YOU DECIDE THE MENU

What Should Earl Pour First?

We've got the trailer. We've got a pile of ideas. What we don't have is a good reason to pretend we know which drink people actually want most.

One of the fun parts of rebuilding an old horse trailer into something completely different is that there really isn't a rulebook.

Earl could become a lemonade stand. A hydration trailer. A zero-proof bar. A refresher shop. A coffee-and-matcha trailer. A boba stop. Or some weird combination of several of those that turns out to be better than any of them on their own.

Rather than sitting around trying to guess what people want, we figured we'd do something considerably more scientific:

Ask everybody.

We've been looking at beverage trailers, coffee trailers, lemonade stands, mocktail bars, fruit refreshers, dirty sodas, hydration drinks, agua frescas, frozen drinks, and just about everything else people are pouring over ice.

So we picked ten contenders. These aren't ten final recipes. They're ten directions Earl could take.

Why We're Letting Everybody Else Decide

Earl is being built around a modular idea. The permanent parts of the trailer should stay useful while the service setup changes with the job.

That means a drink concept does not have to become Earl's entire identity forever. A hydration setup can make sense for a race or work site. Citrus can make sense at a festival. Zero-proof cocktails can make sense at a wedding. Another event may want something we haven't built yet.

But we still need a first working beverage setup. And if people are going to be the ones walking up to the window, their opinion ought to count.

And Yes, “The Earl Mashup” Is a Real Option

We included a wildcard on purpose.

Maybe the answer isn't choosing between lemonade, refreshers, agua frescas, fruit tea, and hydration drinks. Maybe Earl's menu should steal the best ideas from all of them and become its own thing.

A sparkling cucumber-lime agua fresca. A blackberry fruit-tea lemonade. A coconut-lime hydration slush. A matcha lemonade. Something we haven't thought of yet.

If that's your answer, vote for the mashup and tell us what you'd put in the cup.

We'll Publish the Results

We're going to run this alongside the Earl TikTok campaign and see what people choose. Once we've got enough votes to make it interesting, we'll post the results and show what won.

And if the winner is something completely different from what I expected, even better. That's the entire reason we're asking.