Killer Mike doesn’t drink that much, but today he’s pouring a couple ounces of clear peach-flavored moonshine from a mason jar. El-P, the other half of rap group Run the Jewels, is “the drinker of the group,” more prone to join fans in rounds of post-show drinks. Still, if someone insists, “you gotta try this one,” Mike will partake.
SINCE 2013, the duo behind hip-hop group Run the Jewels has built a reputation for its smart beverage industry collaborations, which started with the Chicago brewery Goose Island, brewing a Belgian ale released during that year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. Over the years, they have partnered with a host of Black-owned breweries, including the Never Look Back lager with Green Bench Brewing Co., and All Due Respect, an ale made with molasses and grits, with Proximity Brewing and Spaceway Brewing. These brews, and RTJ’s involvement, featured at Black craft beer festivals Blacktoberfest and Barrel & Flow.
After years of dabbling with collabs, RTJ has officially entered the beverage space with their own line of ready-to-drink cocktails, dubbed Juice Runners, a nod to “Jewel Runners,” the name for their fans.
The first release is the Paloma Remix, a canned mezcal paloma created with El Tinieblo, a mezcal producer in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Featuring organic grapefruit juice, agave nectar, and salt, the cocktail retails for $60 per case of 12. Mike says he’s also excited to serve it at his restaurant, Bankhead Seafood, in Atlanta.
“I know this is making my grandfather giggle somewhere in heaven,” Mike says about his entering the drinks game. “He giggled at the idea that I could feed myself through rhyming words, and he appreciated the artistry of making good whiskey.” RTJ’s audience piqued Mike’s interest during the group’s meteoric rise in the early 2010s, when music fans were often fans of craft beer too.
Mike is more familiar with corn whiskey, but El-P has his own special history with mezcal. When his wife, comedian Emily Panic, would visit her grandmother in Querétaro, a town outside of Mexico City, she’d bring back clear, unlabeled bottles. “I was just like ‘What the fuck is this? This shit is incredible,’” El-P says. “This was before mezcal was really available in the States.”
He became obsessed with mezcal. “I took them to [Run the Jewel’s manager] Amaechi [Uzoigwe], and that’s how the whole thing started.” Before mezcal became “the hipster drink of choice,” El-P says, he and Uzoigwe started to seek it out, knowing that if they ever expanded beyond beer, mezcal was next. Eventually, they started seeking out rum as well. In fact, the group’s next collaboration is with Detroit’s Two James Spirits, which sources rum from distilleries in Jamaica.
“It takes you down this rabbit hole when you start learning about rum and its history,” Uzoigwe says, beyond the swashbuckling pirates of popular imagination—a story, instead, about rum’s origins as a product of enslaved peoples’ labor and invention.
For RTJ, this new foray into drinks makes complete sense: The passion for one art form begets passion for any medium they can get their hands on. “We're weird art guys,” El-P says.
