Slings & Arrows Consulting

We love creating great cocktail experiences.

We’ve designed dozens of bars, tasting rooms and ready-to-drink products around the idea that a great drink shouldn’t be hard to find.

Interested in chatting?

Services

We are bar and spirits industry veterans who have worked with a variety of clients over the last decade. We've opened and operated award-winning bars, revamped restaurant cocktail programs and designed ready-to-drink products for the retail market.

We're creative, quirky, and not afraid to serve a Martini on an ice-cube now and then.

Our areas of focus are:

Concept Creation & Development
Start-Up Planning
Bar Equipment & Seating Layouts
Operational Strategy
Recipe & Menu Creation
Effective Batching Programs

A great drinks program doesn’t have to be complicated, but it’s far from simple to create one.

We’ve spent thousands of hours obsessing over details like the best ergonomic design of a bartender station, or the most efficient way to keep track of changes in pour costs.

About Us

We’re passionate about details, and we believe that truly great bars are the result of carefully considering many small decisions and details together to create something new and different.

Chall Gray – Partner

S&A’s creative lead, Chall tends to organize most vacations around going to out of the way bars, and is a fanatic about architecture, cocktails, design and lots and lots of other things.

Jay Sanders – Partner

A nationally known touring musician, as well as tech entrepreneur, Jay manages finances and operations, and loves far-flung adventures in places like the Himalayas or Iceland.

We also have talented mixologists, chefs, beverage scientists, designers, architects and builders that we work with on a project-by-project basis, depending on the client and project needs.

Other Projects

Hamlet & Ghost Saratoga Springs, NY (2016)

The first craft cocktail bar in Saratoga Springs, Hamlet & Ghost has received rave reviews from opening and elevated the food and drink scene in Saratoga to a new level.

Long Branch Distillery Long Branch, NJ (2018)

We were tasked by LBD with creating an efficient and ergonomic backbar design within a small footprint for their distillery tasting room.

Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack Asheville, NC / Greenville, SC (2020)

For Rocky’s we created a simple, delicious and profitable cocktail program incorporating an efficient pre-batch system, which was introduced across all three Rocky’s locations.

ELDR Asheville, NC (2022)

ELDR asked us to design their opening cocktail & spirits lists and create a functional backbar layout designed to accommodate a daytime coffee concept and evening cocktail service.

Shagri-La Carolina Beach, NC (2022)

We helped develop Shagri-La’s retro island bar concept from top to bottom, working on the project through opening and operation.

Asheville Proper Asheville, NC (2022)

The premiere steakhouse in downtown Asheville needed an efficient, pre-batched cocktail list with a classic feel. Cocktail revenues increased over 20% after our revamp.

Two Trees Distilling Fletcher, NC (2022)

Two Trees needed a series of signature cocktail recipes for their line of flavored whiskies. These recipes needed to work for both customer-facing advertising and on-premise service.

Little D’s Asheville, NC (2023)

This upscale neighborhood eatery from the Asheville Proper team wanted a strong cocktail program to complement their chef-driven menu.

Other Projects:

The Cocktail Bar: Notes for an Owner & Operator Book (2018)

Written by Chall Gray, this concise overview of bar ownership was lauded by industry great Dale DeGroff as “a much needed book.”

Ophelia's Cocktail Companion Software (2018)

We launched our in-house recipe software in 2018 and use it in all of our bars, as do several of our consulting clients. Ophelia shows our bartenders the recipe to every cocktail we’ve ever made, and automatically recalculates what our team should charge for them based on liquor prices. If you’d like to license Ophelia for use in your drop us a line.

The Buckminster Cocktail Co. Asheville, NC (2023)

Our ready-to-drink cocktail brand launched in 2023, with an Old Fashioned in 750ml bottles. Next we’ll release a canned version of our Hello Friday cocktail, with several more releases in the pipeline. We’re also designing a series of kegged cocktails for the music venue Rabbit Rabbit.

Our work has received coverage in many outlets, including:

New York Times, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Wall St. Journal, Imbibe Magazine, Garden & Gun, Departures, Serious Eats, Men’s Journal, USA Today, Punch, Whiskey Advocate, Southern Living, Monocle, and many others.