Dana Dufek
Plain Spoke is the brainchild of Merchant and Lucille beverage director Tom Dufek.
As someone who spends much of his time behind a bar, mixing drinks is the last thing Tom Dufek wants to do when he’s at home or at a party. “It’s not just because I do it all day — making cocktails without the proper setup is just kind of a pain,” says Dufek, who serves as beverage director for Merchant and Lucille.
The inconvenience of recreating cocktails outside of a bar setting combined with his disappointment in the selection of ready-to-drink options available in liquor stores inspired Dufek to create his own solution — Plain Spoke Cocktails, a line of high quality, all-natural craft cocktails that comes in a can. Earlier this month, Dufek debuted his first product, a Moscow mule, which is now available at Trixie’s Liquor Store on East Washington Avenue and will soon be at other stores around Madison.
“We wanted to start with a cocktail that everybody knows,” Dufek says. The next product in the pipeline is a bourbon smash, and eventually Plain Spoke will offer up to six varieties. “We want to stick with the classics for our core cocktails and then branch out,” Dufek says, adding that eventually he hopes to introduce seasonal cocktails or collaborations with breweries or bitters companies. “The options are limitless.”
It took Dufek nearly two years to perfect his idea. He started experimenting at home, cooking up vats of ginger syrup and tossing everything in a SodaStream. He stashed tiny bottles all over the house to see how the cocktail would hold up over time. Even with Dufek’s extensive knowledge, the undertaking proved a challenge. “It’s not as easy as just throwing some stuff in a can and calling it a day,” he says. “We had a ton of false starts.”
The biggest problem was oxidation — a chemical reaction that breaks down molecules and turns fruit brown. Dufek solved the problem by thinking like a brewer. “Oxygen is the worst thing that can happen to beer, and it’s the worst thing that can happen to fresh juice,” he says. “So I started looking at the brewing process — what if we could replicate that, but for a cocktail?”
The cocktail ingredients go into a brite tank, a piece of brewing equipment used for carbonating and storing beer. The tank is filled with CO2 to purge any remaining oxygen from the environment. Once the cocktail is carbonated, it goes into a can-filling machine and gets another dose of CO2 before sealing. Dufek has partnered with Two Tall Distilling in Sun Prairie for facility space. “It’s funny because we’re basically making distilled products, with brewing equipment, in a distillery,” Dufek says.
Dufek hopes Plain Spoke will help fill a need in the beverage industry. When conducting market research, he found that demand in the ready-to-drink segment was “continuously nosing up,” but the quality of the products available remained flat. “In stores, your only options are [products like] Jose Cuervo margarita mix and BuzzBallz,” he says, referring to the line of pre-mixed cocktails with names like Strawberry Rum Job and Choc Tease. “There’s an obvious disconnect when you look at the quality and creativity of cocktails coming out of bars and what’s available when you go to the store.”
