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If there is one cocktail synonymous with the karaoke craze that swept Hong Kong from the 1980s to the 2010s, it is whisky and green tea. The combination, which mixes the boozy notes of whisky with the fresh and mildly herbal taste of unoxidised tea, is fondly remembered in the city. Many Cantopop-loving Hongkongers of drinking age enjoyed the tipple before the city’s karaoke lounges shut down in droves during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, the cocktail is something of a lost memory, at least locally. But on the other side of the world, in Vancouver, Canada, two entrepreneurs have revived the usually self-mixed cocktail, putting their own spin on it in a can and calling it Triple X.O.G. In October, the drink’s creators appeared on the Canadian reality television show Dragons’ Den, where they received multiple offers from potential investors. The drink’s story began in August 2022, when Taiwanese-Canadian Felix Chen – who was exposed to Hong Kong culture through his friends and his sister, who lived in Hong Kong for more than 10 years – was put in charge of serving alcohol at a friend’s rooftop party. He had little bartending experience, and thinking about what to serve at the event caused him to feel a sudden pang of nostalgia for cognac and green tea, a common drink in Canadian karaoke lounges. It was a slight deviation from the whisky original in Hong Kong, where he visited his sister frequently before she moved to Thailand. “I would go into the karaoke bars, in Lan Kwai Fong and whatnot, and it would always be a good time, back in the heyday,” Chen says. “I really enjoyed cognac and green tea, but I realised I hadn’t had it for over a year because it was always only [available] at karaoke bars.” It was a light-bulb moment for Chen, and he bought lots of green tea to mix with Hennessy cognac at the rooftop party. A delicious change from the usual vodka soda, the drink was an instant hit. “At the end of the night, it sold out. All the green tea was gone. Everyone just preferred to drink that. Everyone loved that drink – whether you’re new to it or you knew it before, you’re going to enjoy it,” Chen says. One of those people was Rudy Pham, who had never tried the combination before. Pham, who is of Vietnamese and German descent, had shown up to the party expecting not to drink a lot, but was “blown away” by Chen’s drink. “I took a sip and it absolutely blew my mind,” Pham says. “I ended up having a really good night. A month later, [Chen and I] went hiking and talked about random, different business ideas. I was like, ‘Wait, what about that drink that you gave me a month ago at the party?’” The pair spent the next two years developing a business plan and the formula for Triple X.O.G, in which the “X.O.” pays tribute to the cognac quality grade and “O.G.” pays homage to the “original gangster” that is the green tea cocktail from East Asia. Cognac and green tea may sound straightforward enough, but because the drink is most often hastily mixed in dark karaoke rooms, there has never been an official recipe. “We ended up going through 35 different iterations of flavours until we were finally happy with the flavour we have right now,” Pham says. “It took us [a lot of] trial and error and back and forth.” They also wanted to elevate their canned cocktail by making the taste more accessible and the ingredients higher quality. “When you’re at karaoke, people are just mixing whatever. Sometimes it’s really strong; sometimes it’s really weak. It’s all over the place,” Chen says. “The beauty about our drink is that it’s a nod to that recipe, but we’ve modernised and improved it to today’s generation’s taste, [with] a little bit of carbonation so it’s super refreshing and really smooth and easy to drink. We think this is the comeback for that drink.” They add that their cocktail, which is gluten-free and has an alcohol volume of 5 per cent, hits the sweet spot between “not too strong” and “not too sweet”. The 13 grams of sugar per can mostly come from Canadian honey. The first batch of Triple X.O.G., produced in East Vancouver, hit the local shelves in September 2024. In the months that followed, Chen and Pham hosted a launch party, took the drink to a spirits festival and took part in tasting events. Sales climbed steadily until earlier this year, when the duo took suggestions to audition for Dragons’ Den in Vancouver. A few weeks later, they were invited to pitch on the show in Toronto and eventually accepted an offer of C$100,000 (US$71,000) for 20 per cent of the business from Manjit Minhas, a Canadian entrepreneur and television personality who co-owns Minhas Breweries, Distilleries and Wineries. Their episode of Dragons’ Den aired on October 2. The past year has been “a really, really fun journey”, Pham says. “We both started doing this with no prior experience in beverages or alcohol. It’s been such a cool [learning] curve, to be able to reflect and see where we started just with an idea.” Chen adds that, while he and Pham try to “learn and figure things out all at the same time”, they are continuously working on new flavours and hope to one day reintroduce the drink to Hong Kong.
