Meredith Mills-Merritt spent her career building prestige beauty brands before she ever thought about starting a spirits company. Then her mom's backyard gin cocktail — built on frozen lemonade concentrate, muddled mint, and a floral gin — became the recipe behind The Original Southside, a canned, ready-to-drink cocktail now on shelves in more than 20 markets.

On this episode, Meredith walks through the 13-month development process that turned a family recipe into a business, the difference between a compound gin and a distilled gin, and why she bet on gin instead of the far more crowded vodka and tequila RTD categories. She and John dig into the beauty-industry habits she brought with her: obsessive ingredient sourcing, real cane sugar over corn syrup, and a refusal to hide behind a vague "clean" label.

That obsession led Meredith to co-found the Clean Alcohol Collective with Conor Begley of Fathers Brewing — a coalition pushing for the kind of ingredient transparency that's standard in food and beauty but still optional in alcohol. They talk through the FDA's decades-old awareness of benzene risk in citrus-preserved beverages, why flavored malt beverages can legally pretend to be tequila cocktails, and what it takes for a brand to earn a spot in the Collective.

Plus: how to actually drink a Southside (over ice, with a lemon wheel, or topped with prosecco), what breaks first when an RTD scales past 20 markets, and why sales patterns move across the map like a horseshoe each winter.

Spirits & brands mentioned: The Original Southside, Fathers Brewing, Happy Dad, Cutwater, Salt Point, High Noon, Straightaway Cocktails, Hendrick's, Tanqueray

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