[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it hard. Now get it in gear.
It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law, and I just opened my podcast studio.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to entrepreneurship, where we talk with business owners and celebrities about their business stories.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: So now we're on to David and Monica Kowalski. And this is really a cool product, Kulua. It's a nostalgic, award winning blend of coffee and liqueur born from a family recipe. Tell us all about this.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Well, we have two businesses, so we're those entrepreneurs. And I. And I worked in corporate America for 28 years. Laid off position, moved to India, and then I, in 45 days, opened a tap room just because I didn't know that it was supposed to take longer than that. And, you know, we just were like, all right, let's jump in. But what happened is I was having difficulty finding a coffee liqueur, and with a Lebowski's tap room, you have to have a white Russian, right? And it was really serendipitous because I was looking my daughter. There's rites of passage in our house. And while I. And I like to think I'm a cool, hip mom, but I'm not. You know, you have to be 18 to do some things. You know, it's just you have to. And our youngest wanted a tattoo, and she wanted it of my mom's handwriting, which is very near and dear. My mom had passed away, and so she wanted her handwriting. And so we were looking in the Tupperware recipe book that everybody had in the 70s, and it was green. And then he opened it up, and it had pictures on it, and it was like jello salad. And it had all these things that everybody's mom had or grandma or crazy aunt, right? And so I still have that because that was my mom. Since we're looking for a handwrite, I found my dad's recipe for coffee liqueur that he used to make. And my dad passed away when I was 18, and so I hadn't even had a white Russian, hadn't thought about it, and I was like, oh, let's try this out. Let's see if it works. And of course, it was laid out very. I'm sure he had done many AB testing, right? It Was, this is what you do. This is the next step. Depth. Things were underlined a couple times. You know, like, very specific, Very specific. Very specific region of coffee. All of it was, like, right there. Of course, I put everything together in a pot and didn't turn out right. Turned out like candy. So then I followed it exactly. And then. Then I had the perfect test kitchen because we had the tap room. And, you know, with our liquor license and everything, and most liquor licenses across the country, you can infuse things. So you'll go to, like, your favorite restaurant. They may infuse a vodka with Jolly Ranchers or with jalapenos, you know, tequila. You can do all of that. So it was basically a house made coffee liqueur. So for eight months, I made coffee liqueur at Lebowski.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: It was a very happy eight months, by the way.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Happy eight months. And then I was getting this. Can we buy it? Can we buy it? Well, that's where the liquor license changes, right, because then you become a bootlegger. So you can't do that unless you're in Distiller. So.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: So then I'm sure you want to admit that publicly.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: I never sold it other than in a drink.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: We are attorneys here, by the way.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: We talked about it. I was like, what's the worst case scenarios? We sell a pallet. We had to buy a pallet. So we found a Distiller Black Hat distillery. We're really good friends with Joe, and we. We just kind of was like, what does this look like? What's the, you know, cost? Can we. How do we do this? And if you were my attorney, you'd be really happy because I was like, well, how are you doing this? And he's like, oh, it's just a fee for service. And I was like, okay, let's sign that.
So we. We did a fee for service, did our first palate, and we sold 1500.
[00:04:01] Speaker D: Bottles in the first 60 days.
[00:04:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:03] Speaker D: That we launched it.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: So what makes it so fantastic?
[00:04:06] Speaker C: There's a lot of things that make it really fantastic. It's gluten free. It's 100% additive free. So if you look at other coffee liqueurs, a lot of them have caramel coloring and add additional things. There's really nothing in there other than all natural ingredients. That's it.
[00:04:25] Speaker D: Monica's dad chose to use vodka as the base, and so that. That is really what works to our advantage. The vodka doesn't add an extra flavor to the product, so it lets the Colombian coffee that we use really shine through in the product. It also doesn't add an extra sugar component, so the TTB won't let us put this on the label. But ours. Ours tends to be about a third less sugar than most coffee liqueurs on the market currently. And as Monica mentioned, it acts as a natural preservative. So we're one of the only major coffee liqueurs on the market that has no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, and.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: It'S a nostalgic flavor. And definitely when it's being made, it's. I mean, it just takes me back to. And somebody's like, oh, how old were you when you're making it? 7. You know, I mean, I was. I'm an only child, so I was in the kitchen with my dad. But then it was something that brought me back to. To. We gave this out to the neighbors, right? There was that trade. It was. I grew in a very small town, Trinidad, Colorado, population, you know, 8,500 coal miners. And it was that nostalgia. And then somebody has a White Russian. They're like, oh, my gosh, I forgot. I love this drink. Or now it's the espresso martini, but you can mix because it is such a neutral spirit. We do a limoncello White Russian, which sounds like, oh, you're mixing lemon and coffee. And half and half. No, it tastes like German chocolate cake.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: And this has quite a kick. It's like 20% alcohol, right?
[00:05:49] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: And that's another reason for its popularity.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: And, like, if you go on their.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Website, no kidding, they show it, like, with chocolate brownie, and you pour this over a chocolate. That's like heaven to me. I just want to say, that looks so good.
[00:06:03] Speaker C: Now everybody's palette is a little different, right? You have Dutch brothers, You have Starbucks. You have whatever coffee. You know, like, people go out and have coffee. Let's go have coffee somewhere. Right? So our palates are a little different than when I was young. We did it during Christmas because that was like, cold weather. It was hunting season. There's a lot of things that were brought into that from a culture and family perspective. And now it's like, you know, I mean, that was when I think my dad probably would complain to somebody charged 50 cents for coffee with no refill. You know, like, what are you talking about?
And now here's that $8 coffee.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: So can you describe the taste of this to our listeners? How would you describe it?
[00:06:47] Speaker D: So different people get different notes. The most common things, obviously, like a caramel or brown sugar type of. And definitely that coffee flavor really shines through.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: And even non coffee drinkers will taste like chocolate notes.
[00:07:00] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:07:01] Speaker C: So when we've competed in different spirit festivals, that's a thing that comes through. Is a, is a, is not only just the coffee, the maple, vanilla, and then a chocolate.
[00:07:12] Speaker D: We have developed 55 different recipes for White Russians using every single alcohol you can imagine. Absinthe based, limoncello based, you name it, we've tried it with our coffee liqueur, we have 10 different espresso martini recipes that we make. One of the crazier ones is a hot honey tequila espresso martini. That is just, wow, phenomenal.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: These are all things that we share. This is part of our culture and our brand. Because at first, you know, colleagues would go, well, you're giving out recipes. Well, it's a consumable product. Of course I want them.
I also own a tap room where anybody can make a hamburger, but they come to eat a hamburger that I make because they didn't have to make it. Right.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Or they like your hamburger.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Or they like hamburgers. So, Jed, Monica, and David, how are.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: You incorporating the origin story for how you found this recipe, rediscovered it, and developed it into your market facing?
[00:08:03] Speaker C: That is on all of our, like, shelf talkers. It is on everything that we, you know, like even our team at the Tap room, because in Colorado, you can take bottles home with you. So anything that it's incorporated into our website. So it talks about how, you know, we're honoring my dad with a family recipe. Right. It's here. It's made right in the heart of Colorado in the, in the middle of the United States versus nothing to be imported or anything like that. And you can buy it and request it online in the cities and states that allow that. That's something that we incorporate on our website. On any talking, any sales meeting, that story is brought up. So that way they know and, you know, it's fun is because, you know, my dad's name was Donald. And so Donnie, it kind of incorporates into the movie. So we even have a little thing that says a tribute to Donnie.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: For those who don't know what was the movie that you're referencing?
[00:08:55] Speaker C: Big Lebowski.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: So you have Lebowski Kulua, right?
[00:08:59] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: That's your website. Can you kind of spell out how people find you on your website?
[00:09:04] Speaker D: Absolutely. It's lebowskiskoolua.com. it's L E B O W S K I S K O O L L U A h dot com. And they can go there, find out about more about our story. Find recipes for both food and cocktail drinks, fun interactive things that take them back to our our Tap Room website as well.
T shirts, merchandise, all that kind of thing. And more importantly, they can go and directly order the product in most states. We have online sales live now and they can go on and check that out. You can also see the different awards that we've won for the product. We picked up our first gold medal for the product in San Diego at the San Diego International Spirits Festival in February.
We just recently won three additional gold medals at the Los Angeles Invitational Spirit Challenge, and we're currently competing in the New York International Spiritual Neck of the Woods. Knock on wood, we're hoping to do just as well on the East Coast.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: So it sounds like a really popular product. It sounds like it'd be a great gift for the person who has everything right.
Yeah. Something they haven't tried before. So thank you very much.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Marisa Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
