Why We Started a Mobile Bar

Written By Nicole Culver

In the last few weeks, we have been receiving DM’s asking why we started a mobile bar catering business. It is always really exciting to receive these messages because 1. people are taking the time to reach out and 2. someone out there views us as a business!! You might be questioning my #2 but stick with me here. When you spend 2 years dreaming of a concept that only lives in your head, there is this constant nagging question of whether the idea will ever make it to reality. Then you take all of the scary steps to bring the idea into existence, only to realize that no one knows it now exists. After what seems like forever, all of the money and literally every second of your time; one day you wake up and realize that people are aware of your business and seem somewhat interested. So now that I have clarified why it is so freaking cool that our business really exists in the world and that other people are aware of this, I should probably jump into the “why we started a mobile bar”. In the case of Allure & Alchemy, we could really summarize the “why” with a quote by John Lennin.

“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” - John Lennon

Except, in our case, it was a business happens when you are busy making other plans. Let’s take a walk back in time and examine the 2018 version of Herb & Alchemy (later to be named Allure & Alchemy…under legal duress). Our “other” plans involved a brick & mortar location in the suburbs, incredible craft cocktails, lite bites, and a laid-back vibe in a live plant covered modern industrial setting. The lease location was found, the financials pulled and the business plan was written….poorly but written nonetheless. I can still remember thinking this is it! and planning how my resignation to my corporate job of 5 years would go. But life happened and as you can probably guess……we never opened a plant covered industrial modern brick & mortar. Looking back now, we are so thankful it didn’t work out because COV!D would have irreparably crushed our business and dreams.

“I vividly remember curling up on the worn lazy boy recliner at my dad’s tiny
Seal Beach, California studio and unloading my frustration and despair around the process
of getting Herb & Alchemy into a lease space.”

So how did we go from preparing to be the owners of a stationary bar with a $$ monthly lease to a completely mobile event-based business out of a tin can on wheels? It can be traced back to two moments in time. The first was late August 2019, feeling completely miserable and stuck while searching for lease spaces. I vividly remember curling up on the worn lazy boy recliner at my dad’s tiny Seal Beach, California studio and unloading my frustration and despair around the process of getting Herb & Alchemy into a lease space. I remember saying out loud that I wish I could just pop up and create amazing cocktails without all of the red tape and bullsh!t. It was at that moment I opened my iphone notes app and wrote a reminder note to research the legality of a mobile cocktail business.

Over the next few days, I researched about mobile beverage catering and realized that private events were the way to take mixology mobile without having a brick & mortar and liquor license. Here is event #2. After my California trip, I came home and excitedly told Ryan, my husband, about the potential new direction for Herb & Alchemy. He reminded me of how we had hired mobile “mixologists” for our 2017 wedding and it had been an awful & disappointing experience. Event #2! It hit me like a freight train! I instantly was transported back to our very rainy wedding day and recalled stating “we could do so much better than this” after discovering that our lead mixologist was wearing a black hoodie and somehow had horribly messed up a whiskey mule… it’s literally whiskey, lime juice and ginger beer…..like how does one hooded individual mess that up so badly?

“…little did we know that we were about to enter a chapter of our lives
where we would long for days where we only had to work 18 hours.”

By September 2019, I had found a beat up little 1958 Gem trailer and somehow convinced my husband to take a 3 day drive from Texas to Arizona to pick it up…..all while we both were going through our busiest season at work. Ryan drove 18-HOUR DAYS and made it back in record time… little did we know that we were about to enter a chapter of our lives where we would long for days where we only had to work 18 hours. The next few months can be marked by very late nights of working on trailer repairs and retrofits, hunting for discount bar equipment, researching laws and realizing that the mobile bar community was very small and underrepresented in almost every way.

By late December, the trailer was completed and we were ready to launch. I could write about all of the tenets that I created for my business or all of the ways I oversimplified the actually very complex operations behind mobile mixology… but I will save that for another blog post… probably titled “Very Hard Lessons Learned”. If you made it this far, thank you for hanging in there and overlooking all of the run-ons and deficiency of punctuation. At one point in time, I wanted to be a writer. This was before I took my first collegiate creative writing course and had to work incredibly hard to pass with a B-. Please accept the sincere apology of this Economics & Political Science Grad gone bartender.

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