After making his name as one of San Francisco’s leading cocktail snobs, Thad Vogler of Bar Agricole may have found a new calling. For once, the cocktail he’s proselytizing isn’t made with single-estate, biodynamic ingredients, nor from a spirit aged for decades in a barrel. Rather, it’s a vodka soda. In a can.
Specifically, the drink Vogler and his co-conspirator, acclaimed British designer Simon Waterfall, are launching in June is called Waste. It’s one of the nation’s first upcycled packaged cocktails, made from the agricultural refuse that companies from various industries would normally dump into a landfill. The packaging and can are black, with a white type in Helvetica. It intentionally borders on generic (“It’s giving ‘Cards Against Humanity,’” said one astute editor at The Standard), yet it definitely gets your attention. That’s the first goal. The second is to get you spring-break drunk, while simultaneously bettering the planet.
If there’s one quick takeaway from hanging out with Vogler, a man who, at 6-foot-8, towers above everyone, it’s that he tends to counter his stature with wry self-effacement. “If you’d asked me 15 years ago, when Bar Agricole opened, if one day I’d be working for free for a ridiculous English guy who’s trying to make GNS from garbage, I’d say, ‘That sounds about right,’” he says.
To get the joke, you have to know that GNS stands for grain neutral spirit, a high-proof alcohol made by distilling pretty much anything containing both sugar and carbohydrates. Typically, it’s produced from corn, wheat, or barley, but it can be made from anything from rejected carrots to leftover cupcakes. The opposite of precious or expensive (“it’s the industry’s dirty secret,” as Vogler puts it), a GNS is typically used as a base for vodka and gin.
It is also the starting point for Waste, which contains vodka, carbonated water, and organic citrus (at 4.5% alcohol). To make the GNS, Vogler is utilizing agricultural refuse, of which there’s no shortage in our country. The U.S. discards more food than any other nation — a third of what we produce — at the rate of 2.5 billion tons annually. According to the USDA, that food waste contributes to the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants per year.
This may seem to go against the bespoke, farm-to-bar drinking that Vogler has long espoused. (“Agricole” means farm or, more directly, agriculture, in French.) He opened the original, lauded Bar Agricole in SoMa in 2011 and went on to open Trou Normand and Obispo — even moving Bar Agricole to a new location for a hot second.
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They are all closed now. His restaurateur days are over, he says. It’s been a humbling experience. He’s sticking with alcohol — bottom shelf and top shelf. At the same time Waste is debuting, he’s about to relaunch his online shop for single-origin spirits, and he continues to work with three-Michelin-starred Quince, curating the bar program.
Should you think his two businesses are in conflict, he disagrees. By investing in small-batch spirits, Vogler has always promoted good agricultural practices, just on a micro scale. He hopes to make a bigger impact with Waste. “I’ve always been interested in booze as an agricultural product. It’s all about maximizing agriculture from two sides of the same coin. And if we can make GNS — this flavorless, shitty thing — from agricultural waste, it’s huge,” he says.
However, this whole Waste thing wasn’t initially Vogler’s idea. It took a call from Waterfall — aka the “ridiculous English guy” — to get him to think bigger, cheaper, and definitely brasher.
Waterfall, while not a spirits expert, is a storyteller and a designer. He arrived in the Bay Area from London in 2013 and has since worked as a creative director at Intel, Verizon, and Airbnb, among other major companies. “I’ve been building brands all my life. I’ve worked for the Coca-Colas of this world,” he says. (He is also quick to inform you that in 2007, he was awarded the Royal Designer of Industry — the U.K.’s highest honor in the field, which he shares with the likes of Apple’s Jony Ive.) Like Vogler, at midlife, Waterfall was ready to do something that could have a positive impact.
Waterfall lives in Berkeley, rides collectable motorcycles, wears bandannas around his neck, and has a long goatee. He’s a talker, a character. He had lined up one partner, Thomas Hartman, who is in charge of operations out of St. Paul, Minnesota. But he needed a respected cocktail person behind Waste, which is why he approached Vogler. “Thad has spent his entire life fighting for authenticity in the spirits industry,” Waterfall says. “I did my presentation about Waste for him, and at the end of it, he said, ‘Right — I’m in.’”
As it stands, the GNS in Waste is made with 12.5% whey left over from Bay Area dairy farms; this is Upcycled Certified (a certification run by Where Food Comes From, the same third party behind the USDA Organic and Non-GMO Project verifications). The vodka — the other 87.5% — is made from surplus corn.
They hope to make it all upcycled certified one day, including the CO2 and water. But the upcycling world is relatively new, and not everything is available or certifiable. The packaging for Waste is also environmentally aware. The can is made from 70% recycled aluminum, and the box the cans come in is made from post-consumer paper, with soy-based ink.
Vogler and Waterfall have dreams of making various versions of Waste with ingredients that reflect each market in which it’s sold — using surplus rice in Japan, apple waste in New York, pineapples in Barbados. Kind of the idea of farm-to-table, but waste-to-can.
Unlike recycling and composting, upcycling isn’t yet part of everyone’s mindset, but the duo are banking on Gen Z’s value system being aligned with their cocktails. “It’s like the organic movement,” says Waterfall. “It took time before people were sold on paying double for a slightly wonkier, smaller avocado.”
When Waste launches in June, it’ll cost less than $20 for a four-pack, in line with a canned Crafthouse Vodka Spritz and about double a High Noon Vodka Seltzer. As much as their intentions are virtuous and rooted in sustainability, Vogler and Waterfall are hopeful that Waste will be a home run in other ways. White Claw, for instance, did $2 billion in sales last year, Waterfall says with admiration: “I have so much respect for the guy who started it.”