Spiritual Alchemy: An Interview with Kevin Barrett

A CANDID CONVERSATION WITH THE MAESTRO BEHIND DRAM & DRAUGHT

For Dram & Draught’s Kevin Barrett, the adventure into bartending has been a coast-to-coast experience.

Born and raised outside of Philadelphia, Barrett found himself in North Carolina by his late teens, where he attended community college in Wilmington. He finished his schooling on the West Coast, where he attended bartending school while residing in Washington.

After his stint on the West Coast, Barrett found himself back in Wilmington and found a love for wine, allowing him to open a wine shop with a business partner. That lasted until 2008 when he sold his half to his partner and decided to move to Raleigh. The following year, he found a job at Foundation in the heart of downtown.

For seven years, Barrett carved a name for himself as one of the bar’s favored bartenders, but he was running someone else’s bar, not his own. So, during a one-year hiatus from the industry in Argentina, contemplating if getting out of the industry would be a great escape, he devised a detailed business plan to open his own bar when he gets back stateside.

Enter Drew Schenck, owner of Cary’s RallyPoint Sports Grill. During Barrett’s time at Foundation, he met Schenck, became good friends, and eventually became business partners.

After Barrett returned from Argentina, he unveiled his plan to Schenck, who was preparing for a flux of new customers with the recent announcement of the Bass Pro Shop’s arrival in the same shopping center as his bar. But time passed, the plans evolved, and the vision of Dram & Draught came to be.

Taking the two things he learned while in bartending school, which was “Use two hands and put everything back where you found it,” he and Schenck opened the first Dram & Draught inside an old auto garage back in 2016, with the goal of being the best neighborhood bar possible.

Today, Dram & Draught has seven locations across the state, including Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham, Wilmington, Cary, Winston-Salem, and Charlotte, in order of opening dates.

Spirited Haven caught up with Barrett to discuss liquor trends, the short-lived canned cocktail Colaka, and the recent rise in nonalcoholic options.

How does Dram & Draught come up with its drink menu, especially having seven locations? You have many bartenders coming up with some fancy and tasty drinks.

It’s actually a great, fun process. It’s a lot of work, but now that we’re done with openings for a while, each location has its own screen process. We give them parameters. We will tell them we need a drink from this drink family or this liquor, and here are some suggestions. But they can use almost anything they want. Each location has its own workshops and submits the best one in each category. Then, twice a year, myself, Drew, our system managers and head bartenders get together and taste the drinks and vote on them. And then we figure out which drinks are best.

It’s great for a bartender to see his or her drink on the menu and be able to talk about it to the customers.

That’s what everyone wants. Everyone wants to participate and contribute and be a part of something. And that’s why we have the best possible menus. Every place has its Dram favorites, which are all the drinks we bring back. And then we have the local section, where it’s like two or three drinks you can only get at that location. Sometimes, the menu can come down to the liquor availability; because of our wonderful system, we can’t necessarily get the same liquor in every city. In our following menu, we’re actually going to be expanding our nonalcoholic beer and cocktail section.

Do you see the liquor trends for each location? Tequila probably sells better in Durham than in Wilmington, but Bourbon is probably king. Correct?

There are trends, but I agree that bourbon is king. We sell more wine in Fenton than we do in most of the other locations. We do sell more tequila in Durham, but bourbon is still the number one seller, and an old fashioned is almost always the number one seller nearly every day.

An Old Fashioned is my go-to drink. It’s usually the first thing I order when I go to a bar or lounge, and it’s surprising how many places can screw up such a simple drink.

It is a simple drink, yet a lot of people seem to screw it up. If you can’t make an old fashioned, then I’m drinking beer or wine for the rest of the night. I usually order an old fashioned or, every once in a while, a Manhattan, another pretty straightforward drink. It can be different from how we make it at Dram. One time, I was at a bar in Wisconsin that people said was good, and I walked in long enough to see it and said, “No.” I could tell just by looking at the place! We tried a couple of drinks, and they were mediocre and sweet. They made me an old fashioned and served it over crushed ice, and I was like, “Are you trying to fight me?”

Living here in Raleigh, our hangouts are either at your downtown location or at Fenton in Cary. The Cary location also seems packed; how has it been doing for you?

It’s pretty outstanding. There were some high bars and hoops to jump through to get there, but it was worth it. We’re both really happy about it and have a great crew and management team. It’s only a year and a half, but we’ve seen in that time sales grow and grow and grow. It’s trending in the right direction and it’s doing great. Honestly, it’s the one that was busy from right out of the gate. Sometimes, you’re busy, and you have that honeymoon period, and then things drop off, and you have to build your business.

There is this movement, especially from the younger generations, to go nonalcoholic and not consume alcohol. And you have dry bars popping up all over the country. How does a place like Dram & Draught cater to those who have decided not to drink liquor but still want to hang out with friends who do?

We made the choice that we are taking our spirit-free cocktails to another level. I remember the days when you didn’t have anything on the menu that was alcoholfree. If a pregnant lady came in and asked for something, it was something sweet or sour, soda water and a sprig of mint. And you’re like, here you go.

Years ago, after a trip to New York, I returned and said we need to do better. So we have three spirit-free cocktails, and they’re high quality. It is important to us, and it is growing. We will be expanding our selection to five drinks instead of three. They are high-quality, spirit-free drinks that are less expensive than our cocktails.