I've been working in a liquor store in Ventnor, NJ for about a year now. It's actually a nice "family owned" liquor store (they've owned it for 30 years) owned by a family interested in wines (IOW, it's not one of those "brown bag" types of liquor stores). We've got a good selection of wine (especially for a "strip mall" sized store), beer (quite a few microbrews), and even some specialty liquors for various nationalities.
Well, when my brother and I got bit by the "mead bug" and found out, thanks to a recent beer festival, that Redstone Mead was available, I bugged my boss for quite a while to get it in. Unfortunately, she had been bitten by the Irish "Meade" product that was priced high and didn't sell well. It took quite a bit of convincing to get her to order some (even though I mentioned that through my brother, some of his friends, and me we'd have a nice base to start with). Finally, I got her to place a small order (2 cases of 6 bottle each) of Redstone Traditional Mountain Honeywine. That sold out in about 4-5 days (one of my brother's friends was having a barbecue and bought half of the bottles on the first day).
I was thinking "Okay, this should help in getting more in soon." Unfortunately, the distributor is one that they only order from every 4-6 weeks (depending on how fast they sell all the stuff they buy from them). So basically, we ended up ordering relatively small quantities (the distributor didn't have a lot of it either and ended up back ordering quite a bit of it, too, which also increased the time between when we received orders of it) and not very often.
In the meantime, one of our wine distributors brought a sample of some mead that he sold. It was an extremely sweet dessert mead that seemed to have so much honey added, that the honey taste seemed to overpower the "mead" taste (if you know what I mean). Granted, I'm new to mead so maybe I'm not 100% accurate on this, but it seemed a lot different compared to the few meads we've made and the commercial ones I've tasted before. Basically, I think it was a mead that was what a wine person without much experience with mead would consider mead to taste like (IOW, a sweet wine that tastes like raw honey). I personally didn't think too much of it and it was priced a lot more than the Redstone stuff, but she got two bottles of it in anyway (She even said that "This is what I thought mead is supposed to taste like"). The thing that really threw me about this was that she did this after we had had 2-3 orders of the Redstone meads come in, yet she finally took this time to say to me, "Actually, I know one customer who goes to those Renaissance fairs. Maybe he'd want to buy this!" (Like he wouldn't want the stuff that I had told her to get!)
Well, anyway, I'm still working on getting more mead in. It looks like some of the other stuff by the distributor in question is getting low (they're a specialty beer distributor), so maybe we'll get more in a week or so. I'll work on getting a larger order for mead placed this time.
So fast forward to this week. We're really low in mead (my brother came in and bought the last "Sunshine Nectar" and I bought the last "Traditional Mountain Honeywine" from the store's Redstone collection and I'm not sure when our next order will come, although I'm hoping it will be this week). Finally a customer comes in and says "Do you have mead?" The only stuff we had was the super sweet dessert mead. I was about ready to scream because here was a guy that I could have pointed to and said, "See, we can sell the Redstone mead to other people." Instead, he ends up buying the super sweet mead that the boss ordered.
Well, when my brother and I got bit by the "mead bug" and found out, thanks to a recent beer festival, that Redstone Mead was available, I bugged my boss for quite a while to get it in. Unfortunately, she had been bitten by the Irish "Meade" product that was priced high and didn't sell well. It took quite a bit of convincing to get her to order some (even though I mentioned that through my brother, some of his friends, and me we'd have a nice base to start with). Finally, I got her to place a small order (2 cases of 6 bottle each) of Redstone Traditional Mountain Honeywine. That sold out in about 4-5 days (one of my brother's friends was having a barbecue and bought half of the bottles on the first day).
I was thinking "Okay, this should help in getting more in soon." Unfortunately, the distributor is one that they only order from every 4-6 weeks (depending on how fast they sell all the stuff they buy from them). So basically, we ended up ordering relatively small quantities (the distributor didn't have a lot of it either and ended up back ordering quite a bit of it, too, which also increased the time between when we received orders of it) and not very often.
In the meantime, one of our wine distributors brought a sample of some mead that he sold. It was an extremely sweet dessert mead that seemed to have so much honey added, that the honey taste seemed to overpower the "mead" taste (if you know what I mean). Granted, I'm new to mead so maybe I'm not 100% accurate on this, but it seemed a lot different compared to the few meads we've made and the commercial ones I've tasted before. Basically, I think it was a mead that was what a wine person without much experience with mead would consider mead to taste like (IOW, a sweet wine that tastes like raw honey). I personally didn't think too much of it and it was priced a lot more than the Redstone stuff, but she got two bottles of it in anyway (She even said that "This is what I thought mead is supposed to taste like"). The thing that really threw me about this was that she did this after we had had 2-3 orders of the Redstone meads come in, yet she finally took this time to say to me, "Actually, I know one customer who goes to those Renaissance fairs. Maybe he'd want to buy this!" (Like he wouldn't want the stuff that I had told her to get!)
Well, anyway, I'm still working on getting more mead in. It looks like some of the other stuff by the distributor in question is getting low (they're a specialty beer distributor), so maybe we'll get more in a week or so. I'll work on getting a larger order for mead placed this time.
So fast forward to this week. We're really low in mead (my brother came in and bought the last "Sunshine Nectar" and I bought the last "Traditional Mountain Honeywine" from the store's Redstone collection and I'm not sure when our next order will come, although I'm hoping it will be this week). Finally a customer comes in and says "Do you have mead?" The only stuff we had was the super sweet dessert mead. I was about ready to scream because here was a guy that I could have pointed to and said, "See, we can sell the Redstone mead to other people." Instead, he ends up buying the super sweet mead that the boss ordered.
