Jason Momoa doesn’t do half measures. Not in his life, not in his glass. If he’s involved, he’s a “F*** it. Let’s go all in” kind of guy.
On top of being Aquaman, the A-lister actor’s broad shoulders currently bear the weight of the popular Apple TV franchises See and Chief of War. Off-screen he adds his heft to projects that reinforce his eco-concious values—the sustainable water brand, Mananalu; natural soap company Humble Brands; an on-going creative collaboration with Harley-Davidson; and, now, the premium drinks brand Meili Vodka.
“Honestly, I did not like vodka, so at the heart of it we wanted to make one that didn’t suck,” Momoa chuckles as he leans back on his chair. “Don’t get me wrong, we did our research and everything else out there looked like trash, and tasted like trash. So we set out to make it beautiful—to champion the spirit instead of it constantly needing to be covered up.”
Wearing dark glasses and a cap branded with the company’s logo, his in-person presence is made even more cinematic with the fact that the view behind him is a wide-ranging panoramic over Dubai’s famous Palm Jumeirah. We are at Ciel Dubai Marina, a newly opened property that houses a bar that currently has exclusive rights to distribute Meili. Half of the fun of being in the tallest hotel in the world is the view that it offers; the other half is catching the contagious enthusiasm that Momoa has for his new venture.
Pronounced “May-Lee”, it is named for the Nordic god of travel, but also translates to ‘the lovely one’, he explains. The original idea was inspired by the aspect of old US moonshine distilling, but unlike other brands where they “distil it to death so it tastes like hand sanitiser,” Meili is only distilled once.
“Our secret is the quality of the water,” says Momoa. “To create the best product we could, we went in search of the purest water we could find.”
That search essentially took Momoa and his business partner, designer Blaine Halvorson, nearly nine years. From ice melts in the Northwest passage, to Antarctica and even Mount Everest, the trialled every sample with their grain mash back in rural Montana—each one providing a different flavour profile. “The irony is that after all that time searching around, we were given a tip off by Blaine’s father that the purest, and most sustainable, water source was actually a 300-billion-year-old aquifer near Blaine’s home in Montana. It is a rare source of pure, pure water that doesn’t need to be filtered,” says Momoa. “That was our unicorn.” And a unicorn it has proved to be. Since launch—and an aggressive marketing strategy to showcase its excellence—Meili has already collected multiple industry-leading awards for its quality.
Momoa and Halvornson “go way back,” and have worked on several design projects together from their custom Harley-Davidson collabs to projects with hip workwear brand Carhartt. Knowing this helps explain the rugged-cool aesthetic of the bottle and the branding. “Design 101 is to make something that catches your eye but also, for me to be involved, there has to be an environmental element, so we only use post-consumer glass. It helps create something that looks rugged, and feels authentic.”
The lingering question in the room then, some 70-something floors up, is why are they here in Dubai?
“Meili was named after the spirit of travel, so at its core it represents adventure, discovery, and exploration,” says Momoa. “It is pretty wild when you consider that this thing started from the water deep under the ground in the middle of nowhere in Montana, and now nearly ten years later we are sat here in Dubai sipping it in the tallest hotel in the world.”
Wild, yes. But then again, Jason Momoa doesn’t do things in half measures.