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The Bloody Mary cocktail and I had a tempestuous, six-month liaison three decades or so ago, then we parted amicably.

So it was with some trepidation that I bellied up to the bar at Stoney’s restaurant on L Street in Northwest Washington last week for a brief encounter with my spicy old friend.

This week’s column is about Greg David, the exuberant and ever-curious co-founder and chief mixologist of George’s Bloody Mary Mix — a bottled recipe named for his late dad.

David told me to meet him at Stoney’s, where I could sample his creation, spiked with a shot of Ketel One vodka.

David is on pace to sell approximately 144,000 bottles of his 32-ounce Bloody Mary mix this year. That will bring in a gross revenue of $504,000. After bottling and ingredients (cost of goods sold), he expects a gross profit of $177,120. After marketing, travel, promotions, insurance, accounting, Web site and advertising, he should make about $124,000 before taxes.

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The mix, which has no alcohol in it, is carried in almost 2,000 bars, hotels, liquor stores and supermarkets in the greater Washington region, and starting next month, it will be in 168 Giant groceries.

He expects to triple revenue next year to $1.7 million.

David, a career bartender and proud of it, exudes enthusiasm and drive. The native Marylander and former star high school wrestler said he has the curiosity gene.

It surfaced back when the youngest of five children would roam his father’s Upper Marlboro restaurant, chatting up the regulars.

“That’s how I got to be where I am. How did they do that? How did he get from here to there?” David said. “Don’t pretend to be smart and act like you know everything. Ask the question. That is the value added. You are only dumb if you don’t ask the question. ”

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Did he say Value Added?

He was not a natural athlete. But he worked at it and got a wresting scholarship to college before getting injured. He knows that you get only a couple of breaks in life. You had better put in a lot of mat time and go for the pin when you see it.

“You have to be dedicated,” said David, who is a student of success stories like that of the late Sidney Frank, who became a billionaire through his marketing of Grey Goose vodka and Jägermeister.

After college at then-Towson State University and the University of Maryland, where he studied nutrition, the beefy former wrestler first found work as a bouncer.

One day, he walked into Middleton Tavern on the Annapolis waterfront as a young 20-something and asked for a job. He became a waiter.

When one of the regular bartenders didn’t show up one day, David got his job. He learned his craft from the other bartenders while attending college.

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“That’s where everything got rolling,” he said of his Middleton days.

David became known for his Bloody Marys, which he had carefully researched from other bartenders in the area and polled his guests about what they liked and didn’t like. The Bloodies were so good that he would mix a batch on the weekend to last the entire week.

When his older brother and his sister-in-law opened Globe restaurant in an old theater on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 2006, David became bar manager and brought his Bloody Mary recipe with him.

There, he learned exactly what to pay for alcohol, beer and other ingredients so that the bar could make money on its drinks.

That knowledge would become critical when he later was computing exactly how much to charge bars for his Bloody Mary mix.

Within a few months of arriving in Berlin, Md., he entered and won a Bloody Mary contest in nearby Ocean City. People started paying attention. David started making gallon jugs for friends and strangers, charging only for ingredients. He started making it for fishermen heading out on their boats for the day.

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His girlfriend, Theda, a hair stylist, and others encouraged him to bottle and sell his Bloody Mary mix. By 2011, Theda and her twin sister had worked up a simple business plan.

“It was, ‘We need Greg and his Bloody Mary recipe,’” David said, jokingly.

The two sisters and David scraped together $9,000 from their tip money to launch the project. Each owns a one-third share of the company.

Sensing that he was on to something, David insisted that they take their time, holding down their regular jobs and pacing themselves.

“We weren’t in a hurry to make this happen,” he said. “I wanted to do this right.”

For six months, David painstakingly turned the recipe he knew by instinct into a written one.

After Globe would close on weekends, David and his girlfriend would stay up late into the night, making batch after batch of mix, carefully measuring horseradish, tomato juice, lemon, spices, Worcestershire sauce. Writing it down. Sampling. Throwing out the batch and starting again.

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When he had the perfect recipe, he found a bottler in Virginia Beach. Then a label-printer. He consulted with the liquor and beer distributors with whom he was acquainted from being a bar manager to figure out his next steps.

The economics were crucial. David knew from his experience exactly what price point to meet so fellow bar managers could make money by using the cocktail mix. He knew if the bar could get eight drinks out of each bottle, they could meet their profit margin.

“I knew intimately what the cost was, what the percentages need to be, and what the price was to charge at the bar. You want your bar costs to be less than 20 percent of your sale price. So if you sell a $1 drink, your profit needs to be 80 cents.”

David has priced George’s Bloody Mary Mix so that a bar will come in under the 20 percent threshold.

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“I knew anything under $4.65, you were golden,” he said. His bottles wholesale for $4.45.

By summer 2013, he had his first batch of 2,500 bottles. He took samples to five liquor stores and five restaurants he knew.

The start-up’s break came at a big alcohol trade show that year in Ocean City. He got the attention of Reliable Churchill, a large Maryland distributor of wine and spirits.

In 2013, David’s company sold 2,110 cases of product at 12 bottles per case. It grossed $89,000 before taxes and interest.

In 2014, George’s Bloody Mary Mix grossed $186,000 in pretax earnings on 4,430 cases.

From there, he knew that to make real money, it was time to think big.

“My whole goal was to get wide distribution,” he said. “I didn’t want to drive this stuff around.”

To keep up with the pace, David switched to a large-scale Baltimore bottler. With the increase in scale and reduction in unit costs, he estimates his future pretax profit at about $1 per bottle.

So how was my George’s Bloody Mary last week at Stoney’s?

Good enough to know I needed to stop at one.

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