Mobile’s Great Day Latte has received City Council approval for an on- and off-premise beer and wine license, and the coffee shop is planning to use it in a specific direction.
What’s Coming
The shop will expand its menu with drinks built on wine-based ingredients, including its own take on espresso martini-inspired drinks, coffee-plus-wine creations and other specialty offerings.
The distinction matters. A beer and wine license does not permit spirits, so a traditional espresso martini — which requires vodka — is off the table. What a wine-based license allows is a category of drinks built from fortified and grape-based products that can approximate the same flavors within the license’s limits.
That is a genuine constraint, and building a menu around it takes more thought than pouring from a liquor bottle.
The Existing Menu
Great Day Latte currently offers regular coffee, espresso and lattes, frappés, herbal tea, specialty drinks, children’s offerings and more.
The shop is on South Conception Street in Mobile.
Why Coffee Shops Add Alcohol
The economics are straightforward. A coffee shop does most of its business before noon and goes quiet by mid-afternoon, leaving a building, a staff and a lease idle for the most valuable hours of the evening.
A beer and wine license converts that dead time into a second daypart without requiring a second concept. The same room, the same equipment and largely the same staff serve a different customer after 4 p.m.
It is one of the more common moves in independent coffee retail, and in a downtown with evening foot traffic it tends to work.
On- and Off-Premise
The license approved is an on/off-premise beer and wine license, meaning the business may both serve drinks for consumption at the shop and sell sealed product for customers to take with them.