For over 20 years, rock legend and Red Hot Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis has been enjoying a weekly coffee ritual with his longtime friend Shane Powers. The duo are both firm believers in the idea that everything happens over a great cup of joe. Now they’re ready to share that philosophy with the world in the form of a canned cold brew called JOLENE. And they’ve enlisted a team of beverage and entertainment industry all-stars to bring it to life. The potent potable is available to order online starting today in its uncut Black recipe, alongside White–a non-dairy latte, blended with oat milk.
It’s all built around a premium product; a bold blend of delicately-roasted, acidically-balanced beans ethically sourced from an all-female co-op in the high Andean elevations of Peru. Once they had a masterful recipe dialed in, Kiedis and Powers decided they wanted to make something especially accessible to concert-goers and the nightlife scene. It makes sense considering that they had crafted something entirely unique to that landscape: a non-alcoholic liquid that delivered a caffeine-fueled head change, nevertheless.
So, first they tapped John Terzian, the hospitality impresario behind h.wood Group. He came on board immediately and enthusiastically, eventually bringing with him two other trusted execs (who also happen to be industry juggernauts in their own right): Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation and James Morrisey, founder of Global Brand Equities. The combined expertise of all partners ensured both consistency of product along with an unparalleled degree of live venue accessibility. Indeed, this might be the most concert-friendly RTD ever.
Coffee fans in Los Angeles and New York can now look for it at select local retailers before it rolls out to 40 separate Live Nation amphitheaters across 23 states this spring. On grocery shelves, 12-pack cans of Black will sell for $33, while the oat milk latte alternative is set to retail at $36. We scored an advanced taste of the crisp, invigorating beverage along with an exclusive sit-down with Kiedis and his JOLENE co-founders. And we can confirm it’s both one of the more arduously-developed and well-composed coffee products to hit shelves in years.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the genesis for this product?
Anthony Kiedis: “I have a strong connection to Shane Powers. We have a tradition of getting together and talking about life–a pretty weekly affair for years on end. One day he says to me on the sidewalk of San Vicente Boulevard [in Los Angeles]
, ‘Hey, let’s start a business!’ But I’m not business. I have no idea about business. I don’t do it. But we got down to the kernel of what we could both bond over and have fun with and knew a little something about and enjoy on a daily basis. [Ultimately], Shane and I wanted to do something fun together that we could enjoy life together doing. We weren’t going to come up with a computer chip for alien intelligence. Instead we decided to get in a kitchen and figure out the best possible approach to selling coffee so that we could take trips and go to high-altitude coffee farms and hang out with farmers and drink coffee and make mistakes and breathe the morning fog.”
Tell us about the journey of flavor development for JOLENE.
Anthony Kiedis: “It was a long and winding road with many high and lows and many starts and stops. But ultimately we went into a kitchen with a master roaster who was in charge of free-trade coffee beans for California. And we made the best coffee ever made on earth. We slow-dripped this beautiful bean and it got you higher than any coffee you’ve ever had in your life. We were pinging.”
Was it challenging to capture that in the can?
AK: “We tried and it really couldn’t be done. Like, we tried a 100 different times and the retort process just annihilated our hopes and dreams–going to all of these different people whose job it was to re-create what we had made in this [Los Angeles] kitchen.”
Shane Powers: “It took us five, six years and we still couldn’t come up with the drink. Because what we had originally made in that kitchen was incredible but it could only stay alive for three days. We wanted to get something that could reach the masses; that we could travel the country with and experience life with. But in order to get it shelf stable you had to put it under immense heat. I was in no way, shape or form capable of doing that. So I reached out to John [Terzian] and told him that I needed help. He contacted James [Morrisey] and James’ company got the formula right. And that really was the first major breakthrough to show us that this could actually happen.”
James Morrisey: “I originally saw this in 2019. But it just wasn’t shelf stable. We looked at the production and supply chain and were able to find out a solution that was mass marketable and scaleable. It took us three years of rigorous tasting–and the guys were striving for perfection. But we stuck to our guns to keep the quality of product and that was the key–to keep that original flavor.”
John Terzian: “There’s a lot of coffee drinks out there with crazy amounts of added sugars and we wanted to stick with the healthiest ingredients that you could put in there. That’s part of what took so long, but it was well worth it.”
AK: “Failure was our best friend along the way. The fact that we failed and failed and failed really led us to the team that we have here today and I don’t think we could have asked for better than that. So, grateful for the failure, the defeats and the fuck-ups along the way because they arrived at the right place.”
When did you first get into coffee?
AK: “I don’t really have any familial coffee history. I was relatively late to the coffee game. But I first got into it in the early ‘80s at a place called the Tropicana Motel, which was a rock and roll motel for little rock bands that came through LA. It was on Santa Monica Boulevard just west of La Cienega. It was a beautiful place and it had the best breakfast in the world. And I would go there with my punk rock friends–Pete Weiss, mainly. You’d have a bunch of Sunset Strip rats and then Muhammed Ali would be in there getting a $3 breakfast. That’s where I started drinking my coffee. And my friend Pete always referred to it as joe. ‘Let’s go get a cup of joe!’ That was the genesis of my connection with the beverage.”
And how did it evolve from there?
AK: “Over the years–I travel earth for a living–I started noticing things about coffee; paying attention to how they drink it, where they drink it, when they drink it, how they make it. Whether in Italy, or Australia, or Indonesia, everyone has their take on what coffee means. But it means something to everyone. That inspired me to get into its actual origin story, starting in Ethiopia. There were religious leaders telling farmers that they could not touch the coffee plant. Then a goat herder supposedly saw his goat get really frisky after eating the beans off of a plant. He noticed a discernible change in the behavior of the goat after eating the cherry of the plant. And he mentioned that to the clergy who told him that they were off limits. So he threw these beans away in a fire and it produced a fantastical aroma. He gathered those roasted beans out of the fire, crushed them up, mixed it with water and it was on.”
Any places on the planet that particularly impress you with their respective coffee rituals?
AK: “In Indonesia on the island of Borneo where they call it ‘kopi kopi.’ Every day is a gift over there because you don’t know if you’re going to see tomorrow. So that moment where you sit down and get your coffee before you go up the river to go into the jungle. It’s extra heated because you don’t know where you’re going to get your next meal or where you’re going to sleep. I will also give the Australians credit for making a brilliant, classic cup of joe on their beach walk streets.”
During your journeys in Indonesia, did you ever get to try the revered Kopi Luwak?
AK: “I’ve had the poop coffee. Not there. I’ve had the poop coffee in Malibu. It’ll cost you more–the poop coffee is extra. But it’s just another cup.”
SP: “What’s the concept behind the poop coffee?”
AK: The bean is digested by a small animal, it’s kind of between a cat and a monkey. They shit it out and the digestive enzymes mellow it out.
SP: The enzymes! [Laughs] So, this is what a typical Thursday is for us. The big brother/little brother thing is very prevalent for us because I learn so much on any given get together [with Kiedis] about the history of coffee.
