An Excerpt from the Book of Horball's

Set the stage: an evening soirée. Your place. All your friends are there. They are jerks and they are thirsty. Your bar is equipped with every liquor, amaro, vermouth, aperitif, bitter, and garnish imaginable. You have shakers, strainers, jiggers, muddlers, peelers, mixing glasses and beautifully clear hand-cut ice. But hidden in your arsenal is a secret weapon beyond their expectations.

Your friends are tired of the run-of-the-mill “common” cocktails. They need something that comes from a by-gone era. They need something surprising and tangy. They need something truly unique to up their cocktail game and fill that hole inside of them where joy should live. They need The Common Cocktail Cure-All.

Suddenly, as if struck by Zeus' thunderbolt, someone yaps their drink hole at you:

“This soirée bores me… please make me a drink that doesn’t suck.”

You were born for this moment. Your bar transforms into a whirl of activity. Jiggers clang, liquor flows, peels fly. The secret ingredient is added just as a chorus of angels hail this glorious cocktail with a single beam of light. You move your shaker to their heavenly song like some magical pair of maracas.

A chilled glass, a silky pour over perfectly tempered ice, a flourish of garnish. You hand your friend their prize as they fail at trying not to look impressed. They take a sip:

“Tart, fruity, tangy, perfectly balanced… I can tell my co-workers about this drink and they will think I’m better than them. Thank you… thank you…”

A single tear of joy falls from their cheek into their glass adding the perfect amount of salinity to their cocktail… just like you planned. How did you up your already way-too-involved cocktail game that’s probably a sign of a serious problem you should get counseling for? Horball’s Drinking Vinegar!

Whether your life revolves around cocktail culture and you want to next-level your mixology toolbox or you are a normal person with an actual life and you just want to make fantastic drinks without all the effort: Horball’s is The Common Cocktail Cure-All! Add this handsome bottle of heavenly nectar to your shelf and create amazing drinks for your friends or just totally forget about those people and enjoy it yourself!

Horball’s is a shrub: a drinking vinegar popular in the colonial days used by sailors to cool down on the sea and by revelers to enhance their drink of choice. The recipe is simple: the freshest fruit, natural cane sugar, and tangy vinegar. Crafted with care this blend naturally creates a perfectly balanced additive that can enhance any drink: spirits, soda, water, bubbles and even beer!

Who We Are

Horball’s is the completely necessary vanity project of four totally normal guys from Raleigh. We are somewhere in between the cocktail Gods from the Book of Horball’s and someone who wants to be able to have a good drink by adding one thing to liquor and drinking it right now. We’ve been to awesome cocktail bars all over the world and love what shrubs bring to the game. They add a completely new dimension to cocktails. And for people whose life doesn’t revolve around complicating booze, they can be used to make delicious sodas or flavored waters. Also, health benefits blah yadda so on whatever.

By day we are scientists who optimize recipes for a living. By night we drink. Shrubs are like bringing our work home with us and combining it with something we actually enjoy: making cocktails so fancy it’s probably classified as an official personality disorder.

We love this stuff and through some “hard work” we have created amazing shrubs from quality ingredients that are complex enough to bring something completely new to your palate but simple enough to be versatile in many recipes. With “even harder work” we love to create new awesome cocktail recipes for you to enjoy Horball’s with.

We’re excited to share our creations with the world and hopefully develop some new cocktail snobs.... which means there’s nothing wrong with us at all and being this fancy is perfectly normal. Validate our obsession: become a convert to Horball’s.