a can.
That last part — the presentation — is the part most can-cocktail brands waste.
Adam's nine-years-deep take, lightly paraphrased: nitrogen in a still beverage is usually just used as a rigidity blanket — pop the can, drink the can, done. What Forward is doing is treating the pour as a 30-second sensory moment that turns a $7 can into a $14 on-premise menu item.
Picture the math from the bar's side: every mocktail your bartender shakes mid-rush costs you a minute of line throughput. Pop, pour, garnish, six seconds. The bar makes more per cover. You don't lose the occasion when the table switches to non-alc at hour three.
👉 The brands winning on-premise in non-alc are the ones that solved the bartender's labor problem, not the consumer's vibe problem.
📉 The Mistake Everyone Else Makes
I asked Amy what the hardest part was. Her answer was not what most guests give.
“Everything's been hard. I'm a really positive person, but this whole experience, I don't think anything has worked out the way that we thought it would. So being able to pivot.”
Then the part that should be required listening for anyone with a deck that says "national launch year one":
She got pregnant two years in. Not planned. Eight months old at the time of recording. Four kids total.
“I have been paying people to help me work the taproom and I probably should have stayed working myself, but I was nine months pregnant.”
The mistake nine out of ten founders make is treating the founder's calendar as an infinite resource. Amy's didn't have that line item available, and the brand still scaled. Why? Because the foundation was built before the bandwidth shrunk — taproom open, COGS dialed in, distributor relationship locked, e-commerce humming. The brand could compound without her doing 80-hour weeks.
If you're a founder who is staying up until 2 AM hand-selling because that's "what it takes" — you are designing a business that breaks the moment your life changes.
🎯 The One Idea You Should Steal
Here it is. This is the whole episode in one move.
“We named our business for the state motto… we want to be that non-elk brand that's lined up against all those alk options.”
Forward Beverage is regional on purpose. Wausau is their test market, not their target market — and Amy is open about it. The thesis is: prove the model in a tertiary Wisconsin city, lock in the unit economics on a 53-account base, then franchise the taproom model to Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis.
That sequence is the inverse of the deck-driven path most founders take.
I told a story on the show I'll tell again here: a tequila-RTD founder named Nico walked the floor at MBWA looking for distribution out of state. Adam asked him how many accounts he had in Jersey. 150. Adam asked his TAM in Jersey. A thousand. So Adam asked the only question that matters: "Why are you here?"
Most brands don't make it past year five because they keep chasing new markets to mask weak velocity in the markets they already opened. Amy isn't doing that. She's running the velocity-first, footprint-second playbook — and the proof is in the reorders.
“Yes, I am getting repurchases on those 53. Absolutely.”
🧭 What This Means For You
If you operate in non-alc, hemp, functional, or RTD — here's what to actually do this quarter:
Audit your own cost per can in writing. All-in landed, not just COGS. If you can't say it out loud in five seconds, you have your first project.
Build a regulatory hedge. If 100% of your portfolio depends on one ingredient class (THC, CBD, kratom, kava), build a non-regulated parallel SKU now, not when the bill hits the floor.
Treat your physical footprint as media spend, not retail. A 1,200-square-foot taproom in a tertiary market may produce more brand value than $50K on Meta. Forward Beverage is the proof.
Negotiate term down, not up. If a distributor offers you five years, counter with two-renewable plus a 180-day notice. Amy did. The contract is a risk-allocation document, not a commitment ceremony.
Build a brand that can run without you for 12 weeks. Pretend you're going on parental leave tomorrow. What breaks? Fix that before you scale.
💬 Final Thought
The most generous moment in the conversation came at the end when I asked Amy what motivates her.
“It's too good of an idea not to do it, right? And we already have the metrics and the success of like, we've gotten this far. So that keeps me going.”
That's not motivational poster talk. That's a founder who knows her numbers, knows her market, knows her hedge, and is choosing — every week — to keep showing up while running on two hours of sleep and an eight-month-old on her hip.
If you're building right now, that's the bar.
🔗 Sources & Further Reading
🧃 Your Move
If you're building in non-alc, hemp-derived, or functional RTD and you don't yet know your landed cost per can, your distributor margin structure, or what your brand looks like if your hero ingredient gets regulated out — let's fix that.
That's literally the work we do at BevAssets every week.
👉 Grab time on my calendar.
Truthfully,
Sam
