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This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.
What started as a COVID-era experiment between actor Wyatt Russell (Marvel universe, that guy) and Geneseo native Richard Peete, an accomplished film producer, has evolved into one of the more interesting ready-to-drink brands quietly building a following in Western New York.
Lake Hour—their lakeside-inspired canned cocktail line—began as a pandemic side project fueled by nostalgia, long group chats, and time on their hands during industry shutdowns. I first interviewed the pair in 2024, shortly after launch, when they were still very much figuring it out in real time. This time around, I wanted to check back in and see what they’d learned—and where the brand is headed next. (Also, yes, I will always make time to talk to Russell. “Lodge 49”forever.)
When I caught up with them in late January, Russell was preparing for a press tour for season two of Apple TV’s “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” and Peete had just wrapped filming a new A24 project. Not exactly the typical beverage startup origin story. But Lake Hour has never really felt typical.
The idea, they’ve said from the beginning, wasn’t to chase a trend. It was to recreate a feeling—late afternoons near the water, music playing somewhere in the background, friends wandering in and out of a kitchen with sandy feet and sunburned shoulders. The kind of upstate summer that feels both specific and universal at the same time.
After staking out space in Rochester coolers, Lake Hour is stepping up its game. There’s a new tequila-based Passion Fruit Tangerine flavor. Watermelon Cucumber, Green Tea, and Blackberry Tea are moving into 16-ounce cans. And the company has hired a full-time CEO, Michelle Ivey, to run day-to-day operations—a move that signals the brand is settling in for the long haul.
Recent state law changes now allow spirit-based cocktails to be packaged in 16-ounce cans for the first time. That might sound like inside baseball, but in the RTD world it matters. Bigger cans mean more flexibility in pricing, more presence on shelves, and—let’s be honest—more staying power at tailgates and backyard hangs. And because Lake Hour is spirit-based—vodka and tequila, not malt—you’ll find it in wine and liquor stores, not in the beer aisle.
“This started as this fun experiment that Wyatt and I were doing during COVID and then the writers’ strike when the film industry was down,” says Peete, who still lives in Geneseo. “We were very naïve getting into it. We thought we’d design a logo and that would be it. But it was like, ‘Oh, flavors, we’ve got to figure those out.’ Because the first round we tried was not good.”
They refined the flavors. Scrapped early versions. Tweaked sweetness levels. Adjusted carbonation. Spent serious time getting them right.
“And then we thought we’d be done after that,” Peete says.
They were not done.
Because once you have a drink that tastes good, you still have to get it into people’s hands. Distribution, they quickly learned, is where theory meets reality. Lining up wholesalers. Securing shelf space. Managing inventory. Navigating state-by-state regulations.
“We learned the distribution part is the most difficult part,” Peete says.
After gaining traction in 2024 and 2025, Lake Hour expanded into eight states with a lean team of four employees—all while changing distributors in New York. Growth came quickly, maybe a little too quickly.
Like a lot of small brands riding early momentum, they stretched. And like a lot of small brands, they recalibrated.
In 2026, the strategy is more focused.
“We’re concentrating on our roots in Western New York and then in New York,” Peete says. “Wyatt and I decided it was time to bring on someone who had experience in the industry and could help us drive the ship.”
Enter Ivey.
Her hire isn’t flashy, but it’s meaningful. Ivey started as a dive bartender at 18 and worked her way into hospitality management, operations, and consulting. She eventually became chief operating officer of Ilegal Mezcal, which sold to Bacardi in 2023. She’s built sales teams, secured distribution, raised capital, managed supply chains—the unglamorous but essential work of turning a cool idea into a durable company.
“I didn’t need to start my own thing,” Ivey says. “Because they’ve already done it.”
In a ready-to-drink market that feels increasingly crowded—with every celebrity, athlete, and legacy liquor brand trying to claim cooler space—operational discipline matters. Flash can get you attention. It doesn’t guarantee shelf life.
Lake Hour has never tried to out-neon the RTD shelf. There’s no calorie-count arms race, no ingredient list that reads like a lab experiment. It’s vodka or tequila, real juice, cane sugar. The cans look like they were pulled from a lake house fridge circa 1985—and that’s very much intentional.
And here’s my unpaid endorsement, because you know I’m a beer guy: these are good. Thoughtful flavor combinations. No chemical aftertaste. Balanced, clean, easy to drink. I don’t write about stuff I don’t like. If I did, this column would be much shorter.
The shift to 16-ounce cans may seem small, but in RTD speak it’s a subtle flex. Tailgates. Backyard bonfires. Concerts. Bills games that refuse to end. These are the settings these cans were built for. Watermelon Cucumber, Green Tea, and Blackberry Tea get the bigger format, and Passion Fruit Tangerine—an idea Russell picked up while filming “Thunderbolts” after seeing the combo pop up in various drinks—rounds out the tequila lineup.
They wanted another tequila SKU to balance the portfolio. They also wanted something that tasted bright but not syrupy, tropical without being beach-brand cliché. The result lands somewhere between citrus-forward and crushable, without veering into sugar bomb territory.
The celebrity angle is fun, sure. But it’s not the headline.
The headline is place.
Lake Hour treats Rochester, Western New York, and the Finger Lakes like a home base, not a marketing checkbox. The growth has been deliberate. Test flavors. Adjust formats. Build repeat buyers. Avoid the national rollout trap that has swallowed plenty of buzzy brands before them.
“It’s where I grew up and Wyatt grew up in the Toronto area (playing youth and junior hockey),” Peete says. “It’s really natural to us. It’s the vibe of the brand. With the Finger Lakes, it’s about leaning into that culture. The area has been good to us. Sometimes it feels kind of forgotten about.”
“The places we grew up in are important to us,” Russell adds. “It’s not like a beach. This is a very specific thing we both felt from the time we were very little. It wasn’t a brand exercise where we were like, ‘People like lakes. Let’s be lakes.’ This is very special to us.”
That specificity might be Lake Hour’s biggest advantage. It doesn’t try to be everywhere for everyone. It leans into docks instead of day clubs. Campfires instead of cabanas. Western New York instead of wherever the algorithm says growth lives.
“There’s such a sense of community here,” Peete says. “The idea of Lake Hour is like, ‘Shut your phone off, put it away, spend time with your neighbor, meet some friends, hang out around the campfire.’ That’s a philosophy we all live by in this area.”
Bigger cans. New flavors. A seasoned CEO. But the core hasn’t shifted.
Lake Hour is still approachable, flavorful, social. It works on a dock, at a tailgate, or on a Rochester porch when the sun finally decides to cooperate. No gimmicks. No over-engineered nonsense. Just something that tastes like summer—even when summer’s being stubborn about showing up.
And if it happens to come from a couple of guys who know their way around a Marvel set and an A24 premiere? Fine. That’s just bonus trivia for the group chat.
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.
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