“There is a clean, clear line from alcohol to cancer. There just is,” says Dionne. “And so as I’m getting surgery after surgery, biopsy after biopsy, and I’m making liquor, I was like, ‘No. This does not feel right.’” As she cast about for her next project, Dionne grew introspective. What is it that she savors about craft spirits and other alcoholic beverages? She realized it’s the mouthfeel and engagement as she drinks them. “It’s evaporative and it’s engaging different parts of your palate at different times,” she says. She’d long enjoyed tonic water — the quinine has a cleansing, bitter taste that lifts the palate. Yet there were few craft tonic waters in the U.S. There’s Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz and Q, but both are sweetened with agave, which some consumers don’t like. Fever-Tree, made in the U.K., is the tonic water of choice among U.S. bartenders. “I realized that there’s space for more expression in tonic,” she says. But it wasn’t until a German machine that prints cans digitally became accessible to small businesses in the Portland area that Dionne founded Dappled. (This technology avoids the use of paper labels, which make cans impossible to recycle.) She contracted with a local company that had the machine, and then she had to find access to a unique canning line that allows for a higher level of carbonation than most lines for beer, cider or kombucha do. Dionne is insistent about having a high carbonation level for her tonic water, which measures about 3.4%. “Without the high carbonation level, [tonic water] just falls flat,” she says. “It doesn’t have the same mobility in the mouth.” So far Dappled has three flavors: aromatic (flavored with cardamom, vanilla and lemongrass), citrus (yuzu, lemon and lime), and floral (rose, chamomile and lavender). Since April 2024, the cans have been carried by Market of Choice; this past March, New Seasons began selling them too. Dionne says a half-dozen out-of-state shops have also begun ordering Dappled—many of them booze-free bottle shops. “They’re reaching out from Florida and New Jersey and Boston and Chicago,” she says. Market research that she and her crew have conducted at grocery demos and other consumer-facing events has revealed that a full 40% of Dappled customers are buying it to drink on its own rather than as a mixer. “That was stunning to me,” Dionne says. “They’re looking at it as a standalone craft beverage, which was our intention. But it feels so good that it’s actually working!” The Hops Heartland When Victoria Pustynsky moved to Oregon a decade ago, she worked briefly in the wine industry before realizing that there was a stumbled upon hops as an ingredient. “It was so tasty. It was herbal and piney and super citrusy!” she says. Hops and cannabis are part of the same family and use the same extraction method, too, so the move to hops wasn’t super challenging logistically. In early 2021, just a year into the pandemic, she launched Aurora Hops in a 330ml amberglass bottle in two flavors: pomelo sage (with Citra hops) and yuzu orange blossom with peppercorns (with Citra and Mosaic hops). Early press was extremely positive: In summer of 2022, the New York Times’ Wirecutter included it in a roundup of the best nonalcoholic drinks. Bi-rite, the high-end San Francisco grocer, was Aurora’s biggest customer. But because of the Aurora name, there remained confusion about whether or not the hops version of Aurora had CBD. (It didn’t.) In the summer of 2022, Pustynsky repositioned the hops drink as Lolo Hops and started packFaith Dionne great business opportunity in creating a cannabis-based beverage. It was 2015, and recreational cannabis had just been legalized statewide. Her initial idea was to offer a lowdose apéritif with 2.5 to 5mg of THC. But this was shot down by some in the industry, who favored cannabis-infused beverages spiked with massive amounts of the intoxicating cannabinoid. She found that irresponsible. She chose, instead, to create a CBD-based beverage. In 2017 she founded Aurora Elixirs. “We were pretty early on with capturing this idea that people wanted something that was participatory but not intoxicating,” Pustynsky says. “They wanted to feel something that’s relaxing — but also kind of a ritual that you can wind down with at the end of the day.” But even with CBD, a nonintoxicating cannabinoid, there were a lot of regulatory hurdles like banking and payment processing. She and her team started exploring other nervine herbs like ashwagandha. They 17
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