“People who are into whiskey are really into the hunt,” O.J. Lima, cofounder of Taste Select Repeat, explained over a phone call this summer with Vanity Fair. This love of the hunt that compels whiskey enthusiasts—whether finding a store nobody else knows or nabbing hard-to-come-by bottles for a good price—is the exact nature Lima and fellow cofounder Pierre Auguste hope to cater to with their company: part subscription box, part nerdy club for enthusiasts of all knowledge levels.
What started initially as a mailing list of about 200 grew to 1,000 supporters in no more than six months, with a composition that spoke to the diversity of whiskey drinkers. “[The] list is about 50/50 people of color to white people,” Lima explained. “We’re about 35% women and about 40% people under 35. So all of those demographics are really fundamental and the new demographic of the American whiskey drinker.” Whiskey is younger, browner, and more female—and Taste Select Repeat aims to ensure those groups aren’t overlooked by an industry that, while changing, remains largely white and male-dominated.
Vanity Fair: What were the early days of the project—how did the two of you come together to take this idea on?
O.J. Lima: I really got a full-on crash course in spirits when I was working at Complex and we were launching the site First We Feast. I found myself go from being a guy who just drank Maker’s Mark, which a lot of people would consider a gateway bourbon, to having all these bottles in the office and being able to try them not at a massive expense to myself. Now, outside of New York, the idea of the single barrel and the barrel pick was much more prevalent in particular, more in the South. There was a liquor store I used to buy from, [where I] became friends with the owner, and he had some barrel picks he had on his own, and they were okay, but what was important to me was just the fact that somebody was doing them in our area.
It was a very narrow aperture in terms of what was offered here in New York City. So you would go to one event, or you would follow these people on Instagram: It would be no women, no people of color, all my age and older. And I just felt like there was something that was more fun and interesting and inclusive to do. And I believe Pierre was also interested in that, but the stores were not really that interested in it because it meant taking a chance on purchasing barrels from unknown places that they weren’t necessarily sure they could sell. But at that point I realized that we were a fourth tier in a three-tier system. I decided that I was interested in pursuing my own liquor license and starting my own shop that would also use technology to help get to our customers.
Pierre Auguste: I think certainly the pandemic offers challenges, but it also offers a very unique opportunity for this business model where we can ship just about anywhere. I’ve always been very big on exploring different whiskeys, and I love to get other people to explore. So it offers me an opportunity to get people to try something they might not have tried before. Certainly starts off in whiskey, and it just expands from there to other spirit types. When all of these other brick-and-mortar places, especially bars and restaurants, were scrambling trying to figure out how to generate revenue and lobbying to be able to offer people to-go cocktails, we’re situated in a great spot where you can go online for things that we’ve curated and put our stamp of approval on and get people to try that.
Lima: We essentially started as a strange whiskey club in New York where people would buy our stuff in a liquor store. What we realized from social media was, Oh, wow, we have homies and like-minded friends all over the country, and they’re looking to us as guys who have been doing this to give them tips and help them get good bottles.
And what is your process behind a barrel pick? What’s the thinking leading up to a particular pick and thereafter?
Lima: We go to these distilleries and we ask them if we can try multiple barrels, and then after trying multiple barrels, we either decide on one—or usually we end up trying to ask for two because I’m a habitual line-stepper; closed mouths don’t get fed. Or in some cases, and this is what we love about working with craft distilleries, we’ll ask them if we can do an experiment on it. So we’ll ask them to take the whiskey out of the barrel it was in and put it in a barrel that a brewery company used to age a stout beer, or we’ll ask them if we can blend two barrels together, or if we can add water to get into a certain proof that brings out other certain elements. And the craft distilleries are generally game to do those sorts of experimental projects. That we love, because it’s taking it up a notch from just going to a place and picking the barrels, and in fact, that’s almost the easy part. The hard part is to do your research ahead of time, to understand what the distillery has there, to try other things that other people may have picked there, or other products that they’ve had, and then distinguish what is the product that you’re most interested in. Is it rye? Is it bourbon? Is it single malt? So doing all of the prework before you get there is the hard part to help ensure that when you sit down and they pull the barrels for you, the barrels they are pulling for you are going to be good.
Auguste: And to that end I think there’s several more variables that go into it, including making the connections. I don’t think either of us can stress just how important it is to make the right connections and meet the right people that can put in a good word for us when we’re going to a distillery that we haven’t picked from before. A lot of our friends that live in Kentucky that we’ve made great friendships with, they may come and pick with us, or they may put in a good word to whoever’s running that program to say, like, “Hey, you know these are good guys, let’s get them a good pick.” Because ultimately a lot of times you’re at the mercy of whoever’s putting the barrels out for us to choose from. That’s an important factor.
Do you imagine there will be more shifts in the liquor industry toward the perspective you guys have of digital first, working with distilleries and in turn reaching a wide consumer base quite directly? Do you see that becoming more of the norm?
Lima: We started in a way where it was like, “Oh, isn’t this a cool story about two Black guys who go to Kentucky and there they are with these distilleries, dot dot dot,” and that is completely true. The industry certainly was in a space that never really had to deal with diversity of color or gender or any kind of identification; they were used to having one type of consumer, and now they don’t. It is very similar to when Timberlands went from being a work-boot company to all of a sudden people in hip-hop being like, “Oh, we love Timberlands.” There’s a million different products that we could list where the corporations have not really understood how to deal with new consumers that don’t look like or behave like their old consumers. I think in that regard, we get a lot of love now from most of the suppliers and their companies because they recognize that we just inherently have a wider aperture for the type of people that we speak to; because of our nerds-to-novices attitude that you don’t have to be one type of person to like whiskey, just like we’re not one type of person, just like Black people aren’t monolithic. We’re never going to make someone feel a way about liking our stuff because they’re not on a certain skill level or experience level with the product. Instead, we’re going to spend our time and energy trying to educate them on the entire industry.
In that regard I think a lot of the brands really dig what we’re doing and they’re interested, because it fundamentally helps them; it helps the industry at large, helps tourism to the state of Kentucky. We fill a void that is between companies that don’t know how to talk to their new consumers and their new consumers. But none of that would make a difference and nobody would be interested in us if our barrel picks were terrible.
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