Join the Founders of Metabrew tonight!
Romy Raad & Natalie Neumann, co-founders of Metabrew and alumni of the program will join tonight (Monday, 4/10) an online class of Design Innovation and Leadership! This is a great opportunity to learn from our alumni how they connect the dots between the lessons on design leadership and innovation and their current experience, leading this dynamic startup. They will join us between 8-9pm EST. Feel free to join the conversation via zoom – https://NewSchool.zoom.us/j/112716219
About Metabrew
It might sound strange, but Metabrew was in its own way a philosophy before it was a product.
How to Live in New York City: a Crash Course
Rewind to 2013, when we were in grad school, and not yet privy to the little ways New Yorkers know how to make this city work for them (like facing the right way on the subway, or getting to know your local bartender, etc.). Life was good, but like anything good, there was some work required to get it.
Food had been essential to both us, having grown up in Bavaria and Lebanon where “local,” “grass-fed,” and “pastured” aren’t words you see too often in grocery stores because the produce was always fresh and local, and the chickens and the cows were always raised in a grassy field. We knew that better food made us feel better.
The one thing that didn’t jive with us was the way we caffeinated.
For one of us, it was impossible to keep going without what was more or less a pot of coffee, and a 2-liter of Diet Coke day in day out. For the other, the amount of caffeine in a regular cup of joe was too much for her stomach to take, and she survived on a spare amount of tea in the morning to help her on throughout the day. For both of us, coffee and tea weren’t doing enough for our particular needs, and we still wanted/needed the benefits of caffeine to sustain our hectic lives. Basically we needed less caffeine, and caffeine that lasted longer.
Coffee with Oil is Better
We wondered if there was another way, did some research and stumbled on a circle of folks who were blending butter and coconut oil into their coffee.
The idea made sense – caffeine dissolved in fat is digested slowly, so you get a slower release from the caffeine, and thus don’t need as much – but, it was time-consuming, more than a little messy, and too heavy for our stomachs.
So, seven days before graduating from our Master’s at Parsons, in May 2015, we registered this company.
We took to the lab, strapped on some rubber gloves, and exclusively spoke like Albert Einstein for a while, while we tinkered with a version of buttered coffee that made it easier for people to give it a try. We stumbled through a slew of interesting experiments ranging from a ghee-base, to a shakeable kit, but we really started to have success once we moved towards a plant-based model.
We’ve thrown about everything but the kitchen sink into a hot pot of joe (we’ll get back to you on that habanero coffee), but the day Metabrew really happened for the first time was fairly uneventful.
We were chilling another experiment, this time with cacao and cashew butter in addition to the MCT oil and coffee. We’ll never forget what we saw when we opened that refrigerator door.
The face of (Thriller) Michael Jackson was miraculously impressing itself on the inside of the carafe, just there, a result of some natural separation of the cashew and the coffee. The King of Pop was sending us a message, “This is the start of something, something big, get down, and bring it to the people!”
And so we did. Metabrew has been thrilling and bringing a very countable number of people back from the dead since, and we’re humbled to see that the meta nation just keeps getting bigger and bigger.