Whynatte founder

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. By Taylor Arnold. Jesse Altman and Andy Wessels never set out to start a beverage company, but that is exactly what they did. In the last five years, Whynatte Latte has become a staple in over restaurants and bars all across Atlanta.

So what made this beverage such a local phenomenon? Altman and Wessels credit good old-fashioned word-of-mouth to their success. So Jesse bought the Whynatte domain and began posting pictures of friends with the drink. Friends told more friends, and pretty soon Whynatte cocktail parties were popping up on college campuses all over the country.

Then Rolling Stone heard about this underground phenomenon and featured it in the November issue. By , they released their own read-to-drink latte on the market. Prior to even launching a product, the Whynatte was written up in Rolling Stone Magazine. Eventually, it got to the point where they were making gallons of latte in their home, and delivering it to bars in Atlanta for use as a mixer.

They eventually hit a critical mass, where they could no longer make enough latte to keep up with demand, and started to explore the possibility of creating their own coffee beverage.

That was two years ago. Consumers snatch up the Whynatte Latte, and both on-premise and off-premise distribution quickly expands.

The Whynatte Latte is now carried in over locations in Atlanta. When we first started playing with latte recipes, we didn't know what would taste good, so we went back to classic recipes like the Irish Coffee. It had to be stuff that was quick and easy for the bartender. It's a speakeasy-type place, no sign, deep in Chinatown.

The drink was a combo of vodka, cucumber, mint, lime, vanilla, and what they called "local Chinatown aphrodisiacs. As far as Whynatte drinks go, my favorite drink at the moment is the Lightning Bolt, which is Whynatte with RumChata and a splash of vanilla vodka, mixed together in a tall glass over ice. It tastes kind of like the milk you'd have left at the end of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

This is one of those drinks that people try, and you just see them look at it like, "What the F was in that? The Cheetah : Naked chicks. Also, the Cheetah sells more Whynatte than any other bar in town. Rumple I'm going to get eviscerated for saying this! On a hot afternoon, give me the watermelon margarita at Fox Brothers, which is fantastic.

Otherwise, really anywhere if I'm watching a good local band perform — could be Smith's, Vinyl, Star Bar, Terminal West, or any other local music venue. Our first order of business is to launch Whynatte in a few new cities before the end of the year.

We've used Atlanta as something of a laboratory, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and we intend to take everything we've learned here and apply it to new markets. At the same time, we're working on expanding distribution at grocery, convenience, and package stores in Atlanta. There's an undeniable link between people drinking Whynatte in the bars as a mixer, and then eventually purchasing it from retail to drink on its own without booze.