Interviewer
In the world of cocktails, it's usually the spirits and the liqueurs that tend to get all the love.
But as anyone who has made drinks knows, it's the syrups and mixes that are often the true stars of the show. But taking the flavour profile of your drinks up to the next level with a flavoured syrup is often more difficult than that sounds.
Going through the rigamarole of having to find the ingredients and ensure consistency means that it's simply easier to turn to a pre-made syrup.
One business that is sweetening the experience is Cocktails & Sons. Started by award-winning bartenders, and husband and wife duo, Max Messier, and Lauren Myerscough, the brand aims to bring simplicity to your bar. To find out more, we talked to Lauren about flavours, simplifying syrups, and of course the drinks that you can make with them.

Thank you for joining us, Lauren,

Lauren
Thank you for having me, happy to be here.

Interviewer
Now take us back to 2014, when you guys started. Why do you think it was important to you to make a syrup and mixer range?

Lauren
So back in 2014, my husband and I were both working as bartenders in restaurants that had a very nice cocktail program. And a lot of people would come up to the bar and say, oh my goodness, I loved this cocktail so much. How do I make it at home? And you would say, okay, well you just buy this expensive alcohol and they'd say, yes, I can do that. And then you're gonna buy this, uh, obscure liqueur, that you're only gonna use for this cocktail. And they'd say, absolutely, yes, I can do that too. And you'd say, all right, and then you're gonna put sugar and water together in a pan and gonna cook it. And they would say cook, no, I don't do that, and that's where we would lose them. And so we realized that there was this real gap in the market, that allowed people, the confidence to make these kinds of cocktails that we were making behind the bar in their own homes.

Interviewer
Now, of course, post pandemic, there’ve been a lot of people who've gotten into making drinks at home, but back then, was there really a lot of interest in making drinks outside of the bar?

Lauren
Surprisingly, yes, we were … I think a lot of people don't realize that this cocktail resurgence was well underway in 2014, by the time we had started doing this. We actually never even considered doing this for a commercial setting before mid 2015. We thought everything that we were doing would just go straight to retail. We had a lot of success, especially with our Spiced Demerara, which is our old fashioned solution. People really loved the fact that they could just make it at home. And we had a lot of people come up to us. We started at the farmer's markets in new Orleans selling our products because that's where we got a lot of our ingredients from. And we had people coming up to us at the farmer's market and they would just say, you know what? You make this so easy, I don't even have to buy the expense of bourbon anymore. It's restaurant quality. Thank you so much. So yeah, the, the reaction at first was pretty surprising,

Interviewer
But then once you'd done farmer's markets for a little while you actually took your products to a Kickstarter campaign. Tell us a little bit about that.

Lauren
Oh, this is great. So, uh, we realized that in order to make this a full-time gig, we were going to need a little bit of help. We just had a baby. She was born in March of 2015, so right after we launched the company, which is something that I, I just cannot recommend. If you're gonna start a business, don't have a baby at the same time, but we realized that we were gonna need some help getting this off the ground. So we launched a Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2014 to take the products from a little cottage, kind of doing in our own kitchen to really pushing them into kitchen. That was FDA approved. That was used mainly for smaller businesses where you could rent space. And we wanted to get a spot in there, but to do that, it's, it's a pretty hefty down payment if you're gonna start your own company. So we launched the Kickstarter, it went really, really well. And we ended up raising about 10 grand to do all of the necessary. You know, you have to get your nutrition panels done and you have to test the shelf life. And you have to make sure that the product that you put out there, because once you transition from, you know, selling it yourself to putting it into a store, you have to make sure that that can stand for itself. And that's, what we put the money behind for the Kickstarter.

Interviewer
I imagine in those days, it was a lot easier to get attention on Kickstarter than it would be for something like this today.

Lauren
I cannot imagine doing what we did back then today. Uh, yeah, it was probably a whole lot easier back then, especially because there weren't a lot of people who were doing what we were doing too. I know the non-alc market is flooded now. There's, there's so many options and that's amazing. That's great news, but yeah, it's, it's a lot more crowded

Interviewer
Aside from the regulatory aspect of it and, you know, put the down payment on the kitchen and all of that sort of thing, actually just gearing the recipes up from doing small batch into commercial sizes, that must have been quite a thing to get your head around.

Lauren
It really is. Uh, and even today we continue to scale up. We recently transitioned into our own space and bought an even larger kettle than the one that we had available to us originally. And that scaling up our recipes for that has even been a mind boggling, because some of it is math, but some of it is also an art. Some things don't scale up as well as others. So yes, you're gonna put the same weight of sugar in there, and you're gonna put the same weight of what of water in there. But some of those ingredients, the more you scale up on them, the harder they may be to pinpoint. So some of it is artistry, and that's actually one of the components that my husband really enjoys is nailing down. How do you produce the same thing over and over again? When your ingredients are not going to be exact every single time.

Interviewer
Now, as you mentioned, there are a lot of people who are doing mixes and syrups now, is it weird to see the market expand the way it has?

Lauren
I'm actually overjoyed. I'm a firm believer in a rising tide lifts all boats and seeing more people turning towards the alcoholic market and seeing more products on the market, I think lend a greater visibility to what we're doing. And it makes our job a little bit easier. I'm not approaching people anymore and saying, Hey, yeah, this thing is non-alcoholic and you added two things, but you can also make non-alcoholic cocktails with it. Back in the day, when we were first starting, people would say, what I, I don't, I don't think I understand, is it, does it have alcohol in it? Is it, is it a bitter? No, no, it's, it's, it's a syrup and they taste it and they go, this is sweet. Well, yes, because it's a syrup and now we don't really have to do that. Consumer education has been one of the most difficult aspects of this job, just letting

Interviewer
I was actually about to ask. Is it hard to get people to understand?

Lauren
Yeah. I mean, it used to be a lot

Interviewer
What, what you're doing, but also what they can make with it.

Lauren
Yeah. It used to be a lot harder, but now I think, uh, especially with so many more products in this category, it's getting a lot easier. I really love seeing the category expanding, but yeah, we do a lot of consumer education on the side too. I mean, we still put out cocktail books. Uh, we keep a blog running of all of the cocktails making, we put out a series of very simple things that you can do behind the bar to make your job easier. So how to make a twist, how to shake a cocktail, how to stir a cocktail, just things that make it easier for a beginner to get interested in this.

Interviewer
I imagine though products like Fassionola would still be a bit it foreign to people.

Lauren
Oh yeah. If you think that's hard, you should try explaining an Olio Saccharum.

Interviewer
Well, yes, yes.

Lauren
Yeah. I mean, there is still a little bit of education there. Sometimes it's easier than others, but it's easier to explain if you start out with what the cocktail is that you can make with it. With Fassionola, we would say this was the syrup for the original Hurricane, as it was first introduced to Pat O'Brien's in new Orleans and people say, oh, okay. And then on the label itself, we put down what it is always, because I think all of our syrups are probably a little bit of a, something to wrap your head, your brain around, when you first see them. But with Fassionola, we put on the label that it's a tropical fruit syrup because that's what it is. Our Fassionola is true to the original recipe, … well, not exactly true. It's our interpretation of that recipe. Nobody really knows what was in Jonathan English's Fassionola, but true to what we would interpret it to be.
We put in fresh pineapple mango and passion fruit. And then to that, we add strawberries with a little bit of lime and then to get that deep red colour, we put hibiscus in it. So if you introduce that to somebody and you say it's a tropical fruit syrup with strawberry, they get it, that light clicks and they say, okay, yeah, I know what I can do with this now,

Interviewer
Now you have eight syrups and two mixers, which ones have proved to be the most popular.

Lauren
Oh, the Spice Demerara. I get people who walk up to me, once they know who I am, and they'll say, oh my goodness, I've been buying this to since 2015. Thank you so much. I have an old fashioned at least once a week with it. And that warms my cold cold heart, but it's also, the Fassionola, definitely. I am frankly surprised at the reaction that we've gotten to it. When we first put it out, we did not know what to expect. We were just looking for something that we could do that was a little bit fruitier than the other flavors we put forward, which were all a little bit more herbacious. Louisiana strawberries are famous down here. They're huge. They're sweet. Ponchatoula has a strawberry festival every year. Ponchatoula is a city about an hour north of New Orleans where we get all of our strawberries from, and they are famous in the south for their strawberries.
And we were looking for a way to use them. And we came across this article about Fassionola with Beach Bum, Jeff Berry, talking about the original Jonathan English Fassionola. And we thought to ourselves, you know what? This could really, it be an opportunity to see what we could do. And the reaction has been amazing. It really took off. It has a life of its own. I get a few emails a week asking me because it is still a seasonal syrup, when is the fashion coming back out? Uh, and we always tell people, you know, it's seasonal to Louisiana strawberry harvest. So even we don't know exactly when it's going to out. We have a roundabout probably mid-March, but we, we don't actually know ourselves until we get that call from the farmer that says, Hey, come pick out your field because they're ready to go.

Interviewer
So we're probably what a month or so away from it now, then

Lauren
We're about a week away.
Lauren
Picked out we're ready to go. Uh, we're rolling already. Uh, don't tell the customers online yet, cuz they'd be mad that I haven't released it, but yeah, we just, uh, made the first big batch today.

Interviewer
Oh, that's very exciting. Yeah.

Interviewer
Must be nice to have a seasonal product like that. Where there is that sense of expectation every year.

Lauren
Oh yeah. Well the only scary thing about it is, you know, if the strawberries have a bad year, where are we gonna be? And that's something I think that we struggle with, especially as the climate has been changing, we struggle with how is that going to affect the crop in the future and with hurricanes coming through and they're getting more powerful. It's a little scary.

Interviewer
Yeah. I can imagine anytime you're dealing with natural product, even in the best of years, there's always gonna be a variation of flavour and crop size

Lauren
Oh, absolutely. Um, that's also where a little bit of that artistry comes in that I was talking about earlier. My husband and I know that there will be slight tonal shifts every year with the Fassionola, but it's part of the excitement in making it, what is it going to be like this year? It's never gonna be bad, but some years you get a more fragrant perfume strawberry, and some years, it's gonna be that tropical fruit is gonna come out a little bit more. So it's really interesting to work with. It's never boring.

Interviewer
Your most recent offering is the king cake rum cream. What was it like working with Gambinos bakery?

Lauren
What's so exciting. Uh, I'm so glad you brought that up. We just finished king cake season. Mardi Gras was about two weeks ago and the guys at Gambinos are amazing. They are truly the king of king cakes. They've been in this business for so long and working with them has been a pure delight. Sidewalk Side Spirits is the company that puts out the King Cake Rum Cream and they license the name from Gambinos. But Gambinos has worked really closely with us to try to tinker with our king cake syrup, to get those notes that are so important to their king cakes. Uh, so we went through rounds and rounds of testing to get this recipe right. But in the end it was great because we were actually the ones, my husband and I, who got to sit down and formulate this and put it all together. So we are directly responsible for what went into that bottle. And it's just such a fun product. And once again, seasonal, which is amazing, cuz I can't imagine having the fun that we have without all year round, that would be too much fun. Really capture something about Mardi Gras, and we're really proud of it.

Interviewer
Now if people haven't experienced king cakes before, can you, you explain the flavour?

Lauren
Of course, I'll tell you the story of my husband and his first experience with the king cake. My husband's not from New Orleans. I am, I'm born and raised. I'm actually the granddaughter of sugar cane farmers. My husband is from San Francisco. He's a city guy. I met him when we were both living in New York and then I dragged him by his hair down to new Orleans. So he wanted to make a king cake syrup. He got this idea, uh, after his third year there and a king cake is basically a cinnamon brioche and it's frosted with this citric acid frosting and then covered in sprinkles, which are purple, green and gold. And then, you know, you hide a baby in there and whoever gets the baby has to buy the next king cake. And so when he started tinkering, he put all kinds of stuff in the syrup, there was All Spice in there and something else I don't remember. And I tried it and I was like, no, I was like max. A king cake is just that it's a cinnamon brioche. You have to simplify it. And he said, oh, okay. And he ended up taking some of that sugar and mixing it with this amazing Vietnamese cinnamon, putting just a touch of lemon in there. And there was still a note that was missing from the middle. So we ended up reaching out to a pecan farmer from north Louisiana and getting some pecan extract and putting just a drop of it in there. And that really rounded the whole thing out. And it really, when you bite into it tastes like a king cake. It's that cinnamon, you get that this yeast flavour from the sugar and then you get this like very strong Cinnamon flavour, which gives way to a delicate note of pecan. And then that lemon finish. So that is, that is a king cake. And if you've never had it, you can have it in a bottle with our king cakes syrup or the Gambino king cake Rum Cream.

Interviewer
Now I imagine that the Mojito and the Margarita mixes are probably the easiest of your products for people to understand. Do you want to talk through the flavour profiles of each?

Lauren
Oh, absolutely. In the mojito and the margarita we made on a whim, we actually got contracted. We do a lot of private contract and one of them called for us to make a margarita mixer, which was something that we never thought that we would do. We were very much in the camp of, you know, death to sour mix, but we started playing around with it and realized that most of the margarita mixers that are out on the market right now are mostly water. So you end up putting one or two ounces of tequila with four or five ounces of a margarita mixer. And that's how you get your margarita. Well, if you've ever been to a restaurant or a bar, it's the opposite. There's usually an ounce of tequila to maybe a half ounce of lime and a quarter ounce of syrup.
And we were so used to getting these or making these types of margaritas at home that we thought to ourselves, well, let's just make something that's little bit more restaurant style. So we ended up making this concentrated flavour for our margarita mixer where the recipe on the bottle is actually two ounces of tequila to one ounce of our mixer. And that will make you a three ounce cocktail. So the flavour profile behind it, we took one of our more popular syrups, the honeysuckle and pepper corns, which we recommend for agave products as it has a little touch Sage in the back of it. That honeysuckle has a nice bright note on it and the pepper corns really compliment tequila’s, agaves and Raicilla’s. So we took the honeysuckle out of it and we kept the pepper corn, and we kept a little bit of the Sage and we added clarified lemon and lime juice to it.
So you're really getting an all natural product that we've managed to filter to the point where it's shelf stable for a year. It's very fresh. It's very refreshing. And it has that beautiful pepper note on the back of it, which is really what has been lacking in a lot of the prefabbed margarita mixes that we tried before. And then the mojito mixer, we just took our mint and lemon verbena. We toned the verbena way back and we pumped up the mint a little more, put three different types of mint in there. And then we put a tiny touch of wormwood in the back of it to round it out. Well, it gives it a tiny hint of bitterness in the back, and that's really what you're missing. If you're not gonna do, uh, a lot of salinity, the bitter note in there will tie the entire thing together and give it almost like an umami and it makes it just like a very complete cocktail. It feels better on your tongue. It gives it a roundness on the palette.

Interviewer
Can you take us through a few of your favourite cocktails to make with your syrups?

Lauren
Absolutely. So we keep a recipe blog with all of our new recipes on there and some of my favourite things to do. I been playing a lot with the ginger honey, which was one of our newest offerings. We just started offering it last year. We have this really great honey farmer. His name is David Young. He owns a nonprofit. He started an apiary in the lower ninth ward after Katrina, when all of those houses were decimated, instead of rebuilding some of them, he kept a block wild and he let whatever was gonna grow there. He let it grow. So he has an apiary there and his bees collect nectar and make this amazing honey, because it has this touch of Magnolia and sweet olive and Jasmine, lots of Jasmine. So his honey is just very gorgeous. So we took that and we married it with classic ginger and Galangal, which is a, like a Thai ginger.
It has a pine note in it, which compliments that flowery note. And then we put just like a tiny, tiny bit of lemon in there just to marry it all together. So I have been making Brown Derby. I am a huge fan of grapefruit and grapefruits are in season right now. So we have been doing it's about an ounce and a half of bourbon. We do a half ounce of the ginger honey, about three quarter ounces of the grapefruit juice. And then we just shake it and you put it in a glass and it's so simple. You know, the Brown Derby named after the famous Los Angeles hat shaped restaurant, 1930s, Hollywood, but it feels like such an easy and classic drink to make it home. And especially with the weather changing, I don't know about you, but my throat is on fire from allergies. So this one really hits the spot right now. And then for the Fassionola, we've been making a lot of fashion, no cocktails lately, especially because we've been doing a lot of photo shoots and half the fun of photo shoots is making the real cocktail to try it out and then drinking it. We had a little too much fun the other week making some Fassionola cocktails, but I will tell you my favourite, once again, it's a grapefruit one. We made a salty dog, uh, with the Ola and we started out

Interviewer
Out that, that interesting.

Lauren
It was so good. I was really impressed. So we started out with two ounces of vodka and then we did half out of fashion, Ola about three quarter ounces, grapefruit, and just a quarter ounce of lime to give it some contrast and a, we put a big salted rim on it and it was definitely the favourite. I ended up making about three or four of those and they went very quickly. That's what I've been drinking. I just it's the grapefruit season, you gotta take advantage.

Interviewer
Of course. Yes. And what about with your, some of your other syrups?

Lauren
Oh, sure. The honeysuckle and pepper corns. I know my husband lately has been enjoying a nice Gimlet at the end of the night. He's big into, into gimlets, uh, of course, super classic cocktail. He's been making them with about two ounces of gin, about three quarter ounces of the honeysuckle pepper, corn, about an ounce of lime. It's so simple. And I would love to lie to you and tell you that, you know, he puts it over ice and he really savours it. But honestly, they disappear very quickly in our home, actually pours it straight into his mouth and it goes, and then we've been doing our Oleo-Saccharum, I know that you've done this before, but, Oleo-Saccharum is course just like a mix of orange and lemon peels that we do in a sugar bath, it pulls all the oil out. And then we combine that with a ginger cardamom and lemon grass tea that we make. So it's a very refreshing, very easy. We've been making sazeracs with those because of course, if you're in new Orleans, it's the home of the sazerac, it's our official cocktail. So we've been doing two ounces of cognac, about a quarter ounce of the Oleo, four dashes of Peychaud's Bitters, rinse a glass in absence. And it has been fantastic. That's usually what we serve guests when they come over and they want, you know, cuz everybody, when they come to new Orleans, they want a real new Orleans experience. So that's usually what we make 'em.

Interviewer
Now, have you been surprised by some of the cocktails that people have made with your syrups?

Lauren
Absolutely. I have to give credit to Instagram here because it's such a beautiful platform. People will make things and post them to our account or tag us in them. And I am consistently amazed by people's creativity. There's a woman in Pennsylvania. Her name is Carolyn and she does just the most gorgeous cocktails, shout out to Carolyn. She posts them and tag us in it. And I, her creativity is just beyond anything. I remember once she, during honeysuckle season, she plucked a bunch of honeysuckle from her garden and just made just the most beautiful drink. I mean, visually it was stunning. Creativity like that. It's just really incredible. And then not to mention like the bartenders will go into a bar and try these drinks whenever, you know, we hear like, oh, so and so is using your stuff in a cocktail. Can you go by? Absolutely. I just love trying all of the different things that they've done with it. It's really amazing. The creativity in this industry, I'm consistently impressed.

Interviewer
Now it's not just alcoholic drinks that the syrups can be used in though. Is it?

Lauren
So we have a really big push right now with non-Alcs, which I love. It's great. A lot of my friends have stopped drinking, especially now I've stopped drinking right now because it's lent right after Mardi GRAS season of blend begins. It's 40 day and everybody gives up something. All of my friends do it. We all do it. Everybody in new Orleans is Catholic during lent. When you have that much indulgence, lent is kind of a welcome break. Even though we're not Catholic, it gives us a good excuse to stop. Everybody else has January 1st for their new year, where they get to make these resolutions and do these like projects. We have the day after Mardi Gras, that's the New Orleans New Year.
So we stopped drinking a bunch of my friends and I, and we were actually in the sitting in the kitchen today talking about all the non-alcoholic stuff that we've been doing. So putting a little bit of spiced demerara in a hot cup of tea makes a taste like a constant comment from Twinings, which I'm a fan of, but yeah. So we've been putting it into hot teas, making non-alcoholic hot toddy’s. We've been experimenting a lot this year because there's such a big offering with non-alcoholic distilled spirits. So like Monday Gin or Seedlip, we've been using that lately to try and make mocktails, o you can still enjoy without imbibing. It's been really fun. And I think that the syrups probably add a dimension to it, especially with the concentrations, cuz these aren't one to one syrups, they're a higher concentration of sugar than water in them. So they have a different mouth feel. So it gets you really close to that mouth feel of a cocktail and it really sets it apart. It's not like somebody's giving you a soda. You can feel like you're still part of the conversation. And the people who work for us are mostly bartenders themselves, so it's been really fun to trade recipes with them. I think we're gonna have a new batch of non-alcoholic recipes coming to the website soon,

Interviewer
Other than people getting more into home cocktails. What other changes have you seen over the last eight years?

Lauren
That's a really good question. We've seen a bigger push into transparency. People wanna know what they're putting in their cocktails and what they're putting in their bodies. And it's been great for us because we've always been very transparent, down to the farm where our stuff comes from. We will tell you it's on the bottle, it's on the website, but it's been great because people have been asking more questions. Hey when you say watermelon, where is the watermelon coming from? And it's wonderful to be able to tell somebody, this is from Indian Springs Farmers, Co-op. It is the oldest black farmer's co-op in the nation and they're the only provider for our watermelon. And I think people feel really good too, knowing exactly what's in there and knowing that there's nothing artificial color-wise or flavor-wise in that it, it is what you're gonna get.

Interviewer
Obviously the pandemic was difficult for everyone, but I imagine that you guys were actually quite busy during that period.

Lauren
We were, I was a little surprised. So we had a drop off just like everybody else did. Most of our business that was on premise, meaning in bars and restaurants dropped off. And to some extent still hasn't completely recovered. But we had kind of a break for a couple weeks where we were able to kind of take a breather and watch out for our child. And then things exploded. And people started making cocktails at home and people who were making cocktails on Instagram or Facebook started using our stuff. And we started publishing more recipes and more cocktail videos ourselves. And we had to turn our living room into a fulfillment center. No, it was wonderful. We were able to build, uh, box sports with all of the orders, which our child loved. Uh, if you got a broken bottle during that period, I'm so sorry, we let our, at the time, five year old pack them, but she got really good at it. You know, it's as tiny hands. Uh,

Interviewer
And they, they are useful at that age.

Lauren
She likes to come in and work with us. It's after school, if we're still working, I'll go pick her up and she'll say, Hey, can we go to the kitchen? And I'll say, absolutely, cuz it's on the way home. And she can stop there and I'm telling you, she can, out cap all of us. She can put those caps on those bottles and she'll turn to the rest of us. And she'll say, do you need a break? You need 10, I can do this, but that's why you have them. Right. So they can help out.

Interviewer
Well, exactly. Yes. Now I believe you are available in 10 states across the US.

Lauren
Yes. So we are in stores and 10 states across the us, but we are also available online for all 50. So, uh, plus some territories,

Interviewer
Are you looking to expand overseas at any point?

Lauren
We are. We have been looking into it. Uh, we are actually just audit that conversation. There's a great group called SUSTA, uh, Southern United States trade association. And we've started talking to them about ways that we can change our packaging and our labelling to start shipping overseas. So it's, it's a conversation it's gonna take us a little while, but it's definitely one that's already started

Interviewer
Now. Of course, if people want more information, they can go to your website, which is cocktailandsons.com or follow the brand on yours socials.

Lauren
Yep. We are on Twitter, on Facebook and on Instagram at cocktail and suns. And then we also have a Tumblr with all of our recipes, which you can find on our website, that's cocktailandsons.tumblr.com.

Interviewer
Well, look Lauren, thank you so much for the time to speak with me today.

Lauren
Well, thank you so much for me. This has really been a delight