Quirky ideas are worthwhile if they get customers through the door of your pub

Our regular trade remains strong, but new business is increasingly more difficult to come by and a straight forward ad in the newspaper and a barbecue on a sunny Sunday afternoon just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

(To be fair, we’ve had precious few sunny Sundays this year…)

Even financial incentives seem to be struggling to gain us advantage over our competitors. We’ve always had a strong price point on our two main drinking products, but if we run a promotion on a product (within the confines of the Mandatory Code, of course) it seems that all we end up doing is selling the same product to the same people for less money.

And a two-dine-for-£10 promotion in the local papers barely washed its face at its last outing.

More successful, however, has been my wife’s endeavours to get different local authors to come and give talks about their works at our pub. Branded as an ‘Authors & Cupcakes’ evening, which sounds far too feminine for a boozy beer-lead establishment, Ali has regularly been filling the pub with people eager to listen to authors of all types of fiction speak while they consume glasses of wine and gorge themselves on cupcakes.

People who wouldn’t otherwise have used the pub. And, to be fair, people who might not necessarily be interested in another, shall we say, quirky product that has caught my attention this week.

G-Spirit have launched a range of spirits inspired by premium vodkas that had been filtered over diamonds. Rather than using jewellery, however, the company have decided to use something far more… exotic.

According to the founders, two former barmen, every drop of the German company’s whisky, rum or vodka has been filtered over the, ahem, breasts of a beautiful lady.

Three different ladies have been chosen, including Alexa, Playboy’s Playmate of the Year 2012, and the initial run is limited to just 5’000 bottles of each product. The bottling process is also quite time consuming, presumably because each lady needs to shower. Quite a lot.

The products aren’t exactly cheap, either, at £103 per 50cl bottle. Niche market then? Well, possibly, but niche seems to be working at the moment where everything else isn’t.

But then, making a whisky that has to be poured over the body of a famous model can’t exactly come cheap. And, according to G-Spirit’s Q&A page, every single drop is poured over said mammaries, all, they assure us, under the watchful eye of medical personnel and the German health department…

Quite.

Still, I’ll be sure to keep you abreast of the situation if I choose to stock some. I’ve just got to work out how much I’d charge for each nip…