Meet The Founder Of Brēz, America's Best-Selling Cannabis Drink

Forbes

18-04-2025

Aaron Nosbisch was 13 years old when he smoked his first joint in a friend's backyard in their Western Illinois suburb. It was an exceptionally risky high for Nosbisch, who knew that when he returned home, he would be facing his father—an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Over the next five years, if Nosbisch ever came home a little stoned—and he often did—his dad would pound on his smoking buddies' doors and greet them with arrest threats.
'It scared the hell out of them, and lost me a few friends,' says Nosbisch. 'Back then, the idea was that if you were involved in cannabis, you're on a slippery slope down to demise.'
Now 31, Nosbisch runs one of the best-selling brands in the cannabis industry's buzziest sector: the THC beverage market. Founded in 2023, Brēz is a low-dose cannabis drink infused with Lion's Mane mushrooms, which many believe have health benefits including improved cognition and inflammation. The company brought in $28 million in revenue last year and $13 million in the first quarter of 2025. It's outpacing nearly every other competitor, and at just the right time.
Illustration by Kelly Thompson for Forbes
Brēz is made with small doses of hemp (5 mg or less), which is derived from the same plant as marijuana, but with a lower amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—the compound that gets people high. Hemp products started cropping up in 2018, when the federal government legalized the crop through the Farm Bill. But it took several years for brands to understand the how to take advantage of the legal loophole for hemp-derived THC.
The floodgates for beverages like Brēz truly opened after 2023, when Minnesota created a mainstream market for hemp by legalizing it on a state level. Between 2023 and 2024, cannabis beverages started appearing everywhere from liquor stores to the supermarket.
'When you make a product available in places that people are already used to going, it's already part of their day-to-day or week-to-week routine,' says Ian Dominguez, founder of New York-based cannabis investment firm Delta Emerald Ventures. 'That's the explosive power of this category that we haven't [previously] seen in cannabis, specifically dispensaries.'
Competition is also stiff within the hemp industry. There are now hundreds of brands like Brēz on the market, and Brēz is between 60-100% more expensive than similar products. A 6-pack, with 2.5 mg of THC, is $40. Meanwhile, competitors such as Wynk sell six cans at the same dose for $25, and Cycling Frog sells a 6-pack with 5 mg of THC for $20. An outlier is Cann: Brēz's 12-pack with 5 mg of THC is $115, while Cann in the same dose is priced at $103.
Unlike most cannabis products, Brēz markets itself as a healthier alternative to alcohol—an attractive quality for drinkers who don't consider themselves stoners, but might be interested in a fast-acting, hangover-free high. Low-dose drinks are designed to give consumers a buzz, not get them wasted. (One of the common complaints about beverages like Brēz is that they aren't as effective as cannabis flower or even edibles.) Products like Brēz are even more appealing to alcohol distributors, who saw liquor sales decline nearly $1 billion in 2024. 'We think the THC beverage market will be worth $30 billion in 10 years—that would basically put it to the same size, or slightly bigger, than the craft beer market today,' says Dominguez, whose firm values the current cannabis beverage market at $530 million, up from an estimated $175 million in 2021.
Nosbisch, who has a pinned Instagram video of himself smoking a joint while snowboarding, comes across like a tech bro on island time. A college dropout living in Palm Beach, Florida, he calls his hometown a 'middle-of-nowhere cornfield' in the Midwestern Bible Belt, where his weed use strained his relationship with his parents. He hated high school and dropped out after his freshman year opting to finish his degree online before moving down to Florida to attend Palm Beach Atlantic University—where he dropped out after his two years to start a job in marketing for an app company based in San Francisco.
'In my head, I'm this tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley—I just happen to be in Florida,' Nosbisch says. 'That's who my idols are. Steve Jobs, especially, but Elon, all these guys.'
While walking in downtown West Palm Beach in 2015, he noticed a parked Tesla—a semi-rare sight as the Model S had only been released in 2012. 'I walked up to the car, and I was like, 'Hey, I just want to let you know how much I love your car, and I'm so glad to see one' and all this stuff,' Nosbisch recalls saying.
The driver, an entrepreneur named Eric Fishman, offered Nosbisch a ride and made conversation about a portable aromatherapy diffuser he and his son were developing called Monq Aroma Vape. Nosbisch made several suggestions to change the business, from the design to a shortened name, and ended up spending the weekend at Fishman's house to talk more. A month later, Fishman invited Nosbisch to lunch, offering him a piece of the company and a marketing job.
Monq, as the company is now known, earned $150,000 in its first year. By year three, it was bringing in $15 million with Nosbisch as the Chief Marketing Officer. But by then, Nosbisch realized his stake in the business was an empty promise. Over the years, he says Fishman had avoided making any written statements or documents addressing Nosbisch's supposed equity. Nosbisch was fired a week after he put his foot down and refused to work until he was given the equity he was verbally promised. (Fishman told Forbes that he refutes Nosbisch's version of the story, but acknowledges there were delays in the equity agreements for Monq). After losing his job, Nosbisch went back to his favorite pastime—getting high. 'It got to a point where I was like, 'Wow, I'm smoking a lot of pot. I got to make this profitable somehow,'' he says.
In 2018, he cofounded a cannabidiol (CBD) brand, which sold non-psychoactive products until the company's Facebook account was restricted for failing to comply with Meta's advertising policies. Though the business fizzled out, Nosbisch was inspired to start an agency called Lucyd in 2019 to solve the complex problem of advertising federally illegal cannabis.
Most social platforms have strict, conflicting and sometimes arbitrary regulations when it comes to advertising cannabis products. Meta, for instance, forbids any ads promoting the sale of cannabis products related to psychoactive components, but it does allow ads for CBD products with prior written permission.
'I just paid really close attention to Facebook's rules, figured out what was allowed, what wasn't allowed, and did the same thing with Google, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok to come up with strategies on how to compliantly advertise these products,' Nosbisch says.
By 2023, Nosbisch says his company handled advertising for 60 of the top cannabis brands, including low-dose THC beverage pioneer Cann. The product impressed Nosbisch 'as a guy who used to drink a lot of alcohol and stopped drinking alcohol,' and he fell in love with the beverage sector, especially after seeing Cann take off.
He soon started dreaming up his own cannabis beverage. Nosbisch eventually met a man at a psychedelics conference who had experience emulsifying Lion's Mane mushrooms, which are not known to have psychedelic properties like their more famous cousin, psilocybin. The encounter led to Nosbisch's concept—a microdosed cannabis and mushroom-infused beverage.
He bootstrapped the new company with $250,000 and invited a few partner investors to join him. Nosbisch owns 70% of Brēz, which plays on 'breeze' and 'breathe easy.' (Several investors own between 5% and 10% each.) Launched on cannabis' high holiday—4/20—in 2023, Brēz earned around $1.3 million in its first year and became profitable after six months. One of its first customers included Nosbisch's father—a now retired ATF agent. 'I took all of my experience in e-commerce, cannabis and wellness, and I brought in the smartest people I knew from past projects to hit the ground running,' Nosbisch says. 'Brēz just took off.'
THC beverages still only make up less than 2% of the nation's nearly $32 billion legal cannabis industry. Brands like Brēz—hemp-based products that are legal unlike products made with marijuana—operate outside of the regulated cannabis market and often don't sell within dispensaries. In 2024, THC beverages brought in more than $255 million, up from $230 million in 2023. And four out of the five best-selling brands within the regulated market, including Keef Cola and Uncle Arnie's, doubled their sales from 2023 to 2024 with the top earners like Keef Cola bringing in revenues just north of around $28 million.
But it's taken more than a decade for Keef Cola to match Brēz's revenue, even though Brēz was founded just two years ago. The advantage is that, unlike cannabis beverages made with marijuana, Brēz it isn't concerned with selling its drinks in legal dispensaries. That's because Nosbisch isn't marketing to customers who frequent smoke shops looking for a strong high. 'It appeals to the canna-curious crowd…those interested in dabbling,' says Mitchell Laferla, a senior data analyst at cannabis market data company Headset. 'That's how a lot of the low-dose beverages that started off in the regulated markets [began].'
Naturally, the growth of the category has gotten the attention of the spirits industry. Spec's, the second-largest liquor chain in the country, has embraced THC beverages, distributing hemp-based THC beverage brands like Pamos and Buddi. Steve Jabour, the statewide director of the wholesale department at Spec's, told Bloomberg earlier this year that he has never seen a faster-growing sector, and estimates that THC beverage sales at Spec's will surpass gin this year.
'Within a year of Minnesota legalizing low-dose products in the mainstream market, I started talking to restaurant owners and liquor store owners who were saying one in five customers were ordering these products,' says Ben Larson, CEO of cannabis infusion company Vertosa, whose technology makes THC drinks possible. 'It's a completely different order of magnitude…to go from less than 2% of regulated cannabis sales, to, all of a sudden, the total addressable market being 15% or 20% of liquor sales or alcohol sales,' he continues. 'That's what really reinvigorated or invigorated the category.'
Brēz is currently sold in more than 1,700 retail locations, with its products entering alcohol retail giant Total Wine & More last October. Nosbisch says he is now considering raising around $20 million to lean harder into retail but hasn't made any moves yet. 'I don't want to be told what to do by a bunch of VC types—but at the same time, this is becoming a very big game very quickly,' he says.
Beer distributors are another giant consideration. Two years ago, none carried THC beverages. Now, at least 10-15% in the National Beer Wholesalers Association carry hemp products on their trucks today, according to the NBWA. Beer sales decreased $400 million across the U.S. last year, a pattern that follows spirits, down $500 million in sales in 2024. The category has collectively suffered from a combination of higher alcohol prices, increased warnings about health risks and demographic changes. Many beer-specific distributors are looking to make up the loss in THC beverages.
'I could argue that for the beer distributors, this pain started with the Bud Light backlash in 2023,' Dominguez says. According to Delta Emerald's research, it was the Anheuser-Busch beer distributors that were the first ones to really embrace this category after the massive slump in Bud Light sales.
Of course, as more distributors enter the category, more potential problems arise for brands like Brēz. 'There's an interesting dynamic when you are a heavy direct-to-consumer brand trying to build relationships with distributors that can unlock retail shelves,' Larson says. 'It's perceived as competitive because any sales that are happening DTC are sales that aren't happening through the distributor. So why would the distributor help promote that when they can just move other products?'
Above all, the continued rise of THC beverages is contingent on hemp's federally legal status—which might be challenged. The 2018 Farm Bill, the piece of legislation that keeps hemp legal, is set to be reviewed this fall, but that uncertainty hasn't kept startups like Brēz from making big moves.
Earlier this month, Nosbisch snapped a photo of himself riding in a Mercedes-Maybach that Post Malone had just sent to pick him up. The two were meeting in Miami to discuss the singer's potential investment in Brēz. Nosbisch posted the picture on LinkedIn and added an explanatory caption—misspelling Maybach—followed by a new mantra: 'Still trying to figure out if I'm dreaming.'