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If you’ve ever found yourself thirsty for a drink in Pennsylvania, you know that things can get weird.
Let’s say it’s dinnertime in Philadelphia, and you’ve booked a late table at one of the best spots in that city’s thriving restaurant scene—maybe Pietramala, where chef Ian Graye is delivering some of the most tantalizing vegan cuisine in America. You walk in. You sit down. You’re craving a cocktail. No dice. Pietramala belongs to Philadelphia’s vast constellations of BYOBs. The path to securing a liquor license in Philadelphia is labyrinthine and expensive, so a lot of restaurants simply don’t serve alcohol at all.
No problem, you think. I’ll step outside and buy some. Good luck. Since the end of Prohibition in 1933, liquor stores in the state have fallen under the aegis of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, and trying to find one of their outposts open late and within walking distance of the restaurant can feel like a maddening outtake from Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. (I mean, sure, you might consider driving across the border into the freer territory of New Jersey and buying a bottle there, but that’s basically smuggling and Fast Company would never endorse such activity.) If you’ve got a specific bottle in mind, such as Catoctin Creek rye from Virginia, well, just give up. Per the Board’s decree, none of the state-controlled shops even carry it.
Although . . . it turns out there is one place in Philadelphia that does sell that particular rye, and for that you have Andrew Auwerda to thank.
As a founder of a company called Philadelphia Distilling in 2005, Auwerda understood his state’s liquor laws all too well. In fact, Philadelphia Distilling was the first distillery to show up in Pennsylvania since Prohibition, and its revolutionary Bluecoat Gin won a bunch of awards. From his years making and selling Bluecoat, Auwerda knew that the Keystone State’s byzantine approach to the pleasures of drinking happened to include one curious loophole, a wrinkle that he had helped lobby for as part of a dramatic realignment of the state’s laws in 2016: You could sell the spirit in Pennsylvania if you happened to bottle the spirit in Pennsylvania.
What that means, conventionally speaking, is that a distillery in the state that gave us the Steelers and cheesesteaks might sell bottles of its own vodka or rum directly to customers who come to the distillery for a tour and a taste. Gradually, though, Auwerda teased out a broader way to interpret it: What if a spirit happened to be made elsewhere, but bottled in Pennsylvania?
From this insight was born Botld, Auwerda’s new enterprise—currently represented by a single shop on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia—devoted to giving Pennsylvanians a taste of bourbons, rums, gins, and liqueurs that cannot be found in the rigid liquor stores controlled by the state board. Auwerda, who is 54, has enough confidence in the concept that he has parted ways with Philadelphia Distilling. This year, he and his Botld team (currently seven employees) plan to triple the number of spirits they offer, scale up their e-commerce, and open several more stores throughout the state. The startup raised $1.5 million in seed capital in 2021 and expects to raise more capital in 2023.
For locals, Botld is a Wonka-esque wonderland of Finnish gin and Santa Fe single malt and armagnac and amaro and all sorts of other sips that have been more or less invisible in the state for decades. Think of it as a counterintuitive bookstore that specializes in whatever’s indie and banned. “People walk into the store and ask, ‘How is this possible?’” Auwerda says. “Every distiller in Pennsylvania could do exactly what I’m doing.” (Maybe, but as a credible and well-known veteran of the craft spirits movement, Auwerda has a considerable head start.)
Like so many pivots in American entrepreneurship, Botld emerged out of the panicked stasis of the pandemic, when liquor stores closed (“Overnight we had zero business,” Auwerda says) and the distillery was reduced to turning its gin into hand sanitizer. Eventually, deliveries and direct-to-consumer sales gave them a reprieve. “Sales took off,” he recalls. “People were lined up outside the distillery—literally.” Auwerda wanted to sell other spirits too (I need a rum, he thought, I need a vodka), but the only way to do that legally was to import totes of booze into Pennsylvania (in spite of the tiny-sounding name, a “tote” is like a 1,000-liter plastic bladder that’s moved via forklift) and pour the elixirs into Pennsylvania-based bottles.
Hey, wait.
“That’s when the idea dawned on me,” Auwerda says.
The arrival of Botld is a source of joy for craft distillers who have been trying to break into the lucrative market in Philadelphia, but haven’t passed muster with state authorities. “What Andrew was saying was, ‘I can use the laws in Pennsylvania to give you guys a leg up,’” says Becky Harris, the chief distiller and cofounder of Catoctin. “I just thought it was incredibly innovative thinking by Andrew.” Catoctin’s flagship bottle, Roundstone Rye, actually did get welcomed into the state-owned stores in 2017, but then got delisted because sales hadn’t met the necessary minimum. “Craft spirits are really story-driven,” Harris says. “It takes time to build that.”
Like a wine shop where the proprietors know how to coax you into trying a bottle of Bordeaux by providing a character sketch about the vintners, Botld prioritizes a mode of storytelling that the liquor control board doesn’t have the bandwidth for. Botld also prioritizes female-owned distilleries like Stephanie Jordan’s Avallen Spirits and Black-owned distilleries such as Delta Dirt, whose cofounder and CEO, Harvey Williams, makes vodka from sweet potatoes grown on his family’s farm in Arkansas. “Delta Dirt is the first vodka I have ever really liked,” Auwerda says.
On the surface, yes, Botld is just a little shop selling craft spirits that residents of Philadelphia can’t find anywhere else in the city, but it’s also an experiment that calls to mind Slash, SST, Sugar Hill, Twin/Tone, Sub Pop, and other independent record labels that built an audience for music that was outside of the mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s. “We don’t want to be snobby,” Auwerda says. “We want to be democratic.” And Philadelphia knows a thing or two about that.
Jeff Gordinier is the author of Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World. He is a frequent contributor to many publications, including Esquire, Air Mail, and The New York Times and has appeared in the Netflix shows Chef’s Table and Somebody Feed Phil.
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