As North Carolina continues to struggle with bringing in liquor and distributing it to the state’s more than 100 different ABC Boards, bartenders are losing the battle of keeping their bars in stock. Even spending hours driving from ABC Store to ABC Store and burning through long-collected stocks of rare releases hasn’t kept the beverage menus at the city’s best bars intact throughout the shortage. While some issues are national — Jack Daniels is facing a shortage due to a lack of bottles — no other states are seeing what are in North Carolina.

At Dot Dot Dot, owner Stefan Huebner had to change his cocktail menu nearly weekly due to a spirit becoming out of stock — despite spending traveling 180 to 200 miles per month, about 14 hours, between ABC Stores to fill his liquor orders as best as possible. Even then, he often comes up concerningly short. To be able to better adjust to missing liquors, Huebner is removing mentions of brand names from the cocktail menu. Instead, they will simply list base spirits as made with bourbon or reposado tequila, for example. 

Leah & Louise mixologist Justin Hazelton is taking similar steps, switching from brand names to “aged rum” or . While replacing a whiskey is somewhat straightforward, when it comes to replacing ingredients needed for a unique flavor profile, things get more complicated — and more time consuming.

“To stay creative and be innovative, we have to go deeper into prep and deeper into making syrups and shrubs to keep the flavors ongoing,” Hazelton says. “It’s not something we can just pull off of a shelf and get that flavor we’re looking for, we have to create that flavor from scratch.” 

Doing extra prep to achieve flavor profiles available to bartenders in other states is something that North Carolina bartenders are familiar with, given the difficulty of obtaining more obscure products. However, given the staffing shortages most restaurants are facing, the added prep time for missing ingredients is another unfortunate stressor.

While Hazelton doesn’t believe removing brand names from his menu will harm the reputation of his beverage program’s reputation, Huebner isn’t sure the same applies for Dot Dot Dot. His back bar, known for having one of the best whiskey collections in Charlotte, is slowly becoming depleted of the whiskeys that earned his beverage program such respect. 

Huebner’s stockpile of allocated whiskeys, carefully and lovingly collected over years, is rapidly shrinking. 

“When everybody walks in and goes, ‘Why don’t you have Buffalo Trace, Blanton’s, Eagle Rare?’ that was one thing because that’s always been allocated for the last four years, five years,” Huebner says. “Now, it’s just like, ‘Hey, why don’t you have Woodford Reserve? Why don’t you have Four Roses Single Barrel?’ stuff that isn’t even allocated.” 

To maintain his bar’s reputation for a deep whiskey list, Huebner says he may have to shift focus to antique spirits, which follow a different process through the ABC thanks to the efforts of The Crunkleton owner Gary Crunkleton. 

While overhauling the ABC system is what most bartenders are desperately hoping for following its failures during the pandemic, doing so would require significant legislative effort. Huebner says one easy fix would be to allow restaurants and bars to purchase liquor from anywhere in the state. Currently, they are only allowed to purchase liquor from an ABC Store in their own county. 

“If they could even open it up at the state level, I would just take one day a week and go travel and buy shit from other counties,” Huebner says. “I would have to do a lot of work and it would be a day of my life to do it, but I would be able to probably get back the selection I had. It’s scary now, because all the stuff I sandbagged for three years, it’s just disappearing. I’m burning through it.”

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