Side Bets
ON-COURSE COCKTAIL: This Arnold Palmer with a kick is one of four canned cocktails designed for golf by Denver’s Lifted Libations.
FAREWAYS
Juice Up Your Swing The perfect mix of soda, cocktails and golf inspired a Denver-born line of organic hard seltzers. By John Lehndorff YOU HAVE TO LOVE a story that boils down to two great things: golf and cocktails. That twosome has been tight since ancient Scots drank a wee dram on the world’s first links. This tale starts with Drew Fulton, a golfer who co-created an organic, artisan soda company to make high-quality cocktail mixers, and a hard-seltzer business to can ready-to-drink golf cocktails inspired by “swing juice.” “At the golf course you’d always see guys coming into the turn saying ‘I gotta get some swing juice,’” Fulton says. TO THE GAME BORN Golf has always been stitched into the life of this jocular Golden-raised “kid.” “I’ve been golfing my whole life. My one grandfather lived on a golf course. In the evening he’d let me go out and play the hole behind his house. My other grandfather had his own golf cart. I still play every Sunday with my wife and young kid,” says Fulton, who has worked at three local courses including Willis Case, primarily, he adds, to keep on playing. With a hole-in-one to his name, Fulton does have another claim to fame. “I once golfed one round every month for over five years in Colorado. It’s not easy in January or February to keep the streak alive,” he says with a belly laugh. His streak only ended when his soda business took off. Fulton had co-founded Denver’s Rocky Mountain Soda Company and the hard seltzer-focused Lifted Libations with childhood buddy “Moose” Koons. BECOMING A POP STAR “We started the soda company because Moose was part owner of a distillery in Palisade,” he says. “I was visiting there one time, and they were mixing their cocktails with Big K soda out of a plastic jug. That was all they could get, but we thought there had to be something better.” When a nearby craft brewery closed, the duo decided to buy its bottling line and launch a line of upgraded artisan sodas. The turning point during soda-making training also turned his stomach. “This guy warned us about mixing disodium benzoate with coloradoavidgolfer.com
Boulder Birch Beer has a cult following. And if you’ve sipped cocktails at local establishments, you’ve probably tasted these sodas. “I created most of these flavors with different alcohols in mind,” Fulton says.
Tee Up ROCKY MOUNTAIN SODA sponsors an annual amateur disc golf championship as well as a September 10 Tee Time golf tournament benefiting the First Tee program at Denver’s City Park Golf Course. tee-time-classic-citypark.perfectgolfevent.com
citric acid because you can create benzene—a known carcinogen. I didn’t think that was cool. I decided to learn how to do it the right way without any preservatives,” he says. The resulting beverages—natural, nonGMO, gluten-free, Kosher and vegan—have fans of all ages. Rocky Mountain’s root beer flavors the floats at Little Man Ice Cream locations.
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MAKING A HARD TURN That devotion to flavor and ingredients also inspired Fulton and Koons when they looked into canning hard seltzer and cocktails. “I tasted all the big hard seltzers and there are two dirty little secrets about them. Almost all of them are made with malt liquor (high alcohol beer). They use a lot of sweeteners to make that malt palatable, but they don’t have to list them on the label,” Fulton says. These tastings brought back youthful memories for Fulton: “What’s crazy is that, growing up in Golden, we had a lot of contact with Zima,” he says. Zima was Coors’ premature stab at a clear malt-liquor beverage.
August/September 2021 | COLORADO AVIDGOLFER
