Meet the Alabama guys who've put Bushwacker in a bottle

For Alabama entrepreneurs Carter Echols and Michael Smith, a trip to the beach isn’t complete without mixing up a batch of Bushwackers. That creamy, boozy concoction is as synonymous with a beach vacation as the rhythmic lullaby of crashing waves and the fiery hues of a spectacular sunset. But, oh, what a mess they are to make.“I was down on the coast in Apalachicola with my brothers,” Smith recalls one particular Bushwacker misadventure. “We were making some for the wives, and it got all over the kitchen everywhere.”So, Echols and Smith figured, there had to be easier way. Why couldn’t they just buy Bushwacker in a bottle, already mixed and ready to pour? No fuss, no mess. Their creative wheels started turning, and the two old friends began putting together a plan. Along the Florida Panhandle, Bushwackers have been around since a previous owner of Pensacola’s Sandshaker Lounge tasted the frozen cocktail on a trip to the U. S. Virgin Islands and came back and started serving them at the Sandshaker in 1975. They became an immediate hit. These days, you can get a Bushwacker just about anywhere you go on the Gulf Coast, from Live Bait in Orange Beach and Pirate’s Cove in Josephine to The Hangout in Gulf Shores and, of course, the Flora-Bama Lounge in Perdido Key.(In 2010, then-President Barack Obama sipped on a Bushwacker on a surprise visit to Tacky Jacks in Orange Beach while in the area to inspect the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.)But after doing a little research, Echols and Smith couldn’t find anyone who had bottled the recipe.“We found out that many people have had the idea to put Bushwacker in a bottle over the last 30 years, for the same reason that we did,” Smith says.“It’s four or five different ingredients depending on which recipe you’re using, and you can’t always find them. We were like, ‘This needs to be in a bottle.’ So, that spurred the idea.“And we found out that everywhere we go, lots of people have had the same idea,” Smith adds. “We basically feel like that we were just hard-headed enough to keep doing it. We just kept banging our heads against the wall until we got it right.”Echols and Smith, who are a year apart, have been close friends since they grew up together in the small town of Linden, the county seat of Marengo County in Alabama’s Black Belt. They played football, baseball and basketball together in high school and fished in Echols’ grandfather’s pond. After they went off to college -- Echols to Auburn and Smith first to West Alabama and then to Troy -- Echols came back to Linden to work in his parents’ grocery store for about 20 years while Smith built swimming pools, developed websites, and later partnered in a live-streaming business. Echols had moved to Sarasota, Fla., and Smith was splitting his time between Marengo County and Warner Robins, Ga., when they hatched their idea to put Bushwacker in a bottle in the summer of 2019. (Since launching their company, Smith has also moved to Sarasota. All data is taken from the source: http://al.com Article Link: https://www.al.com/life/2021/07/meet-... #smith #newsmusic #newsworldtoday #newstodayabc #newstodaymsnbc #kingworldnews #