To start this article, I'd like to mention that my posts will be completely unfiltered. You'll get the bad with the good and everything-in-between. It's through our individual experiences that we can learn and feel for each other. If anything is offensive or too real, you can stop reading. Now that you're ready for the real story, here we go...
The First Beginning (and the End)
It was December 2019. My first son was born and talks of something called COVID-19 swept the world. I had also just launched my first product, Blue Phoenix, and had started to get a following in the SF Bay Area.
Then, COVID reached American soil and all of my restaurant customers were suddenly shut down. I made the hard decision to forgive all debts owed to our struggling restaurant customers and shut down Blue Phoenix as well. It took me 4 years to get Blue Phoenix out there - all to be foiled by the most random, yet extremely serious pandemic in recent history.
I was devastated. A new father with no way to provide for my family.
But, I never gave up! My best quality may be my persistence. Even though my rice wine wasn't going to succeed without restaurants, the populace that was mandated to solitude were consuming alcohol more than ever. It was then that I knew I had to develop a retail product in order to survive in this new environment.
Creating a Retail Product
At the time, hard seltzers were all the buzz, with White Claw, Truly, High Noon, and many small brands vying for dominance. So, I got to work buying all of the hard seltzers I could get my hands on so I could establish myself as an expert in the field. I ranked each brand, wrote down every brand's name, flavors, abv, sugar, carbs, Untappd rank, Untappd percentile, and really got an understanding for what I liked and what the public liked (based on Untappd rankings). In total, I was able to review 15 brands (in rank order):
Go-to brands:
Good brands:
- Kirkland, Bon Viv, SOMA Seltzer, Wild Basin
OK brands:
Stay away brands:
- Maha, Nude, Corona Seltzer, Truly
I will say that White Claw and Truly have made improvements and new products since then so today I'd rank them higher.
While I was testing, I considered important things like nutrition facts, how it was made, what flavors big brands selected, how the ingredients made me feel, and how bad of a hangover I had the next day.
It was actually after all of the hangovers from drinking hard seltzers that I had the idea to create a drink with anti-hangover ingredients inside - what is now Eutopia. I was basically ruining half of my entire next-day with hangovers - not a good idea as a parent and someone who needs to be highly productive.
Note: we can't say Eutopia is anti-hangover, we have to say it focuses on "recovery and a better tomorrow", due to the FDA categorizing hangovers as a disease.
Making Hard Seltzer
I'm a very hands-on type and I believe that nothing can substitute experience. Even with Blue Phoenix, I read many books on alcohol (Moonshine (good beginner level), The Compleat Distiller, Proof: The Science of Booze, Brewing Sake, The Sake Handbook, Cheers.. To Making Rice Wine, Sweet Fermented Rice, and Medicinal Brewing), volunteered at my local craft sake brewery (Sequoia Sake - shot out to Jake!), and made my own product at our manufacturer. To make hard seltzer, I broke it into 3 projects: brewing, flavoring, and chemistry.
Brewing
Brewing hard seltzer from scratch at the time was surprisingly difficult. There was very little literature and what I could find often did not work. At the end, I had a great recipe, but I had to contact a lot of individuals and watch a lot of YouTube videos to figure it all out. I bought a ton of equipment, some of which needed fixing: fermenters, a boiler, a CO2 tank, corny kegs, a kegerator, a freezer and temp control switch (for crashing), a filter, siphons, and funnels. Then I got to work.
I ran into every issue under the sun: contamination (star san is your best friend), weak fermentation (need to balance sugars, salts, diammonium phosphate (DAP), and nutrients (fermaid)), clarification issues (biofine is awesome), pH balance, carbonation, and aeration. At the end of my experimentation I ended up with a formulation for a 5 gallon batch: Omega Yeast Lutra Kviek, 4.5 lbs corn fructose, 1 lb dried rice extract (to thin out the profile), 70g burton salts, 20g DAP, 30g Fermaid O, and biofine to clarify.
In the end, a hard seltzer base was not the way to go, but what I wanted to communicate here is that any product you want to sell, you should be able to make yourself. Whether it's nuts-and-bolts to make a satellite or yeast and sugar to make alcohol, you should know every stage of the design.
Flavoring
I had very strict requirements for how I'd flavor Eutopia. First, I wanted no added sugar or sweeteners. Anyone who's tried a paleo diet will tell you that sugars from fruits are processed by the body much differently than processed sugars. There's a reason why sugary drinks will give you a hangover - it's hard for your body to process.
Second, I wanted the best fruit flavor while minimizing caloric intake. I tried everything under the sun to get my drink to be easy on your body. I tried flavoring with dried fruit, powdered fruit, juices, purees, syrups, and juice concentrates. Dried and powdered fruit were very costly and produced a very muted flavor profile. Syrups were overly sweet and did not meet my first requirement (but worth trying). Juices, purees, and juice concentrates were all great options and a mixture of each are within Eutopia. Concentrates are the best way to go, as you'll save on expensive shipping costs. Juices are the best for bright flavors. Purees are good but inconsistent (I only go this route if the other two are not available).
Finally, I wanted no bad aftertaste. I thought that out of all of the drinks I've ever had, Blue Moon had the smoothest finish. They do a coriander and Valencia orange peel soak. I skipped the coriander and went with a dried orange peel soak, which was excellent!
Chemistry
This is something I'm still not an expert on and that should be left to experts. I don't have much to say here other than consult a drinks formulation professional. This book did give me a good baseline: Chemistry and Technology of Soft Drinks and Fruit Juices. In general, there may be some pH balancers and/ or natural preservatives added to your baseline formula.
This is where I'll discuss how I formulated Eutopia to focus on recovery and a better tomorrow. Honestly, this was super complex and I'll probably write a full article on it later. As previously mentioned, the hangovers from drinking all of these hard seltzers were killing my productivity. At the same time, there were some very effective hangover cure pills and drinks that were hitting the market. I got equally nerdy on these products as I did for the hard seltzers and tried them all out. Eutopia's formulation is based on these (painful) trials and noting common actual ingredients or vitamins in products I thought were the most successful.
What I ended up with as key ingredients are: dihydromyricetin (DHM), prickly pear, gingerol, ginseng, vitamin C, B vitamins, and antioxidants. The TTB is the governing agency for alcohol and they go off of the FDA's Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list for products allowed in alcoholic beverages. That really posed a big problem for me because DHM was the most impactful ingredient (I also spent a lot of time figuring out how to make it water soluble) and I'd still get a hangover with my seltzers. What saved the product was actually using Blue Phoenix as the base, since it's brewed just like sake and that process generates amino acids and little to no congeners. With that final change, I had my functional recipe.
Part 1 Conclusion
So, that's it as far as product development goes. Of course, Eutopia didn't end up being a hard seltzer - mostly because that alcohol is shit. It's fermented very quickly, which produces a lot of undesired flavors (wet socks aftertaste imo) and congeners. That will lead us to part 2.
Next up: The (Unfiltered) Story of Eutopia (Part 2 of 3): The Rebirth of Blue Phoenix
Then: The (Unfiltered) Story of Eutopia (Part 3 of 3): Product Launch