Building SUNGOD, Episode 1: Why We Started From Scratch

Ben sat down at HQ and talked through where the idea came from in one take, so that is the first episode of Building SUNGOD. The video is right here, and under it is the short version for anyone who would rather read it than watch it.

Where the idea came from

We look at drinking a little differently now, especially as we get older. Seltzers drive us nuts, they give you heartburn. Tequila and whiskey are for later in the evening, you cannot be counting those at noon. And we love the social side of a drink, the boat, the backyard, the round after golf, so quitting was never the plan. The downsides of what is on the shelf were just too much. So we took a step back and asked a pretty basic question, how do you make the whole experience of drinking better?

The study that set the direction

Ben found a study Huberman covered on his podcast, and it changed how we thought about the problem. Everyone assumes sugary drinks cause the worst hangovers. If sugar were the problem, ethanol mixed into orange juice, about as sugary as a drink gets, would sit at the top of the list, and in the research it sits at the bottom. What actually tracks with how bad the morning is are congeners, the things other than ethanol that fermentation and aging leave behind, tannins, acetone, a long list of chemicals nobody prints on a label. From the most to the fewest it goes brandy, red wine, bourbon, dark rum, whiskey. We wrote the longer version up in the congener guide.

So if you are drinking ethanol to get the buzz anyway, why not package it with the best things you possibly can, and take out the stuff that hurts at the point of sip? That one sentence is more or less the company.

Three building blocks

None of this is complicated, which is the part we like about it. The first block is the spirit, as close to a congener-free neutral grain spirit as we can get, which is why ours is distilled to 96 percent (the science of that is here). The second is real ingredients, pressed juice and pressed fruit, organic, gluten free, nothing hidden. The third is water, Palomar Mountain spring water, which is most of what is in the can. Three parts, easy to test, and then you get something out there and iterate as fast as you can.

The label thing bugs us too. Ben holds one up in the video: total sugars, two grams, includes two grams added sugars. Is that four grams or two? Nobody knows what is in a bottle of rum either, and the industry gets away with it because nobody asks. Our bar is that the can just says what is in it. What Is a Hardwater goes deeper on why that matters for the whole category, not just us.

That is the mission, make Hardwater a category people recognize, a drink that keeps the social part of drinking and leaves a lot less of the next morning in it. Episode 1 ends there, with the three blocks on the table and nothing tested yet. The next one is the kitchen, where the first batch of what became Minted Sol gets made, and the flavor story covers how that turned out. The longer origin story has the sailing trip that started all of this.