THE SURPRISING IMPORTANCE OF A COCKTAIL TO GO

This is the story of how complicated it is to change a simple law—and the large role entrepreneurs can play.

- Jason Feifer

Want to do something radical? Order a cocktail from your local bar or restaurant, and then walk out the door with it. Prior to the pandemic, that act was illegal almost everywhere in America. Cocktails had to be consumed on-premises. They couldn’t be packaged and sold for takeout. And they certainly couldn’t be delivered to people’s homes.

Then the pandemic arrived, and bars and restaurants began shutting down. To create a lifeline for these businesses, more than 30 states began temporarily legalizing the sale of to-go cocktails. In Vermont, it happened on March 19, 2020. That’s the day Sam Nelis knew he’d still have a job.

“We realized that we could bring back some staff and start doing cocktails,” Nelis says. He’s the beverage director for the cocktail bar inside Barr Hill Distillery, a maker of craft gin and vodka in Montpelier, Vt. His team swiftly got to work, serving cocktails in glasses that could then be repurposed in people’s homes, and it saved their business. “If anyone out there is listening,” Nelis says, “I would say, please, keep the to-go cocktails going forever. I don’t know why it was never allowed.”

Nelis may not realize it, but he’s pondering something very important.

There are two good reasons to wonder why to-go cocktails weren’t allowed. The first is about alcohol itself: To-go cocktails were illegal because of a tangled mess of laws that go back a century, and that still dominate the economics of alcohol today. And yet, when you really dig into the way alcohol regulations are changed, to-go cocktails reveal an important lesson about how to create positive change more broadly.