Now with Brown-Froman, Ryan Cheverie is quite literally an icon in Vancouver’s cocktail scene, and he’s only been here for five years. Ryan was previously the restaurant manager and “bar keep extraordinare” at the Hamilton Street Grill in Yaletown. Ryan started slinging drinks about 10 years ago in Halifax and has gotten to play with some of the world’s best and brightest mixologists in North America: Tony Abou-Gamin, Dale DeGroff, Brian van Flandern, Murray from ZizZag Cafe and more.

Well, it wouldn’t be Canada if there wasn’t somebody bitching about the weather, and it’s my turn. Honestly, I’m not in possession of any stats, radar maps, rain gauges, weather vanes or anything of the like to prove it, but to my untrained eye, the weather in Vancouver has been extremely lame and unco-operative for the whole of 2010 up to this point.

We can’t win, in February we had patio weather the one time we wanted snow. Ever!  Now you need 2 heaters, a blanket, and like a hot toddy or something to tough it out on a patio past Sundown.  It’s JUNE for God’s sakes, what the hell!?

Okay, enough whining, but in the real world, people go out more when it’s sunny, while they’re out they spend money which pays servers, cooks, restauranteurs , as well as infinite other service oriented industries that see much more throughput during  this summer cycle of the economy. In fact, in many restaurants and bars peoples very shifts are dependent on the weather, sometimes hour-by-hour. As in:  ‘Okay Suzy, you’re scheduled for the patio today and the forecast looks mediocre so you can come in and set up but if it rains, you’re out of here, no matter how much you paid for that days worth of parking.”

So the weather sucks boo-hoo, poor Vancouver, enough of that. Thing is; I’ve been in the business of selling alcohol in one way or another for ten years or so now and let me tell you, it’s a pretty resilient industry. People drink just as much to commiserate as they do to celebrate. Economy good? Bust out the Cristal. Economy bad? Let’s just drink three bottles of Korbel instead. Either way, the liquor industry wins, it’s recession proof, but I’m beginning to wonder whether (pun intended) it’s weather-proof.

Every day I hear retailers complaining about their back rooms being full of ready-to-drink coolers and ciders that haven’t sold because the sun hasn’t shone, how beer sales are way down because people aren’t taking that camping trip to the one place on earth where beer is a perfectly appropriate breakfast beverage.  It’ll be interesting to see whether a bad season makes a bad year, or will we as a market just drink more come the frosh week-thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years booze luge that ramps up in a few months.

In the end though, there’s no way of knowing, statistics will come in, numbers will be crunched and there’ll be plenty of blame and/or credit to go round–weather, economy, demographics, who knows? Admittedly many of us could probably stand a little less exposure to UV and ABV, but what fun would that be?

Cheers

Ryan Cheverie – Brown-Froman: http://www.brown-forman.com/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 10:09 am and is filed under Industry Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.