🥃 He's a spirited storyteller

Good morning! Today is Saturday, March 28, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

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by Ashley Fahey

Modern, visionary, fresh and approachable — or classic, timeless, bold and balanced?

In our social media-driven era, where “brand” and “personality” have come to the forefront, I’ve spent some time reflecting on The Ledger’s brand and how that applies to a cocktail.

Telling a story through a cocktail may seem unusual, but that’s something Mark Frietch does as The Craftsman Cocktail, a business he started in Charlotte a little more than a year ago, as a side hustle to his bartending gig at The Conspiracy in uptown.

I was curious to know how Frietch’s process worked in practice, so The Ledger hired him to create a signature cocktail for us. (Chalk it up to a marketing expense.)

The Ledger strives to do fresh, innovative reporting and storytelling that has nuance and context — stuff that can get left out in an age of story counts, page view metrics and short attention spans.

One cocktail crafted by Frietch managed to tell that narrative in a surprising way. The drink sounded like it would be one thing — it was described as tropical, with tiki bitters and aged rum as the base, so “sugary” immediately came to mind — but it had a beginning, middle and end that played out smoothly and unexpectedly. You wanted to take your time with it and soak up its subtleties. Like a well-reported story, you might say.

Another had a more classic feel, with walnut and chocolate flavors: smooth, bold and rich. It was a little in your face, but you knew you had something good right away.

Frietch, who worked in corporate recruitment for 20 years, was laid off after the pandemic. He decided to do what many did post-2020: a hard pivot into something completely different.

For him, that was craft cocktails — not exactly something he had professional experience in.

Behind the counter at The Conspiracy, a cocktail bar at the bottom of The Vue, and in his spare time, Frietch began to experiment. He likes to riff on what he calls the “mother cocktails,” like the mother sauces in French cooking, to create unexpected flavors and combinations.

He would enter his creations into cocktail competitions, picking contests that would challenge him to think differently about what a cocktail could be. For example, in the fall of 2024, he participated in a Day of the Dead spirit competition, in which he was charged with creating a tequila cocktail that paired with a food truck taco.

At another competition — the first that he won, in fact — he combined blanco and reposado tequilas, Amaro Montenegro’s bittersweet orange flavor, tiki bitters, and a pineapple cilantro shrub.

There’s a research-and-development aspect to making craft cocktails: a really good one has to have flavors and a balance that doesn’t overwhelm the drink. This particular shrub — cocktail parlance for a syrup made from fruit, sugar and vinegar — took several iterations to get right.

“I had a gram scale, I had a little beaker that had a metal spinner in it, things like that. And I'm sitting there trying to figure out, OK, what's the ratio of the vinegar to the sugar water that I need?” he said.

But creating a balanced, innovative, tasty cocktail is only the start. Judges are looking for a compelling story, too, he said. Frietch would practice the art of storytelling when presenting his creations at competitions.

That’s when the idea of The Cocktail Craftsman started to percolate: Could he create specialty cocktails that tell a unique story for clients — as a business?

The Cocktail Craftsman is not a bartending service, Frietch is quick to note, but purely the R&D and storycrafting of creating a distinct cocktail that reflects, for example, a couple’s love story on their wedding day, or a company’s brand at a convention or trade show.

Frietch told me about one couple he worked with: the groom was from Memphis, Tenn., and the bride from the South Carolina Lowcountry. They wanted to blend Memphis barbecue influence with Gullah flavors into a cocktail to serve at their wedding, so the cocktail he created included tobacco bitters (a nod to the barbecue influence) and citrus and ginger notes to reflect bright Gullah cuisine. 

“Those are the types of stories that get me excited,” he said. “Anybody can have a him and a her cocktail, and it’s an espresso martini and an old fashioned, but nobody's going to remember that.”

(For the record, I asked Frietch what he thinks of the espresso martini. “It’s had its run,” he said.)

Frietch said he loves to upend expectations. For a North Carolina liquor brand, he infused crab paste with the company’s rum, combining that with a syrup he created with Old Bay spice blend and honey, and celery seed bitters.

“People were like, oh my God, crab in a cocktail?” he said. “It was a really, really interesting concept and I think that's what's starting to happen with bartending trends … how can you get creative with a lot of different flavors?”

To craft The Ledger’s signature cocktail, Frietch in a call asked me a series of questions, including how I would describe The Ledger as a person in three words (I went with forward-looking, experienced or seasoned, and “old school meets new school” — that's more than three words, but I have a reputation of exceeding my word count.)

He also asked what impression we’d want the first few sips of the cocktail to have on the drinker. I gave the cliche journalist answer: I want it to tell a story. Some of my favorite cocktails feel like a three-act play, I told Frietch, because there’s a different experience from the first sip to it settling on the palate to the aftertaste. I also encouraged him to lean into an “Oh, that’s intriguing” vibe.

We then got into the nuts and bolts (I had to try to set aside my own preferences here) to determine whether it should be a slow sipper versus an easy drinker, spirit preference and taste direction (i.e., fruity, citrusy, refreshing, botanical, spice), as well as any diet and allergy restrictions.

In an official work outing, The Ledger team tried two concepts Frietch came up with. The first, a tropical riff on the Vieux Carre cocktail, contained Bacardi Ocho, apple brandy, Lillet Blanc, Domaine de Canton (a ginger liqueur), and aromatic and tiki bitters. The second, a variation of an old fashioned, also had Bacardi Ocho as its base, paired with Averna, a cinnamon-demerara syrup, and chocolate and black walnut bitters.

Although both were enjoyed by most of the team, the first was the winner, for its nuance, surprise and warmth. Ledger executive editor Tony Mecia was still thinking about the cocktail hours later — the kind of impact we hope our stories leave on our readers.

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Ashley Fahey is The Charlotte Ledger’s managing editor. Reach her at [email protected].

On Saturdays, The Ledger sifts through the local news of the week and links to the top articles — even if they appeared somewhere else. We’ll help you get caught up. That’s what Saturdays are for.

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