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Will This Work?
A tiny startup has an audacious new pitch for the seltzer wars
Seltzer is experiencing whiplash. After a summer of liquor companies co-opting sparkling water with a new breed of alcohol-spiked versions — including an actual shortage of White Claw hard seltzer — a tiny beverage startup is trying to get consumers to make the meta-leap back to what is, evidently now, dry seltzer. Or what entrepreneur Jason LaValla has creatively coined “leisure soda.”
What exactly is leisure soda? According to LaValla, he’s created a drink that isn’t “promising to do the work for you” — or one that could simply be a liquid balm for “relaxing and enjoying the moment.” It’s a decent enough premise: Perhaps between politics, social media, and workism, citizens of our United States of Anxiety want to relax a little bit. Maybe a new, booze-free incarnation of artisanal seltzer can help them?
At least initially, LaValla wasn’t trying to solve a national epidemic. Three years ago, the then-28-year-old was grinding at a corporate law firm in Manhattan, run down by daily informal happy hours. “At work at a particular time, people would start reaching for a drink — whiskey or scotch or whatever,” LaValla says. He always had an affection for liquor, but less brown and more regional — specifically amaro, a bitter Italian herbal liqueur made with unique herbs and ingredients.
So much so that LaValla had been spending nights and weekends playing novice herbalist in his apartment. “I had an entire closet dedicated to tinctures that I made,” he says. “High-concentration extracts of maybe 30 or 40 botanicals. Everything from burdock root, angelica, mugwort.” LaValla thought he might even one day launch his own amaro brand. That is, until his itch to take a break from alcohol of any sort kicked in. “I needed a little something to replace that.”
So he hatched Casamara Club, a two-person beverage upstart now peddling a bottled cocktail based on fizzy amaro drinks, minus the liquor. “I had that kind of lightbulb moment,” LaValla recalls. “What if I could use these amaro flavors to make bitters, and use those bitters to make…
