Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/148134
Joe Cleveland (left), Bar Manager at Coqueta, tastes the St. George Spirits Gin with Bucalo. You're Sean Bucalo, and you're the Craft Spirits Specialist for Young's Market Company in San Francisco. Your challenges are many, and your day is long. But you are having a hell of a lot of fun. Bucalo is intense, because he has to be. The craft spirit movement is white hot in San Francisco, and the competition is everywhere. And it's fierce. But not everything is about business, and Bucalo knows that success "is really about relationships." For a person who's only been in the San Francisco position for a year, he clearly has developed deep ties within the community. Sometimes, that relationship-building means that you do business with people you're not really even doing business with yet. Take Joe Cleveland at Coqueta, for example. When plans were announced for the boutique-style Spanish restaurant on the city's waterfront, there was a palpable buzz. Everyone wanted in on the action, because the action was going to be fast and good. To augment the restaurant's ambitious food program, Cleveland was seeking a custom-made gin that could be used in the kitchen as well as the bar. Enter Bucalo, who put Cleveland in touch with Lance Winters at St. George Spirits in nearby Alameda. Lance went through a host of concoctions and distillates, and finally settled on two. One, a botanical gin with a strong cinnamon presence ("We didn't love it until we tried it in a gin and tonic," Cleveland says, "and then everything changed."); the other gin offering a hint of saffron that mingles nicely with items on the menu. But all this work on Bucalo's part, all this facilitation happened without any official business taking place. On the Storefront And it's not just the restaurant customers that Bucalo has to know everything about; retailers are constantly educating themselves, learning of august 2013 / the tasting panel / 109 TP0813_104-132.indd 109 7/24/13 9:40 PM