The Magic of Misdemeanor

Okay. Let's talk about what's actually in this thing.

We get the question a lot. Usually about 20 minutes after someone drinks it, when they've loosened up and are grinning and squinting at the bottle like it personally betrayed their expectations of what a non-alcoholic drink is allowed to do. "What did you put in here?" Fair. You deserve to know, and honestly, we're a little too proud of the answer to keep it to ourselves.

Misdemeanor was not supposed to be easy to make, and it wasn't. We killed a lot of batches getting here. So here's the honest version of how the magic works.

The whole point

Just the good part.

Here's what we were chasing. That golden stretch of a good night, the part where you're warm and easy and somehow funnier than usual and genuinely glad to be wherever you are. The good part. Just the good part.

Alcohol gets you there, sort of. It does it by quietly turning the lights down on your entire brain and then billing you for it in the morning. We didn't want to turn anything down. We wanted to turn the right things up and leave the rest of you completely alone. No fog. No 3am staring at the ceiling. No "why did I say that" replay over brunch.

You can't fake that with sugar and bubbles. You need real plants doing real work. So we went and found the best one.

The Star

Meet kanna, the reason any of this works.

Kanna (Sceletium tortuosum), a scrubby little succulent from the dry parts of South Africa.

Kanna is the star. Everything else in the bottle is a backup dancer. Essential for the show. It wouldn't be complete or nearly as good without them. But not the star. That's kanna.

It's a scrubby little succulent (Sceletium tortuosum, if you want to impress someone) from the dry parts of South Africa, and people have been using it to feel good for a very, very long time. The San and Khoikhoi were chewing and fermenting this plant to lift their mood and take the edge off a brutal day long before anyone had a word like "nootropic." They cracked the good part centuries ago. We just showed up later with a desire for a good time and knowledge of metabolism and pharmacokinetics.

The magic lives in kanna's alkaloids. The one we built the whole drink around is mesembrine, and it pulls off two things that, together, are kind of perfect.

First, it nudges your serotonin. Quick refresher: serotonin is one of the main chemicals your brain uses to set your mood. Normally your neurons fire it off and then immediately vacuum most of it back up to reuse. Mesembrine slows down the vacuum. More serotonin hangs around a beat longer, the signal lingers, and your mood drifts quietly upward. You get easier to talk to. Other people get easier to like. The whole room picks up a soft glow.

Second, and this is the part that keeps Misdemeanor from being a nap in a can, mesembrine goes after an enzyme called PDE4. You don't need the biochemistry. What matters is that this is the whole difference between calm and checked out. Kanna lifts you without flattening you. You stay sharp. You stay in the conversation. You're just having a substantially better time being in it.

A gentle mood lift and a clear head, at the same time. Loose but not sloppy. Warm but not woozy. Most people describe it as feeling more like themselves, just with the good dial turned up a notch.

And it's completely legal, which, given the name, is the joke we're proudest of.

One more nerdy thing, because it matters. Kanna's alkaloids absorb beautifully right through the tissue in your mouth, which is faster and smoother than making your stomach sort it all out. So we built the format around that. And the dose. One shot is plenty for most people, but everyone's a little different, so some will want a bit more and some a bit less. That's the point. Sip it, listen to your body, and have as much as feels right for as long as it feels right. What genuinely ate up our R&D was getting the blend itself dialed in, so whatever amount feels right to you feels great. We found it. You're welcome.

The supporting cast

The backup dancers.

A headliner with a bad band is still a bad show, so we were just as picky about the supporting cast.

Licorice root→Carries its own plant compounds with a long track record of helping people stay steady under stress. Its job is to make sure the kanna lift settles in soft instead of arriving like a slap.

Black cumin seed→The good stuff here is thymoquinone, which keeps the whole experience even and unbothered instead of jangly. The friend who keeps the night from getting weird.

Ginger→In there mostly so your stomach doesn't file a formal complaint. It does its quiet job so the only thing you actually notice is the fun.

There's a little more in the mix, but you get the idea. None of it is in there by accident. The trick was never picking good ingredients, anybody can do that. The trick was getting them to play nice together, so the finished thing feels warmer and smoother than the sum of its parts. That's the part that took us forever.

Why it works

It's not the ingredients. It's the balance.

The thing we're actually proud of isn't any one ingredient. It's the balance.

Misdemeanor is not an energy drink cosplaying as relaxation, and it's not a sleepytime tea cosplaying as a good night. It's its own animal. Kanna sets the mood and opens you up. The rest of the lineup keeps it smooth and easy on your body. The format gets it into you the right way. And the whole thing is tuned to show up when you crack the bottle, stick around for exactly the part of the night you want it around for, and then clear out clean.