- It's dangerously smooth.
- It is.
PAUL WESLEY: It's like Ian Somerhalder.
I'm like a whiskey sour and you're the port.
- No, you're just sour.
- Welcome to Entertainment Weekly's Three Rounds.
I'm Sam Highfill and I'm joined by the creators
of this beautiful thing, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder.
Round one, we're drinking your, your Mystic Charmer.
You guys explain what this cocktail is.
PAUL WESLEY: One and a half ounces of Brothers Bond
straight bourbon whiskey, half an ounce of lemon juice,
half an ounce of honey syrup, which
is a combination of equal parts honey and water,
and you top it with ginger ale.
It's dangerously good.
And you can have it in the summer,
you can have it, like, you know, during the day.
It's like one of these cocktails where it's just,
it's refreshing.
- You know, the only thing about it
is there's some steps to making honey syrup, but it is so worth
it.
Literally just honey in water, you
warm it, put it in your glass, and put it in a bottle.
Let it cool.
So, all right, so.
About 15 seconds.
- That's all you got, buddy?
Aw, Jesus!
Just spilled it all over me.
Not the hair!
- Not-- don't touch the hair.
You can't touch Stefan's hair.
We all know.
- Yeah, of course.
- So, we have our own Brothers Bond strainer,
which we're super proud of.
We're going to strain this over fresh ice.
We're just going to top this with a little bit
of yummy ginger ale.
- Oh, delicious.
- Oh!
That would have been bad.
- He's hammered already.
- And that lemon wheel.
- [WHISTLE]. - Yep.
A little Brothers Bond.
- Get in there, dog.
Get in there!
- Get down to the bottom!
- Get in there!
- Pull it up.
- Shall we?
- It's unbelievable.
- Cheers, guys.
- Ah! - Ah!
- I'm not crazy, right?
- Oh, it's just delicious.
- I could drink that whole thing.
- So, for those who haven't seen the show,
we played brothers who drank bourbon on screen.
Off screen, Ian and I also bonded drinking bourbon.
Obviously, we weren't drinking bourbon on screen,
otherwise, well, his performance would have been a lot better.
- I would have.
- He would have forgotten even more lines.
But the reality is we would finish shooting
and we'd go to the bar or we'd go to our homes or whatever,
and we'd always kick back and have a bourbon.
So we developed this love for bourbon.
Ian had--
- It's the only way that we could actually--
- --tolerate each other. - Tolerate each other.
- Careerwise, let's talk.
What was your first audition?
- Oh my God, my, I--
I'll just-- I got, I started doing
theater in elementary school.
- Yeah, elementary.
- And I was doing, you know, kind of just
like theater stuff, and then I was doing this theater workshop
in, uh, in New York City, and an agent saw me and said,
hey, you want to audition for a soap opera.
And I was like, yeah, of course.
- Oh my God, that's right!
- So I auditioned for the soap opera and I got the job.
- You were young, right?
- Yeah, I was really young.
So that was my first real audition.
I had done, like, a couple little commercials,
but I never really auditioned, more like an extra,
you know, you put your head shot,
your head shot kind of thing.
But, but that was my first real audition, and I got the gig.
The show got canceled like three months later.
- What show?
- It was called "Another World."
- I think my first-- my mom used to take
me to auditions in like local theater
when I was really a kiddo.
And I want to say my first audition,
I think, probably either at school or for a production,
I want to say like fourth grade maybe?
So, maybe fifth-- no, probably fourth, fourth, fifth grade.
And I knew very early this is what I wanted to do.
It's a long time.
You know I've been doing this a long time.
And we still don't know what the hell's going on.
- Why's he looking at me so seriously?
- Let's, let's go to drink number two.
Talk to me about Blood Brothers, which is a great episode
of Vampire Diaries.
- One and a half ounces Brothers Bond straight bourbon whiskey,
0.75 ounces lemon juice, and 0.7 ounces simple syrup,
0.75 ounces of port wine.
- Blood Brothers is really our take on a classic whiskey sour.
And the reason whiskey sours have
been consumed for 100 plus years is because A, it's really nice.
Typically bourbon is going to be really
a lot stronger than ours, and this really balances it out.
But that woodiness of the bourbon
is really nicely balanced out with the citrus and the sweet.
We love to put a port wine on top of it, which
just really-- and what's cool is is that,
you'll see it, the legs of the wine, you know,
the wine comes down and really just mixes and gives it
this really incredible flavor.
So, without any further ado--
- Without further ado.
- --we get this beautiful liquid.
0.75 ounces of port over this.
Now watch how beautiful this is.
PAUL WESLEY: Oh, there it is!
- And you get this, like, gorgeous--
comes down the sides.
You know?
I mean, it's just a beautiful simple cocktail,
but, like, this is a whiskey sour, but the Brothers blend.
- I'd like to preface this by saying I made mine in a rush,
and also like half an hour ago, so pay attention to theirs.
That's the pretty one.
Mind just is--
- Ha ha ha.
Cheers.
- Yours is very porty.
- I know, it is.
I want that at a summer picnic.
- I'm like a whiskey sour and you're the port.
- No, you're just sour.
- Can you drink iced tea anymore or were you done with it
by the end of Vampire Diaries?
- Well, I'll tell you a funny, funny, funny iced tea story.
So, we were obviously drinking the iced tea quite often,
and, you know, when you're on set,
you're doing take after take after take after take.
And, you know, you take a sip in a scene, well,
you got to, for continuity you have
to do it essentially from every angle, wide, medium--
- Talking about Season One, we were all just like--
- So, yeah, and so, the first season I was--
- We thought we had psychological problems.
- --like, I couldn't sleep, I was jittery, I thought
it was because I was nervous.
Turns out I was just consuming so much caffeine,
because there's so much caffeine--
- 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, you're drinking
like 600 to 800s milligrams.
- So, yeah, so season two, they switched it
out to decaffeinated iced tea.
Man, I was losing it.
- We were, literally, season one,
we were lunatics because we were drinking this tea.
- OK, but I remember you guys talking about,
when we talked about, like, the pilot of Vampire Diaries,
you went apartment shopping so that you could get apartments
next to each other so you could, like, rehearsal all the time,
right?
So did you?
Did you rehearse all the time?
Was that a key part?
- Yeah, we flew to Atlanta together
so we can find apartments.
- By the way that was in May of 2009, isn't that wild?
That was May of 2009.
- But we flew, we flew to Atlanta,
and when we both got together, we literally got a car,
we just-- it just so happened we were wearing the same--
- No, we arrived at the airport, when I met you, I pulled up
and I had a, I had a hybrid car.
We had like some flashy rims on it.
- [LAUGHING] No--
- It had really tinted windows.
- We had, we had white T-shirts--
- So we were wearing the exact same clothes.
- --same jeans--
- --same boots--
- --and the same backpack.
- --and the same glasses and backpack.
And we pulled up to the hotel--
- Oh, yeah!
We had those black Ray ban sunglasses on?
- Yeah, black Ray-bans.
We pulled up to the hotel, and they're like,
are you guys in a band?
- We looked Like the Blues Brothers, I'm not kidding you.
- The show hadn't premiered yet.
It was really funny.
- It hadn't premiered yet, we hadn't even shot it yet.
- Yeah, no, we, we, we spent a ton of time rehearsing.
- We wanted to be, that's why we wanted our apartments next
to each other, so that we could--
we knew that we needed to be brothers,
but we wanted to rehearse everything together.
- Hey, you know what, in this new creative space,
should we get a bunk bed?
And then just kind of have sleepovers and talk bourbon?
- Big brother gets the top bunk.
- You do try your best to, to form a bond with whomever
you're working with, because you spend all of your time
together, but yeah, with us it came pretty easily.
I think a lot of our sort of synergy, sort of,
we joke around about it, but the truth is, we are
kind of different, you know?
And, and, and I think that's what kind of allows
it to, to sort of coexist.
I think when people are too similar,
at first it can be great, but then it ends up kind of sort
of wearing itself out in a way.
We're so different that he brings what he brings
to the table, I bring what I bring to the table,
and it just sort of blend nicely, you know?
And I think that it's a really, it's
a unique but really fantastic synergy for not
only friendship but business.
- It's also been tested.
You know, you're talking about over a decade tested.
Right?
He and I, we helped build a massive pop cultural phenomenon
of a television show together based, not based--
- In all humility.
- No, I mean, and I did, I completely--
I do say that all in humility, but built on the backs of us
and our cast and our whole production team and our,
you know, right, everybody's, everyone's backs that
was built. But this dude and I had to show up every day
and love what we were doing, respect one another,
and build on it every single day.
I mean it, our souls are in this bottle.
And--
- Don't quote me on that.
- Round three, let's let's talk about this Bourbon Tease.
- One and a half ounce of Brothers Bond whiskey,
you have three ounces of ginger kombucha,
you squeeze a lemon wedge--
- Smell that.
Isn't that incredible?
- Damn, that's good.
And one teaspoon of freshly grated and peeled ginger.
- So, literally, freshly grated ginger.
- And, by the way, again, I want to reiterate
this is all on our website, so you don't have to--
if people want to make this at home,
it gives you the method and the ingredients
and photos and everything.
So anyway, here it is in its finished form.
- And I'm going to use a Brothers
Bond beautiful cocktail spoon.
So, the bourbon tease is, is a sort of--
- Cheers!
- --modern take--
- Shall we take a sip?
- --kombucha-- cheers, sister.
- Cheers.
- It's kombucha, it's bourbon.
- You can't even taste the bourbon, which I don't
know if that's a good thing.
Because it's just so, it's like, it's like you don't even
know you're drinking alcohol.
- It's so good.
So, for a bourbon company for us, Gen Z,
we get the tail end, that 21 to 24-year-old, or 22, maybe,
to 24-year-old, is the very tail end of the Gen Z generation.
And so, that generation is incredibly engaged.
They are very, very, very aware of the things they're drinking.
And the other thing about it, too, and this
is something that we talk about from a corporate level, which
is so, strange for us to say, but as a company
level, is that Millennial and Gen Z consumers--
- I'm a Millennial, just so you know.
- You are a Millennial.
But you know, Millennials and Gen Z's are going
to change the world, right?
But the idea is just like, listen, Millennial consumers
and Gen Z consumers, they want to know that the companies
that they are spending their hard-earned dollars supporting
are going to something that means,
is meaningful, that these companies are good stewards
of their environment, their corporate structure,
their communities, whatever it may be.
And that's why we are so proud of this company.
It's not just building these, like, incredible cocktails,
or even just bourbon you can drink warm out of the bottle--
- I think what he's getting at is we have a give-back
component, and I don't know if you know about it,
but we're really excited about it.
In fact, our neck tag you know, sort of speaks to that.
And so, we're giving a portion of all of our sales
are, is going towards regenerative agriculture.
So, yeah, I mean, what Ian says is, is totally accurate.
I think these days if you start a company,
you have to sort of think about how you can give back.
But, you know, one of the other things that I think
is so special about our brand, or at least what we stand for
and our ethos of our company--
we talk about it with our team--
is that we're not interested in just selling alcohol.
It's like, we're interested in people purchasing
this and experiencing a bond with whomever
they're sharing it with.
I mean, really.
And I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but it's true.
- It's true.
- Alcohols are meant to be consumed in celebration
and in kinmanship. - Together.
- As a bond.
And so we really want the Brothers Bond name, yeah, OK,
it's a nod to us, but at the end of the day,
it's the bond with whomever you're sharing this drink with.
And I think that's so important for us
to really note to our fans and to people that are buying this,
is to really enjoy this with someone.
- Let's end this on one final "cheers," guys.
Cheers to you and Brothers Bond.
- Cheers, Samantha. - Cheers.
- Thanks, guys.
- Good talking to you.
- Thank you Samantha.