Untitled Art's Florida Seltzers

About halfway through our interview I ask Levi Funk, craft brewery Untitled Art’s founder, the question burning in my mind. We are sitting in a tiny room at Octopi Brewing, the contract beverage facility and taproom in Waunakee where Untitled’s products are brewed. I’m wondering how Untitled’s Florida Seltzers taste so fruity compared to other hard seltzers. I’m picturing stomping on fruit in a giant vat, a la Lucille Ball in that episode of I Love Lucy. Is that how it is? Just stomping on oranges?

Funk raises his eyebrows and pauses before replying, “I mean, you could do that to make seltzer if you were not doing it 200 barrels at a time. We work with suppliers who give us juice or puree, so the fruit has already been smashed—so we don’t have to smash it with our feet.”

Untitled Art launched its line of hard seltzers in 2020, one year after the ‘Summer of White Claw.’ Love it or hate it, “White Claw is who built that style,” Funk says. “It’s kind of weird because there were products that weren’t that far off from what White Claw was from a product standpoint, but certainly White Claw created and blew up what we call hard seltzers.”

Ignoring those who said it was just a fad, Funk became interested in creating his own version of the popular beverage. “In the craft beer world there was this tendency to say seltzer isn’t beer and that it’s a ‘less-than’ style,” Funk says. “I saw the same thing happen with New England IPA. All these West Coast brewers were like, ‘New England IPA is not real brewing—you are doing a bad job of making beer, you are wasting hops.’ But there is a tendency in the beer world to view any innovation as a threat to the tradition.”

So when Octopi got new pieces of equipment that made it possible to brew hard seltzers, Funk jumped at the opportunity. “The question in my mind was, How does a craft brewery make a seltzer? If we don’t reject the base—if we view it as a new base like New England IPA—then how do we create a craft product?”

Experimentation is nothing new to Funk, who opened Funk Factory Geuzeria, his first brewery—or blendery—on the south side of Madison in 2012. Born in Iowa, Funk grew up in the La Crosse area. “I got into beer as a consumer, as a fan,” he says. “And then eventually [I got] into sour beer and lambic, that style. In Belgian lambic production there is a blendery business model where you don’t brew but you buy stock and do blending. I was curious if that model would work in the US, and that question led to starting Funk Factory.” A very “niche” category of beer, “It’s very nerdy but it’s a lot of fun,” Funk says. “It is also very, very traditional.”

While traveling Funk got a chance to see what was up and coming in the beer world, and he eventually approached Isaac Showaki, Octopi’s founder, about starting a “clean” brand of beer. “These are the styles of beers that would never be made at Funk Factory,” Funk notes. “We are doing mixed ferm there, so it doesn’t have to be sterile and you don’t have to worry about infection, because all the beer is infected there. To make a clean beer in that environment would be difficult from a production standpoint, and it doesn’t fit the ethos of what Funk Factory is.”

When Funk started Untitled Art in 2016—the team has since grown to about 15 people, its products now distributed to more than 20 states—he had a clear goal: “I [wanted] to make these beers that I would see out at festivals being produced on the East Coast or West Coast, or even overseas, and bring it back to Wisconsin and produce an example of that here.” The name Untitled, with its stark logo of black letters on a white background, was meant to counter the hype that often surrounds other craft beer brands and labels, which capitalize on keywords meant to affect your impression of the products. “I wanted to strip all that away,” Funk says. “It feels like when you are at a gallery and you are looking at this painting and you don’t really understand it and then you read this description and then you understand it… or think you understand it. You can go through a gallery and do that, but you might find that statue in the middle of the room without any information on it is the thing you found the most beautiful. That is what I wanted to create.”

After finding early success with stouts and hazy IPAs, in 2020 Untitled launched its popular line of fully fermented, non-alcoholic beers, in addition to its fruit-forward Florida Seltzers. Both products were made possible by equipment available at Octopi. “It was seeing new equipment coming into the facility and saying ‘How am I going to use that?’”

Funk recalls. “Florida Seltzer was that: we have this equipment and this equipment; if I merge those together I can make Florida Seltzer.”

In this case the equipment included a high-pressure membrane filter that creates a clean hard-seltzer base. “It’s actually the same process that White Claw uses,” Funk says. It also included a tunnel pasteurizer. “I could add fruit to a very clean base and I could pasteurize it so it was stable. So you were left with the sugars, the sweetness of the fruit, and you didn’t have to add anything artificial to it.” Which answers the question of why Untitled’s Florida Seltzers taste so much fruitier than those sold by White Claw or Truly, “which are clear liquid using extract and not any fruit.”

Untitled’s hard seltzer flagship flavor, Prickly Pear Guava, was a nod to the tropics and remains in rotation. Other flavors soon followed, including Raspberry Lime, Blueberry, Black Cherry, and Pineapple Mango. This summer’s variety pack, featuring Strawberry Kiwi and Navel Orange Yuzu, will be joined by two new flavors: Meyer Lemon Watermelon and Apricot Kumquat. Rocket Popsicle, a seltzer base with Bomb Pop flavorings of blue raspberry, cherry, and lime, will make its second appearance in stores during the latter half of June, in time for the Fourth of July. “That is just kind of a fun one,” Funk says. “No sense of ‘We’re making a good-for-you product’; we’re making an alcoholic popsicle beverage. And it’s blue!” A one-off flavor, Black Mangosteen, will be available in stores in August. And whatever flavor comes next, rest assured it will taste like its name. “For us, with [our] Florida Seltzer, it’s kind of a hat tip to the evolution of craft beers,” Funk says. “ “[We’re] saying we are going to evolve hard seltzer, but instead of using the essence of fruit we are going to use a lot of actual, real fruit.”