Founder Feature: Emmanuel Waters and Courtney Tucker of Old Hillside Bourbon

14:01Emmanuel Waters:Yeah, the big and the same one. We always get compared. There are a plethora of us outside of the big ones, but that's okay. You don't know what you don't know, right? You just, I just tell people to educate themselves, right? So I appreciate you having this platform so we could share goodness.

14:16Caitlin Bricker:please i mean even for me when i look at the space i feel like there's definitely a lot of color missing we need more diversity at cpg we need more diversity and voices more diversity and experience if you wouldn't mind can you tell me what your experience has been like stepping into this industry especially with that one percent attached to the specific niche that you're in in CPG and how you're kind of breaking into this or making yourselves known.

14:49Courtney Tucker:One example that kind of sticks out to me is that when we represent our brand, we get looked at as the help or like a worker or an associate. And then when you tell them, hey, this is our brand, we get like, oh, wow, you guys are the owners. So it's almost like a shock that we're in this space. and you know I used to take it as a form of disrespect but now I kind of embrace it right because I use that as a tool because that's leverage at this point right because they're not anticipating me walking in owning a spirit and so I just kind of use that to my advantage at this point but again it was it was hard to take you know coming from corporate where you have to to fight and scrap for decisions and a seat at the table, to have your own company that you're representing and you're the face of is huge for me.

15:44Emmanuel Waters:And to piggyback off that, I think in addition to them saying, oh, you're the owners, also when they would taste it, oh, this is really good. I'm like, what were you expecting? What were you expecting? That was the thing. We always get that. And the one thing I can appreciate in addition to our amazing stories that we tell is we have really good bourbon. we are whiskey connoisseurs like jesse and brian and gordon i say those three because they were literally like doing the ciliary tours and tasting and trying like my palate is now refined now but i know what terrible juice tastes like by the time i did so i couldn't tell you the difference but we didn't go out there and we'll wear this hat proudly we are happy to say that we are black and veteran-owned brand but we're just not trying to be the best black-owned bourbon we want to be the best-owned bourbon period and we happen to be black right and we are connoisseurs of that and we stand by our craft, which is why all of our bottles have won gold and double gold and all those spirits challenges and whatnot.

16:38Emmanuel Waters:You know, like we stand by that. But it's been tough, right? This is a very tough industry. We were at Buffalo Trace for Christmas. We had a company all hands. And the lady had said something like, this is their ninth millionth barrel that they've done. They've been doing it since like 1775. And I looked around our guys and said, we've only done, I don't even know what the number is, maybe a thousand at this point. but I said guys we're just simply behind the times we're just newer space that's really it right they've been doing this for literally hundreds of years and we're doing it in year six if you look at the market right now like all the big distributors are closing the market is shrinking and yet we seem to be hitting some growth so I said guys sometimes we're surviving is thriving right can we ride this wave until things kind of mellow out right and I think now consumers as a whole, right, with everything going on, they don't just want to drink or anything.

17:28Emmanuel Waters:They want something personal. And if you're not connecting with your consumers, you don't have something special, they'll just move on. There's just, it's so competitive. Yes, that part.

17:37Courtney Tucker:Yeah, that craft space is so niche right now. It's like, you know, you have to have a story behind what you're selling, right? And so people immediately gravitate towards us because we're telling these great stories and we have this great bond in terms of our friendship and our founder story, you know, it's incredible as well. So I think that's really what's driving us in this space is our storytelling ability and through our product, through our branding.

18:01Caitlin Bricker:I do have to touch on what Emmanuel was saying, because as founders, I think it's so important that you're putting yourselves out there and that you're letting your consumers know who you are, because that connection piece, like you're saying, is so important. I used to be a buyer in personal care and cosmetics and the natural products industry. First thing I would do, I'd look at ingredients, I'd look at packaging, then I'd go right on the website and I'd go to about. Because I want to know your story. Like, what's the difference? Who are you? How passionate are you about what you're doing? And that is what is going to spark the difference between just a product and a product that you have a personal investment into, even if you're not part of the brand.

18:42And I think you know what you're doing.

18:45Caitlin Bricker:You know what you're doing. You do. I mean, like, I can feel it. I mean, Emmanuel, you were saying, like, this wasn't your thing prior to this, but now it's your thing. And this is something that is, like, in your blood now. And, Courtney, for you, I really hope that your Instagram feed is elevated now that you're actually a bourbon founder. I would love to see a side-by-side before and after.

19:08Courtney Tucker:Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

19:11Caitlin Bricker:But it is really important that you're forging these connections with your customers. I think even I can speak for somebody like myself. I was grappling, not grappling, but I was trying to make the decision. Do I quit drinking altogether or do I just keep going towards higher quality alcohol? Is that going to make me feel better? And you know what? It probably would. But I made the decision ultimately just to stop drinking. But I think these people who are kind of on that decision-making path of do I keep drinking or do I go towards higher quality? They're going to look towards brands like Old Hillside Bourbon because you have that founder story.

19:49Caitlin Bricker:You have the history baked in. And it sounds like the quality that you're going for is not just your average bourbon on the well at a bar. You're going for top shelf.

19:59Emmanuel Waters:We're premium bourbon. We do have, obviously, a lower tier skew with like$39.99, but it's always been premium. And if you look at the market dynamics, right, you know, pretty much millennials and up are pretty much our target. Gen Z isn't really drinking that much, but I also think they haven't been through a lot. Wait till they get a little bit older and gone through a couple of sessions that we had. I'm sure they'll start to drink a little bit more, you know, but to your point, you got to have, you better have a niche. You better have a good story because it's literally too competitive, just to be quite honest with you, right?

20:31Emmanuel Waters:You better have something good. And then also, like you mentioned, ingredients and whatnot. It took us almost 18 to 19 months to craft that first bourbon and the first label. So we put a lot of investment into the juice and the packaging, right? We could have just easily came out with something. We could have got some six-month juice and just slapped the label on it and went to work. And we could have easily got, for the sake of, you know, I'm a finance person. And so our cogs could have been a lot cheaper if we had got 350 bottles out of a barrel versus like 200. But you want that quality, right?

21:03Emmanuel Waters:You want to be able to taste it, you know, and be like, OK, this is good.

21:06Caitlin Bricker:And the quality also feeds into the storytelling. Courtney, you were mentioning how important the storytelling is. Can you tell me more about the history behind your brand? Emmanuel touched on this briefly with Old Hillside. Can you tell me more about Old Hillside itself and what stories you're bringing into your brand today?

21:26Courtney Tucker:Yeah, I mean, Emmanuel Treston, the Black Wall Street tie, right? And I think Hillside High School in itself is very historic for, you know, a lot of celebrities coming out of here. Ernie Barnes, I'm thinking of Shirley Caesar, John P. Key. Like all these entertainers came from that area, right, in that small town, Daryl, North Carolina. but there's a lot of powerful impact that was left throughout that community, right? And so it's a community, right? Hillside High School, it's not just a high school, it's a strong community in Durham, North Carolina. So when you say, you know, anything about Hillside, it has to be like quality, right?

22:03Courtney Tucker:It has to be like premium, it has to be like on point because folks are looking at you and they're like, hey, you better make our name, you know, make us proud, right? And so to that point, the community stands behind us. I think what sticks out to me is our first tasting, our first demo at ABC store. We had a line wrapped around the door, right? It was like we were selling iPhones and it was like grandmothers, you know, aunties, uncles, they were just supporting us like no other. And then we were like the fastest selling bourbon in the state, right? And so we Broca Regga.

22:37Caitlin Bricker:Congrats.

22:38Courtney Tucker:No, and I think, you know, that all speaks to how we intentionally crafted our product, right? And so it's about community. It's about where we're from, you know, in terms of our heritage. And we just wanted to make our folks proud, right? So we kind of didn't stop there. Man, you mentioned that Jesse into horse racing. And so we kind of looked at that space, and we found out that African-Americans dominated the sport of horse racing in the late 1800s. And so we took a deeper dive and we found like four black jockeys. And so we prominently put those on our bottle, our last ride bottle.

23:14Caitlin Bricker:See what you did there.

23:16Courtney Tucker:Yeah. Isaac Murphy won the Kentucky Derby six times by the age of 16. Oliver Lewis was the first Kentucky Derby winner, first winner of the Kentucky Derby, black man. So those stories are like kind of out there, but they're not being told. Right. And it's almost like they're sort of being erased. And so what we want to do as a brand is replace those stories. Every time one story is a race, we want to replace those stories. We want to get those stories out there. And so Emmanuel talks to him because he was interested in the female jockeys. And so he was going 3 o 'clock in the morning researching female jockeys.

23:50Courtney Tucker:And he found three female jockeys that were prominent in that industry at the time. And so he wanted to celebrate them. Yeah.

23:57Emmanuel Waters:So the success of the last ride was crazy. It's supposed to be one time thing. And then we're like, wow, we got something. And so I was just up late at night because I don't sleep now. And a lot of that was the company, less the kids. But as I was researching, I was like, I want as many women as for because women we know are the backbone of America. And if you know, black stories, I like to say, are buried beneath the surface. Black women are six feet beneath that, is what I always say. And so we always ring the four. But so I found these three amazing women, Eliza Carpenter, Silly Bishop, and Shera White, very pioneers of horse racing.

24:29Emmanuel Waters:I'm like, wow, black women horse racing. These are 1920s. Eliza was born a slave, like first stable on America, first jockey. And so it took us about two years research, finding the family. So in addition to making bourbon, I'm also now a researcher trying to find families. and then list them down and write emails and get the legal involved. But you fast forward to last year, we unveiled the bottle, our trifecta bottle, which I have here. You can see these amazing women on the story. What's interesting about these families, Sylvia Bishop and Cheryl White specifically, these families actually knew each other back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, right?

25:04Emmanuel Waters:But they never met. They had never met. We have an event. We bring them out to California. We have a big event. It's a couple hundred people. and they met for the first time in our event and miss laverne got up and talked about her her mother never received her flowers on earth but she received them that night and she embraced cheryl white's brother don't make me cry you see it there was not a dry eye in the building it was that type of and i get goosebumps and chills thinking about us like guys we are literally creating history. Nobody is doing this type of stuff. Now, granted, Cora can tell you had no money to throw the party.

25:45Emmanuel Waters:Bottle's going to run. We are an emerging brand, right? We don't have like this massive$100 ,000 marketing budget. Everything we're doing, we're going on like the skin and scrape of our teeth. But it's so important for us that we want people to, we would just want to honor them, you know? And it was just, there were no words to describe it. It was literally, you had to be the moment. It was just, I mean, when she just got up and spoke, I mean, everybody's in tears. I mean, there's no way to say it. Like, it was just, wow. It's like, these are the type of stories that we're doing and why I'm so passionate about it.

26:13Emmanuel Waters:So in my mind, I'm just like, this industry sucks. It's tough. Like, you know what I mean? But at the end of the day, if you have a good story and I'll let you know, like, Hey, give me some space on your shelf because you're literally bringing history onto yourself. And the same thing that we're doing now on this year. Have you ever heard of the Harlem Hellfighters?

26:31Caitlin Bricker:No, unfortunately, I'll be totally honest, I haven't. Please tell me.

26:36Emmanuel Waters:Yeah. We're the very first African-American unit to fight in World War I. You know, in that time, early 1900s, like they weren't even allowed to be in the same unit as some of the white counterparts. They actually fought for France. So before the Tuskegee Airmen, we unveiled a bottle about them and they were on the front lines for 191 days, the longest in American unit history. So we took our bourbon, we aged it for a total of 191 days and we finished it in French Pinot Noir wine barrels, which is the region of France that they fought in, right? And when we aged it and proofed it at 112, because they were the men of bronze, they're one unit fighting one enemy for two countries, thus the proof 112.

27:15Emmanuel Waters:Everything that we do, we're letting the stories create our bourbon, right? That's something we can hang our hat on. And it's really good juice as well, you know?

27:24Caitlin Bricker:I'm like, okay, so do I break my sobriety now or?

27:31Emmanuel Waters:oh my god you know so these are the type of things that we're doing and we're proud to say you know we've gotten pushed back on it right like oh maybe you guys shouldn't go down that hole and kind of pigeonhole yourselves right in a space that is you know predominantly white right you shouldn't you shouldn't be the black brand but if we don't tell our history who will i mean

27:50Caitlin Bricker:you're talking about the erasure of these people and now you're giving a literal physical object that a retailer can then put on their shelf that somebody can take home with them and spread the word like even if you're not in this for money the impact that you're making I don't think anybody's ever made me cry on camera before I am just like I'm beside myself right now the storytelling that you're able to weave into this product like you genuinely are making history right now and you're able to tell other people's story through your product this is crazy to me and it's so well done like you're not that I was expecting it not to be well done but everything from your website like I was like oh okay like my scroll isn't working right now no you're making me sit there and watch this story unfold I was like okay it's getting ahead of myself but no like everything is just so you really put true thought into this and you can tell through your product you can tell through you as founders the people that you're bringing in i mean that story that you just told about bringing these families together is so powerful i think retailers who are selling alcohol would be doing themselves a serious disservice not to have your products on the shelves absolutely your words to

29:12Emmanuel Waters:god's ears yeah we tell them all the time i'm game but look it's crowded i mean you got pretty much these little small little tiny shelves and bourbon is just i mean my god right bourbon category is massive so how do you fit that space so we always like to leave with a story but look at the end of the day we literally have to keep fighting right i think that's what we have to do and it's mentioned earlier this has been like the hardest fight personally of my life to leave something that was corporate america which i think to me um always say regardless of the input you always get the same output.

29:43Emmanuel Waters:I mean, you get paid on the first and 15, right? You know, to leave something that was pretty much, I would say, now in retrospect, I think it was easy, right? And to do this to where you literally - The safe option. For sure. It's a safe option, right? And even, you know, to your point, trying to raise capital, if you are African-American and you are a woman and you are trying to raise capital, it is dang near impossible, just to be quite honest with We get something last year,$3 billion. We got 0.002 % of VC capital that went out in America. You can see I'm big on stats. It's sad, right? It's like, holy moly, we're not getting anything.

30:20Emmanuel Waters:And that's across every industry, whether it's spirits, whether it's production, whether it is tech, AI, that is America's story. And so, but it's crazy because diversity works. Like, that is the engine that keeps America going. So why it's an attack is beyond me. But in the day, you know, we don't need your sympathy. We just want you to hear our stories and we're going to keep building regardless. Right. And it's tough.

30:44Caitlin Bricker:And maybe cut a check or two.

30:48Emmanuel Waters:We will take your check, you know, but those people out there, I mean, we've had to, you know, outside of one investor, we've literally had to bootstrap it for the last six years. This is a very capital intensive market. Right. We know nothing else. So it's funny because I'll call Corey and be like, what else is new? Right.

31:08Courtney Tucker:We're built for this, you know, in terms of just kind of that struggle piece. Right. Because we've always had to fight for, you know, what we wanted. Right. We always had to fight for a seat at the table. So so this is part of the course for us. You know, I think that's what makes us unique is because we're all along the same mindset. Right. Emmanuel spent years in corporate. I'm 25 years in. And so as you can imagine, the battles that we've gone through, you know, internally to be heard, to be seen. Right. And so this all falls within that. It's like, hey, we don't stop. We don't quit. We don't give up.

31:42Courtney Tucker:You know, and I think if we keep going, put one foot in front of the other and we'll get there. Right. And so I think that's our motto is that we just don't quit. We just keep going. And I think, you know, I always say this company is ordained, right? And it's something that, you know, is happening outside of us. Like, we're not driving this. Someone has a higher power driving what we're doing because it's so meaningful. And so when we look at situations like we had with our party and bringing those folks together, those families together, and like for the first time, like that for me was confirmation.

32:12Courtney Tucker:Hey, we're doing the right thing. You know, no matter what we're going through in terms of the struggle being seen and being heard and being visible on the mainstream, like these stories make sense. These stories are enough for us. And so once these stories hit mainstream, this sky's the limit, right? And so once the right folks find out about our brand, the sky's the limit. So we just have to keep going.

32:35Caitlin Bricker:I get the sense that both of you feel fulfilled. even if tomorrow was the last day for your business, it sounds like you have done what you wanted to do.

32:46Courtney Tucker:Absolutely. And we had this conversation, what, yes, a couple days ago. What's the end goal? What are we trying to accomplish? What's the end goal? Who are we? What's our identity? We're a storytelling brand. We're not just a spirit brand. We're a storytelling brand. And these stories that we're telling are important. You know, these are American stories, right? So not just African-American stories. These are American stories, you know? And so we take a lot of pride into telling those stories effectively and with care. Right. And so that's who we are.

33:15Caitlin Bricker:I could talk to you guys for hours. If you ever decide to publish a history book, call me because I'd be the first one placing a presale order. I'm just like I'm blown away by what you're building. I am so touched by the story at the party that is just like, wow. I said this already, but retailers would be doing themselves a disservice by not carrying your products. So if there are retailers listening right now, what do each of you have to say to them about your products and why should they carry them?

33:49Emmanuel Waters:First of all, we have great juice. Let's start there. Great product, quality premium product. At a great price. At the end of the day, if you want something different, consumers are tired of boring drinks on the shelves. At the end of the day, they are tired of stuff. doing the same old, same old. So if you want a true, great craft brand that brings history, heritage, and homage in every bottle, give us a call. That's really it. You know, California specifically, California, Hawaii, Kentucky, North Carolina, and we just opened up Alabama, Mississippi. We're not even in like all America. We're just, we're small, right?

34:23Emmanuel Waters:We're still niche. We're still learning the market. Our strategy was to go deep before we went wide, right? We want to know what works, what consumers are saying. And the feedback that we got is, They're liking it, right? And so now, you know, got to raise some money to scale, but that'll come eventually. We don't want to go too fast. You've seen what happens when you grow too fast too soon.

34:43Caitlin Bricker:Lose control.

34:44Courtney Tucker:And there's a lot of meat on the bone, too. Like Emmanuel said, we haven't really touched. Scratch the turf is of kind of where we should be. Bars, restaurants, hotels. We still have to get in those spaces as well. So, yeah, we've got a lot of room to grow.

34:56Caitlin Bricker:Well, I am super excited for you guys. I think 2026 will hopefully be your year. for everybody who's listening right now and wants to get their hands on some old hillside bourbon where can they find you online and what's your instagram handle and maybe courtney if your feed is up to date you can drop your instagram handle too yeah it's not about me you know if

35:21Courtney Tucker:you can just follow our website follow our instagram old hillside bourbon company.com is our website, O 'HillsideBourbonCO, Instagram, Facebook, and then also LinkedIn, O 'HillsideBourbonComedy.

35:33Caitlin Bricker:Thank you guys so much. This has been such a pleasure talking to you. I am, like I said, so excited for your brand. I cannot wait for more people to learn about you, what you've done, what you're doing, where you're going. I'm excited.

35:48Courtney Tucker:Thanks for having us. We appreciate you. Thank you.

35:51Caitlin Bricker:We'll talk soon.

35:54Caitlin Bricker:CPG BFFs, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast. As you may know, we're not just the top globally ranked CPG podcast. We're a community of tens of thousands of CPG founders and experts, and you should join us if you haven't already. Head to startupcpg.com to sign up. You'll get an invite to our Slack community, hear about events near you, and get access to opportunities that connect you with buyers, investors, and other brands. It's free. So what are you waiting for? I'll see you in Slack and in real life. Thanks for listening.