In a nutshell what is Sonic Tonics all about?
Sonic Tonics is a range of ready-to-drink carbonated cocktails built by bartenders and blending across alcohol and CBD. We model each one on bar classic in terms of the profile but try to mix it up with unique flavours, colours and our own elan.
We've been mucking around with this since around 2019 at my basement bar - Behind This Wall in Hackney Central, north London - but in the past two years it's evolved, naturally of course, out from a hospitality side-hustle into the world of consumer packaged goods!
Why did you want to create drinks using CBD?
Sonic Tonics is a CBD RTD drink for the ages
It goes back a long time. Before the bar, I was working in Los Angeles and doing bits of music production when CBD and edibles really first boomed in 2016. I was fascinated in these products being sold on mood. I had never seen anything like that before: buzzy, unwind, uplift, etc. Through asking a ton of questions, I quickly learned that CBD wasn't really doing anything to the head per say, but was more like a modulator or filter shaping each unique experience, or "mood".
Simultaneously, I was enjoying a lot of downtown bars and the cocktail scene. One night the penny dropped and I wondered what sort of role CBD could play as a filter against alcohol's scuzzier edges.
Much like the way you would record a sound: the instrument creates a note, but then in the studio you can apply additional processing tools to shape how that sound is experienced and enjoyed.
Fast forward a few years and CBD became legal here and the bar had been open a few years. I popped across the road to Holland & Barrett one day, picked up some CBD oil and started tinkering on the concept.
It's clearly a fast growing but also quite misunderstood area of drinks - how did you work out how best to use CBDs in the drink and go about sourcing and making sure you got the right quality?
When CBD first hit here I think people were putting drops in everything post-hoc and going for the big upsell. Everyone knows that oil and water don't mix so I didn't really understand how this was working as a consumable.
As bartenders, we want to balance, blend and emulsify different ingredients so they work in a harmonious way. We were making a butter and honey syrup at the time using a fat washing technique to emulsify the butter.
Once I had got the CBD oil I started incorporating that into the syrup in place of the butter. By having your hard to mix ingredients in a syrup as a vessel you are much more likely to shake them hard into a drink and mix them well with the booze and other ingredients, giving customers a more united product with the CBD and alcohol running right through it.
As far as the sourcing went, it was the wild west back then. One time we found a supplier online, collected from a basement stall at the old shopping centre in Queensway and then three months later they had disappeared.
You are using cold-press CBD - why and how does that differ from other methods of using CBD?
Alex Hill has looked to capture the spirit of the drinks he makes at his Behind This Wall bar in Hackney in Sonic Tonics
Cold-press is extracted directly from hemp using natural and non-intensive techniques; however, a cold-press oil from hemp maybe only contains around 5% CBD if you're lucky. So to use it as an ingredient and get to your required dose you need a lot of oil! The other 95% can't just be cut out — it's just biomass. There's a lot of flavour in it, so I wanted to turn that into a part of the profile and experience, making it a positive.
It's quite earthy and bitter, which is an element like wormwood and other roots that are very prevalent in a load of ancient liqueurs that go into all the best cocktails.
CBD isolate - a white powder extracted using intensive industrial processes — is what goes in most drinks. You can get water soluble ones that dissolve in just like salt so you can keep your drink nice and light and clear. With the trend towards seltzers and health and mood drinks, this has been a benefit to loads of brands. I wanted to make a proper cocktail though, not a calorie counter - and with the oil that's really the only way to do that. Full fat fun!
Talk us through the ingredients for each of the products and why you wanted to use those combinations?
Each recipe is slightly modelled on the profile of a 'classic' - but this is probably true for every drink in human history! You know how they say if you break down the plots of movies there's something like seven tenets that everything else is a derivative of? I think it's really the same with drinks.
The rum one was the first and came from a swizzle drink I served at the bar pre-lockdown which really leant on the ginger, cardamom and orange blossom. All our CBD syrups are made with honey and then we add the ingredients, so these become the flavour and function engines for each drink.
But I really wanted these to be tonics so each has a handmade tonic syrup in there too. The gin and tonic is the template on which all our concoctions are built.
Spicy margarita - but make it tonic! Negroni Sbagliato - tonic that one too. That would then feed back into the honey CBD syrup to get the flavour profiles right that weren't in the booze, acid or tonic. So jalapeño and kumquat for the tequila tonic, leaning spicy marg. Fig, tonka and violet to round out the hemp root in the non-alc - bitter Sbagliato style.
The acid profile in that one uses lactic and malic acid to mimic the profile of Champagne. We then use cold brew tea extractions for tannin, natural colour and length.
Who do you see as the target audience for your Sonic Tonics?
Sonic Tonics is looking to capture those "serious" drinkers that are looking for something more creative, edgy and exciting from RTD cocktails
The honest answer is anyone who maybe wants a bit more from their first drink than their last. But if I had to paint a picture using a customer at the bar, it’s that person who's either open to the most interesting thing on offer, or that one who knows exactly what they want but is willing to be surprised.
Underlying both is a sense of knowing your own constitution and maybe thinking a bit more carefully about how you actually want to feel. They're not giving up drinking, they're just getting more deliberate about it. Culturally they tend to skew towards music, food, independent culture. They buy things because they're interesting, not because they're on offer.
Demographically we see a lot of 28-45s but honestly the drink seems to travel wider than that.
You say it is appealing to wine drinkers? In what way?
Wine drinkers are probably the most flavour-literate drinking audience there is. They're used to talking about terroir, bitterness, complexity - all the things that make our drinks interesting. The Hemp Root in particular has that same unpredictable quality as a natural wine or a Pet Nat. There's something alive in it. And the cold-press CBD brings an earthiness and bitterness that wine drinkers recognise instinctively.
It doesn't taste like a soft drink trying to be grown up. It tastes like something made with proper intention.
It's a great name - how did you come up with that?
I came across an article in Punch magazine about the Gin Sonic. Apparently quinine was illegal in Japan for a while, so instead of gin and tonics, bartenders would make Gin Sonics — a gin and soda with a splash of house-made syrup to add texture and that tonic-like bitterness.
Rumour has it a lot of those syrups had quinine in them on the sly, masked by stronger ingredients. That felt like exactly what we were trying to do - something familiar presented differently, with a little hidden intelligence in it.
The bar has always drawn a lot of inspiration from Japanese Kissa bars too, so Sonic felt right on multiple levels. The music connection, the harmony, the precision.
Sonics was the working title for a while. Then over a long lunch, one of my business partners dropped Tonics as a suffix and it was instantly obvious. That's exactly what these drinks are — tonics in the oldest sense of the word. Restorative remedies. Considered. Made with intention.
Why did you want to take the learnings from running a bar to creating your own drinks brand?
The Sonic Tonics range
The bar has always been a laboratory as much as a business. We don't have a menu - guests tell us what they want or like and we make something for them. That approach generates a huge amount of real world data about what people actually want from a drink, as opposed to what marketeers think they want.
Sonic Tonics is essentially what happens when you run that experiment for long enough. The bar gave us the confidence that the idea worked. The brand is just making it available to more people.
Behind This Wall has always attracted people who care deeply about craft and quality, and that spirit is baked into everything Sonic Tonics does.
You say you have built a new category for modern drinkers with Sonic Tonics - what do you mean by that?
RTDs have proliferated enormously but most of them are essentially the same thing — a spirit, a mixer, some sugar, a can. What we've done is introduce a functional ingredient that shifts the nature of the drinking experience rather than just the flavour of it.
That's genuinely new. The closest comparison is probably what happened when craft beer arrived and suddenly people realised beer could be so broad! We think the same shift is possible in RTDs and we want to be the brand that defines what that looks like.
Where does it sit in the drinks category? A new generation of RTDs? Or are they looking to create a new category?
It sits in the premium RTD space but it's trying to drag that category upmarket in the same way that Candy Kittens dragged up sweets. We're not a canned cocktail in the traditional sense - we’re closer to a handcrafted drink that happens to come in a bottle rather than over a bar. The CBD element puts us adjacent to the functional drinks space too, but we're not a wellness drink. We're a proper drink that happens to be more considered than most.
What is your distribution strategy for the brand - premium on and off-trade?
Our focus has been off-trade first - independent delis and bottle shops that already stock a range of canned or bottled cocktails. The owners of those kinds of shops are passionate, knowledgeable and genuinely want to talk their customers through something new. That's the perfect environment for a drink that needs a bit of explanation.
The Behind the Wall bar where Sonic Tonics was born
On-trade is the natural next step - bars and restaurants where staff can do the same job at the point of service. We're also actively looking for a few supportive wholesalers and pub groups who get what the brand is trying to do and want to grow with us rather than just list us.
Realistically, we're still at that pilot stage where market fit is everything. Are people actually buying it? Are shops re-ordering? Those signals matter more than anything else right now — even if the margins of selling through independent retail aren't the best for early cashflow.
Once we know the product is pulling through consistently we'll push harder and bring in distribution partners who understand what the brand is trying to do. A distributor who just slots you into their portfolio alongside a hundred other SKUs isn't going to serve the brand well at this stage.
Are you going direct or working with distributors - and if so why did you want to work with them?
Direct for now — it keeps us close to the accounts, we learn faster, and the margins work better at this stage. We'll bring in distribution partners when the volume justifies it and when we find the right ones who get what we're trying to do.
What are your hopes for the brand over the next few years?
To become the drink that defines this moment in drinking culture the way certain wines or spirits defined theirs. I want Sonic Tonics to be the thing that serious drinkers reach for when they want that unwind moment, with something that rewards their attention.
Beyond that - more expressions, more events, more of the community that's built up around the bar finding its way into the brand. We started something at Behind This Wall 15 years ago as a space to share in music through pop-ups, clubs and then naturally into the bar itself. Sonic Tonics feels like the next chapter of the same story. I want to see how far it goes.
* You can find out more about Sonic Tonics here.
