To say that we weren’t a little surprised that our tasting room was busy during our opening month would not be entirely accurate. It was dreary February and we only offered Vodka cocktails and a few pickled snacks. What we did know was that we were doing something new and unique in Bloomington, and enough people were also hungry for this. We were the first and only distillery in Bloomington. Around this time there were only two bars in town with a focus on cocktails. One beloved establishment, The Rail, closed suddenly a few months before we opened. The other is a cocktail-mixer bar with plastic cups that won’t break when dropped on the blacklight-lit dance floor. Although we were a distillery first and foremost, we had a beautiful bar and delicious vodka–we knew we could offer what was missing in Bloomington.
We hired strong bartenders and gave them creative reign behind the bar. We gave them one rule: everything was to made from scratch, just like the vodka itself. Our bartenders made original cocktails and played off classic builds to stretch what most people believed vodka should be used for. They infused our vodka with toasted oak chips to make a cocktail akin to a manhattan (The Prelude), they modeled a very complex elixir after Campari so we could serve a knock-out, sans gin Negroni. Everything was elegant, fresh, and unexpected. Almost before we knew it, we weren’t just a tasting room, we were a proper cocktail bar–just without all the other spirits.
It wasn’t just vodka for long though. Our production geared up and filled our rails with new spirits; coffee liqueur, two types of gin, flora liqueur, white rum. What had once been a constraint for a bartenders became a new kind of challenge–they were constantly generating cocktails to highlight our new signature spirits. The bartop filled with house-made syrups, purees, and tinctures. They had to scale back and create new constraints for themselves to keep drink times and prep shifts under control.
Stella Snyder, one of our distinguished bartender alumni who went on to head the cocktail program at Finches Brassiere, said she has never made so many cocktails in a single shift than at Cardinal. It’s a work out.
