Journey of a Cocktail Crate

How one dissatisfied boozehound traveled the world to create the ultimate craft cocktail mixers.

Ask Alex Abbott Boyd about the best whiskey for an old-fashioned and you’ll probably get an earful. The 29-year-old founder of the Long Island City–based company Cocktail Crate has tasted enough of it to know the difference between good, bad and meh. “Bourbon and rye have so much regulation in the recipe, how they’re distilled, how they’re aged, that it all comes out tasting pretty much the same. But with Canadian whiskey, there are no rules.”

Although the idea of renegade Canadian alcohol—running wild, breaking the law—might run counter to the cherished image of our polite northerly neighbors, Boyd is insistent: “Any grains recipe, any kind of barrel, any way of aging it; you get some that taste like American ones and some that are just more delicate, flavorful, a lot more like Scotch.”

When it comes to the daiquiri, he’s equally adamant: “People have a terrible view of [it] because of slushies and New Orleans. When made right, it’s boozy as all hell, super tart and very dry. Ernest Hemingway sat in Cuba pounding them back, and he was diabetic, so that’s how you know it wasn’t too sweet.”

Over the past six years, Boyd has made it both his job and his passion to have opinions about alcohol. Pretty much all his travels these days involve sampling gins, rums and mezcals. The best of them become inspiration for his cocktail mixers, which are ethically and sustainably sourced and, maybe most importantly, easy to use at home. For that, Boyd perhaps has a selfish reason, all too familiar to anyone with gastronomic know-how: “When I went to friends’ houses or had my own dinner parties, I would see how time-consuming it was to make [a cocktail]. I spent two dinner parties where [that’s] all I did all night.”

He knew there had to be a better way. And unsurprisingly, the solution came to him on his travels: first to Egypt, then to India. 

As a consultant for Pepsi in Cairo in 2012, shortly after the first uprising that led to the Arab Spring, Boyd was growing restless. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the fact that he was essentially selling soda to people fighting for their country’s independence. “This is so disconnected from what I really care about,” he remembers thinking. “I’m going to quit, come home and start my own food business.” 

A consummate tea drinker, he made a stopover in Darjeeling to visit the organic, biodynamic tea farm that supplies Honest Tea with its raw materials. He was struck by the way the farm integrated itself with the surrounding jungle, cultivating a kind of symbiosis that strongly influenced the tea’s taste and character. “The value of ‘organic’ and ‘biodynamic’ is easy to understand abstractly, but when you feel it and see it and taste it… that had a real effect on me.” 

The next few steps, involving a successful Kickstarter campaign and space at the Organic Food Incubator on Borden Avenue, took him from unofficial dinner party bartender to the owner of a business that ships nationwide. In between, he was traveling from Union Square to the Bronx and back on a kind of frantic sourcing quest, looking for farmers’ market honey, for example, or the best juicing oranges. His first year in business, his delivery van was the subway. Now you can find Cocktail Crate mixers like the Ginger Bee or the Sriracha Margarita on the shelves at Whole Foods. 

It wouldn’t be a stretch to attribute Boyd’s success to his wanderlust, but perhaps he can blame his DNA for that: His Australian mother [Editor’s note: His mother is Jillian Abbott, who writes for Edible Queens] and Queens-born father met and fell in love in the Himalayas (“My father had been riding a bike around India”). Born in Australia, Boyd moved to Queens with his family at the age of 11 and immediately began a love affair with the borough, its diverse communities and its cuisines. This was long before dumpling-crazed foodies were taking the 7 train to Flushing to eat in mall basements, or seekers of authentic Mexican were trading tips on where to get the best tacos and tortillas. 

“Before we were even allowed to go to Manhattan, we were allowed to take the bus to Flushing. So we knew everything, from where there’s good Vietnamese food to where to get the best Indian.” 

Since then, except for those brief sojourns in Egypt, India and Mexico (a mezcal tour of Oaxaca, a week of micheladas on the beach), he’s been a Queens lifer. After several years in Astoria he settled in Long Island City, where he now lives with his wife, and where bottles of Cocktail Crate mixers are shipped out into the world. But to Boyd, living and working in Queens isn’t just about the cheap rent, the reliable access to Manhattan and the feeling of home. He simply has the strong sense that he and his company belong here: “Any good cocktail is taking ingredients from all over the world, mixing them together, and creating something better than the sum of its parts, and that’s Queens.”