The Rise of Temperance Bars with Vaughan Yates

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Speaker 2 (00:06)
So welcome to Amazing Food and Drink, and I am absolutely delighted today to have Vawn Yates, who is the founder of the Virgin Mary Bar in Dublin, with us. Welcome to Amazing Food and Drink, Vawn.

Speaker 1 (00:18)
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:19)
You’re so welcome. So tell me a wee bit about yourself, Vawn, and a bit about the bar as well.

Speaker 1 (00:25)
Okay, well, my background is alcohol. I worked with alcohol for around about 20, 25 years, building distilleries, advising clients on strategy and advocacy for their brands.

Speaker 2 (00:39)
And about three years ago, I started looking at what was being talked about in this workshops that I went to, which is this phenomenon called No Low, which I actually think is quite confusing.

Speaker 1 (00:52)
What I really am interested in No Low is not the no alcohol, sorry, not the low alcohol side, but the no alcohol side. I was really interested in products that could produce flavour that had no alcohol in them. And so around about 2018, I started looking around at what products were out there. And I went to a cocktail show in Paris called Copptail Spirits, and it happens every summer. And I went there. And for the first time in about eight years of going, there were two non-alcohol products being talked about on stage. And I was like, I’m looking at this. This is happening on stage. And I was offered a premises later that year in Cable Street in Dublin by one of my clients. And I actually thought, I think I might open an alcohol bar. And I looked really into it in terms of what people were drinking, how people were beginning to talk about alcohol, how alcohol was getting a bit of negative bashing, how people were looking at products in terms of ingredients. There was also things like sugar tax came in that year, which were forcing people to really think about what they put into their drinks, the amount of sugar they put into their drinks.

Speaker 1 (02:04)
And I noticed that these non-alcohol or no-alcohol products were coming out. And I thought, right, will there be enough for me to have a bar that has a back bar? Because there wasn’t really a precedent for it out there. I looked across the world who had non-alcohol bars, and there was one set up years and years ago, but then they started selling alcohol. The same things happened in London with BrewDog. They set up a non-alcohol bar in the 2020, and now they sell alcohol in that bar. But we are a no alcohol bar. We don’t need a licence to have a premises. So we set up this bar in May 2019 in Dublin, because if it works in Dublin, it will work anywhere. Everybody knows that Dublin is a great crack. But 25 % of the Irish population didn’t drink. So I was thinking, okay, that’s quite a big amount, large amount of people. So we set up the Virgin Mary on Cable Street, and we opened in, as I say, May 2019. And then we shut in March 2020. But we are reopening. We are reopening on July the seventh of this year. So we’re really looking forward to We’re opening our doors and welcoming our customers back.

Speaker 2 (03:17)
Brilliant. And tell me, how did it go from the opening until you had to close, obviously, because of COVID?

Speaker 1 (03:24)
How did it go? Well, it went well in terms of… It was really busy when we started off and then it dipped in the summer because a lot of people went away. In 2019, people were still going on holiday in those days. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:37)
You remember that?

Speaker 1 (03:39)
And then it picked up again towards Christmas. And into January, it was really January and February was good. And then we had to shut in March. So we didn’t even get a full year under our belt. So we then converted to selling online. And we very much started to sell products to people in Ireland and distributed non-alcohol products to people across Ireland to keep the business going.

Speaker 2 (04:04)
Brilliant. That’s actually one of my questions I want to come to in a wee second. But I’ll ask you, so what a non-alcohol products are you actually selling?

Speaker 1 (04:12)
Well, in the bar, from Most of our customers want cocktails. They want our cocktails because they’re complex, they’re difficult to make. It’s actually very difficult to make amazing, well balanced drinks without alcohol, believe it or not, because alcohol is a flavour amplifier. Alcohol gives you amplification of any flavours that you put into the glass. So to do that, most people traditionally would have used sugar as that flavour of amplifier or just to disguise flavour by bringing sweetness in. But if you take those two things out, you then start to have to put complicated, I would say, ingredients together, layer them up to be able to create a beautiful drink. So cocktails are best selling, but online we sell… I’d say that products that have functional benefits are quite interesting. So I don’t know if you know what that means, but…

Speaker 2 (05:09)
Like within the body? Is it like… Yes.

Speaker 1 (05:11)
Yeah. So we have things like mushroom beers, which don’t taste a mushroom. They have things like chaga mushroom, Reishi mushroom, lion’s mane mushroom. Products, I’d say, ingredients that are very beneficial have been used for years in Eastern medicines to help with your immune system, to help with your neurotransmitters, to help with your well-being. So drinks like that. We have three-spirit, we have function, mushroom beers, we have wildlife botanicals, which is bubbles with benefits. So these drinks are really interesting, and they sell very well for us online, and they’ve sold, I think, since we started selling the online business, setting up the online business. Those functional products, people buy them a lot. They’re very popular. They sell out very quickly.

Speaker 2 (05:59)
I have I can tell you that I do know about that, unbelievably.

Speaker 1 (06:02)
Oh, well, there you go.

Speaker 2 (06:03)
One of our other contributors, and maybe we can get you two hooked up, is a company called Otsey Brew, a lady called Trisha McNeely. And two of her products actually use Chagamushrooms and Lion’s Mane. Ordinarily, I have to be honest, I would not have a notion, but I actually do.

Speaker 1 (06:20)
And do those products have alcohol in them as well?

Speaker 2 (06:23)
No, no, no alcohol. And then she told me about the functional benefits as well.

Speaker 1 (06:28)
Well, then she’s right. Because they are… And it’s not just us, it’s our customers that buy them. It’s our customers that want these products. So we’re really interested now because since we closed, more of these products have come on the market. So we’re going to be integrating them more into our cocktails and into our drinks. So you’ll get a lot of people coming in and trying drinks that are beneficial for their wellbeing, their mood enhances. They will come out of the bar with a real boost, a real positive energy. And And you could almost say that they are coming out healthier than them when they walked in. So for a bar, that is really unusual.

Speaker 2 (07:07)
Very good. Yes, that is unusual. No question about it. And tell me, you mentioned online there, how Had you been selling online prior to closure, or was that as a result of what was going on?

Speaker 1 (07:21)
It was actually a result of January 2020 when our customers were going, these products are amazing. Where can we get them? And we’re like, Well, you can’t apart from being in here. They said, Well, would you think about selling to us? I said, Yeah, sure. Here’s a bowl. Take one home. And they were like, No, would you sell them to us through a website or something, getting delivered to our house? We were like, Yeah, we could do. We started to set that up in February 2020. Then March 2020, COVID hit. So we had the website ready for April. It wasn’t like COVID comes and we get the website going. We’d already had it designed. We just need it programmed. So we tested it. And then we had a full up and running Shopify site at the end of April, beginning of May, 2023.

Speaker 2 (08:08)
It’s nearly as if you were predicting the future.

Speaker 1 (08:10)
Well, it’s funny because my wife was like, What the hell are you doing a website for? We don’t need one. Just keep selling through the bar. Let’s focus on one thing. And actually by May, she was like, okay, we need a website.

Speaker 2 (08:24)
I hope you told her I told you so.

Speaker 1 (08:28)
No, I didn’t because she’s sitting here.

Speaker 2 (08:29)
Say hello. Hello. Hi. How are you? I’m only joking.

Speaker 1 (08:38)
Don’t worry. I was wrong. I was definitely wrong. Well, I think there’s a first.

Speaker 2 (08:44)
I’m recording this, so I’m going to show us to my wife. Absolutely brilliant. So tell me, would you encourage others to actually look at online opportunities, Vawn, as a result of your own experience?

Speaker 1 (08:59)
Definitely, yeah. Because I think we’re all so used to digital now. We’ve been living with it for the past year and everything’s been pushed and funnelled through our screens, whether that’s buying clothes or whether it’s buying most commodities, actually, apart from probably doing a local shop. But even with local shopping, people get delivered to their home. So I think we’ve been accustomed to that, and I don’t think that’s going to change. I think the likes of Amazon are just going to go from strength to strengths in their dominance of global distribution and digital consumption. But I do think that there’s a lot of potential for smaller brands to do things differently. And if you offer something unique like we do, people can’t buy They sell a lot of these products that we import into Ireland locally. And if it’s Amazon UK, they tend not to want to ship over to Ireland or the shipping costs are too expensive, especially now with Brexit. So the fact that we can bring products in and we can sell it to people directly, I think that’s not going to change. So we’re going to keep our online business going and when we reopen the bar.

Speaker 1 (10:08)
And I think that any new market that we open a bar in, we’re going to look to have an online presence there.

Speaker 2 (10:14)
Excellent. And do you think that you’ll sell on Amazon, even though it’s a wee bit difficult? No, no, no.

Speaker 1 (10:20)
We just sell directly. We’ll just set up our brand is strong enough to set up directly to grow that brand and for people to come to us because they know they want the best. So So we’re not just selling product. What we’re doing is we’re educating people. So a lot of the packs that we sell online and the stuff that we send, the products that we send to people, it’s built around drinks. So it’s built around serves. We’re not necessarily people, Hey, just buy that one bottle. We’re saying, What if you buy that bottle, you combine it with this one, and you mix it with this, and you put ice in it, and you have this garnished, it gives you a really nice drink. So we want to educate people about drinking non-alcohol products because there’s still a lot of education to do about that. People know They may do, they may not do, how to make a strawberry decory or how to make a very simple drink like an old fashioned. And they certainly know how to make a gin tonic. But for us, when you’re looking at non-alcohol, there’s lots of drinks that you can mix with mixers or you can create simple serves that work really, really well and give you the same occasion that you would have with an alcohol drink, but with just that, just that ethanol taken out of it.

Speaker 1 (11:28)
And when you describe it as ethanol, People are like, Oh, yeah. Perhaps I don’t want to be drinking at the moment.

Speaker 2 (11:34)
Let’s not put that in their bodies. So tell me then, do you foresee this being a growing trend? I’m assuming you don’t think it’s a fad, but is this going to be a whole lifestyle change, do you believe?

Speaker 1 (11:49)
Yeah, I see it becoming more than a trend. I see it becoming, as you say, a lifestyle that people become accustomed to. The people that laughed at me in 2018 are now drinking non-alcohol beers during the week. And they were like, okay, I admit, I’m drinking non-alcohol beers because I don’t want to dry. The taste of them is better than what was there previously. I think beers are brilliant in terms of non-alcohol beers, and especially the craft beers that we bring in. They’re very different to what you get in your local supermarket with with some of the bigger brands, which I think some of the bigger brands do really good beers, and some do really poor non-alcohol beers. And it’s a shame because their beers could be the equivalent of their alcohol counterparts if they put the time and effort into it. And I know that because I’ve got craft beers that taste as good as their alcohol counterparts. And I could give someone a blind tasting and say, taste these two beers and tell me what you think of alcohol. People are like, I’m guessing. So I think that beer is great. I think wine has still got a long way to go.

Speaker 1 (13:02)
I don’t think wine are anywhere near… But you’re coming from a higher ABV. You’re coming from 14, 15.5. Wines used to be made at 8, 9, 10 % in the days when the temperatures weren’t so high. But now, because of global warming, wines are higher ABV. They’re stronger than what they used to be. And to get down to 0.5 is very difficult to de-alcoholize and to keep The body and the consistency in those wines is tricky. So wine is a long way to go. But spirits is great because spirits, or the equivalent of a spirit, I should say, in non-alcohol terms, is great because you mix that with lots of things, with tonic water, ginger ale. You can mix it with other aperitifs, non-alcohol aperitifs, to create really complex flavours. And you’re not there for drinking it by itself. Nobody really drinks gin by itself. It’s the same with non-alcohol spirits. You don’t really drink them by yourself. You mix them and you create mixed drinks that taste great.

Speaker 2 (14:04)
Brilliant. I also had seen on your website, you had cedar as well?

Speaker 1 (14:09)
Yeah, we had great ciders coming over from Somerset in the next couple of weeks. Sheppies is coming over. And we’ve got another cider that we’re bringing in from Somerset that’s really tasty, really does taste of that, I would say, that scrumpy that you get from Somerset. And it’s the home of making ciders. And they’ve really put some effort into making non-alcohol ciders. And this time of year, a nice glass full of ice, non-alcohol cider during the week, I think is a really good drink to drink.

Speaker 2 (14:45)
I’m salivating. I’ll have to try some of these.

Speaker 1 (14:50)
Yeah, amazing.

Speaker 2 (14:51)
What I’d like to discuss now is if you move to Dubai or the Middle East, and I another bar opening. Very exciting. Tell me about that.

Speaker 1 (15:02)
Yeah, we’re opening in Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi, sorry. Yeah. And we’re opening a 80 seat bar stroke Eatery, which is really exciting because although the culture there is based around non-alcohol and alcohol is not permissible, it’s very interesting because the places that try and sell drinks that I suppose the alternatives are very much those sugary fruit juice, as I talked about earlier, or coffee. So when people go out at night, they drink speciality coffee. So there’s loads of speciality coffee places in Abu Dhabi and Dubai even. And that’s where they go to, and they smoke their sheeshpipes and drink their coffee and eat cakes. They eat cakes at about 10:30, 11:00 at night. So it’s not great for an upper diet, drinking coffee that late and eating sugary or drinking sugary drinks. So we’re very much geared towards bringing this sense of well-being and this bar that’s geared towards well-being into the culture, the Arab culture in the GCC regions. So it’s been a long time and we’re not open yet. We hope to open in August. And the bar is going to be an amazing, I suppose, statement to say that we’re bringing this new style of drinking to that region.

Speaker 1 (16:40)
And we hope it will be one of many for the future.

Speaker 2 (16:44)
Brilliant. And first thing, how did that come about? And secondly, how are you going to tell the people of the region about it? How are you going to get that message out?

Speaker 1 (16:53)
Okay, well, the bar came about because we were approached by a partner over there, and they said, we really like your concept, and we’d to try and make it happen here. So that was why it came to fruition. And the second question is really about education. It’s really about people coming and experiencing what we have. And bear in mind, if you can only go into a specialty coffee type environment that late at night, because you’re forbidden to go into a space that has alcohol, right? Your choices aren’t great. And therefore, what we’re setting up is, I suppose, a very unique environment for people to come into. It’s a very PR-able story over there because of the fact that it’s a bar that you can actually go in if you’re an Emirati, and you can go in and you can have a drink in a cocktail glass, you can have a drink in a beer glass, or you can have a drink in a wine glass, and there is no alcohol in it, and there’s no alcohol being anywhere near it. So the set up there is slightly different to the Dublin because in Dublin, we’re allowed 0.5 % or less on the European law.

Speaker 1 (18:04)
But over there, you’re allowed less than 0.05 %. So the products we use, we have to get tested and we have to get approved in order to be able to use them in the bar. Otherwise, they shut us down.

Speaker 2 (18:18)
Yes, absolutely. Would they have to be halal as well?

Speaker 1 (18:22)
They don’t have to be halal. So halal means it’s permissible. So certain products that we Our products we’re taking over there are halal, and other products we will take over there will not be halal, but we will get them tested if we’re selling them in the bar. And that’s the key thing. That’s the key thing because halal, I believe, is different. The halal set up is different in different areas, in different regions. Around the world. So our thing is to be make sure that our products that we sell in Abu Dhabi are approved by the municipality in Abu Dhabi.

Speaker 2 (18:54)
Are you thinking about rolling this out throughout the Middle East or are you going to bring this to the world? Is this going to be continental Europe, America, et cetera, or just maybe Middle East?

Speaker 1 (19:03)
No, we think globally. We would really love to be able to open a bar in LA, a bar in London.

Speaker 2 (19:11)
Sounds great.

Speaker 1 (19:15)
Yeah. And Cairo, Riyadh, all those places across the GCC regions as well, going to Oman, if possible. I would like to be able to embrace the change that is happening in culture in various… I don’t think it’s just us wanting to go and do that. I think there’s a requirement, there’s a demand for it within these cities, and we would like to go and do it. And can you believe that there is not a non-alcohol bar in London at the moment?

Speaker 2 (19:43)
No, unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (19:44)
I think there were four or five, okay? But now there are none. So we want to go out there. We want to have a good business approach behind us and go in there and to be able to make it work.

Speaker 2 (19:58)
I have to say, and we had spoken I talked about this earlier, the fact that there’s one open in Dublin that’s doing well is absolutely amazing. So that’s a recipe for going around the world.

Speaker 1 (20:07)
Exactly. And I do think that different cultures will embrace it in different ways. So if you take San Diego and you get all that fit, super healthy, tanned San Diego. Surfers. Exactly. They want to live healthy. And you’ve got that whole Silicon Valley group that are all progressive. And I do think that different products will sell differently in each bar, but time will tell and we’ll see how we get on.

Speaker 2 (20:33)
Brilliant. And tell me, apart from the obvious challenges over the last few weeks, what challenges have you faced when you’re starting the Virgin Mary bar?

Speaker 1 (20:42)
I think And I think the biggest challenge is really educating enough people. And they may walk into the bar with a perception of what they’re going to drink, but they leave with a very different perception. And Anna and I are Drinks Creator. She calls it that click moment, where people go, wow, I’m drinking this. I get it. I understand what you guys are doing now. And I do think that is the biggest challenge, because people even talking to some people who are in the industry, I’ll say, we have a non-alcohol bar. Have you ever been? Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about your bar. Have you ever been? I don’t really like mock tales. And I’m holding my head going, we don’t serve mock tales. We serve non-alcohol cocktails. And they taste different from anything you’ve probably ever tasted. So we put things like peanut butter into our drinks and all kinds of things that make them interesting.

Speaker 2 (21:43)
So they’re very grown up drinks, really, aren’t they?

Speaker 1 (21:45)
They are, yeah. And that will be combined with things that are bitter and sour. So you’re getting that whole balance of sweetness and bitterness. That really is the key ingredients behind or the key The DNA behind a good cocktail is balancing your sweet and sour and making sure that the taste, flavour, and flavor’s work.

Speaker 2 (22:06)
Well, I can guarantee, when I’m back in the capital, I will be in to try one of your famous cocktails. I can’t wait.

Speaker 1 (22:12)
Okay. Excellent.

Speaker 2 (22:13)
Excellent. And I was I just want to say to you there as well, had you any help? Had you any agency help from the government or local development agencies to help you with this startup?

Speaker 1 (22:23)
No. No. Nothing at all? No. No. We just basically put our own money into it and just got started. And I think it’s very hard still to get support because we’re not in the vintage side of things. So we’re not licenced premises and we don’t get all that support that they get. The only real people that have been supportive of us through this has been our landlord, which actually is a drinks company called Irish Distillers. And they’re actually our landlord and we lease the property from them. And they have been amazing with us over this period of time. And there’s a certain irony in that, isn’t there? There is. And also our brands have been really good. If the people that we work with and we are going to support again when we open our bars, some of those brands have been very good with us. They’ve given us free products to sell during COVID. They’ve helped support us during these times. So I think it’s been, I suppose, our landlord and our suppliers that have really helped us. And that’s been it.

Speaker 2 (23:33)
Brilliant. So a big shout out to them. And Board Bia and Fáilte Ireland, if you’re listening, let’s get some help there, you guys.

Speaker 1 (23:40)
Yeah, if they’re listening.

Speaker 2 (23:42)
They’ll be listening. So tell me now, what about… Well, I’ll not come to that question. I was going to ask about the future. I’ll ask you about success. Have you any successes? Have you got awards or anything like that or anything in the offing?

Speaker 1 (23:58)
Okay. We were at most innovative bar of the year in 2019, I think. Brilliant. So we are an innovative bar. I mean, we’re a bar that doesn’t sell alcohol. If that’s not innovative, what is? And I think that we We’ve got to really think about how we think about our bar and how we grow it. And we’re not somebody that really goes after wars. We get a huge amount of PR. We get a huge amount of coverage in the I would say the press have been very supportive to us because the press write about us in a very positive way. They like what we’re doing. And it does tick a few boxes when it comes to responsible drinking. You couldn’t be more responsible than coming to drink in our bar. And you see it everywhere now. It’s really interesting. I was watching the Euros the other day and Heineken zero, zero. So non-alcohol is mainstream. And support responsibly is their message. And I think that that’s happening at the biggest football occasion that we’ve had in the last four years or whatever, or since the World Cup. And you’re seeing these non-alcohol brands come into sporting events, and they are better for you than actually drinking an alcohol-based product.

Speaker 1 (25:22)
They’re less calories, they’re isotonic, they’re made with natural ingredients. Actually, they are good products at the end of the day. So I think it’s really interesting to see the way that non-alcohol is moving into mainstream in some areas. But when it comes to the drinks and us enjoying them at home or in our bar, we know very little about it, apart from the fact that probably beer is probably the biggest category that has done well within that non-alcohol sector.

Speaker 2 (25:50)
Yeah, brilliant. Absolutely. Tell me, so here’s your chance to plug the Virgin Mary Bar. Where can we reach you physically? Where can we reach you online? If we’re going to ask you questions, if I want to get my products into your bar or I want to buy them, tell us now.

Speaker 1 (26:05)
Okay, well, first of all, any inquiries, come to info@thevergeonburybar. Com, and we’ll pick them up for you and come back to you on that. If you want to drink, it’s 54 Cable Street, Dublin. It’s the north side. It’s a really quirky street on the north side of Dublin, just north of the Liffey. It’s the south side of Dublin, don’t generally go to the north side, and the north side, don’t really go to the south side. But we’re on the north side and we like it. And then our website is thevirginmarybar. Com, where you can buy product online through our shop or you can read about us. But we’re very positive at coming back to people. If people inquire to us, we will respond to every message that we get. And we make an effort to build our community. And that’s really the community of people that come to us and support us. That’s our lifeblood. That’s very important to us.

Speaker 2 (26:57)
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And the last question, which is a $64 million one, if you like, what’s the future for you and your wife and the Virgin Mary bar?

Speaker 1 (27:07)
So $64 million is what we need globally. So we were right with that. I think that I think that’s where we are at the moment. We are looking at investment, and we’re looking to take this brand globally. And it’s something that we are actively pursuing at the moment. And I know that Abu Dhabi is our first opening, but it’s by no means our last. It’s a really exciting time for us.

Speaker 2 (27:33)
Absolutely brilliant. Well, I really hope that our viewers who are watching this now, someone might be very willing to part with some money and take this to the rest of the globe.

Speaker 1 (27:44)
Okay. Thanks very much for having us on board.

Speaker 2 (27:47)
That was fantastic. And we wish you all the best in the future. I’ll guarantee you I’ll be down in Dublin to see you.

Speaker 1 (27:52)
Okay. It’ll be nice to see you down here.

Speaker 2 (27:54)
Thanks very much, Vaunt.

Speaker 1 (27:56)
Cheers, Al.

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