After Club Mate

Club Mate has been the drink of German nightlife so long that it barely registers as a choice anymore. You drink it because it’s there, because everyone else is drinking it, because the first sip is somehow both horrible and necessary. The taste gets worse before it gets better, but it always gets better. That’s the ritual. That’s the deal.

Four guys in Berlin—all from Moabit, passionate enough about the problem that they decided to solve it—came up with Disco-Limo while they were out partying on May 1st. They were probably drinking Club Mate, thinking about it the way you think about something you depend on but don’t love, and they asked themselves: what if it didn’t taste like that? What if we made something with organic lemon, organic caffeine extracted as a byproduct of decaffinating organic coffee beans, nothing industrial about it? They decided to build it.

The appeal of this isn’t the product itself. It’s the fact that someone looked at an established monopoly and thought, we could do better. Crowd-funded, small-batch, the kind of thing that works if it works and disappears if it doesn’t. By the time the idea reached the market, it would have cost them real money and real effort. Most alternatives to established products fail. But the attempt itself matters—it proves the market isn’t completely locked, that culture isn’t permanent, that even institutions built into the fabric of a place can be questioned.

Whether Disco-Limo actually survives is almost beside the point. Club Mate isn’t going anywhere. But for a moment, there’s a choice. For a moment, someone in a Berlin bar could order something different and mean it.