WINCHESTER, Va. — Brad and BeBe Parkes wanted to create an alcoholic beverage that people could feel good about drinking.
They didn’t want it to be packed with sugars or other ingredients that could cause consumers to feel tired, bloated or hungover.
“I think every time anyone talks about alcohol, you kind of want to group it into a certain category. But our whole thought process is that we’re different and that our product is a way to drink and still feel good,” BeBe said. “I always think about how we like to go out on Friday, maybe drink more than you should, then get up at 6 a.m. and still do something Saturday morning. We wanted people to be able to have fun and still feel good. It doesn’t really fit into a category that’s out there right now.”
About two years ago, the Winchester couple started the process of creating Masq Hard Tea, an alcoholic beverage made from organic tea and organic fruit ingredients.
“We’re health conscious, but we also like beer and like to go out and hang out with friends and have a good time. We were kind of looking for what the healthiest alcohol options were,” Brad said. “There’s a lot of options like seltzers with no sugar or no carbs, but there’s not anything that we found that actually has good ingredients.”
The name Masq Hard Tea, the couple said, is a play on the word “masquerade,” with the idea being that it’s an alcoholic beverage masquerading as a functional beverage or vice versa.
They began experimenting with the recipe using an organic yerba mate (green tea) base and added organic blue agave, organic monk fruit and organic adaptogen. Then they added alcohol.
“If you take the alcohol out, it’s a functional organic tea,” Brad said.
The flavor is more fruit-based and less what someone might think of when considering an alcoholic tea, BeBe added.
“It’s easy to drink. It’s not heavy. I think the variety of flavors helps. They’re all totally different. It’s not a sweet tea taste,” she said. “The tea part was for the health benefit instead of a taste factor. They taste very similar to their name, and that was on purpose. The quality of ingredients, it’s all about it tasting like the actual flavor.”
The alcohol content for Masq Hard Tea is 4%, which is similar to a light beer or seltzer. “But more flavorful,” Brad said.
“We wanted it to be drinkable like a seltzer. These are really full of flavor but still drinkable,” he said. “A lot of flavored things coming out are something like a beer with natural flavors. But we’ve got actual tea, actual agave and so on. They’re real ingredients.”
Once they narrowed down which flavors and ingredients were must-haves to kickstart the launch of the product, they turned the process over to a food and beverage lab to work on perfecting the concoction.
“The first batch actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” BeBe said. “I was really surprised that the first batch wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t ‘it,’ but it wasn’t horrible.”
About 15 batches and hundreds of taste tests later, the product was ready to head to market.
Brad, who works in beer and wine distributing with Anheuser-Busch and whose family has been in distributing with Anheuser-Busch since 1990 and with Stroh’s Beer about 15 years before that, knows the ins and outs of the distribution business and used some local contacts to find opportunities to pitch Masq Hard Tea.
“The challenge now with any new brand is that there are so many new items on the shelves. Distributors are constantly inundated with new products,” Brad said. “We really felt that we had to create something that would stand out.”
Masq Hard Tea hit the market in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina in February and later made its way to Michigan and Wisconsin in May.
Masq Hard Tea currently comes in three flavors — Blueberry Lavender, Dragonfruit Acai and Lemon Ginger. More flavors are in development and there’s a possibility of working on some local seasonal flavors, the couple said.
A four-pack of cans runs about $9.99.
For more information, visit drinkmasq.com.
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