Trophy Brewing, a stalwart of Raleigh’s beer scene, moved into THC seltzers in early 2025 after seeing how well other companies’ drinks performed at their bottle shop, State of Beer. Now their first line of seltzers, Starry Eyes, accounts for 5% of sales and is off the shelves as quickly as they make it.
But with federal law changing in November, Trophy expects to shut down production in the coming months.
“We don’t have an actual deadline yet,” said Les Stewart, Trophy’s co-owner and head brewer. “It’ll probably be two or three months away from that November mark before we stop making it, so that we can run through inventory, because retailers are also going to stop buying it.”
The Assembly talked to Stewart about how regulations on THC drinks compare with those on alcohol.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Assembly: How does the structure in place to ensure that Starry Eyes complies with the law compare to the rules for your alcohol products?
Les Stewart: There is no compliance on the THC side of things. This is all self-initiated. Our entire structure is an anticipated process that we thought was going to happen with regulation. We do all of the regular testing that we would do for any beverage. We do all the other standard FDA food-safe practices in terms of cleaning.
But as far as specific compliance for THC, that’s all stuff we made up, meaning we send each batch [to the lab], every time. We get it done right before we can [the batch]. We drive it up to our lab and have them do a same-day testing on it to make sure that we are within a 1 to 2% difference of our printed-on-the-can volumes of THC.
“There is no compliance on the THC side of things. This is all self-initiated.”
Les Stewart, Trophy co-owner and head brewer
Other than that—the compliance in terms of what we’ve written on the can, that it’s not intended for 20-year-olds and below—we made all that stuff up, anticipating that there was going to be some type of compliance applied to us at some point in time, which has never happened.
What went into getting the THC levels right when you started?
I mean, it’s mass. We do volumetric calculations all the time for dosing for the beer side. This is not something that we’re unfamiliar with.
I guess the difference would be that THC doesn’t dissolve in water, so it has to be emulsified. How does that affect production?
I can’t go to my buddy down the street who makes gummies and take his dry active THC product and bring it over here and put it directly in mine because it’s not going to be soluble. It would just fall to the bottom. So instead, we actually work with a lab that provides an emulsification.
They process the active THC into a liquid product that we then use in our product, and it makes it as close to soluble as it can be. It’s not dissimilar from adding oils into our nonalcoholic fizzy water sparkler, which is also nonsoluble. But if you create an emulsification, then you make sure that you’re recirculating the tank as you’re packaging it to make sure that you have the exact same amount in each can.
You must be logged in to post a comment.