East Hampton Native Launches New Tequila Brand Montaukila

Under Montauk’s Americana-iconic “Lunch,” Simon Cascante, 28, often spends his days and evenings as assistant general manager of the Lobster Roll restaurant. But in his time-off, he’s constructed what will perhaps be a future icon for the hamlet: a tequila label.

Montaukila — neatly combining the words Montauk and tequila — hit the shelves on the East End in May 2019. Today, it can be found at liquor stores across the island.

And with local bearings, the brand is no wanna-be hamptonite: Mr. Cascante who graduated from East Hampton High School in 2009, runs almost every aspect of the business, sans the bottling of the tequila, from East Hampton.

“This is as local as it gets,” said Mr. Cascante, who noted that he runs the only tequila brand local to the East End.

Inspiration for the company actually came from Mr. Cascante’s background in graphic design. He had made mock logos for brands and decided that Montaukila’s had the potential to make-it-big.

“I had the logo in my computer for a long time,” he said. “We do have a very different aesthetic than other tequilas.”

The bottle is fit with a beachy-colored label and Native American arrowhead logo — a homage to the Montaukett. Mr. Cascante said he set-out to design a brand that’s about the “people that are enjoying it.”

And people seem to be doing just that — enjoying it. Sales are strong, and the brand actually sold out, Mr. Cascante said.

“This is an untapped potential,” he added.

But Mr. Cascante thinks some locals are, understandably, skeptical of the true roots of a liquor brand using Montauk’s name. “There is a little bit of apprehension with the local community,” he said.

He differentiated the brand from those more “celebrity oriented” — those like JaJa, owned in part by The Chainsmokers, and Casamigos, which is owned by George Clooney and two partners.

And when Montaukila was blindtested against that up-island rival — Casamigos is based in Manhasset — Mr. Cascante said his brand was the unanimous favorite.

Like Casamigos, Montaukila is bottled in Jalisco, Mexico. Mr. Cascante developed the flavor in Jalisco at the Casa Maestri distillery, where his product is now bottled.

“From manufacturing to the point where the product arrives at the warehouse at Boening, I have my hands on the process,” he said. He also runs his own customs operations, different from other brands that often source cross-border transit matters to other companies.

Boening Brothers, based on Long Island, is his distributor of choice — the company distributes Montauk Brewing Company’s products, a brand whose success Mr. Cascante hopes to emulate.

And with no experience in the liquor industry, starting his own brand had its share of hiccups along the road. Mr. Cascante described particular frustration in finding lawyers to help in the process.

“A lot of these lawyers didn’t want to play ball with me,” he said, explaining that they preferred to work with a brand that was bottled in the United States, as opposed to working with two federal governments if the brand was bottled in Mexico.

“I pride myself in execution, so I really just accelerated everything,” Mr. Cascante said, explaining the brand’s rapid take-off from trademarking in September 2018 to sales in May 2019.

In the future, Mr. Cascante hopes to enhance a partnership with Oceanic Global, an ocean-conservation non-profit, as a way to orient his brand toward the seaside town he calls home and after-which he named Montaukila.