Jennie
Ripps

Jennie Ripps spends her workday doing something most beverage CEOs would never admit to: standing at her own kitchen counter, blending fruit juice, tea and botanicals by hand until a recipe tastes right. Only then does it earn a trip to the production line. That habit - small, stubborn, a little eccentric - is the whole argument behind Owl's Brew, the boozy-tea company she runs as founder and CEO.

Owl's Brew makes ready-to-drink cocktails and spiked, sparkling teas built on real ingredients instead of the flavorings that fill most of the canned-cocktail aisle. The brand reaches shelves in more than 40 states - Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, Total Wine - and pours at venues from Yankee Stadium to TD Garden. It has collected more than 40 tasting awards along the way, including gold and platinum nods at the SIP Awards. But Ripps tends to talk less about distribution maps and more about what is, and isn't, in the bottle.

She co-founded the company in 2020 with Maria Littlefield, her longtime business partner. The pitch was almost embarrassingly simple: they wanted a boozy drink they actually wanted to drink, and couldn't find one that wasn't loaded with artificial flavoring. So they made it themselves. The two had already proved they could blend a beverage people loved; the new question was whether the same discipline could survive the messier world of alcohol, distribution and three-tier regulation.

The answer, so far, has been yes. Owl's Brew now spans hand-crafted boozy teas and spirits-based ready-to-drink cocktails, and the awards have piled up - more than 40 tasting honors, with gold and platinum medals among them. For a brand that started as a fix for a personal craving, the scoreboard is unusually crowded.

A publishing career, a pot of tea, and a left turn

Ripps graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 with a degree in English and went into publishing. The detour came through tea. She started blending teas and botanicals, fell hard for the craft, and trained as a certified tea sommelier - a credential you expect to find in fine dining, not in front of a canning machine. Along the way she blogged for the Huffington Post's "Healthy Living" and "Taste" sections.

In 2012 she and Littlefield launched Brew Lab, a tea company built on the belief that you could make genuinely great-tasting drinks with tea and botanicals as the base. Brew Lab brewed custom blends for a roster of tastemakers - Momofuku, Sweetgreen, The Edition Hotel, Soho House. In 2014 the Specialty Food Association named her to its "35 Under 35" list. In 2018, Brew Lab was acquired by a larger tea company.

That exit could have been the ending. Instead it was a setup. Two years later, the same two founders were back - this time adding alcohol to the equation. The years at Brew Lab had taught Ripps the unglamorous mechanics of a beverage business: sourcing, blending at scale, the slow grind of getting a small brand onto a big shelf. She would need all of it.

It also gave her a thesis she still repeats. Building a beverage brand, she says, is a marathon rather than a sprint - a line that sounds like a platitude until you remember she has now run the race twice, with an acquisition in between. Patience, in her telling, is not a virtue so much as a job requirement.

Clean Boozy, and the case against the flavor lab

Ripps has made transparency the spine of the brand. Most drinks in the category, she argues, are built in a flavor lab, where the phrase "natural flavors" can quietly cover a long list of undisclosed processing. Her answer is the "Clean Boozy" movement: real tea, real fruit juice, real botanicals, and a recipe she can trace because she mixed it herself.

It is a point of view as much as a product line, and Ripps is direct about why that matters. "Disruption means having a POV that shifts a category, or shifts the consumer mindset," she has said. She points to three traits that keep a founder moving: being prepared, treating rejection as a pathway to a better solution, and staying opportunistic. As ready-to-drink cocktails move from special-occasion treat to everyday pour, she sees the timing as hers to seize.

In 2021 the company raised a Series A and brought on Emmy-winning host Jeannie Mai as chief brand officer to help shape new products and brand strategy. By 2023, the Hartford Business Journal had named Ripps an Innovator for carving out a growing niche in boozy tea cocktails.

The "drink wise" tagline does a lot of work here. It signals the ingredient story, yes, but also a posture toward the whole category - one that favors transparency over volume and the long game over the quick splash. Ripps frames the founder's job around a short list of habits: be prepared, expect rejection and use it, stay opportunistic. She has described disruption not as noise but as a point of view sharp enough to move a category or change a consumer's mind. In a market crowded with hard seltzers and look-alike cans, the point of view is the differentiator.

A book club and a collective

Ripps wants Owl's Brew to be more than something you uncap. She started the Boozy Book Club, a space where literature and tea cocktails meet and readers connect with authors over a shared story. And through the Wise Women Collective, she advocates for women's voices in beverage alcohol - an industry where leadership rarely looks like she does. The brand has partnered with Women's Voices for the Earth, Keep A Breast and Penguin Random House.

The partnerships tell the same story. Owl's Brew has worked with Women's Voices for the Earth, with Keep A Breast, and with Penguin Random House - an unusual coalition for a cocktail company, and a deliberate one. Ripps has been candid that she wants the team behind the brand to reflect values that the broader alcohol industry has been slow to adopt, starting with who gets to lead.

A Greenwich, Connecticut native and a mother of two, Ripps is also a graduate of Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program, part of Cohort Seven. The throughline across all of it - the tea sommelier badge, the kitchen-counter recipes, the book club, the collective - is a founder who would rather build something specific and real than something generic and big. It is a slower way to grow a beverage company. It is also, she would argue, the only way to grow this one.

What she's done

• Founded and scaled Owl's Brew to 40+ states and retailers including Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target and Total Wine
• Earned 40+ tasting awards, including multiple gold and platinum SIP Awards
• Co-founded and exited Brew Lab tea company (acquired 2018)
• Named to the Specialty Food Association's "35 Under 35" (2014)
• Certified tea sommelier
• Graduate of Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program
• Placed Owl's Brew in major venues including Yankee Stadium, SoFi Stadium, Highmark Stadium and TD Garden

Where it's headed

Ripps's ambition is less about being the biggest can on the shelf and more about changing what "natural" is allowed to mean. If the Clean Boozy idea holds, the next wave of ready-to-drink cocktails will have to answer the question she keeps asking: what, exactly, is in here? And alongside it, the Wise Women Collective is her bet that the people pouring the drinks - and running the companies that make them - can look a lot more like her.

There is a tidy symmetry to the arc. A publishing-bound English major who found her real subject in a teapot, then turned a hand-blended hobby into two companies, an acquisition, dozens of awards and a place on stadium taps. The ready-to-drink boom gave her a wave to ride; the kitchen-counter discipline gave her a reason for customers to stay. Whether boozy tea becomes a lasting category or a passing thirst, Ripps has already made the smaller, harder point - that you can build a drinks brand without hiding what is in the glass, and that patience, blended properly, has a flavor of its own.

Links & sources

Profile compiled from public interviews and press: Greenwich Moms, Authority Magazine, RTD Magazine, Hartford Business Journal, UPenn Career Services and Crunchbase.