Tuscaloosa Margarita Festival (Week Five & Week Six: Crimson Entrepreneurship Academy)

Preparing for and after the Tuscaloosa Margarita Festival has been a dream come true for me. As someone who always doubted my own "cool factor", creating a product that brings others' unique "cool" to the surface has been so rewarding.

We offered tastings of the "Al-rita", using amber agave syrup to resemble the flavor of tequila blanco, orange simple syrup to supplement triple sec, key lime juice for a fresh and sweet flavor, and grenadine for a pop of color. Guests were pleasantly surprised by our seltzer "margarita", and we ended up giving away tastings for five straight hours.

In a climate where the mocktail is used to being the chaser and the refresher between alcoholic drinks, it was a shock to me that interest was so high. Clearly, the attitudes towards these options have changed from when I was a kid, when mocktails were perceived as being sugary sodas for kids. Now, customers of all ages get to enjoy an upscale, alcohol-free option.

And still, the Crimson Entrepreneurship Academy has taught me yet again not to discount the importance of letting the next generation in on the "cool factor". My favorite moment of the festival was getting to share our drink with the adorable kid who was clearly under drinking age, but returned to our booth multiple times. Our drink brought her out of her shyness, allowing her to show the world she was cool, sipping a mocktail alongside her margarita-drinking mom.

If I could go back to when I was her age, I would tell myself about how cool I was; I had always been a trailblazer, even if I seemed different from the rest. Refraction exists for moments like these, where adults looked up at me with wide-eyed excitement, exclaiming "I was hoping for an option like this!".

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