Other
Jacob Briars
Global Advocacy Director
- Discipline
- Other
i. Biography
Career Arc
Bar advocacy is strongest when it has been tested in service, ownership, training, and brand work. Early in his career, Jacob Briars worked across that full spread: bartender, bar owner, Brand Ambassador, brand owner, and head of training and education at Bacardi in New York. Each post carries a different discipline. Bartending trains timing, restraint, guest reading, and the physical cadence of service. Ownership adds stock, standards, staff, atmosphere, and the pressure of making the room work every night. Brand work moves the same questions outward into spirits, cocktails, taste, language, and persuasion. Advocacy, in this register, is not separate from the bar; it is built from the mechanics of drinks culture. Briars’s reputation came through roles where ideas had to function with bartenders, guests, menus, late nights, and crowded rooms. The move from service to education to brand-building gave him fluency in both the appeal of the category and the operational realities that decide whether a message holds. Global drinks education now asks for the same instincts at larger scale. As Global Advocacy Director of Bacardi Company, Briars carries floor experience, entrepreneurial practice, and ambassadorial reach into a wider trade setting. The work remains tied to the exchange between person, drink, and story, only with a larger audience and more moving parts.
Where They Are Now
Global advocacy for a spirits house sits between bars, brands, education, and the people who transmit drinks culture in practice. Briars serves as Global Advocacy Director — Bacardi in New York City, and also holds the title of Global Advocacy Director at Bacardi Company. The wording reflects the scope: based in New York, built for global movement, and concerned with how spirits travel through rooms, markets, and trade networks. Non-traditional marketing, influencer advocacy, and networking are part of that platform for growth. In bar terms, those tools only matter when they connect with the places drinks are ordered, made, discussed, photographed, defended, and remembered. Briars puts the method plainly: "Our brands are built in bars, not boardrooms." The line keeps the emphasis on bartenders, guests, tasting, recommendation, and memory rather than on abstract positioning. Public advocacy depends on attention, and attention has to be earned in the room. Colleagues and audiences describe Briars as engaging, charismatic, and funny; they also describe him as a skilfully shrewd operator with a conscientious work ethic and a brain like a sponge. That combination matters in a field where ease in front of a crowd has to be backed by recall, discipline, and category knowledge. Cocktail communication often turns on context: what a drink is, where it sits culturally, and which detail makes it land. Briars is described as a passionate and creative builder of global brands, an engaging speaker, with a gift for connecting spirits and cocktails to their broader culture and context, and a mine of mostly useless information about cocktails. In a seminar or across a bar, that sort of knowledge can make a familiar serve more legible and give the trade something to carry forward.
Signature
A signature in this part of the trade can be a drink, a talking point, a visual cue, or a way of placing a brand in culture. Jacob Briars is associated with the Daiquiri, Martini, and Queena Fina. The grouping points to classic structure, recognizable form, and a willingness to work beyond the expected frame. The same profile also includes blue drinks, non-traditional marketing, and work as an engaging speaker. The Daiquiri and Martini are clear tests because they leave little cover for weak balance or loose intent. Queena Fina adds the function of a named serve as a point of contact: something that can carry a conversation as well as fill a glass. Blue drinks sit in the same broader understanding of cocktail culture as visual, social, pleasure-driven, and still dependent on craft control. Taken together, the signature is not only a list of serves. In Briars’s work, the through-line is movement between the glass and the surrounding context: the drink, the room, the brand, the audience, and the cultural meaning that gives a cocktail traction.
Peer Recognition
Recognition in brand advocacy tends to mark work that can translate spirits and cocktails for both trade and public audiences. Jacob's honors include Best International Brand Ambassador (2013), Golden Spirit award (2010), and Brand Ambassador/Mixologist of the Year. The span fits a career built across education, storytelling, strategy, and working bar culture. In a trade that depends on memory, repetition, and momentum, those honors mark sustained skill in making drinks and brands worth discussing, serving, and returning to.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Jacob
What does Jacob Briars currently do?
Jacob Briars is Global Advocacy Director.
Where did Jacob Briars work before?
Earlier in their career, Jacob Briars worked at Bacardi.
What recognition has Jacob Briars received?
Best International Brand Ambassador (2013).
