UnCapped: Mighty Kind
Aug. 10—In this episode of the UnCapped podcast, host Chris Sands talks with Joshua Loyal, founder of the cannabis seltzer company Mighty Kind, about his first foray into entrepreneurship when he purchased a dive bar named Pop's Blue Moon with his father — and how that eventually led to the start of Mighty Kind. Here is an excerpt of their talk.
UnCapped: Can we get a little bit of background about you and what you've done leading up to starting Mighty Kind?
Joshua Loyal: We'll start in college. I found myself as the guy that would host parties, find a place to gather, find a band to play, find a keg, buy some cups, stand at the door, and kind of put all the pieces together to have a good time.
UnCapped: So you were the fun provider.
Loyal: I was the fun provider. After two years of college, I moved home. My parents were getting a divorce after 20 years, and my dad asked me if I wanted to open up a bar. He was a carpenter, and I was a ... fun provider. So, somehow, together, we thought it would be fun to open up a small dive bar in an old neighborhood called The Hill in St. Louis.
Fast forward a few months later, and we were signing paperwork. Apparently they were gonna allow us to do this, even though we didn't really have any money or experience — legal experience, anyway. We had parties in our basement with a bar that was made out of recycled materials back in the '90s. That's kind of where it started. Dad was like, if we could charge everyone for their beers — instead of them coming over to the basement and drinking all of his out of the fridge — we could potentially have a nice business plan.
UnCapped: So he was really just trying to find a way to keep your friends out of his refrigerator.
Loyal: Well, I have two older brothers and two younger sisters. There's a lot of hands in the fridge. Next thing you knew, we opened a bar. It's the oldest bar in the city of St. Louis. It's been here since 1908. My father and I bought it from the third generation of an Italian family. We are five generations, two families, and the bar has been here for 114 years.
UnCapped: That's pretty amazing.
Loyal: Yeah. It made it through Prohibition, the Depression, a couple other big words ... now a pandemic. We just celebrated 23 years, my father and I. So I have 23 years in the bar industry. That is a big piece of my story.
UnCapped: What's the name of the bar?
Loyal: It's called Pop's Blue Moon. It was Pop's when we bought it. We added the Blue Moon to personalize it. A lot of our friends and family wanted to call it Pop's because it was this old Italian bar, and then all the old Italians wanted to call it Blue Moon because they thought it was cool that it finally changed names.
UnCapped: It's a "choose your own adventure" name.
Loyal: It was like an old World War II veteran hangout when we got there — guys that would go home in time for Jeopardy. It was so cool. I could write a book about the stories I heard at that bar from that generation. Within five years of me being there, they were all gone. It was really a chance to hear firsthand a lot of awesome stories about things that happened in that bar and on that street and in that neighborhood.
There's a flag that hangs in the bar that has about a hundred names on it, and they are all people from the neighborhood that went away to the war, and a lot of them didn't come back. It was a real dose of reality on the wall. There were three kids on our block alone that went off to war and didn't come back.
It's a really neat experience to be in a community bar like that, that was always known for being a little bit progressive. You just feel like you're in the right place.
People have always done things differently there. There was music when a lot of places didn't have music, there was inclusivity when a lot of places weren't inclusive ... it made sense that we ended up there.
I've booked over 4,000 concerts since then. We booked five nights a week of local music and touring bands for many years there. I opened up a bigger concert venue called 2720 Cherokee. It was a 600-capacity music venue in a 20,000-square-foot space — that was most of my thirties.
A few years ago, I decided to take a break from alcohol, mostly as a social experiment and to make new business partners and friends. I'd been in the bar industry for almost 20 years, and I was just kind of worn out from alcohol and depending on alcohol sales for all of my events. "Was it a success tonight?" "I don't know; did people drink enough?" It just kind of started to wear on me a little bit, on my soul.
I was looking for something else that would keep me in the live music business, keep me in the bars, keep me around my friends and the community, but give me a new energy. I really didn't know what it was gonna be. I just wanted something other than alcohol. It could've been a clothing line or some food item. I stumbled onto a non-alcoholic beer maker that was launching out of St. Louis, and I was like, I wouldn't drink that, but other people would probably love it if it tasted good. This was five years ago almost. In that time, NA craft beer has exploded as an industry all over the world.
That really inspired me to move into the cannabis space. Like, if people are gonna drink beer without alcohol, just imagine if you put a little CBD in it, or a little THC.
This excerpt has been edited for space and clarity. Listen to the full podcast at fnppodcasts.com/uncapped. Got UnCapped news? Email csands@newspost.com.
