How To Make Money Mixing Drinks: 5 Ways To Earn $100 Per Day From Home

Most people hear “make money mixing drinks” and picture a licensed bartender slinging cocktails at a packed bar until 2 a.m. That picture is wrong. You don’t need a bartending certificate, a mixologist degree, or even a full liquor cabinet to earn $100 a day from this niche. What you need is content, a platform, and a clear map of the five income streams that turn a hobby into a real online business.

This post walks through all five of those streams in detail, straight from the playbook Alston laid out on his channel. Whether you’re into craft beer, cocktail recipes, or just curious what difference there is between bourbon and whiskey, there’s a version of this business that fits you. Let’s get into it.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Which platform to launch your drinks channel on, and why YouTube is the fastest starting point
Five specific content formats you can film this weekend with no professional equipment
How affiliate marketing works for drink creators and which programs to join first, including Amazon and Drizly
What YouTube AdSense actually pays and exactly when you qualify to collect it
How to land a sponsorship deal with a beverage brand, even with a small audience
How to package your own drink recipes or home-brewing process into a digital product you sell for 100% profit
How to get local bars and liquor stores to comp your bottles in exchange for video mentions
A direct way to figure out which of these five paths fits your specific situation at finder.platformproof.com

First: Pick a Platform and Build Your Content Home Base

Before any of the five money-making streams can work, you need somewhere to put your content. Your options are YouTube, blogging, and podcasting, among others. Of the three, YouTube is the most beginner-friendly and gives you the fastest way to actually connect with the people who watch you. When someone subscribes to your channel they get notified every time you post, which makes it much easier to build a consistent audience than with a blog that relies almost entirely on search traffic.

Once you’ve picked your platform, you need to figure out what you’re going to say. A drinks channel has more content angles than most people realize. Here are five that Alston specifically calls out in this video, any one of which you could start filming this weekend.

Content Angle 1: Drink Recipe Walkthroughs

Find a recipe online, walk through it step by step on camera, taste it, and give your honest opinion. Rate the difficulty of putting it together, describe what it actually tastes like, and tell people whether it’s worth making at home. Viewers watching this type of video are usually either looking to recreate it themselves or just want to see someone else experience it. Both audiences will watch the whole video.

Content Angle 2: Taste Testing With Friends

Get three or four friends together, everyone 21 and older if you’re in the United States, and film a taste test of different beers, cocktails, or spirits. The reactions, the disagreements, the faces people make, all of that is naturally entertaining content. Alston notes that his wife prefers hoppy IPAs while he’s more of a Bud Light person. That kind of authentic contrast is exactly what makes taste-testing videos compelling to watch.

Content Angle 3: Comparison Videos

Pick two products, explain the differences, and give your take. Bourbon versus whiskey. Scottish whiskey versus Irish whiskey. A mass-market lager versus a craft alternative. There’s a huge audience of people who enjoy drinking but have no idea why one thing tastes different from another. You don’t need to be an expert to make these videos, you just need to be curious and willing to do a bit of research before you film.

Content Angle 4: Explainer Series on Alcohol Types

Turn comparison content into a full series. Episode 1 covers bourbon versus whiskey. Episode 2 covers gin versus vodka. Episode 3 covers different types of rum. A series format like this keeps people coming back because once they’ve watched one episode they want to see the next. It also trains YouTube’s algorithm to group your videos together and recommend them to the same audience.

Content Angle 5: Brewery and Bar Tours

Alston is based in Wisconsin and mentions Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee as an example. Breweries typically offer public tours that you can film and turn into a full video. You can cover the history of the brewery, interview the brewmaster or a staff member, show the production process, and share your honest take on the beers you taste. This type of content is harder to replicate than a recipe video, which makes it stand out in the feed and feel more authoritative.

The key point Alston makes about all five of these content angles is worth repeating: you don’t need to be a bartender, you don’t need a degree, and you don’t need to be a certified mixologist. You need to create content people will watch more than once. That’s the whole job on the content side. Now let’s talk about how that content turns into money.

Way 1: Affiliate Marketing (The Foundation of the Business)

Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service that matches what your audience is already looking for, and you earn a commission when they buy through your link. Alston calls this the easiest of the five ways to make money and describes it as the foundation everything else is built on top of.

For a drinks channel, the affiliate opportunities are everywhere. Someone watching a cocktail recipe video is probably going to want the same ingredients and tools the creator is using. That gives you a natural reason to link to the products in your video description. Some specific products Alston mentions that translate directly to affiliate opportunities:

Special mixers
Ice ball molds (the spherical ice you see in high-end cocktail bars)
Specialty glasses (rocks glasses, coupe glasses, highball glasses)
DIY beer making kits for home brewers
Various beverages and spirits

The biggest affiliate program in the world is Amazon Associates, and it pays between 4 and 10 percent commission. One thing that makes Amazon especially valuable for creators is that the commission is based on the total value of everything the customer buys in that session, not just the item you linked to. If someone clicks your link to buy a $15 cocktail shaker and then adds a $60 blender to their cart, you earn a commission on both.

Beyond Amazon, Alston specifically mentions Drizly as an example of an online liquor retailer with an affiliate program. Drizly is an alcohol delivery platform, and partnering as an affiliate means you can earn a commission every time someone orders the exact spirit you featured in a video. That’s a powerful match between content and commerce. You film a video about a specific vodka, you link to that vodka on Drizly, and you earn money every time someone watches the video and clicks through to buy.

The passive income aspect here is what makes affiliate marketing the backbone of the model. Your YouTube video stays on YouTube permanently, or for as long as the platform exists. Every day people search for “how to make a mojito” or “best bourbon for beginners” and land on your video. Every click on your affiliate link is potential income, and you’re not doing any additional work to earn it once the video is live.

Way 2: YouTube Ads (Stack Income on Top of Affiliate Revenue)

Once you’ve built up your channel, you can apply to YouTube’s Partner Program and start earning from the ads YouTube runs before and during your videos. The two requirements are 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past 12 months. When you hit both of those numbers at the same time, you can apply for monetization.

Alston is honest about the income level here. Ad revenue on its own isn’t going to replace your paycheck unless you have millions of monthly views. The ad rates in the food and beverage niche vary, but for most creators starting out, YouTube ads add a few hundred dollars per month rather than thousands. That’s not a reason to skip it. It’s a reason to treat it as income that stacks on top of your affiliate earnings rather than as the main event.

Longer videos also generate more ad impressions because YouTube can place multiple ads throughout the video, not just at the start. If you’re creating 10-to-15-minute comparison or tutorial videos, that works in your favor from an ad revenue standpoint. The good news is that the type of content that performs well for affiliate marketing, which is detailed, instructional, and specific, tends to also be the type of content that qualifies for mid-roll ads and earns more per view.

Way 3: Brand Sponsorships

A sponsorship is when a company pays you directly to mention their product in your video. You typically work out a contract in advance that covers a specific number of videos, often a package of five or six, and the brand pays a flat fee for that commitment. The mention itself is usually a short statement at the start or end of the video, something like “This video is brought to you by [brand name].”

The beverage industry is a natural fit for this model. Drinks brands, from ready-to-drink cocktail companies to craft beer labels to premium spirits makers, all need to reach audiences who are already interested in alcohol. A YouTube channel dedicated to drink mixing is exactly the audience they want. Alston notes that consistent output and a growing subscriber base are the two things that make you attractive to sponsorship deals. Brands aren’t just paying for reach, they’re paying for relevance and trust.

You don’t need a million subscribers to start landing small sponsorship deals. Many newer brands and regional companies are actively looking for mid-size creators in the 10,000 to 50,000 subscriber range because those audiences tend to be more engaged and more likely to act on recommendations than the audiences of mega-channels. The rates will be smaller, but so is the competition at that level.

Not sure which of these five income streams fits where you are right now?

Answer a few quick questions and get a clear recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Way 4: Digital Products (Keep 100% of the Sale)

With affiliate marketing and ads, you’re earning a cut of someone else’s sale or a share of ad revenue. With digital products, you keep 100% of the proceeds minus applicable taxes. That changes the math considerably.

For a drinks channel, the two most natural digital products are a drink recipe collection and a DIY home brewing guide. Here’s how each of those works in practice.

Product Option 1: A Curated Drink Recipe Collection

If you’ve spent time testing and developing your own recipes, or curating a collection of recipes that aren’t easy to find online, you can package all of that into a PDF or downloadable guide and sell it. Alston’s suggested price point is $9.99 to $19.99. At $14.99 a sale, you only need seven sales a day to hit $100. At $19.99, you need five. Those are achievable numbers once you have an audience watching your videos regularly.

The creation process happens once. You build the guide, put it on a sales page, link to it from your YouTube description, and every sale that comes in after that is pure profit from work you already did. That’s the definition of passive income in the most literal sense.

Product Option 2: A DIY Home Brewing Guide

If your channel is focused on home brewing, you can document your exact process and sell it as a step-by-step guide. Viewers who have been watching your home brewing videos and want to replicate your results are the perfect customer for this product. They already trust you, they’ve already seen the process work, and they’re motivated to buy before they start their own batch.

For hosting and selling digital products, Alston recommends ClickFunnels. Two specific reasons: everything you need to set up a sales funnel is in one place, including landing pages, email list management, and an autoresponder, and the drag-and-drop editor means you don’t need to write code or hire a developer. Alston says you can get a sales page up and running in under an hour. You link to it from your YouTube video description and let it work for you in the background.

Way 5: Local Sponsorships and Comp Deals

This fifth option is one most people overlook, but it can lower your production costs to near zero. Instead of buying all the products you feature yourself, you negotiate directly with local businesses to cover those costs in exchange for a mention in your content.

If you’re a regular customer at a local beverage depot or liquor store, you already have a relationship. Alston suggests going to a store you frequent and proposing a simple deal: they provide the product, you reference in your video that you purchased it from their location. That reference is advertising for them that would otherwise cost money. For a local store, getting a shoutout to a few thousand YouTube subscribers is genuinely valuable.

Bars are an even more interesting option. Alston gives the example of recording your videos on-location at a local bar and adding a line like “This video was filmed at Pier 51 in Chicago, Illinois.” In exchange, the bar could comp your drinks for the shoot, provide bottles for you to feature, or both. You get free product, they get visibility to your audience. That’s a deal that works for everyone involved and costs you nothing except the conversation to set it up.

The difference between this and a traditional sponsorship is scale. A brand sponsorship is a formal contract with a national company. A local comp deal is a handshake agreement with a business down the street. Both put money back in your pocket, one by paying you directly and the other by eliminating your product costs.

The Honest Drawbacks: What the Video Doesn’t Spell Out

Every income stream in this model has a timing problem. Affiliate marketing requires an audience before it pays meaningfully. You can put links in your description on day one, but if only 30 people watch the video you’re not going to hit $100 a day from those clicks. Building the channel to a point where your affiliate links generate real income takes months of consistent output.

YouTube ads are even more delayed. You can’t monetize your channel until you hit 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours simultaneously. For most new creators, that takes six to twelve months of regular posting. And even after you’re monetized, ad revenue at small subscriber counts is modest.

Sponsorships require proof of an engaged audience before most brands will talk to you. The exception is local and small-scale deals, which is exactly why Alston includes the local bar and liquor store angle. You don’t need 50,000 subscribers to walk into a liquor store you frequent and propose a simple comp arrangement.

Digital products require something to sell before they generate revenue, which means you need to build the product first. That’s a real time investment upfront, though it only happens once.

The through-line in all of this is that the content itself is the work that unlocks everything else. You can’t shortcut past consistent video output. The good news is that a drinks channel is genuinely fun to run, the content ideas are easy to come up with, and you’ll find that the process of building it teaches you things about the niche that you couldn’t have known before you started.

A Simple Roadmap for Getting Started

Create a YouTube channel specifically for drink content. Don’t add it to an existing channel with unrelated content.
Film your first five videos using the content angles above. Drink recipe walkthrough, taste test with friends, and comparison video are the three easiest to start with.
Sign up for Amazon Associates and add affiliate links to every video description from day one, even before you have significant traffic.
Research Drizly’s affiliate program and any other online liquor retailers that match your content focus.
Post consistently. The algorithm rewards channels that publish on a regular schedule. Weekly is sustainable for most people starting out.
Once you reach 500 subscribers, start reaching out to small brands and local businesses about comp or sponsorship arrangements. Don’t wait for 1,000.
When you have at least 20 videos published and a library of original recipes or a defined brewing process, build your first digital product in ClickFunnels and link to it from your most-watched video.
Apply for YouTube monetization the moment you hit 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours at the same time.

Find Your X

If you’re reading this and thinking “this makes sense but I don’t know which part to start with,” that’s exactly the problem finder.platformproof.com is built to solve. Answer a few questions about where you are right now, what skills you already have, and what kind of work you actually want to do, and get a specific recommendation for your first income stream. No generic advice, no one-size-fits-all answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be 21 years old to start a drinks channel?

In the United States, you need to be 21 to legally purchase or consume alcohol. Alston specifically notes that taste-testing videos should involve people who are 21 and older. That said, many of the income streams, like reviewing drink accessories, filming brewery tours as a non-participant, or creating content about the history of different alcohols, don’t require consuming alcohol at all. Know your local laws before you film anything involving consumption.

How long does it take to qualify for YouTube monetization?

YouTube requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past 12 months, and both thresholds need to be hit at the same time. For most creators posting one video per week in a focused niche, reaching that milestone takes roughly 6 to 12 months. Channels that post more frequently or that produce content with strong search demand can get there faster. There’s no single timeline that applies to everyone.

What equipment do I actually need to start filming drink videos?

You can start with a modern smartphone. Most phones shoot 1080p video, which is more than enough quality for YouTube. A stable surface or inexpensive tripod, decent lighting (natural light from a window works at the start), and a quiet room are the only real requirements. As your channel grows and starts generating income, you can upgrade to a dedicated camera and better lighting. Don’t let equipment be the thing that stops you from posting your first video this week.

How much can I realistically make from Amazon affiliate links on a drinks channel?

Amazon Associates pays between 4 and 10 percent commission depending on the product category, and the commission applies to the customer’s total order in that session, not just the specific item you linked to. The realistic income at smaller channel sizes is modest, typically a few dollars per video per month. At larger scale, with tens of thousands of monthly views and multiple videos each linking to several products, it can reach hundreds of dollars per month. Affiliate marketing is a long game, and the income compounds as your video library grows.

What type of drink content tends to perform best on YouTube?

Recipe videos with clear, searchable titles perform consistently well because people search for specific things. “How to make a classic Old Fashioned” or “best homemade margarita recipe” are terms people type into YouTube every day. Comparison videos also do well because they answer a question viewers actually have. Taste tests with genuine reactions tend to get strong engagement. Brewery tours and behind-the-scenes content get fewer views but attract a more loyal audience. A healthy mix of searchable recipe content and personality-driven taste tests tends to build channels faster than either approach alone.

Can I start a drinks channel without spending a lot of money on alcohol?

Yes. The local comp and sponsorship model Alston describes in this video is specifically designed to handle this. If you film at a local bar in exchange for a mention, the bar covers your product costs. If a local liquor store comps you a bottle in exchange for a reference, you’re paying nothing out of pocket. In the early days before those relationships exist, starting with affordable products like craft beers from a grocery store or inexpensive well spirits keeps costs low while you build your channel.

What’s the Drizly affiliate program and how does it work?

Drizly is an alcohol delivery platform that allows you to earn a commission when viewers click your affiliate link and place an order. The exact commission structure varies and you’d need to check the current terms directly with Drizly, since affiliate program details change. The concept works well for a drinks channel because you can link to the exact product you’re featuring in a video. Someone who just watched you make a cocktail with a specific brand of rum is already motivated to buy that rum. An affiliate link to order it directly removes every step between wanting it and getting it.

Do I need to disclose when a video is sponsored or when I use affiliate links?

Yes. The FTC requires that you clearly disclose any material connection to a product you’re promoting, including affiliate relationships and paid sponsorships. For sponsorships, a verbal mention in the video is standard. For affiliate links, adding a disclosure statement in your video description is the minimum. Many creators also add a brief verbal note in the video itself. Proper disclosure protects your audience’s trust, which is what makes your recommendations worth anything in the first place. When your audience trusts your opinion, they click your links. Losing that trust costs far more than any single deal is worth.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make Money Online Mixing Drinks: 5 Ways To Make Money At Home Mixing Drinks,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/_HdEX3uT0yI
Amazon Associates, Commission Income Statement: 4 to 10 percent commission based on total customer purchase value
YouTube Partner Program eligibility requirements: 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months
ClickFunnels, drag-and-drop sales funnel builder referenced for digital product hosting