Acquired Tastes.
Pairing Monkey Shoulder Old Fashioneds with a Mitch Orr menu, on the idea that the best things take a bit of growing into.
Monkey Shoulder needed a way to reintroduce itself to a confident, taste-curious millennial audience without sliding into the standard whisky-brand playbook of heritage, oak panelling and serious men in hats. The cocktail in question, the Old Fashioned, has been around long enough to be both intimidating and overdone, depending on who you ask.
Taste doesn't always land straight away. The drinks people end up loving most are usually the ones they had to grow into. Australians know this about themselves: 57% say they've developed a taste for things they once didn't get, 47% would call their palate sophisticated, and 87% agree not everything needs to please everyone, yet 82% still default to the familiar.
We built Acquired Tastes: a one-night dining experience pairing a multi-course Mitch Orr menu with Old Fashioned variations made from Monkey Shoulder, each cocktail tuned to its course. Held upstairs at Vitelli's in Redfern, framed as a confident reintroduction to the cocktail rather than a celebration of its history. The brand wasn't asking the audience to like it. It was inviting the audience that already had the palate.
Bookings opened on the 1st of May and sold out in two hours. The campaign run is still in market, so the rest of the numbers are to come, but the early read is that there's an audience for confident drinks that ask something of the drinker.