Latest / Ready To Drink Podcast / Same Family, Different Drink: Rick Duchin of HopXL on Hops, Cannabis and the Future of Beer

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Same Family, Different Drink: Rick Duchin of HopXL on Hops, Cannabis and the Future of Beer · Ready To Drink Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: My name is uh Rick Deachin.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the president, CEO, and founder of HopXL.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh water soluble.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: We make water-soluble solutions for a lot of different industries.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Ha and hops was the one that I found the most intriguing based on what everybody does in the beer industry.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: So excellent.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: How long?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you context to also uh so 22 years in in the beer industry and the alcohol industry as a whole.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh started when I was 19 years old in the wholesale world, working breakage, work driver, everything like that.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then now in the past few years, I've started this business 18 years ago, uh, helping brands navigate the wholesale world.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's evolved into market development strategy, public relations, and everything like that.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm look I'm uh looking forward to shooting the shit with you on uh on the beer industry, especially in the hops.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And also I'm not gonna, I am wearing shorts, so I'm not gonna blind anybody, but I do have a giant hop tattoo where the hop lines are going up my leg.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I will give you that further context as well that I'm all in.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the irony as well is just to give you also is this show is called Ready to Drink because I'm three and a half years sober.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I did this as a joke uh because I I don't drink, but I love the industry and I still work in it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just kind of one of those things as a a little uh juxtaposition, or I guess that's not the way you're a double double entangle for everything.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh people have found that it's uh me being an ambassador for the industry and still and not being an actual consumer.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: It allows the people to be really relaxed with me because nobody's selling me anything.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And any stories that I'm putting out there is genuinely because I care about the people in the stories.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I don't drink either.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: So there you go.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the industry, I supply flavor and aroma, but I, you know, I could drink the flavor and aroma.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I do a lot of it through uh drinking my own hop water or uh teach I'm teaching people how to make hater because boiling hops to make hop water is not hottel.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's you know, yeah, in theory it is, but most people that want to drink hop water don't want bitterness.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you start boiling a product like that and get bitterness, then you're well, you're missing the fermentation process to make a craft beer and it's just kind of going partway, but it doesn't give you that refreshing flavor of hops, which I actually love.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I found some interesting things along the way, which is really weird with hops, is because I started doing some testing on myself.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: I have another business I'm working on, and I started looking at the health benefit benefits of hops, and I traced it in my body, and I found that a really clean hop, hop water actually lowers my uh blood sugar by 30 to 40 points every time I drink it.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that whole idea that beer's good for you, yeah, if you take out the alcohol, beer is good for you.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely helps you in your day-to-day life of managing this human body that I inherited.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's interesting because we also I work in the full adult beverage category now.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So in the portfolio during the day job, when we're not doing the podcast, we represent uh hemp and hemp brands and uh infused brands as well as in the um functional beverage space, non-alcoholic.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting you brought that up because I'm learning a lot more, obviously, every year about uh how hemp and beverages and the water-soluble emulsions in hemp can affect the body and and work through things.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not gonna make any health claims on here or anything like that, but I am gonna speak my own, is yeah, and and to know to to know also that on the non-alcoholic beer side, it sometimes is not psychosomatic that you get that relaxation from a non-alcoholic beer.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, a hoppy one, uh, let me let me say that, like one that actually is doing it truly in the right way and extracting the alcohol.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm very fascinated that you brought that up.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's an amazing find for us because you know, we're a science-based background and we do a lot of stuff based on, you know, what is the best.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're not so, you know, like just our company.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: My philosophy is you're never finished.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: The time you're finished is when you're dead.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you're in a company and you're going forward and you're trying to do something and sell something, you constantly have to look at that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can't stop.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: You have to try to figure out what's the next, what's the next.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're gonna find something out there that's the best water soluble that changes the way that the water soluble interacts with the beer because it is changing.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and you have to you you can't hold back that kind of science.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so we constantly are are doing experiments.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: It it costs a lot of money.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane how much it costs to do experiments.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think I don't think you can rest knowing that there's a possibility of something better out there.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's just us as a company.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: When did you uh start hops XL?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably uh five years now.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: We've been playing with hops, but I've been in the water soluble in the cannabis industry for uh, I don't know, 35 years.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you went you went the reverse of some of the okay, some of the other people I talked to.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I started in the cannabis industry as a grower and then did a lot of growing uh in California and you know went through all the raids and all the other crap and the people shooting at you and junk like that.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I kept moving myself away.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: I went into a I got arrested for it uh for growing in indoors.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was the first major arrest doing hydroponics back in '86 in right a couple blocks away from the police department because I thought it was the best closest.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: If I get really super close, they wouldn't know.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that was that was the beginning of me and and playing around.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: I stopped growing at that.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I did some small grows in my you know backyard, made everything look like bushes.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And my neighbors would say, uh, wow, you know, you have a skunk in your yard, it's constantly, it feels like the you know, he's letting go.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, I can't find it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I just kind of buried it like that.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: But all my hedges were all trimmed like square and and everything looked good.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of what I did.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I got tired of smoking.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I just got tired of it.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like you're putting in a system into your lungs, and so I started going down this path.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do I make a drink out of this that I can drink?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like like if I can take the cannabis and I can get the oil, which I I knew how to do that, but I couldn't figure out how you go from the cannabis oil to a drink and then and then get it so that you can, I can just drink it, drop it in, and put it in my pocket.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody would know what it is, wherever I am.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I can stay high all throughout and and do that.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that took that took me down a rabbit hole.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: It just it was uh the first couple of times I did some a lot of different types of um water soluble, and I didn't like the taste to it, or I didn't like the bitterness, or it fell out of it fell out of solution, and it was a great learning curve for me and the industry.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: I played in the industry, so I finally came up with what we're currently using, and uh, I can't really talk about a lot of stuff because it's a proprietary.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it if you don't know about water soluble, just go on AI, ask the different ways, and you'll get a whole list of all the different ways to make water soluble.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're all there, none of them are missing.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's just the cleanest place that if you want to start down that path, go do that, go have fun and go decide what you can do.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: When you're doing it for a business, it's a different animal, and you have to be, you have to have your your way of doing it the same way every single time so you get the same outcome no matter what.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we landed.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it was fun playing along the way.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and, you know, like I remember sitting down and uh with some, you know, attorneys and stuff, and we were eating dinner, and I order water, they order cocktails.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: I take my drops, drop it in there, and they're like, What are you doing?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm saying I'm making a cannabis drink.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, at a restaurant, yeah.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, No way.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Can I put something in my alcohol?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not allowing you to do that.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh they pushed their drinks away and they all got water, and they started to see what that felt like.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then it was an amazing, it was an amazing attribute to what you can do with water-soluble.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's an instant delivery system.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: It it lives in water, doesn't live in the alcohol, doesn't live in there.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it can't live in the alcohol.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's not possible for a water-soluble product to join an alcohol.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a misnomer that everybody in the industry thinks.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people in the industry that are doing these extracts, they come out with an oil and they try to push the oil into the drink.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with it, 98% of that beer is water.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: So why are you trying to push it in the alcohol when you should be pushing it into the water for pure flavor and aroma?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make sense.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: The two different ways.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the the first part of it, people going down the oil path, is that's all they know.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: They make an oil, they get that oil.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's the oil they want to use.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Most people using extracts have always just used the oil.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: They dump it into water and they say this isn't work that well.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no kidding.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oil water.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, like you can do that experiment.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone at home, go take some olive oil, take a glass of water, put a little bit of alcohol in it, dump in, you know, the oil and see where it goes.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: It'll float on the top every single time.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you'll get that oily taste in your mouth, and you do all these different things trying to get rid of it.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can't.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't work.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can do whatever you want, you can mix it forever, you can do whatever you want to do.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as you stop, guess what?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: It comes out, it separates.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Or you get stuck at a certain ratio.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is the biggest problem that like Chinese brewers or Taiwanese brewers have.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: They don't like strong American 11% alcohol.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: They they just don't.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how do they get the flavor and aroma and they can't build it high enough to get the craft part of it right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they get stuck in between because they're trying to shove the flavor and aroma in the alcohol, and the alcohol can't hold any more oil.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Just can't.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where you're getting this kind of fight on a consistent basis with low alcohol craft beers.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do it?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can't.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can't get the flavor and aroma in it.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care how you dry hop, I don't care what you actually are doing, it's not possible.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're in water and you're adding flavor and aroma, and you're capable of putting it in there, all of a sudden you're unlimited.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can have as much flavor as you want.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can have you can have a a triple IPA with zero bitterness by putting flavor and aroma in your water, it'll overpower the bitterness part of the beer.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do that any other way.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's not possible.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: What year, what year did you start experimenting with we'll go we'll go back to the ops in a second, but how far, how long when you were in in the cannabis and and beverage infusion aspect?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: What year was did you start doing that?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I started in probably 19, I want to say right around 1990, I think, is when I've been smoking since I was 13, and and uh I'm not a smoker.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's like every time you light something and you roll a joint and you put it in, well, you are a smoker.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're just using a different tobacco, right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's no and I think at one time I started coughing from it or something like that.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: And every time I did it, I was coughing.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was also an athlete.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just felt that it was the wrong approach for me to keep smoking and try to be the best I could possibly be in the sports that I I was doing.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I needed to find another way.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm and I don't like sugar.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: So now I'm in a big, now I'm in an issue, right?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's easy to take cannabis, shove it into sugar, make a gummy, take it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: The only problem with gummies is if you put it with an oil, you got the same issue.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know what how much that one gummy has inside of it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care who you are or what you can, you can't mix it that well such that each gummy is the exact same thing, unless you use water soluble.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you use a water-soluble cannabis and you push it in as part of the mixture, you know that every gummy is this villa graph.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Which I haven't found another way of doing that.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: So well, and I I think it's it's I think it's it's one of those things where we don't think about it, but it's like found it's foundational science that we we kind of we want to we want to think we can do it differently.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I think I always go back to this uh this one bachelor party one time, 2004, 2005, and you know, I I used to make gummies or brownies and all kinds of stuff, but I did it just in the kitchen and the wrong way, you know what I mean?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember one time made a whole batch of brownies for a bachelor party.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: We get in the limo, and of course the bachelor ends up eating the golden brownie, which nobody nobody knew which one was gonna be the golden brownie.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, he also was not a a regular cannabis user.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was about an hour or so we're in the limo, and he's like, my legs don't work, I can't get up.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those things that I always love to laugh.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's a doctor now, and I'm not gonna give his name or anybody like that to embarrass him, but um, he's a highly respected individual today, but I'll never forget that time where you got the golden brownies.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's uh everybody's been there.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I want everybody to also understand when you buy things that are right, when you buy, you know, non-synthetic stuff and you really get not necessarily in that you get in there and you buy the right stuff, you have the right experience.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And again, cannabis is not for everybody, but I do encourage people if you had a bad brownie in the 90s or early 2000s or a bad gummy because your buddy made it and you just stayed away from cannabis, the world's changed and technology's changed a little bit.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I invite you back to for another round.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, plus everybody that's never yeah, I like saying this to older people because they're always scared of taking cannabis.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: They they don't know what it's gonna feel like and all that kind of stuff.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very easy.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you're too high, take some pepper in your hand in your hand and just eat it, and you'll come off of it so fast it's not funny.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: It'll change the whole story.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: The other way of doing it is getting some CBD, because CBD and THC, they don't like each other, they're like mortal enemies.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so what happens is you can take a CBD, water soluble drops, put it in some water, you want to come down, just drink that, and your THC goes, What the heck are you doing to me?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it starts to change, and you get you go more towards the CBD side than you do the THC side.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that just helps people that are old and are just wanting to come into it to play around without feeling like I'm gonna get too high and I'll die.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I like to tell people like, yeah, I'm glad you brought up the peppercorns because it's one of those things where I try, I always joke around people.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I'm not trying to have you try to go down on a hero's dose of silos sideman with me.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, there's an easy exit strategy in your cabinet.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, people don't talk about it.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that every dispensary on the planet should sell pep peppercorns.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: They should actually sell it and have it there.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and people go, Why do you have peppercorn here?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's to help people like that that got too high.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like Rick, I think I think that's our next business.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: We got to start talking, man.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: We could just we could just buy regular recording peppercorns, we'll relabel them, and we'll sell them to every dispensary over the country, every big shopping dispensary.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll close the instant save.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: We can call it something like instant save or something like that, where you know, you actually save yourself from going down the rabbit hole.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just think that uh people get too scared and they haven't figured out that we already figured this out.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like I used to sit with my buddies and you know, it it was uh it was an area where everybody was trying to do the strongest cannabis they can possibly do.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: It it it was not 30 or any of that crap because I I don't believe that's real.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's manipulation of COAs that's not really telling you the true story.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: But needless to say, we'd sit there and smoke.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like you said earlier, my legs aren't working, my hands aren't working, I can't get up.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, I was making CBD water soluble solutions.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: I have it in my pocket, I'd squirt it into my mouth, and you know, while they're all stuck on the couch, I'd be good and get up and walk out, and they're all like, How in the hell did he do that?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like Iron Man over there.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Little do they know I had a trick up my sleeve.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: I still haven't told some of my friends that that's what I did, but they probably will find out now because they all follow me and they'll f see this and they'll go, that asshole.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe he did that.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not still, I'm still not telling my friends, and it's their fault for not following the show.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So perfectly.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Rick, you you were you're unique, uh, and and you and I are unique because we we we service, we we straddle the line of a couple different categories in the adult beverage world.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Talk a little bit about the last couple years and like your view as a service provider, ingredients provider, and and and services, what has been going on and kind of where you see things going.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I know some of it is obviously with November in the hemp world and everything with hops and all that.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like, talk a little bit about too.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think certain people get really are getting very uneasy about different things in cannabis and hemp and things like that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a natural evolution of the education.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and and whether it's the lawmakers or the public at large to normalize certain things.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, just for anybody that doesn't know, as well, hops and cannabis look similar because they are in the world together and reason why they they have similar attributes and similar, you know, effects and things like that.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's dance a little bit in the category as a whole and how all these things are running their lanes right now.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so I started in you know, illegal market cannabis, which is really weird to me because you know, just like hops, you can find hops throughout our our country uh growing wild.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can find cannabis growing wild, you can find ham growing wild.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's all out there if you know what to look for.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can definitely find hops varieties that people have never noticed.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I get calls a lot of the time from uh people up in the Sierra and other areas.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: I live in California.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I'll go.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I always go.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I I always like to see what they found and you know what it is.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've seen a few people get fine hops and they're excited they found them.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: They were growing wild in the perfect location where they had was next to a river, the whole everything was perfect, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they'll they don't know what to do with it, and they'll broadcast that they found it, somebody will come and steal it, uh steal the the hop variety and go off for a can of beer.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's kind of at a certain level, there's some players in the industry that shouldn't be doing that.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: You should you should award the people that brought that up.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: So in the cannabis world, we almost got rid of hemp.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: We were probably probably within a if we would have could continue down the journey of that, trying to grow the best THC, we are also on the journey of getting rid of hemp from our society completely.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was a scary time, and a few people in our industry saved that.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: They they had seeds, they had all the stuff they they created to come back.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: The idea between behind cannabis, there's a lot of people that wanted it legal.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I used to make, I think the old timers will will know, I used to make five to six thousand dollars per pound growing it.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was a specialty art.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you had to know what the hell you were doing.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like it's an easy thing to grow.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, it's not an easy thing to grow at all.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: But today, there's enough information that anybody can put cannabis on their patio, grow their own plant, and and do that.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's a simple thing.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: So through this whole thing, for me, it's been good and it's been bad.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say that.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I love the idea of medicine.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I've always felt I didn't know when I first started growing how powerful it was as a medicine.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a lot of stuff happening in our um around where people were dying from diseases and In especially in San Francisco area.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I was growing, and I decided to help, so I would donate cannabis a lot.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I really saw the medicine part of it, watching these people be able to eat when they weren't able to before.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: I watched people get better.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: I watched some people die.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely changed my perspective on growing for recreational.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: The problem that we all had was if we would have stayed in the medical, we would be a lot farther than we are currently.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened was the government, in its almighty wisdom, decided to get involved.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as they got involved, it they created this system where they made all the money and the growers lost all their money.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: They became the licensor.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And right from the beginning, people that had been growing for years could not get a license.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yet an attorney that doesn't even know how to grow a plant would get a license.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we all were like, what the hell?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you wanted to change it to be legal, everybody that was growing at that moment, you could see it, you could walk through and say, if you're growing, we'll give you a license.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you wanted to be legal and open to the public, that's what you would have done.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think the great the black market for cannabis is as strong as it ever was.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's it's definitely coming back.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Just no money in it anymore.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, you know, like if you can go up to Northern California and buy a pound for under$1,000, what why?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why deal with all of the growing hassles and, you know, the all the different parts of being illegal when that's what the cost of it is.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go toward down the market of where we are heading now or drinks, it's still the government that's in the way of supplying medicine on a continuous basis for individuals out there.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Pharmaceutical companies.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: They're a bigger, they're a bigger industry.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: They want to control it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: They want to break it all down into a single component.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And cannabis has been around a lot longer than these pharmaceutical companies, and it's been helping people a lot longer than the pharmaceutical companies have been helping people.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually think that getting it legal changed our course.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we're not, it's not really the government that's telling us what to do.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's the pharmaceutical companies that are trying to limit what you can do and how you can do it.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And our laws are constantly changing because of that.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not really looking at the whole bigger picture.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to lose any money to a grower or whatever.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some great growers out there that do some great products, but they can't get out there.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: So then they put this middle person in, which is, you know, these stores for you to go buy it, and you can have Elf's license.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, now they restrict what they can sell, and that changes on a consistent basis.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if you really get into it to be in that industry, how I see it is you can't print a label until the day that you are deciding what you want to put out on the market because the law changes that fast.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you and as soon as you put that label on it, that's that can.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as that that's that can, you're in trouble.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you get into this place where you're already legal, even though you started when you were legal.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it changes too rapidly for any industry to survive.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I I bow to anybody in the cannabis industry that is finding a route through the hell.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm still, and I'm gonna say this, I'm waiting for a class action lawsuit against the government for the way they are handling the cannabis because you're not allowed to do any deductions, yet the government takes money from you.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's taxation without representation.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the starting of the United States.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we started.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we're back at it just because we have a great product, does a great thing, and helps a lot of people.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the FDA, I'm not really gonna get start on that because we're public right now, but I will say one thing.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really FDA for the people, it's FA FDA for the pharmaceutical industry.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and it were if the FDA was really for the people, we'd have a different way of looking at everything.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I can go into flowers and you know, like, you know, bread, other different products that are actually harmful for us because the FD FDA approves what how they process.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and they process things that other countries would never accept our food.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like you have to really look at what you're eating because it's scary what the FDA allows people to put in food and beverage.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna stop that realm.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I said enough about that.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna I started with making a drink.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what happened?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm making drinks for myself all the time, and then one of my friends was getting married, and he asked me, he says, Hey, Rick, I had 3,000 people coming to your to my wedding.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, What?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, let's not even talk about drinks.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: How why would you have that many people show up at the festival of love?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's not that's not even a wedding.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy, right?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So uh he's he said, Hey, I want a a beverage for all my friends, and my wife wants a beverage for all her friends.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we're big cannabis people, and you know, it's like everybody should be high at our wedding.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, All right.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I sat back.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Whether they want to or not, we're doing it.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I decided that I make this drink, but I made it all out of hip.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I I wanted it not to be as strong.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted it to be that they can have multiple drinks and not everybody laying down on the ground enjoying the sun passing over their heads or something like that.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I made all these drinks and I went there.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of beverages to serve.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I that was a brain thing for me, too.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you make this many beverages?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: I did all this mixture and I made them a big batch out of a, you know, a friend of mine that had a brewery, and we mixed it in there.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Probably the first illegal mixture of a cannabis-based drink in a brewery tank.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's that long ago.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we made it.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: I made like 35-gallon kegs because I didn't know how much to make.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so each one was labeled.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: We went through it all.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end of it, I looked at myself and I was like, why am I not putting this on the market?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I created a company, it was called Soul in You, the Soul, your soul, and in you is a beverage for your soul.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the whole thing was it was a perfect name for a drink, and I put it out there.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that, you know, how do you get drinks out there?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: I went to farmers markets, I put it out there.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: I got a lot of people drinking it.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they would drink cases of it.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was insane how much I was getting distributed.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then I said, Well, I don't know, how do you get this on the real, how do you hand it out?
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh I had a few friends that were distributors.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: I went to the went to them, I said, Do you think this is a possibility?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, hmm, I don't know.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: We can find out if stores are interested, and then see, you know, what we have to do.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had meetings with like Safeway up in northern the northwest, had them with a few different ones, and they drank these drinks.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: I made a lemonade and I made a hibiscus drink, and I made a root beer with all the sugars and all the other stuff.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was a really good brewed root beer.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was unbelievable.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: We presented these drinks, Sol and you.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was like before the wave of all the drinks that are out there now.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we handed it to them.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: They drank it, they all loved it.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Every single one that we went to, everybody was like, this is a great drink.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so they went away.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they went through the legal ramifications of having a beverage like this that was out there.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: There were no rules really at that time with hemp and all that kind of stuff.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Really, the farm bill opened up hemp.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: I should have been able to put it out there just by the rules.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: California would not give me a I needed California to give me a letter that it was okay for me to make this.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't do it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they said it was, but they wouldn't give me an actual letter that said it.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, trying to convince me, oh, they told me I could do this.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the letter?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the Safeway guy said that the best way.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: He sat down in front of me, he says, Rick, I'd love to bring these in.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you can produce it because I know who you are.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that you can produce it, and it's not that it's not gonna be the same every single time.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: The problem I have is the federal government.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: If I bring this in, it's 72 containers of product that we're gonna bring into our stores just on the West Coast.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: If the government came the next day and said, you can't sell that, what do I do with it?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: What I want to do with it is give it back to you.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Can you take it back?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, No.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: I would be bankrupt.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, that's what I thought.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad that you're an honest person because most people would say, Yeah, we'll take it back, but they never would take it back, right?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you're stuck with this drink that, you know, we bought.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, that's the reason I can't buy it.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, it's not that it's not a great drink and it belongs on our shelves and it would help consumers.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: We like it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I want to get a case of of it from you for my personal use.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we just can't do it.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, you know, the the threat of the federal government on top of it makes it hard.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: So even today, drinks change so drastically, so often, I got out of it.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was just like, why?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why play this game on a consistent basis with the government?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not worth it.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not worth it the way that they take all the money and you take all the risk.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the it's not worth it.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I really do applaud the the people that are staying with it.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think that most of the little mom and pops are gone.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's really the big, you know, big companies that are able to withstand it, and they might donate enough money to the federal government that they get their rights to do what they do.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: And but whatever.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: The idea is to get these beverages into people's hands so people can drink them and feel good and they don't have to drink alcohol.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a great thing.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think there should be choices.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, those people that are staying with it, spending the money to get it in the market and marketing it and handing people great drinks, I think it's awesome.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the beverage category is a gigantic, gigantic place.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably misunderstood by 90% of the population of how big it is and what it does.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: But all I can say is walk into a convenience store, the number one thing you see in that store is drinks.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: The rest of it are all there for you to drink more.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not there for you to drink less.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I realize that that there's a reason why everything's salty and sweet and everything like that.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, it is.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's the plane to pull that frick door.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: So part of this whole thing with me making drinks and all that kind of stuff, I was playing around with, I got a box of hops from my friend.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's the brewer.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, I asked him, I said, You think I can like make this stuff water soluble?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Yeah, I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: You, you, you know, here's a box.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like a couple years old.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's in my refrigerator.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked at him like, how much do you have in there?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Don't ask me.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's always too much.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Hops and boxes, just by the way that we have to buy them.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's a ridiculous scenario.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I took it back to my lab because I was gonna, you know, mix it with cannabis or mix it with some, and I wanted this hop flavor.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I thought it would mix really well because hops is a sister to cannabis, and I'm sure they want to hold hands again.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I went down this path and I took a box and I ran it through our hydrocarbon extraction machine, and we kind of looked at it and we were like, wow, it was coming out.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: It felt like we were in a brewery.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, seriously, the whole place was just it smelled like a brewery, like all the hop smell was just inundating the room.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we got this golden, beautiful looking oil that, you know, matched anything that I've gotten out of cannabis.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Anything.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was all just it was like the perfect color, the perfect smell, and all that kind of stuff.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so we uh kept going and we made it into a water soluble.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we went from an oil to uh water soluble with my technology, and and all of a sudden we put a couple drops, and the aroma was insane.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh I don't know, it was like you stuck a the hop cone.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: You opened up the hop cone and you stuck it in your nose, and you were you that's all you could breathe.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Drinking the drink, that's all you could do is smell this outrageous product.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the flavor was the hops.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was a hundred percent you could say, oh, that's mosaic, or that's citra.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's I mean, there was no separation of what the flavor and aroma was.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: The weird part for us uh through our hydrocarbon system, the pellets became dust.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was nothing binding it together anymore.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: There was nothing there.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So so we sent it into the lab to get tested what we had, and and we found out we had 98% of the the cone, the the pellets have we were able to extract it.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing we couldn't extract was one part that you have to go through an ethanol bath to get that last two percent out.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're still having that on our plate because I think it's important.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's important for human health to have the last two percent.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh but all everything came out of it, all the different elements of what people are looking for in a beer.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Everything.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I went around to some breweries.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: I went, I I would say the best reaction was Paul from Carl Strauss.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if you know him, but he I met Paul.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: I met Paul years ago.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was in the craft beer world very intensely from 2010 to 2017.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So Paul was sitting, and and if we're in San Diego, he's in San Diego.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: I walked in without an imitation.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he was sitting at his desk and I walked in and he's like, Oh, another one.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, I don't want to talk too much.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: What I really want to do is I want you to taste something and tell me what you think.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna let you do it.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna do it for you.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: See, there's nothing, no trickery, no, no, nothing.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, So tell me about what I'm looking at.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, one part you're looking at the oil.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is what the oil is.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: He undoes it, he smells it, and he goes, That's spot-on mosaic.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, That is exactly what it is.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and he goes, Wow.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, What are these bottles?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now I want you to put it in some water.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he gets up, go gets a couple glasses of water, brings the glasses to himself, takes a couple drops, drops it into the water.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: First thing he does, what do you do?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing you do with a glass of beer, yes, smell it.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's the first thing that every you know, if you're a real beer drinker, you're smelling it.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not a real beer beer drinker, you just taste it and you net and you miss 90% of what you really were trying to get.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: So he puts it up to his nose and he's swirling it around and he was like going looking at me, and he's like, takes a little sip.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's fucking impossible.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you put that aroma, that flavor in a glass of water.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's not that that doesn't work.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't work.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, You want me to blow you out even more?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: I said, give me your whatever beer you want, uh, and you'll change it right here, a finished beer.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, You can't change a finished beer.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Bring a beer, put it down, let's do it.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he brings a beer, pours it into a glass, and he adds drops.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he swirls it around, he smells it.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, it has more mosaic in it.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: And like takes a sip, uh, puts the beer down, leans back in his chair, and he just looks me straight in the eye and says, Fuck off.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is not possible.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what you did, but it's not possible.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do this, you can't change a bad beer.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: You can't change a beer flavor.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I've been able to take a Corse Light and make it a IPA.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Yeah, I can see that you can do that.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's that was an insane moment for me because we just cracked the code of what's possible in that moment between Paul and myself.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was a combination of what I do and what he does, bringing it together and looking at it.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: We introduced it to a lot of different breweries, and and you know, we have a few breweries that are still working with us.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: We have water soluble, you know, like hop companies that are working with us.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Most people are scared of the hop industry and they're scared to move, they're scared to actually do things.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: When you when you actually look at how much hops are on the market, you can pretty much stop buying it, and you probably have another, I don't know, eight years of hops that are being stored in people's refrigerators.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: We also found out through this whole process that years don't matter.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: We degrade hops on a hop scale, but that hop scale as an extract to a water soluble doesn't matter.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't exist.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you get into the real savings, I guess for for beer companies, let's let's move the idea that there's two different pathways to go.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Move remove that idea.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: Just say that there's a pathway, and now you're trying to figure out what that pathway is to making beer.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because reality, you know, most brewers today came from their garage.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been taught through brewing beer that the only way to get flavor and aroma through into a beer, and they all call it tradition.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not tradition, they all call it through pellets.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, pellets is not an old thing, so there is no tradition of a pellet.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: The, you know, that's you can count years since it came out.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you're really going to be a traditionalist, go do it like monks do it.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's a traditionalist, and that's the only tradition in making beer.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: The rest of it, uh, you changed your tanks, you changed your processing, you changed that you can draw dry hop by shooting it in.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: You have changed everything around it, but you call the hops the tradition, and it's not.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to make that clear.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if extracts came before the pellets showed up, you'd be doing extracts, right?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because using cones is a limited beer time.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: You can't brew what you want to brew if you're just doing it off of hops, and that's the reason for pellets.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, this is the second part of that.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: An open bag of pellets lasts zero amount of time.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: You open that bag, you're you pretty much better use it, or you know, you got hours before it's not going to be good anymore.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's how bad it goes that fast.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you use an extract that's been turned it as an oil, you got two, three years of that same material lasting in a refrigerator.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of a big container holding all your hop boxes, hoping that you can preserve something, you're talking about a standard refrigerator you can buy from wherever you want to buy it from, put it in, you put your hops in there, and that's as much space that you need for a gigantic brewery to continuously brew beer.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a way different scenario.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a huge savings that I'm, you know, I'm not that's not my job to tell you what your savings.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: My job is to point out facts.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's all my that's all I'm gonna do.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you can either do it by putting vegetable matter into a fermented beer, and now as moment you put that in, you're introducing a lot of problems into making beer.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: The moment you decide to dry hop with a with a pellet, or you decide to put rosemary or anything in your beer that's an organic matter, you have just introduced a heck of a lot of problems that you're trying to manage the moment you do that, all the ways to making a beer.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: One is how long do you keep it in there?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: How long does it take to get the flavor and aroma out of a dry hopping thing?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Standard, somewhere between four to seven days.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you do a second dry hop because you still don't have the flavor and aroma at that time.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Using an extract.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm gonna say if you didn't hear the beginning part, an oil and water, they don't mix.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're dry hopping and you throw an oil in there, you got issues.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: You might not have as many issues as you did it by putting an organic matter in, but you'd still have issues that are showing up.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna talk just about putting a water soluble product in there.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this product and you are wanting to dose dry hopping, and you're gonna use this water soluble.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: Before you do that, you would take some beer out and take a picture of it, pull it out.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fermented thing.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's already you're you're capable of drinking it.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: Take a bunch of four-ounce glasses, pour some into it.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the first glass, dose what you think you want in a water soluble.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Might be three drops of mosaic, might be four drops of citra, whatever your dosing is.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and taste that.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the beer you want to drink?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: And you got a yes-no answer.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: If it's a no, push it, dump it out, don't touch it again.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: Take the next one.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Decide what you want to put in it.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Through this stage, you'll get to an area where you go, that's the beer I want.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're in a four-ounce water soluble.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, it's a simple mathematics from four ounces to 130 barrels.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: You just heard that, right?
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's no fancy math you have to do or anything.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: You mix that together and you dump it in.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: The next day, 24 hours later, actually, it only takes eight hours.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: The water soluble starts finding water.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: It wants water because it's a concentration we're adding it, and it's trying to find water.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: So what's in the tank?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: Water.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's everywhere.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's mixing itself.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to mix it.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: In 24 hours, it mixed itself.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's an amazing thing, what I just said.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's finding where it is.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you mix it, you're eight hours.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you put a blender in eight hours, you have a finished beer that you can can.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's done.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to wait for the aroma and all that to come out.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're trying to get 7% of the aroma and flavor out of a box of organic material in a place that you have 4% alcohol or five alcohol.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's a long day.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: That that's that's weeks of waiting for that thing to soak in.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Where the water, it's waiting for you to do something with.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: Dump it in there and and you'll have a drink.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you save by doing that?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first off, you save time, but like give me a break.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you can can a beer the next day, that's insane, right?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're no longer waiting all that.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: You just you just made your brewery twice as big as it was with your same equipment, without adding a solitary bank, you're done.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're now now can grow as big as you want to be because you're not limited by the amount you can you can actually produce.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's one thing.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: Next thing.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say you brewed, I'm gonna use a hundred-barrel tank.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Not that everybody does.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Let me change.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna use a 10-barrel tank because a lot of people use 10-barrel tanks, a lot of small brewers.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably your first real tank you bought when you bought a tap room or decided you wanted to go commercial.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this tank, you start brewing, you ferment, you got everything you got, you got 9.5 barrels in that tank.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: You dry hop, you just lost 20%.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I could say as high as 25%, you lost by putting that vegetable matter in, it starts soaking up all that beer you spent, all that money producing.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then you pull that out and you're pulling the beer out with it, and and then you're throwing away this thing, but you can't really throw it away because it's full of alcohol.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: So now you gotta figure out how you're gonna feed it to a bunch of pigs or whatever, and somebody's hauling it and doing all the stuff.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's costing you 20%.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just say it's 20%.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: So now you're down to, you know, you just lost a barrel out of 10 barrels.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: You brewed it, you have it, but you lost it because you dry hop because you thought you were doing tradition, but it's not tradition.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, tradition is using cones.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is not using a pellet.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's just an easy way for the hop guys to hand you something.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they should have handed you a water-soluble product.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: And guess what they started doing?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to figure out how to do that water-soluble product.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: Why now?
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because the cannabis industry came in and looked at what you're doing and said, Are you guys crazy?
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why would you do what you're doing?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: This doesn't make any sense.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like the science part of me would say that that'd be like Coca-Cola still making coke with actual ingredients that they go get.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: But they don't do that.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: They make it into a liquid that they can pour into a tank.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: They don't do tradition, they do what's right for the business.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a hard concept for brewers to get.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: They think that to stay a craft industry, you got to use pellets.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not the case.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: Making a craft beer is making a craft beer.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: I can't make your beer.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody else.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's your taste buds that allow you to decide what you're gonna put into that beer to make a real beer.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody can tell you differently.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's how you do it.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: You don't do it any other way.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now you have a business.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a business, you better be thinking of cash flow is not profit.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: Cash flow is cash flow.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have to figure out how do you make money so that you can grow.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I guarantee you, you know, Sierra Nevada doesn't think cash flow is profit.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: They have CFOs and in there that know that cash flow is not profit.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of small breweries start brewing and they're not thinking about it.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a lot of people going out of business, not because the people stopped drinking, it's that they didn't have a real business to start with.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of close out on that right there, because that is something that I preach and I've been preaching for years.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean this as not a negative thing, but it was very challenging from 2010 to 2017, especially.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: I managed about 30 different craft breweries in the Mid-Atlantic region.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the number one problem was there, I kept saying to them in these strategy meetings, I was like, guys, we're selling like crazy, we're selling a lot, but this is a trend and it's a it's it's a great early acceptance from the public that we're running on, but there's a lot of back end things that's a house of cards right now.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that was when you look back now in 2026, that's the indicative part of it.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is some of those ones that that didn't have the business sound and the business strategy that they're not around or they're struggling right now.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel I feel for them because it was very the allure of the speed and the allure of the revolution and the growth in those 20 teens and stuff like that.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was that was hard.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: And especially a lot of these younger guys that were young and and you get success right off the bat and you think it's gonna be like that forever.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: And no, there's a foundation and a system that needs to be in place to be sustainable and to thrive.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I appreciate your honesty and I appreciate your transparency in the way you described all that.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I I see it every day and with brewers calling me every day.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's sad because it's, you know, I get I get the allure of of going from your garage to actually a tap, you know, a tap room where people are coming in to drink your product.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's gotta be the best feeling on the planet that you're able to learn a cr a a trade and then you made it commercial.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is you didn't follow up with being commercial.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's the issue.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, there's a lot of new brewers.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be equal, you know, one side would go out of business and the and fill up.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: It would constantly be an equal thing.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it, it's not equal anymore.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, consumer shift changing at the same time, which was the perfect storm for that.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but a beer drinker is a beer drinker.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: To an extent, I think.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's I think I I I used to say that as well, but I'm starting to be cautiously saying that in certain demographics, I'll say that.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: And certain age groups, I think it changes a little bit over time.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're starting to see.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not macro statements, that's more anecdotal in my own circles.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm seeing it a little as as the as the age increases.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, sometimes I'm feeling like, at least in my circles, the beer, the alcohol intake is decreasing.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree with that statement.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I also think that, you know, there's drinks on the market that weren't on the market.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: For a consumer, it's more segmented than it ever was.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: We used to use the term in you, remember skew proliferation in the 2010 to 2017.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's a whole different world because there's a million different categories that weren't there either.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if you started to the whole market, it's it's a lot of segmentation that's gone on.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consumer, I'm in the industry and I'm overwhelmed sometimes walking into the beer section or the beverage section as a whole of uh whether it's beer, wine, spirits, or even in the NA aisle, grabbing mixers and a beers and just regular iced tea and uh and water, even.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like who knew that we'd be in a skew proliferation of water and and cans and bottles and glass, whatever it is you want, you know what I mean?
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's a whole nother world because I grew up where we didn't really have water bottles and we weren't walking around with water.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: We weren't worried about being hydrated as much as we are.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, but hey, I want to I wanna I do want to say one thing I did say earlier as we're closing out.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: I said I'd met Paul before with Carl Strauss, and I had to look it up while you were talking.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Back when I first started interviewing on camera, 20 2011, it was Matt Johnson who I believe was the beer brewmaster at Carl Strauss at that time.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I I have the wrong name uh of who I was talking to, and I for the record want to correct that.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul's sitting at home listening to this and said, Who the hell's that guy?
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was Matt Johnson was the guy I interviewed at the CBC in 2011 out in San Francisco.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: So interesting world.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate all the time you gave me.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh just thank you.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I appreciate it, Rick.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's one of those things where a lot of times, well, it's not a lot of times, but sometimes we get short answers and we get we get very, you know, kind of talking points, but nobody really dives into the mechanics of the imbalances that can exist, which can destroy your business and destroy your brand.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you did a very great job of laying it out in a very practical and science-based way and not a not any sort of like uh complaining way or a picking on anybody way.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the science of it is backed.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's also fascinating that I never really thought about it of the cannabis influence of the extract world into the alcohol world.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's something that that's one of the reasons I asked you when you started with the beverages because it got uh I got obsessed with beverages back in 2017, 2018, especially in 2018 when the farm bill passed.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: But we can all agree like the stuff that was on the market was not good.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, there was some that was good, but a lot of it wasn't.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: And now kind of looking back, it was because of these things that have advanced and these philosophies and these strategies that have kind of grown.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, Rick, um I want to I'll bring you back for another episode with uh with somebody else as well.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: We'll do a little round tables in a couple months.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um we're gonna be digging in here in the next few months on the uh I'm a big I'm advocating in on a state level in Pennsylvania.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: We have a bill that we just got written and we're working on as well as uh federally.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: I worked with uh with the Congress and things like that um as far as what's going on in the hemp space with the beverages.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we are we're very I'm I'm I'm gonna say it is is talking to somebody like you is very inspiring as well because it's one of those things where you can't you can easily get lost on what what's been going on in the past few years in this industry and you forget what's where the ground and was really dug.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's that's things like the sacrifices you made.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to publicly say this is is I think it's wrong that anybody was ever arrested in in the cannabis space before.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the time that you spent, and I think you you rolled past it really quickly is a very cavali cavalier thing, but it's also I respect that you stayed the course in your passion for the industry because a lot of people would have would have ended there.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's not it's not something that you you do take lightly.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was probably a very emotional, it was very financially strained situation.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the resilience that you have to stay in the industry and let your passion drive you is I respect and commend that deeply.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh everything you just said is true.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell that you've you've emotionally worked past it and how casually you mentioned it.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I will close out with this is Rick, I want to remind everybody in the audience there's no script, there's no agenda, there's no prep.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: Rick and I have never shared a drink together, we've never had a cup of coffee, and we've never shaken hands.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: That will change in the future.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna start trying to, as I'm on my travels and work, I'm gonna start connecting in person with guests in the past.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I will I look forward to documenting that and showing that to the audience as well.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: And also, Rick, I want to thank you for the cojones to come on because a lot of people turn down my invite when they realize there's no questions in advance and we're not gonna hop on for 30 minutes and have a meeting.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: I tell people we're just going in raw.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh with the old, I'm not a big fan of them, and I will I will say that perfectly, but the old Bill O'Reilly, fuck it, we'll do it live.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's that's what it is.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and and also, you know, as a whole to everybody, I want to remind everybody that the the point of this is to learn about an industry and to learn about different people that are leading this industry.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: But most importantly, we're all in this industry because of socialization, and we're all in this industry because we care about human beings.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to remind everybody that this is two strangers connecting.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it is this simple.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is this, if you make an effort, and I'm gonna challenge everybody as I have for the past couple weeks, five minutes a week.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: Spend five minutes a week engaging with a stranger, whether it's walking on the street, looking somebody in the eye, putting your phone away at the gas station, filling up a cup of coffee, ask the person next to you how you're doing, and actually give a shit about what they say.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: And don't share your story, just ask them in probe because if you spend five minutes a week, that's 20 minutes a month.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: I bet you there's a couple people that have a full life and it's never gonna phase them, and they're gonna think, what was that weirdo doing at the at the coffee shop?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, that was that's that's gonna happen.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna guarantee you that a majority of the people are in a bad spot or they're feeling lonely, and you're gonna you're gonna make their day, their week, and their month, and that's a good RY.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: Rick, well, hey, thank you again so much for your time today.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I really appreciate this conversation.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: I did too.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was awesome having that conversation and meeting you.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh all I can say to everybody is just be kind out.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: It goes it goes so far.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: It goes so far.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Rick.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Rick, you have a good rest of your day, man.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate you.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: Later.