03: Mark Wong, IMPOSSIBREW®; When life gives you lemons, make nootropic non-alcoholic beer
Hi all,
A lot of people have been asking how I'm making money with this.
I've enjoyed telling them: I'm not.
Here's my Evil Plan:
- Guinea-pig The ProblemKit Method on myself.
- Find a great problem and build something cool <Make money here>
- Guinea-pig The ProblemKit Method on you.
- Showcase your success stories and distil the method into its most concentrated form.
Basically, you're getting ProblemKit FREE because you're along for the ride 🙌
Please consider forwarding to a friend who's itching to start their next big thing.
Next week, I'll share the foundations of The Method and begin a live experiment. Ooooooh...
🥜 Kernel
Describe the top three most brutal, unforgiving, hair-raising moments of your life
Some problems are more painful than others.
I want you to think back to a time when life just hurt. When things were hard. When something totally out of your control cut the wind from your sails.
Perhaps, for you, life feels this way right now. I'm sorry.
But like all big scary clouds, there's often a silver lining to be found. For some people, this silver lining becomes the foundation of a lifelong quest to put a dent in the world, like the Aikido master channelling their opponent's momentum against them.
So take your top three most 'spicy' 🌶️ memories and write them down somewhere private.
Play with rephrasing them using the Subject, Goal, Friction recipe.
As a [subject], I wanted [goal], but [friction].
Who were you in that moment, what did you need, and what was stopping you from getting it?
Here's a recent example from my own life, only last week:
As a Son, I wanted to know IMMEDIATELY when my Dad was out of surgery and how the operation went, but I had to wait for the hospital to contact my Mum first, and then for her to contact everyone else who cares about him.
Thankfully, my Dad is recovering just fine – despite the surgical team losing a needle in his body and extending the operation by 5-7 hours.
It was excruciating to wait, and the last thing my Mum needed was a freight train of anxious texts from the rest of the family.
It can be a painful process to acknowledge problems this way. I'll admit, it's not for everyone.
And let's not forget, lots of people build incredible products that solve fun, trivial problems and just nail it (hello, Alan Adler).
But if you've been kicked in the teeth by life, who's to say you shouldn't kick it back by building something amazing?
🦧 In the wild
When life gives you lemons, make nootropic non-alcoholic beer (Mark Wong, IMPOSSIBREW®)
The following feature is NOT sponsored! I'm here to solve The Problem Problem and showcase how the world's best problem-finders do it (see Evil Plan above). If you're interested in contributing to a future feature, reach out to alex@problemkit.co.
The following is a Q&A transcript with my friend Mark Wong, Founder of IMPOSSIBREW®.
(Edited for clarity)
Alex: What problem are you solving?
Mark: Well, it’s something I’ve found personally quite frustrating. If you want to be healthy, but you still want to drink and enjoy yourself, what do you do?
To drink or not to drink - that has been the question. What if it no longer has to be? When it comes to socialising, the choice has been unnecessarily dichotomous.
You either drink and accept the certain negative side effects, or abstain altogether, which is no fun.
There is currently no way for those who want to drink and enjoy the social benefits of alcohol, without the negative consequences.
Alex: How did you notice this problem?
Mark: I love beer, drinking, and everything that comes with it.
I loved it so much that I started studying it professionally when I turned 18.
I’ve always wanted to love what I do for work (you'll literally spend most of your life doing it, so it might as well be good), and working in booze seemed to be a no-brainer - what’s better than being able to drink beer at work!?
But everything changed one day. On a routine checkup, my doctor said to me that my liver wasn’t doing very well, especially for my age at 22… so I had to stop.
Alex: How did you decide it was worth solving? Why didn’t you just carry on with your life?
Mark: Since then, everything changed.
I couldn’t drink, so my dream of going into the alcohol industry didn't really work anymore.
As I tried to drink other alternatives like lime and soda, Coke, or dreadful-tasting non-alcoholic beers, it made me realise how much of my social life is around going to pubs and bars with friends.
There’s something quite weird about being the only one stone-cold sober on your 4th Diet Coke when everyone else is having fun.
And beer. Oh, beer.
I missed beer.
All the non-alcoholic options had an unusual sort of metallic taste and were all very sweet, which tasted nothing like the real thing, so I thought 'you know what - things need to change'.
But even when some of the available options started to improve in taste, a key question remained for me: why do we drink in the first place?
Was taste important?
Sure, it plays a part, but that was never why we liked booze to begin with (there are certainly much tastier and sweeter drinks out there).
It was for how it makes us feel, the socially lubricating effects of it, and the way it lets us unwind after a long day. People don’t tend to talk about this because it makes you sound like an alcoholic, but the truth is, we drink for function.
Most of us have coffee or tea in the morning as a pick-me-up and to give us energy, and many of us drink alcohol at night to wind down.
And that ‘wind-down’ moment has been dominated almost exclusively by alcohol for centuries (and all the other options were illegal).
Alex: What solution did you come up with?
Mark: I was at the end of my time at uni by this point.
So, with a fairly naive goal in mind, I started speaking to lots of industry experts and professors around top universities to see if the effects of alcohol could be replicated somehow, but almost everyone said it was impossible.
Until I met Durham bioscience professor Dr Paul Chazcot, who was a little unconventional and shared my passion.
We began working to see if we could find something that could mimic or at least get as close to the sensory experience of alcohol as possible - because after all, it’s all just neurochemical processes in the brain that allow alcohol to work its magic.
We struggled for a long time until one day I went back home to Asia and saw that when some older folks had ailments, instead of resorting to pills and so on, they would swear by the efficacy of these dark, murky concoctions of traditional herbal plants to solve their problems.
I was sceptical.
But it planted a thought in my head, and I wanted to find out whether there was any truth to it.
I went back to Dr Chazot and the more we looked into these plants, the more we realised that there was a mountain of research already out there attesting to their potential for everyday benefit.
Specifically, there's a big group of compounds called 'nootropics'.
It's a loose categorisation for things that have an effect on cognition – the world’s most common is caffeine from coffee beans, and there are over 40,000 other active plants out there that do this sort of thing.
What if you could have one that works opposite to caffeine?
Instead of giving you energy, what if we could promote relaxation and stress relief?
That’s when we developed our Social Blend™, a blend of natural ingredients that offer relaxation without drowsiness, working harmoniously with receptors like GABA in the brain to provide that ‘one or two-pint feeling’, without excessive inebriation or hangovers the next day.
I brewed the first version in my university dorm room (it tasted horrific, but we’ve come a long long way since then!)
After I started the business, a BBC producer by chance came across an article I wrote and invited me to go on Dragons’ Den.
We were only 3 months old at the time, so we got rejected by all 5 dragons. But the learning experiences and the number of new people who’ve since heard about the future of drinking we’re trying to create were worth every brutal ‘no’.
Now, fast forward 3 years, and we’ve had triple-digit growth every year.
We've been awarded the UK’s best-tasting alcohol-free beer (both our Enhanced Lager and Pale Ale in their categories), with over 700 customers becoming investors and ranking 26th on Startup100 2024 (the UK’s longest-running startup index). We've been very fortunate!
IMPOSSIBREW® make enhanced non-alcoholic 0.5% ABV beers, brewed with their Social Blend™, designed to replicate the social and sensory experiences of alcohol, without hangovers. From as low as 27 calories per 440ml can, the beers are all vegan and low-sugar. The Lager is also gluten-free!
The best way to get them is via the website: www.impossibrew.co.uk (there are resellers on Amazon but they are much more expensive). Beer is delivered to your doorstep the next day UK nationwide - now with a free IMPOSSIBREW® glass when you get the Bestseller Bundle.
✨ Weekly problem
As someone who lives in a tiny flat and writes a lot, I want to preserve my spine AND save on space but height-adjustable chairs are bulky and don't fold away.
Perhaps, like me, your 'office' is also the living room... somebody #SaveOurSpines!
🛸 Misc.
This week, after a mind-blowing 2 am salt beef bagel at Brick Lane Bagel (open 24hrs!), I decided to make my own salt beef at home. I'm using this recipe from Bon Appétit (corned beef and salt beef are the same).
Join in?
Wishing you lots of problems,
Alex