Los Angeles’ first post-prohibition era distillery, Greenbar Distillery, built its business on the craft cocktail movement – providing unique and local spirits for a growing bar scene in the early 2000s. But helping customers execute inexpensive and uncomplicated cocktails at home was always a challenge.
“We’ve tried to solve this problem for a long time, unsuccessfully,” said co-founder Melkon Khosrovian.
Enter Staria, Greenbar’s newest product released on the brand’s website last month. Bright, tart and citrusy with built-in foam, Staria is a 15% ABV liqueur designed to help anyone create “bartender-quality” cocktails at home with just two ingredients. After five years of research building on the company’s long history of creating complex liqueurs, bitters and amari, the liquid is the 21-year-old craft distillery’s “magnum opus,” said Khosrovian.
What Staria is actually made of is somewhat of a mystery due to its proprietary ingredients. By just swapping out the spirit base, Khosrovian argues that the new $30 liqueur can create a long list of cocktails including but not limited to margaritas, sours, and daiquiris. That versatility is largely new for the liquor shelf, where liqueurs are typically used as additions or centerpieces for simple cocktails like the spritz.
“The flavorful ingredients are all based on whole foods, just like we make all of our products, so real ingredients [are] infused or distilled into spirits, and then there are three other things that are components,” he said.
The sweetness, which comes from cane sugar, was calibrated to the traditional profile of a sour drink. Khosrovian is tight-lipped on the process behind the other two elements: a years-long experiment to develop a shelf-stable sour component “that doesn’t taste like citric acid” and the accidental discovery of a “silky-smooth” vegan foam.
The liqueur marks the company’s evolution as it aims to catch up with consumption trends. Over the years, Khosrovian and his partner Litty Mathew have built a reputation for producing flavorful spirits, liqueurs, and private label products. By making their own unique spins on classic backbar items with natural and organic ingredients, the company has become a go-to for major grocers looking for “weird” and unique private label products, amounting to 40% of its business.
During the pandemic Greenbar switched its primary focus from bars and restaurants to canned products, including ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails and non-alc cocktails, made with their own dealcoholized spirits. Staria is now adding to Greenbar’s lineup something that compliments “what the RTD world represents,” added Khosrovian, but provides “a level of sophistication and quality that, for the most part, is still woefully absent from the RTD universe.”
With RTDs now driving spirits growth, Khosrovian sees Staria as complementary to a trend largely driven by convenience.
“RTD, be it canned or bottled, is for occasions where you’re entertaining a larger group of friends, or it’s your perfect drink and you discovered it. But for the most part, it doesn’t involve a creative force in any way,” he said. “And if you have a favorite gin or tequila, it’s probably not in your favorite RTD.”
That’s likely true. New-to-world RTDs (brand families that did not exist in other categories or segments outside of RTD when they were launched), such as High Noon, dominate the category, with extensions – even from popular spirit brands – still struggling to gain share.
For now, whether or not at-home drinkers will pick up a simple cocktailing solution is also a mystery. Greenbar changed its licensing in order to sell direct-to-consumer before spending time and resources on launching it broadly through the three-tier system. With only a few weeks on the market, it’s too early to tell how customers are using it.
“Because this is brand new as a category in some way, we really want to get our hands around what it is, how it behaves, what motivates people to buy it and what are they doing with it,” said Khosrovian.
Rather than blast the release to its current social networks, Greenbar has engaged a marketing firm to promote Staria as a separate identity and to fresh faces “with no biases as favorite clients or who understand Greenbar and have been part of our story for a long time.”