Austin Chronic: Getting Terpene Boosted With Tejas Tonic

In a crowded industry, Texas’ first cannabis seltzer still stands apart

Entering a ranch house outside Dripping Springs, I take note of the cowboy boots laying on the doormat – they have cool spurs on them. It’s probably discourteous to ask a rancher about the hardware on his heels, but I can’t immediately tell if Aaron Owens is a cowboy or a hippie, so I risk it.

“I wear the spurs because I ride every day,” he says, motioning to the horses out back. “Two things I love: ranching and cannabis. If you take me out into a field of ganja I’m like ‘Hell yeah!’ If you take me out in the middle of a pasture to a rodeo and you got some cows and some horses, I’m like ‘Hell yeah!’ I’m naturally passionate about both because that’s what’s fun to me.”

Those couple of horses, plus 40 head of sheep and a bunch of working dogs, are all Owens has left of the 16 years he spent cowboying. He entered the profession as a young man, working as a ranch hand in his native West Texas with nothing more than a bedroll and a dog. Then he leveled up into breeding ropin’ cattle before leasing his own ranch and accumulating large herds of cows and goats.

After Texas’ iteration of the federal Farm Bill effectively legalized consumable hemp statewide in 2019, Owens indulged his other passion and started Tejas Hemp, growing and extracting newly legal cannabis. That turn in his journey inspired him to cash out, selling his livestock to go all in on an inspired business idea: “We’re about to put the weed in the Topo Chico.”

His Tejas Tonic was the first Texas-made cannabis seltzer to hit store shelves.

Over the past year, cannabis beverages have exploded – locally and nationally – into a market that’s both profitable and crowded. In a recent Bloomberg article, Steve Jabour, the statewide director of wholesale for Texas liquor giant Spec’s, called these non-alcoholic cannabis drinks “the fastest-growing sector we’ve ever seen” and predicted it to surpass total gin sales in 2025.

Those skyward projections could be upended by a Texas Senate bill aiming to enact a total ban on THC. Though SB 3 has yet to be formally introduced, the promised legislation’s sponsor, Sen. Charles Perry, first made his intentions clear in October at a disastrous State Affairs Committee hearing about THC beverages, in which he repeatedly referenced a cannabis addiction crisis and none of the hemp business advocates testifying had the sense to point to consistent research that marijuana is less addictive than alcohol, nicotine, or prescription pain pills.

Eddie Velez, president of the Texas Hemp Coalition, opposes the idea of a blanket THC ban. He’s a Marine veteran who owns Dallas retailer Oak Cliff Cultivators plus the cannabis seltzer brand Ease Up.

“We don’t want bans, we want commonsense regulation – like age restrictions. Our industry does a lot of self-regulation and we’re looking for some help on that. Let’s keep children safe and let’s teach responsible adult usage of these products,” he says. “From cultivation to retail to the beverage side, a THC ban would have a cascading effect – not just in the industry, but in real estate, because we’ve all got leases signed that would get broken, and employment. They’d basically be shutting down our businesses.”

I, for one, would miss psychoactive seltzers, which have become a frequent part of my nighttime liquid intake because many music venues in Austin carry them as a non-alcoholic option. I figure if I’m going to pay $4 for carbonated water, I might as well pay a few bucks more for one that makes my brain fizz.

Tejas Tonic owner Aaron Owens

But something’s different about Tejas Tonic. To me, it tastes more like the essence of cannabis and feels more like the buzz I get from smoking. As we sit in Owens’ kitchen, sipping cans of the Frio Mango variety, I ask him why that is.

“It’s the only drink on the market that has naturally occurring, full-spectrum cannabinoid oil, with naturally occurring, full-spectrum terpenes that we’ve extracted ourselves from our hemp plants and put back into the drink,” he explains. “So when you get the whole plant, with all of those oils, you actually get the full effect and benefits.”

For those of us who never stayed awake through an organic chemistry class, terpenes are metabolites in the essential oils of a plant that contribute to its aroma, taste, and sensory effect. “Terps” are especially valued in modern cannabis cultivation as a driving force in how a strain presents.

Owens is a terp zealot, contending that it’s the key component in what makes cannabis helpful and enjoyable for users. Thus, it disappoints him that most canna-beverages are made using outsourced THC isolate – with THC being just one element in a constellation of over 100 known cannabinoids that we consume when we hit a joint.

The process of making Tejas Tonic begins with plants grown on Owens’ farmland in Dripping Springs and Luckenbach. The harvested material then goes through a steam extraction that collects the essential oils, which are preserved while the cannabinoids are extracted and heated for activation. Afterward, those natural plant oils are added back into the cannabinoids, except in a higher ratio than it originally occurred. That’s why every can of Tejas Tonic prominently reads: “Terp Boosted.”

Soon Owens and I relocate to his porch, as a February rainstorm thunders above, and crack open a different Tejas Tonic variety: Agarita Berry. Agaritas are the little red berries growing on the pointy shrubs that are ubiquitous in Texas. They’re usually tart but the drink is sweet. I ask him if there’s sugar in it.

“No,” he says. “THAT’S THE TERPS!”

Realizing how much the terpenes in Tejas Hemp’s last harvest complemented the flavor of those wild berries inspired the next frontier for Owens’ beverage brand. He now plans to grow hemp with different terpene profiles for each fruit flavor of Tejas Tonic, starting with this year’s fall harvest.

For Owens, breeding hemp genetics for different biological properties is familiar work. It uses the same skills he used breeding rodeo cattle, where he focused on an ideal horn size and body characteristics for roping.

Out on the ranch, the notion hits me that Owens’ business is, in several ways, representative of the state’s intent with hemp: helping farmers with new economic opportunities; providing natural medicine options for those who need it.

Before leaving, I ask Owens what it’s been like to be the first cannabis beverage brand in Texas.

“It’s hard on pioneers,” he admits. “There are no standards so you try to create them. For others it’s about the margin, but we’re passionate. I love this stuff.”