# Michael Waskewich Jr.

Michael Waskewich Jr. writes about the business of beverage alcohol, from trade policy and producer finances to brand storytelling and consumer discovery. The posts also describe The Bar Book’s flavor-matching approach to helping people discover spirits.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/michael-waskewich-jr/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-waskewich
- LinkedIn followers: 14,727
- Based on 16 dated posts, latest 2026-09-25

## Summary

Useful for trade-literate commentary on beverage alcohol business, finance and consumer discovery.

- Best for: Consultancy campaigns on beverage alcohol finance and consumer discovery for trade audiences.
- Not for: Consumer brand campaigns seeking broad U.S. awareness through short-form video or lifestyle content.
- Check first: Confirm audience survey results, recent comparable results, and partnership terms before contacting Michael Waskewich Jr.

### Takeaways

- Flavor matching can help people choose unfamiliar spirits instead of defaulting to a known label.
- Producer liquidity and predictable payment terms, not demand, are what break producers.
- Trade disputes should be read through the costs they create on both sides.

## Main ideas

- **The industry fixed production and distribution, but not the moment a shopper chooses**: Waskewich argues that spirits technology has become sophisticated in inventory management, cask-level tracking, compliance reporting, and cross-border distribution, but the front of house—tools that let brands speak with consumers rather than advertise at them—remains largely unbuilt. A shopper facing 200 bottles with no way to choose represents a lost sale, not a sales opportunity. The brands that lose out are emerging craft producers, veteran-owned distilleries, and those without national marketing budgets. Waskewich proposes flavor matching: consumers enter their preferred profiles, notes, and occasions, and the system surfaces products that fit. Customers who discover a product through genuine flavor alignment come back; those reached by advertising alone drift away.
- **Liquidity and predictability, not demand, are what break producers**: Waskewich returns to the idea that a profitable company can still fail when payments arrive too slowly, and that supply chains depend on trust and predictability as well as margins. This is acute in alcohol, where products require months or years of production planning, regulatory approvals, excise obligations, and complex route-to-market partnerships. Rising input costs, aging inventory, distributor consolidation, and tighter capital add pressure. They apply the same reasoning to independent breweries: growth phases reward expansion—more taprooms, SKUs, and markets—while mature markets reward sustainability. Operators now need to master hospitality, experience design, marketing, financial discipline, and operational efficiency as well as brewing.
- **Trade disputes should be read through the costs they create on both sides**: Rather than argue for one government's position, Waskewich traces who pays. They say the beverage alcohol industry is caught in a dispute it did not start and cannot resolve, taking damage on both sides: American distillers have lost Canadian shelf access, American bars and restaurants face higher import costs, and consumers in both countries pay more. They also point to a detail they say most coverage missed: a 50% tariff on Canadian glass bottles hits American producers that source glass from Canada. Waskewich identifies a zero-for-zero framework as the practical route back, requiring both governments to want it more than they want to win.
- **Export dominance comes from cultural embedding, not shipping capability**: Waskewich treats the biggest export success stories as identity plays. They argue that Corona and Modelo won the United States not through advertising alone but by embedding themselves in American food, occasion, and hospitality culture over decades. The best beverage export strategies, they say, are identity strategies, not logistics strategies. They also challenge the common framing of Mexican beer as a recent trend, pointing to a brewing history that predates most European nations associated with beer.
- **Premium spirits earn their price through transparency and consumer education**: Waskewich compares the spirits category with whiskey's premiumization playbook. They explain that rum has resisted age statements at scale for practical reasons: blending without disclosure protects flexibility, simplifies production planning, and avoids confusing consumers unfamiliar with how tropical aging differs from Scotch. A 15-year Caribbean rum matures differently, with a higher angel's share and faster evolution. Waskewich argues that the industry has used this complexity as an excuse to avoid transparency rather than an opportunity to explain it. Whiskey built its premium story by educating consumers about why age matters, not by simplifying labels. They apply the same standard to cultural moments: heritage storytelling works only when it feels real, and consumers quickly reject it when it feels overly commercialized.
- **Non-alcoholic drinks have become an industrial-scale business**: Waskewich argues that the no-and-low category has moved beyond niche status and is building its own supply chain, processing infrastructure, and vertically integrated production model. A facility that strips alcohol from wine and converts it into vodka base is, in their framing, no longer a non-alcoholic company but a full-spectrum beverage processing platform. The window for producers to build a credible non-alcoholic program without proprietary infrastructure is closing: brands that move now gain access to award-winning process and recipe development support, while those that wait pay more later. On the brand side, they see the combination of a premium importer, national distribution, and a globally recognized athlete as deliberate positioning.
- **Craft spirits earn loyalty by building a place worth going to**: Waskewich argues that the best craft spirits operations do more than make a product: they build a destination, and location carries meaning before the first bottle is poured. In their reading, pairing a distillery with a cultural center is a community decision, not just a marketing one. It creates a destination that can generate genuine loyalty rather than occasional foot traffic.

## Work to read

- [Flavor matching as the fix for a broken discovery moment](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_beveragealcohol-spirits-technology-activity-7495547692631285762-fsni)
- [Reading a tariff fight from both sides of the border](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_beveragealcohol-tradepolicy-spirits-activity-7498446807585292288-zuPW)
- [Payment terms as the hidden constraint on alcohol producers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_beverageindustry-spirits-beer-activity-7474129149155016704-GSil)
- [The non-alcoholic category builds real industrial infrastructure](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_beveragealcohol-nonalcoholic-wine-activity-7500258884704473088-7btU)
- [A celebrity launch read through production method and distribution data](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_nonalcoholic-agave-beveragealcohol-activity-7505656718585163777-XfeT)
- [Why rum has avoided age statements, and what changes when one brand stops](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_rum-beveragealcohol-spirits-activity-7491523879601995776-AfcR)
- [Mexico's beer exports and the identity behind them](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_beerindustry-beveragealcohol-globaltrade-activity-7489349690434428928-EPrj)
- [A distillery built as a place worth visiting, not just a production site](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_craftspirits-rum-beveragealcohol-activity-7494422889287417856-KNRB)
- [What a brewery auction says about independent operator economics](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_craftbeer-brewing-hospitality-activity-7471267769477595136-5mkU)
- [America 250 as a bourbon marketing opportunity with an authenticity risk](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-waskewich_bourbon-whiskey-america250-activity-7466194339547918337-2R4N)

## Brand relationships

- **The Bar Book** (disclosed_partnership)
- **American Distilling Institute** (mention)
- **James B. Beam Institute at the University of Kentucky** (mention)

## Partnerships

Michael Waskewich Jr.'s posts do not specify sponsor disclosure, a media kit, rate card, or published partnership terms. They offer commentary on beverage-alcohol business; brands mentioned, including Crown Royal, Fireball, Evan Williams, Mount Gay, Almave, Puerto Rico Distillery, and others, are news subjects, not announced commercial partners. Recurring tags point to The Bar Book, the flavor-matching discovery platform they write about from the inside, not to third-party sponsors. Before committing to a paid thought-leadership placement, a consultancy should confirm scope, rights, disclosure language, and cost directly. The posts show what a partnership would build on: steady LinkedIn commentary, usually pairing one industry development with an operational lesson. Their topics include producer cash flow and payment terms, tariffs and export access, premiumization and age statements, non-alcoholic production and distribution, and how drinkers find a product on a crowded shelf. A partnership focused on those themes fits what they already publish.

## Alternatives

- Kristin Marley Patrick: Choose Patrick for a campaign about non-alcoholic beverage retail and customer education, rather than alcohol-industry finance. The posts show direct operating experience running a non-alcoholic beverage retail business alongside a public-education career. They explain customer education as instructional design—newsletters, interactive quizzes, and in-person coaching—and describe a community-led local retail model that celebrates local customers and business owners. For a consultancy seeking thought leadership on how non-alcoholic drinks get discovered and adopted at retail, and how to teach consumers about an unfamiliar category, Patrick offers a retailer-and-educator view that Waskewich's macro trade analysis does not.
- Kevin Luby: Choose Luby for a campaign that needs a consumer-product marketing operator rather than an industry analyst. Their focus includes DTC and ecommerce growth, creative testing, short-form vertical video, landing-page production, and the emerging 'Chief Marketer' role, which combines earning attention on platforms you do not control with market-sizing and distribution decisions. The posts describe running marketing and revenue at a drinkware brand for spirits and wine, scaling it from low six figures to an eight-figure business, and reading competitive ad libraries to see what is working. For a consultancy whose client wants a partnership on demand generation for a beverage-adjacent product, Luby's operating detail is more directly useful than Waskewich's trade-policy and category-structure commentary.
- Dani Goldman: Choose Goldman for a campaign about the technology and supply-chain side of consumer packaged goods: AI moving from experimentation to execution, demand forecasting, supply-chain resilience, personalization, and the data architecture—such as a context layer, retrieval-augmented generation, and governance—that makes AI useful. The posts frame CPG trends a beverage producer or distributor would recognise in their planning stack, and the second explains how to ground AI securely in company data. For a consultancy seeking thought leadership on how beverage companies should build data and AI capability, Goldman's operational and technical framing is closer than Waskewich's market commentary.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/