Next Wave Awards Retailer of the Year: Seelbach’s
Blake Riber got into the retail spirits business on a bit of a lark. The 39-year-old Jacksonville, Fla., native had been a mild-mannered accountant for his entire career, running the spirits blog Bourbonr on the side. Occasionally he sold private single-barrel picks to his growing audience and one in particular, a 6-year old wheated bourbon from craft distillery Wyoming Whiskey, blew his mind. “Why aren’t more people talking about this?” he asked himself.
“I was starting to see all these different craft brands coming out that were super good and exciting,” Riber says. “Meanwhile, all these people are chasing Pappy Van Winkle that they were never going to get, and more and more people are coming into bourbon.”
Credit: Scott Suchman
Around that time, he noticed a retail liquor license up for sale in Washington, D.C., and bought it on a whim. The District is unusual when it comes to spirits sales in America; as the only federal city in the U.S., there is no county or state to determine liquor distribution laws. Meaning: Riber could buy whiskey from small, craft distilleries across the country — ones with no other distribution in many cases — import them back to the two 6-by-10-foot storage units he had rented, and then begin shipping them out to most of the other 50 states.
“It seems smart now, but back then it didn’t really seem smart to a lot of people,” he says. But in just a few years, this initial lark has turned Riber into one of the most powerful people in the bourbon industry, even as he has remained fairly under the radar himself. Notifications from his company, Seelbach’s, have become the one email that bourbon enthusiasts open as quickly as possible, eager to discover the next craft brand or bottle that Riber and his team have anointed for greatness.
“‘This is stupid, why don’t you just sell Four Roses and Buffalo Trace?’ many people said to me,” Riber recalls, referring to big, heritage brands from Kentucky that fly off traditional retail store shelves. Instead, he decided early on that Seelbach’s would only focus on craft spirits, predominantly whiskey. Brands like Kings County Distillery out of Brooklyn, Chattanooga Whiskey in Tennessee, and Frey Ranch in Nevada. He was still working full-time as an accountant, so he could afford to do things his way.
Credit: Scott Suchman
Luckily, Riber’s gambit worked. Early on, hot new brands like Blue Run would bring eager customers to Seelbach’s, one of the few places where their limited releases were available. As Seelbach’s has grown, the website, in turn, has become a sort of kingmaker for other brands like Thirteenth Colony and K.LUKE, small distilleries and blenders that Riber thought were bottling the sort of high-quality whiskey that deserved a national audience.
Riber and his small team — led by general manager Denaya “Dee” Jones-Reid and director of media Brian Beyke — send out a few emails per week, pushing only the stuff they truly love, so subscribers know to act quick when they receive a ping from Blake@seelbachs.com. For instance, a recent email touting the new Smokeye Hill Whiskey sold 1,200 bottles within the day.
At the same time, with great power comes great responsibility. Riber and co. unfortunately have to turn down many brands that approach them, hoping Seelbach’s can make it rain for their spirits, too. There’s only so much space in Seelbach’s now 8,000-square-foot warehouse in D.C. (the retailer stocks about 1400 SKUs from some 300 to 400 distilleries); only so many emails they can send out a week before consumers quit paying attention. That reality wears on Riber.
Credit: Scott Suchman
“Who I am to tell a distiller no, I can’t highlight you now,” he says. “They’ve put their life savings into it. I don’t like to turn anybody down, but it’s the nature of limited time and attention. If we start to burn people with stuff they don’t care about, they’re going to stop opening emails.”
Credit: Scott Suchman
With so much customer data, and so many people buying and searching for bottles, Riber has become highly attuned to what’s about to become trendy in the industry, whether amburana barrels, maple finishing, or toasted staves. In 2021, he launched his own craft label, Seelbach’s Private Reserve, and it, too, has become a huge hit. A recent 750-bottle, 15-year-old, cask- strength release sold out in just one hour, at a price of $300 each.
“It’s kind of like Netflix. You start out as a platform, then, when you see what customers like, you begin creating content for the platform,” Riber says. “As far as the spirits industry goes, it’s a bit unusual.”
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