How a trio of college students from South America launched their rum brand in Miami
In the summer of 2021, Ricardo Sucre, Gabriel González, and Gustavo Darquea walked into a Miami highrise with a giant keg and tank of CO2. The party was a friend of a friend’s that Sucre only vaguely knew, but it was a perfect opportunity to field test their rum seltzer. They found an open corner, hooked the keg up to the CO2 tank, and began making their cocktails as reggaeton blasted in the background. Later that night, the trio returned to their AirBnB and discussed the next party they were going to crash.
“I would show up to people’s apartments with [Gustavo] and [Gabriel] behind me carrying a freaking CO2 tank,” says Sucre. “And we’d say, ‘Hey, we heard there’s a pre-game.’ At first, people would ask, ‘What the hell are you doing with that?’ But I’d say just give me five minutes. Let me serve our drink, and if you don’t like it, you can kick us out…. Nobody ever kicked us out.”
You could say the story of Casalú started in Miami, but it really began nine years ago when the trio met as students at North Carolina State University. All coming from a Latino background– Sucre and González from Venezuela, Darquea from Ecuador – they bonded over the lack of Latino representation in mainstream culture – and the fact that the rum selection in North Carolina was, as Sucre puts it, “Sad and pretty terrible.”
“We were able to connect over our culture, and rum was just a part of that,” says Sucre. The seeds for Casalú were planted, and during the pandemic they took hold. Unlike the frat house cliché, Sucre never liked drinking beer in college. During the pandemic, he was inspired by drinking a High Noon vodka seltzer. He thought, what if he made an RTD (ready-to-drink beverage) for Latinos – an RTD with rum? Following his eureka moment, Sucre went to Target, bought a SodaStream, and began experimenting with a rum seltzer.
Over the next year, Sucre and his two partners perfected Casalú’s recipe, and in 2021, the trio started crashing parties. They also pitched their idea to the NC State Startup Accelerator and were one of five (out of 60) startups to receive a $5,000 investment – just enough to buy a keg and move to Miami. And through González’s connection with a professor at NC State, Casalú then raised $1.3 million from four members of the board at Caesars Entertainment, which later introduced their product in Las Vegas.
With funding in hand, Casalú officially launched in April 2022. By December, they were a sponsor at Miami’s Vibra Urbana, the biggest reggaeton festival in the U.S., where Casalú outsold all other RTDs.
This year, Casalú is on track to double its 2023 sales, with 350,000 units expected to ship. The trio also wants to use Casalú as a platform to promote Latino artists and Latino culture in general. Sucre compares his vision for Casalú and Latino culture to what Red Bull did for promoting extreme sports.
“Before Red Bull, extreme athletes were just a bunch of weirdos, right? I mean they weren’t football players or traditional athletes. But Redbull gave them a platform and brought them to pop culture. That’s what we want to do with Casalú,” says Sucre. As of now, Casalú rum seltzer is only available in the U.S., but distribution across Latin America is the next target.
