[KATHRYN]:
There are so many ways to keep your practice organized, but Therapy Notes is the best. Their easy to use secure platform lets you not only do your billing, scheduling, and progress notes, but also create a client portal to share documents and request signatures. Plus, they offer amazing, unlimited phone support so when you have a question, you can get help fast. To get started with the practice management software, trusted by over 35,000 professionals, go to therapynotes.com and start a free trial today. If you enter promo code JOE, they will give you two months to try it out for free.

Welcome to Imperfect Thriving. Today’s episode is all about showing some attention to our adventure, artistic expression, and leisure domain. This episode was actually a Facebook Live happy hour with LeNell Camacho Santa Ana. LeNell has been dubbed the First Lady of Liquor by Garden and Gun magazine. And it doesn’t take long when you’re talking to LeNell to know just how true this is. LeNell is a multifaceted woman. She grew up in Alabama and moved to New York, and after a while opened up shop in Brooklyn. LeNell has found her way back home and opened LeNell’s Beverage Boutique in Norwood, with dreams of racial reconciliation and revitalization. In this episode, we share drink recipes with and without alcohol, the history and story behind the drinks and their ingredients, then we just kick back and enjoy LeNell. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed it.

Welcome to the Imperfect Thriving podcast; for all of us women in midlife to discover your self-limiting beliefs, determine exactly what you want your life to look like, and the imperfect actions to get you there. And have you joined the Imperfect Thriving Facebook group? Well, if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? We have had so many fun events already, like happy hour with LeNell, and the Imperfect Thriving Summit, in which we had 10 speakers enriching our lives in all eight domains, and it was all free to our group. So, if you are all about recognizing your value, letting go of perfection, and taking imperfect daily action toward the life that you want, this Facebook group is for you. So please, come on and join us today.

I talk about domains quite often, because domains or areas of our lives, and what we value within these domains, are our compasses in life. In this episode, we are caring for our adventure, artistic expression, and leisure domain. As women we spend so much of our time and energy caring for others, and this is great, but how much time and energy do you spend on your adventure, artistic expression, and leisure domain? If you don’t give this area of your life attention, you will feel empty, depleted, and frazzled. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well, I say, what about Jill, and Kathryn, and Amy? We need our playtime too. And that is what today’s podcast is all about. So, kick back, or find your next adventure – whatever fills you up. But first, enjoy today’s episode.

We are live and I’m so happy to be here with LeNell Camacho Santa Ana from LeNell’s Beverage Boutique. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. Y’all just don’t know, if you’ve never met LeNell, she is a wealth of knowledge. So, welcome, LeNell, to our Facebook group.

[LENELL]:
Hey, welcome. Thanks. Thank you for having me.

[KATHRYN]:
I’m so glad you’re here. So, what are we going to make today?

[LENELL]:
We’re going to make two cocktails. We’re going to make one with alcohol and one without, because we got a lot of folks living sober these days, more than ever. Many of us are choosing to be sober. Many of us have been sober all our lives. So, we offer a lot of those options here. We are a liquor store, but we do sell a lot of fun things for people to make cocktails that don’t have alcohol as well. We’re going to make a Floral French 75; we’re going to do it with and without alcohol.

[KATHRYN]:
Awesome. I’m ready to get started whenever you are.

[LENELL]:
So just to give you a little background on this cocktail, the French 75, there’s a variety of stories about it. But one of the stories that gets told a lot is that this drink was created by British soldiers during the war. And they had French ingredients like champagne, mixed it with some argue cognac being a French spirit. Now you predominantly see it mixed with gin. So, gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, some sweetener of some sort, and topped with a sparkling wine. It was named French 75 after a piece of artillery that was used in the war and there was a lot of haha that they actually drank this out of a spent shell then. No one really knows that story’s true or not, but it makes a good story. That’s a little history about the French 75.

[LENELL]:
We’re going to make the first one with alcohol. And I’m gonna just walk you through a couple little cocktail tidbits with this. You’ll see this drink served a lot in a champagne flute, but I’m going to show you a couple of tricks that really make this drink shine in a way that you may not have had it in a restaurant or bar. So first off, we’re going to use fresh lemon juice. Always use fresh juice when you’re making this drink, don’t just buy some RealLemon and half assed do this. You gotta go all out. So, I’ve got some fresh juice here. You’re gonna take an ounce of fresh juice and I’m using a two-part shaker. I love this kind of shaker, two pieces of metal, because it’s easy to pop apart once it’s cold. If you use a glass and a metal piece sometimes that really sticks. This is an easy way. The professional way of doing this is often mixing it in the shorter side and then dumping it in so that’s what I’m going to do here. I’m going to put an ounce of fresh lemon juice and an ounce of BLOOM Gin is what I’m using. I love using this because BLOOM has some floral components to it as a London Dry style. It’s got chamomile, pomelo and some honey suckle. This is distilled by a woman; we love to support women-owned businesses. She does not own the company, but she is the distiller for the company. She created this product specifically as a way to highlight some floral components of the gin. And so, a little tidbit about her, she was the contract distiller originally who made Bombay Sapphire. So, she was paid by them to create the gin for them, and I think they’ve now moved the production somewhere else, but she has a great history.

[KATHRYN]:
And a beautiful bottle.

[LENELL]:
It is a fantastic package. I got to go spend a day with her back in 2009, and just really loved getting to know her as an entrepreneurial spirit and a woman distiller. So, take an ounce of this gin so you got equal parts of the lemon juice and the gin. It’s the way that I like to make this, you’ll see a variety of recipes out there. A lot of people will use more gin, I like to tone the gin back a little bit and just do that as an equal in this kind of variation where I’m putting it on ice, on top of ice and serving it in a champagne flute. So, we’re going to do a little floral riff on this. Normally with a French 75 people would put a little bit of simple syrup in it, which is equal parts sugar and water. A floral variation could include a half ounce of St-Germain, this is an elderflower liqueur. It’s so beautiful. Bartender’s call it the ketchup of cocktails because it goes with everything. Tequila, gin, vodka, whiskey. Instead of using this and this, I’m going to use the same elderflower that I’m going to use in the non-alcoholic just because I love the syrup so much, but if you do have St-Germain at home, you can make this right now with the St-Germain, put a half ounce in there. I’m going to use this syrup that’s a beautiful, very rare elderflower syrup. It doesn’t have alcohol in it; it’s from an Austrian wine company called Nikolaihof. You see the word Demeter there – anytime you see the word Demeter on a bottle, that means that they’re certified biodynamic. So, these folks are growing naturally, not using pesticides, not using herbicides, everything about their production is sustainable. So, they are famous for their white wines, especially from Austria, but they do send to the US a little bit of this beautiful syrup made from elder blossoms on their property. So, we’re going to use a half ounce of this.

[KATHRYN]:
I tasted that at your shop last weekend, and it is fantastic.

[LENELL]:
It is so beautiful, and I use it in hot tea. You can mix it with gin, vodka, throw it into some soda water, mix it with your champagne, Prosecco. It’s just so, so pretty. Alright, so then I’m gonna throw some ice on top of that, shake this up a bit. And I use pretty large cubes, about an inch cube. But at home you use whatever you got at home. The bigger cubes will dilute it less than just your basic freezer, refrigerator cubes. We’re gonna shake that to a slow ten count. Then you’re gonna pop that, and I’m gonna take a tall glass… I’m going to put this in a Collins glass. So, this drink originally was a riff on a Tom Collins. You’ve had a Tom Collins, it’s gin, sweetener, lemon juice, topped with soda water. So, some will argue that a French 75 really was just a Tom Collins and trading out the champagne instead of using soda water.

[LENELL]:
So ideally you want to fill the glass with cracked ice. You can just take some ice and throw it into a lint free kitchen towel and take your meat pounder or something and crack it up like that. There’s a safety bag called a Lewis bag that will help you crack your ice at home without it flying everywhere, but you can just wrap it up in a towel is what I do. Use a mallet or something you have in the kitchen. So, we’ve got that, now we’re gonna… here’s my little trick. So, a lot of times you’ll see people shake that, strain it into the glass and then pour the champagne on top of it, but this makes this drink really stand out. So, I’m going to take two ounces of champagne, I’m going to pour it right on top of what I just shook. I’m using real French champagne here; I know you can use Prosecco in this and save some bucks but I’m being fancy here. Mousse Fils is a champagne label that is one of my faves. This guy grows sustainably, and we love his champagnes in our store. We carry all of his products as much as we can. His claim to fame is he’s growing a grape called Meunier that you don’t see very often take the forefront in champagne; it’s usually used as a blending grape. Usually champagne is made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and maybe some Meunier. His champagnes are predominantly Meunier, sometimes all Meunier. This is a Blanc de Noir, which means it’s all red grapes. So, it’s Meunier and a little bit of Pinot Noir, no Chardonnay. So, I’m going to put two ounces of that right in the top of the shaker. So, what that’s gonna do is just really incorporate that bubble right into that. And then you’re just gonna strain that over your cracked ice. There you go. Now, you can garnish that with a lemon twist also if you’d like but this is a fantastic way to make a French 75.

[KATHRYN]:
Cheers.

[LENELL]:
Yum.

[KATHRYN]:
That is so good. One of my favorites.

[LENELL]:
Yeah, this is definitely a classic. Now, I like mine kind of on the tart side. If you do like yours a little sweeter you can add a little bit more of the syrup or a little simple syrup. He’s gonna bring me a fresh tin. In the meantime, I’ll tell you about how to make up the non-alcoholic one. We’ve been featuring quite a few things in the store that offer drinking when you’re not drinking. This is one of them – Lyre’s is a product from Australia. It’s called Dry London instead of London Dry as a gin style, so it’s meant to be used in place of gin when you’re making non-alcoholic cocktails. A lot of people call non-alcoholic cocktails mocktails, but we’re trying to be a little classier; we call them spirit free cocktails.

[KATHRYN]:
Oh, there you go.

[LENELL]:
So, they make a variety of things besides this one, but this of course plays well with the French 75 idea. We sell this as well as their rum imitation, and we’re about to get in their vermouth that doesn’t have any alcohol. So, with this, I’m gonna change that recipe just slightly. I’m gonna use an ounce and a half of this, which is what you’d call like a standard shot instead of… because this doesn’t have the same high flavor that a gin does so I’m going to use a little bit more than I did in the gin one.

[KATHRYN]:
I’m seeing some comments as we go. Yes, Tammy, I will put a list of all of the spirits and ingredients on the group page.

[LENELL]:
A half and a half of that. A half ounce of lemon juice and a half ounce of the syrup. This syrup does have a natural tartness to it. (inaudible) Imperfect Thriving.

[KATHRYN]:
Every day.

[KATHRYN]:
I always tell people – you know, I’ve trained a gazillion bartenders – people can geek out so much over making cocktails and completely take the fun out of it. So, I don’t ever take any of this too seriously.

[KATHRYN]:
We don’t want to take the fun out of it any of it.

[LENELL]:
Well, no, right. Let’s shake that out. We’re gonna get our other Collins glass and fill it up with crushed ice. And then, instead of using champagne in this, we’re going to use free non-alcoholic sparkling wine.

[KATHRYN]:
Yes. Okay.

[LENELL]:
It’s quite fun. We were surprised at how tasty it was. We had a staff vacation; we all went to Martinique for a week in January, and we loaded our luggage down with a ton of champagne. But we actually took some of this with us too, so that tells you how good I think it is. We’re gonna do two ounces of that just like we did. Pour it right into the tin.

[KATHRYN]:
I’m a little bit behind.

[LENELL]:
You good? So, a floral French 75, spirit-free.

[KATHRYN]:
I have my taste tester to come taste this one for me, too. She’s 10, so she can only have the non-alcoholic one.

[LENELL]:
Alright, let’s see what she says.

[KATHRYN]:
Refreshing.

[LENELL]:
These are great for summer drinking as we’re getting into the warmer months.

[KATHRYN]:
Brilliant.

[LENELL]:
Thank you.

[LENELL]:
So what happens, I say, when we serve this drink in a champagne flute, it goes warm so quickly, and you can gulp it down, you know, and get schnockered, but this way it just kind of slow your sip down a little bit, and keeps it cold.

[KATHRYN]:
It’s such a good idea, especially with the one with alcohol in it because I’m finding that it’s easy to drink that quickly with no ice, and it packs a punch.

Yeah, definitely. Anytime you mix carbonation with alcohol, those bubbles enter your stomach and it opens up the absorption faster into your system.

[KATHRYN]:
So that’s what it is.

[LENELL]:
Yeah, some people are like “Oh, man, I get so drunk on champagne”.

[KATHRYN]:
Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out that my limit of French 75 is pretty much one, because two is pushing it for sure with me. So, I’m so curious as to how you got started down the path that you’re on. I’ve read a little bit about you, and I wanted to kind of know a little bit about your history of how you got where you are today.

[LENELL]:
Well, as is often the case…

[KATHRYN]:
Whatever you got.

[KATHRYN]:
Yeah. Oftentimes we start out in the alcohol business out of necessity, like, making money, you know, getting behind the bar somewhere. So, I had an undergraduate degree from Birmingham Southern, and a master’s degree from UAB, but somewhere along that that path I took on a 14-year-old sister. A lot of issues in my family. I’m the oldest of eight kids and my mother really struggled with taking care of family. So, I ended up with custody of my sister and, out of necessity, I started bartending just for some extra income to keep our house afloat and try to provide for her. I was fresh out of college at 21 years old, and I wasn’t making a whole lot of money. So, I started bartending just to bring some extra cash in the house and then, over the years, I realized that was my passion. I would spend more time, when I worked at UAB and administration, any free time I ever got to be on my computer researching alcohol, that’s what I would be.

I finally was just like, I’ve got to take the plunge and get out of the cushy, you know, desk job and do it. So, I’ve been doing things on the side and I finally just had to bite the bullet. I quit my job, put in my two week notice – or a month, I can’t remember what it was now – but I started working full-time in hospitality and I started out, you know, working as a bartender, and the joke is you show up for work on time and you give a damn and, within a couple of weeks, you’ve made the front of the house manager. That’s what happened, and then I went from that straight to New York, and decided that I had to go all in. So, I sold my house here in Birmingham, I sold my car, literally just packed a U-Haul, and landed a job at Sherry-Lehmann in Manhattan, one of New York’s premier wine shops, and that’s where I cut my teeth.

[KATHRYN]:
What led to your decision to leave home? I mean, I know you were born in Fort Payne, not Birmingham, but what led you to leave the South and go to New York?

[LENELL]:
Well, as is often the case, when somebody heads to New York, there’s either, you know, fame or some kind of love affair or a combination of it all. So, I had been dating someone long distance for four years who lives in Indiana. And he had two job offers, one in Atlanta and one in New York, and he said, you know, it’s time for us to take the plunge. What are we going to do? Let’s go finally be in the same city together. Which one would you prefer? And I was like, Well, duh, I mean, I’m not moving to Atlanta. Let’s go to New York. He broke up with me before I actually sold my house and landed in New York, but I literally took lipstick. I took my red lipstick, and I wrote on my bathroom mirror “for me”, and I did it anyway.

[KATHRYN]:
Wow. I love that.

[LENELL]:
So, as is often the case in New York, you know, you end up doing things that you would normally do elsewhere. I ended up having to crash with him and live with him for a second, before I got my own place in New York, which was living in the East Village in Manhattan in a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, one room, little apartment and trying to, like, set some boundaries of, like, okay, we’re not together. We’re not together.

[KATHRYN]:
Yeah, so how long did you wind up staying with him, staying at his place?

[LENELL]:
It took me, I can’t remember how long it took me to find my own place… It was so brutal finding an apartment in New York that I could afford, because I’d just taken the plunge to like, you know, start a new career and I was making like $10 an hour in the wine shop, and I was with him for probably no more than a couple of months. But I ended up living on Staten Island because that was the only place, I could find something that I could afford. So, I commuted from Staten Island into Manhattan to work for a good long while. Then I ended up living in Queens, and lived in Brooklyn, I lived in all the boroughs except the Bronx – before it was over with.

[KATHRYN]:
So, ultimately, you opened your own place in Brooklyn, right?

[LENELL]:
I did. So, I worked for Sherry-Lehmann, and then I worked for another wine shop after that, and then I finally was just like, oh god, I need to know all sides of this business. So, I became a wholesale sales rep and I carried five different wine portfolios, because wine is also a big love of mine, besides, you know, cocktails. So, I did that for a year. It was brutal, brutal, brutal. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done; lugging 35 pounds of wine around, in and out of subways, and making, I probably never made more than $1,000 a month doing it. It was so hard.

[KATHRYN]:
What kept you going?

[LENELL]:
Insanity. Also, determination.

[KATHRYN]:
When things get that difficult, what is it that you drew from inside of you to not quit and go home?

[LENELL]:
Well, that’s a great question. You know, New York definitely has a way of just grabbing you by the heart, no matter how hard it is, it’s such an amazing city. But I, really, I knew there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to own my own business. And I didn’t know how it was gonna happen. So, the whole time that I was in wine sales, I was really interviewing wine shop owners on how they got started, and what they did to run their business effectively and so…

[KATHRYN]:
So, you didn’t know your ‘how’ or exactly your ‘what’, but you kind of knew your ‘why’ the whole time.

[LENELL]:
Yeah. And to go back. I had a friend was a librarian who recommended, when I was in my 20s, a book called “What color is your parachute?” Been around forever, many of you’ve probably gone through it. And it’s a great book to help you really identify what your passion is.

[KATHRYN]:
(inaudible)

[LENELL]:
That cut out.

[KATHRYN]:
Tell us one more time.

[LENELL]:
What color is your parachute?

[KATHRYN]:
Oh yes.

[LENELL]:
It’s a classic, you know, classic, like, figure your direction out kind of book. So, I did all the exercises. And at the end, it really was like I knew what my passion was, and that was to work somehow in the alcohol business. I didn’t know exactly what. So, in doing that, that was my drive, everything I did in New York was like, alright, this is going to be one more step of understanding where I’m going. And I always wanted to be in the bar business as well, but I was so in love with the wine world too and trying to figure all of that out. And so, after being in sales for a year, I decided a wine shop and liquor store combo was going to be my easiest way to get started, and then the bar would follow later, because opening all of that kind of business is so risky and much more capital intense in many ways.

So, I did talk with a couple of wine shop owners that just gave me some good kind of mentoring ideas and advice and, finally, I found a place in Brooklyn that I could afford and signed the lease, very by the seat of my pants, I’ll say, because I didn’t have any legal advice, and that ends up biting you on the ass in New York. So, I signed a lease in this, like, down-and-out neighborhood in Brooklyn called Red Hook, that I just followed my gut. It was a place that was concrete blocked up and had been turned into an illegal apartment. The new landlord was interested in putting it back into a business and gave me a super, super sweet deal on the place. And I made it fantastic and it looked beautiful. It had a crystal chandelier, and everything was so nice and immediately flip the building and sold it. But I was in that space for five years in Brooklyn.

[KATHRYN]:
So ultimately, what led you back to Birmingham?

[LENELL]:
But didn’t come from Brooklyn to Birmingham. A lot of people think I came from New York to Birmingham, but I lost my lease, I’m going to say, choose my words, I did not lose my lease, I chose to close my business. But a new landlord came along and bought the building and didn’t want to renew my lease. I could have opened another business within a few feet of that if I could have found the right space. I did not find the right space, I found people willing to sign like a three-year lease, and I just wasn’t going to do that, it didn’t make business sense to me. So, I say all of that to say that I shut the store down there in 2009. It broke my heart. It was really really crushing. But I said then, I will never do this again without owning my own space.

[KATHRYN]:
Yes.

[LENELL]:
In that process of trying to figure life out, I went to Mexico to a friend’s wedding and I met my ex-husband. So, I was in Mexico for two years with him, and we owned the bar down there called Casa Cóctel before I came back to Birmingham, so.

[KATHRYN]:
Oh, now that sounds fun.

[LENELL]:
So, we had just shut the bar down one night and we were both not happy. And it was a beautiful little, little town the capital of Baja California Sur, La Paz, we were four blocks from the Sea of Cortez, it was a paradise. But we were longing for big city. He’d been in Mexico City before and I was missing New York City. And so, one night after we shut the bar down, I just said, “I wonder what’s going on in Brooklyn these days”. We were looking at real estate. Let’s look at Mexico City. And of course, it was, you know, astronomical, crazy prices on things. And I said, for shits and giggles, “I wonder what’s on Craigslist in Birmingham”, and I found the property where my store is now on Craigslist.

[KATHRYN]:
Wow.

[LENELL]:
And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And a couple of days later, he woke up and we were waking up in the morning and he was like, “you know that picture you showed me? I cannot get that out of my mind.” I was like, “Yeah, I can’t either. Like we should try to figure this out.” He’d never been in the United States, so we had to go through the whole tourist visa, get him in the country. We got into the country. We came and looked at the property, we fell in love with it, everything just kind of fell into place. I ended up getting the property when in foreclosure and we got it for a song. And so yeah, it was all just meant to be.

[KATHRYN]:
Oh, that’s fantastic. So, I live in Homewood. The Little Donkey is in Homewood. And I read that you curated the opening cocktail list there.

[LENELL]:
I did. You know, and I’m grateful for that job because I had worked for Jim ‘N Nick’s before I went to New York, that’s where I managed the front of the house, and so, it was a funny kind of turn of events. I was in Birmingham, I was trying to figure out how to land a job while we were figuring everything out with this property, because I had to sponsor my ex-husband so we could get his citizenship moving and all that jazz. And so, a mutual friend of ours from New York was like, hey, they’re about to open. This Mexican concept… you need to be involved with this. We met and talked and it just kind of all happened and that allowed me to sponsor my husband.

And so, I worked with them, just about six months or so, creating their original drink program, created The Donkey’s Daddy, their original cocktail, and got them up and running and then I left out of there not long after they got open. But yeah, that’s fine to see that they’ve really rocked and rolled with that. How did you decide what you wanted to put on that list? Oh, it took a lot of thought. I mean, I wanted it to have creative cocktails, some of them were things that we had served in our bar in Mexico or were inspired by that. I served in our bar in Mexico a spiced hibiscus tea that would take me two days to make. I showed them a lot of those things that we were doing in Mexico, trying to keep it in, you know, with some authentic Mexican connection. The Donkey’s Daddy was a nice cocktail, it’s a combination of the two loves of tequila and bourbon, and their having that notion of the Southern smoked meat and then still doing a Mexican kinda fusion.

[KATHRYN]:
I’ve had it before. It’s amazing.

[LENELL]:
Well, thank you.

[KATHRYN]:
I love it. So, what are your plans for the future? You seem like somebody who’s always got something brewing.

[LENELL]:
Always, always. Yeah, the big Greek Revival that’s next to the store… For those of you haven’t been, there’s a 1905 historic home right next to the retail space, that we are going to restore. We’re going to restore the exterior, historically accurately, and we’re working with Linda Nelson right now, who’s known around Birmingham for helping folks get their national, historic, kind of, paperwork in place. It’s registered locally, but we’re going to work on this national registry so that she can help us with tax credits. Because this is gonna be a million dollar plus project we’re taking on. We’re gonna turn that into a café concept that we’re gonna call ‘The Copeland’ after the man who originally built the house, and it’s going to be a fun place for people to just come and hang out in a casual setting.

[KATHRYN]:
I love that. Okay, I have one question that I meant to ask you earlier that I’ve kind of skipped. I’m not a bourbon connoisseur, really. I don’t drink bourbon that often. But, you know Julian Wan Winkel the…

[LENELL]:
The third?

[KATHRYN]:
Fourth? Which one is it?

[LENELL]:
Yeah, Julian and I have been pals for a while. This is my daughter, her name’s Damiana.

[KATHRYN]:
Hey, sweetie. She’s adorable.

[LENELL]:
Yeah, I met Julian in New York. The store has made quite a name for itself with American whiskey as a big specialty. I met Julian at a whiskey festival, years ago when my store first opened, and nobody knew who I was. And I was, literally, I was scared shitless. I showed up to a massive conference room full of men. There’s a story that I love to tell about when I first met him, because I put on pink suede pants and I was like, I’m just gonna show up and just like flaunt my shit a little bit, and I put on these, like, crazy knee-high boots, and I just went up to him, and I was just like strutting my stuff, and I was like, “you don’t know me, but you need to”, and I gave him my business card and I just walked away.

[KATHRYN]:
So, wait, what was the, like, the purpose of that meeting, like, I don’t…

[LENELL]:
So it’s a whiskey festival where they bring a lot of distilleries in, and you’ll have a lot of the owners of the brands that are standing behind tables, pouring samples and there’s, you know, just a ton of people running around, flaunting their whiskey, their whiskey ways, and it’s usually a whole bunch of men. More and more women show up at these things.

[KATHRYN]:
So, did he call you? How did this work?

[LENELL]:
So, he followed up with me and we ended up scheduling him to come out and do an event in my store. And it was an amazing memory to build, because we had people packed. Black cars from you know, Wall Street, getting over and parked in this, like, down-and-out neighborhood in Brooklyn, coming in having to find bottles and he looked at me, he was like, “Girl, what did you get? What is this?” And I was like, “get ready. It’s about to happen.” And he was just like, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” It just kind of happened organically.

[KATHRYN]:
That is crazy. So, for those that don’t know about Pappy Van Winkle and all of that, how did that bourbon become so big, you know?

[LENELL]:
Well, the whiskey history; The Van Winkle family had amazing whiskey. They have been out of production of whiskey for many, many years. It’s a brand now that’s in honor of Pappy Van Winkle, who actually did run a distillery in Kentucky, but Julian is under the umbrella of another distillery, Sazerac, Buffalo Trace pubs. But he had access to whiskey, and his father kept the Van Winkle name floating around in the whiskey world for a while, and they made decanters, all kinds of crazy decorative decanters, and they just kind of kept their foot in the door.

He was the first in the US to put out something that was a higher age, and I remember distinctively when I worked with Sherry-Lehmann and I was trying to soak up all the knowledge I could in that very high end store, I asked one of the guys who was mentoring me, “so what about bourbon, like, what’s the cream of the crop bourbon in here?” Because we had, you know, a lot of celebrities shopping there, and it was a lot of high rollers, and so you always had to kind of know, like, what was going to be the thing that people wanted to impress people, and wasn’t even a name that people knew then, but the guy said “the absolute best bourbon ever is this one” and it was a Pappy 20 on the shelf. And so, I was like, Huh. So, there were people like that, you know, in-the-know who just sort of like, everybody behind-the-scenes knew that whiskey was fantastic and it just sort of took off from there. The Japanese market and the European market kind of jumped on aged whiskey like that much more than the US did, which took us a while to catch on to, the 20-year being something that you’d be willing to spend money on.

And when I shut my store down in 2009, I still had his whiskey on the shelf. It went with me to Mexico, I ended up bringing the lot of it back, I didn’t even realize how crazy people were for his whiskey until I was trying to get money to finish my store construction and my ex-husband kept telling me like, hey, there’s so many people in my bar asking, like, “do you have Pappy?” and I’m like, “Yeah, whatever.” And he’s like, “No, really, you gotta pull the shit out of the basement. We got to sell it!” until finally I was like, “Okay, what do we have?” And people, I didn’t realize, were like chomping at the bit. I didn’t realize how hard it was to get now that I’d been out of the scene for a second.

[KATHRYN]:
So yeah, that’s amazing. Well, I mean, I’ve enjoyed this so much and I can keep you talking forever, I’m sure. But I have one question that I usually ask my guests on the podcast, and I definitely want to put this out as a podcast. So, if there’s one imperfect action that our listeners and our audience could do to take them toward their best lives, what would you say that is?

[LENELL]:
Here, recently, one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about in the store – we do a lot of fun things here as a team and we’ve gone through, you know, meditation things together and books together – and one of my staff members started passing around a book called Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach’s book, many of you may have run across it, and the notion of radical acceptance and imperfect thriving, I mean, I don’t know how many times in the past two months I have accepted my imperfections more than ever and just radically accepted myself. And one of the things that I’ve done was something that she talked about in her book, and it’s that connection to (inaudible) and just acknowledging suffering, and one day my heart was so heavy, and I felt like it was affecting everything I was doing, and I literally just held my own face in my hands and said, “LeNell, I care about your suffering.”

[KATHRYN]:
Oh!

[LENELL]:
And everything shifted for me. Because I felt like nobody understood me. Nobody gets what I’m going through, even my sweetheart who’s an amazing man, I was just like, “nobody’s listening to me!”

[KATHRYN]:
But that just like, I love that, because nothing takes the place of self-acceptance, right? Nobody knows what we’re going through better than we do. And the moment that you completely accept who you are, flaws and all, is the moment you really start to live. So, I absolutely love that.

[LENELL]:
There are many self-help things out here, and one of my staff members here, Ashley, is amazing, and we’ve talked a lot about this, how it’s easy to get stuck in, like, what if I just do this meditation, if I just read this book, if I just do this practice, if I do x, x, x, x, I’m finally going to be okay. And when you can go “You know what, I’m just okay. I’m okay already. I can be better, but I’m okay right now.”

[KATHRYN]:
Yes. Whoa, I absolutely love that. So, where can our audience and listeners and viewers learn more about you and find you?

[LENELL]:
So, our business social media is @lenellsbhm. We’re on Facebook. We’re on Instagram. We are located in Norwood, which is a historic older neighborhood, about a mile up from Topgolf near downtown. We’re open every day, noon to 9. If you haven’t been over, we’d love to welcome you over and let you see what we’re all about. Once we get through this COVID craziness, we’ll be doing a lot of tastings and events. And here again, we do tastings and events in here weekly, normally. We also do free yoga classes in here and we’ve had some free meditation, fun things as well. We call our yoga time #yogainaliquorstore.

[KATHRYN]:
I love that and LeNell’s is at 1208 32nd Street North, and they’re open from 12 to 9, 7 days a week

[LENELL]:
Even Sunday.

[KATHRYN]:
Even on Sunday

[LENELL]:
We go to church and come pick up your French 75, basically.

[KATHRYN]:
And check out the gin in the bathtub, which is my favorite part.

[LENELL]:
Yeah, we do have a clawfoot tub full of gin. I’ll click around here and let you see it.

[KATHRYN]:
Yes. I wanted to see that. And all sorts of different bitters and flavors to make either cocktails or, what is it?

[LENELL]:
The spirit-free cocktails.

[KATHRYN]:
Yes, I wanted to not say mocktails. Spirit-free cocktails, there are so many things. And, oh, show us before we go – there were these bottles, and I already had a pretty high tab when I was leaving so I didn’t buy these yet – but there’s beautiful spirit-free, that had a squirrel on it… Do you know what I’m talking about?

[LENELL]:
Yes, Seedlip. Bets is going to grab a bottle so I can show you. It’s another spirit-free alternative. It mixes really well like a gin, so it’s great with tonic, great with soda water. We have lots of recipes. And our staff created a cocktail that’s fantastic, called Hellfire Blossom, that has orange and lemon and orange blossom water, and the most beautiful packaging.

[KATHRYN]:
The labels are works of art. Like, I don’t even want to open it, I just want to put it on my bar at home, so that’s like…

[LENELL]:
It’s so pretty.

[KATHRYN]:
Oh, so pretty.

[LENELL]:
This has peas and herbs in it, and the guy grows his own peas. And this is the spice version.

[KATHRYN]:
Yes, that is on my list next time I go.

[LENELL]:
Yeah, come in. We’ll probably set people up with recipes and give you ideas of how to mix up things, so definitely come and see us. We love to feature women winemakers and winemakers of color, and we have a lot of things in here that’re certified organic. Of course, we’re known for American whiskey too.

[KATHRYN]:
Well now, this has been so much fun. Thank you for joining.

[LENELL]:
Oh, thank you so much for including me and we’ll hopefully be able to do some more things together.

[KATHRYN]:
I loved it. Thank you so much.

Imperfect Thriving is a part of the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you thrive imperfectly. To hear other podcasts like the Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution, or Empowered and Unapologetic go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

If you love this podcast, will you rate and review it on iTunes, or your favorite podcast player? Also, I have a free, nine-part Blueprint to Thrive email course. It’s a step-by-step guide to find out what you want your life to look like, exactly what’s holding you back, and how to get to that life you want. Head on over to www.imperfectthriving.com/course to get the course today.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or guests, are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, I encourage you to reach out to one.