It started as the ultimate hair-of-the-dog remedy. Andy Wessels, bleary-eyed after a long night of drinking, stood over a home espresso machine and whipped up a caffe latte. A bottle of Jägermeister lurked nearby.
“How much to drop a shot of Jäger in this latte?” he called out to his longtime buddy, Jesse Altman, who was splayed out in a hungover stupor nearby. “Would you drink it?”
“Whynatte?” came Altman’s rhetorical reply. They laughed. Then they tried it. Their party-addled brains perked up to the twinned stimulation of alcohol and caffeine and filled with the same thought: “Hey, we’re on to something.”
That was in 2004.
Today Wessels and Altman run a canned beverage company that’s on track to clear $450,000 in sales. They’ve lined up an admirable roster of celebrity fans and investors — from comedienne Margaret Cho to movie director Peter Farrelly — who may help them reach their goals of taking the Whynatte brand national.
But when you ask these two 30-something entrepreneurs about Whynatte, they immediately launch into their well-practiced creation story. To understand it is to know its history. Today’s Whynatte isn’t just milky canned coffee, but also a brand that has grown organically through Atlanta’s bar scene.
“Not to say it wouldn’t have worked in another city,” says Altman. “But there’s something about this place that has fostered this sense of community and helped us grow.”
So back to that fateful day in 2004. That night, Wessels and Altman convinced a bartender to make them Whynattes, and they discovered three fun things:
1. Everyone scowls but eventually acquiesces when you ask for a caffe latte to bomb with a shot of Jäger.
2. It’s actually kind of fun to pound a hot, alcoholic beverage, and everyone looks at you in amazement as you do so.
3. Before long, everyone else wants to pound said drink.
It was the birth of a party sensation. Altman and Wessels, friends since grade school, were becoming the Whynatte guys of Atlanta. It happened just as people started taking and posting cellphone pictures, and just as MySpace was ceding ground to Facebook.
Soon, there were many hilarious free-floating pictures of friends pounding tall, milky caffe lattes as if they were pints of beer and trying not to grimace from the esophagus burn.
In 2006, Altman bought the domain whynatte.com to give friends a place to post their pictures. A couple of months in, Altman was looking at the site when he noticed something unusual. “There was a picture of these two guys from Oregon drinking Whynattes. We had no idea who they were,” he said, laughing. Within six months the site had gone viral and pictures were coming in from all over the world.
The two friends started hosting Whynatte parties at the El Bar in Poncey-Highland, with batches of caffe latte that they spent all afternoon mixing and served from the coffee urn Altman’s grandmother used for church functions. They outgrew the urn and had to get a local coffee bar to supply the latte.
Rolling Stone magazine caught wind of the sensation and ran a blurb about this cocktail craze coming from Atlanta.
Altman, who was working as an investment manager, and Wessels, a facilitator for autistic children, began to realize they had a nascent business on their hands. There were just a couple of problems.
“We had a brand but no product,” Altman continues.
“And we weren’t making any money,” Wessels adds.
Grass-roots approach
How do you start a beverage company?
Well, if you grow up in Atlanta, you start asking your parents’ friends, and a Coca-Cola executive or two will eventually emerge. Before long they had partnered with Jim Natoli, who had spent more than two decades in research and development for Coke and knew how to outsource lab work and production to come up with a salable product.
The Whynatte that emerged in can form in 2008 was a different beast. Its gold-on-black label proclaims “coffee and energy,” and the formulation includes ginseng, guarana seed extract and B vitamins for an added energy boost. With a mixture of cane sugar and artificial sweetener, it clocks in at only 100 calories per 8-ounce can.
By late 2008, the first shipment of 10,000 cases arrived in Atlanta. Altman and Wessels didn’t have a distributor, so they took the grass-roots approach and loaded up the trunks of the cars. Plus, they got their fingers clicking.
“The brand was born online,” says Altman. “Social media was the only way we knew how to market it.” Whynatte hit Twitter big time with all kinds of giveaways. One day they promised a hand-delivered case to the first 10 people to fax a drawing of a unicorn. They offered “Dairy Dollars” — $50 bills taped to cans that they hid near bars that served Whynatte, with clues to their whereabouts communicated through tweets.
They also got involved in the local music scene, and soon a wide variety of Atlanta musicians, from B.o.B. to the Constellations, were touting the virtues of Whynatte cocktails.
National aspirations
Whynatte also proved popular with craft services for movies being filmed in Atlanta — an energy boost for a lot of people who have to spend all day on their feet.
Director Farrelly, in town for the movie “Hall Pass,” first got wind of Whynatte from his wife, who discovered it in Atlanta and immediately cottoned to this low-calorie splurge. When an extra on the set began telling him the Whynatte story, he got intrigued and invited Altman and Wessels for a meeting.
“My wife liked the product so much, and I liked the guys so much, I decided to invest,” says Farrelly. “I like that it’s Atlanta’s own thing.” Farrelly was so bullish on the product he convinced the movie’s star, Owen Wilson, to invest as well. The product had a cameo in “Hall Pass,” but will be featured more prominently in a coffee shop scene of “The Three Stooges,” filming in Atlanta.
Farrelly wants to help take the drink to a national audience, and he suspects it’s one sensation-making cocktail away from a big break.
That cocktail may have been concocted. Walk into more than 250 local restaurants or bars in Atlanta today that cater to the kind of crowd that likes its shots to go down nice and easy, and ask for a Whippet. The bartender will shake equal parts Whynatte and Pinnacle Whipped Cream vodka over ice, drain it into a glass and give you something to excite that happy, buzzy, the-night-is-forever-young part of your brain.
Invented by a bartender at Tin Lizzy’s in Midtown, the widely available Whippet now has fans throughout the city, including comedienne Cho. “It’s really chocolatey and really good. It’s like a dessert,” says the “Drop Dead Diva” star.
Cho also thinks a big part of Whynatte’s appeal is the way it’s so deeply connected to the bar and club scene here.
Altman, who has emerged as the more recognizable face of Whynatte, is “like a tastemaker,” says Cho. “He’s the kind of person I want to meet when I come to a new town.”
And he’s got just the drink for you.
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