Long before Bobby Margarita was an actual ready-to-drink cocktail, it was unknowingly inspired by a boring night at work.

It was in April, during the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs when I had just finished taping a panel hit for the early edition of SportsCentre in Studio 6 at The Sports Network. I had an hour or two to kill before watching that night’s NHL playoff games so the Hockey Insider decided to do a little shopping at Best Buy.

I was drawn to a bright lime green box that contained a Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville Frozen Concoction Maker. My mind drifted to summer vacation that was still weeks and months of hard work away and the prospect of whipping up a batch of ice-cold margaritas appeared in a thought bubble over my head. So I made the purchase.

But it wasn’t until summer vacation, July 7, 2016, to be exact, I got around to unpacking it. I googled “best margarita recipe” and took it for a test drive. Hat tip to Martha Stewart (for the recipe) and Jimmy Buffett (for the marg mixer).

Not only did I whip up a batch of Martha’s margs with the new concoction maker — delicious, by the way — I chronicled it on Twitter. And then, just for fun, I changed my @TSNBobMcKenzie Twitter handle from Bob McKenzie to Bobby Margarita.

I wouldn’t necessarily say Bobby Margarita went viral that summer of 2016, but it most certainly caught on. A lot of people, online and in-person, started referring to me as Bobby Margarita. The more often that happened, the more I had run with it.

In the last couple of years, my son Shawn, aka The Luxury Consultant, and I mused about how cool it would be one day to actually have an actual drink called Bobby Margarita or maybe sell Bobby Margarita merchandise. But it was mostly just idle chatter.

That is, until March of 2021, when an acquaintance of Shawn’s from his college days in London, Ont. — Brock James of the Ace Beverage Group (Cottage Springs, Ace Hill) — messaged Shawn to hook him up some free beer.

Recognizing serendipity for what it is — ABG is a top producer of ready-to-drink (RTD) alcohol in Ontario — Shawn immediately messaged Brock back: “Call me.” Shawn simply asked the question: “Bobby Margarita, why not?” Brock immediately said, “let’s do this”. So we did.

It’s a father-son labour of love on one side and the expertise of Ontario’s premier RTD producers on the other. We took a catchy nickname and social media presence and turned it into a RTD margarita that launched in Alberta in December 2021, and Nova Scotia in January 2022, and Saskatchewan and Ontario in April 2022.

For anyone who knows me or Shawn for that matter, well, we’re not the silent partner types. We’ve been directly and intimately involved in every aspect of Bobby Margarita, from the all-important taste of the liquid — thou shall not carbonate a classic margarita — to the colour and design of the can — beautiful, just beautiful — and all the logos and branding.

That, in a nutshell, is how in the span of five years Bobby Margarita went from a little vacation time fun and frivolity to the best damn RTD margarita you’ll ever pour out of a can.

It’s the Great Canadian Classic Margarita, the one with the hockey stick, or should I say hockey shtick?

I hope you enjoy drinking Bobby Margarita as much as we enjoyed creating it. Because, as it says on the can, Bobby Knows Best.