Before I met with Jen and sampled Kin, I would have translated the previous paragraph as one word, rendered boldly and unequivocally: Bullshit. As someone who had a rather different definition of “euphorics” a couple decades ago (in short: whatever it was you took that led to you and your friends screaming with delight while driving over that bridge at 100 mph with the top down on your way to the beach at dawn—also that other thing you took that made you invite a group of strangers you’d just met in for an almost teary group hug before insisting that they all came over to your place for breakfast), the notion of such holistic kicks struck me as preposterous enough to be almost illegal on some karmic truth-in-advertising precept.

However, as the late, great prophet Doug Sahm famously sang, “stoned faces don’t lie,” and three Kin cocktails and a stand-alone shot in, I can’t seem to wipe the permasmile off my face, while every short silent space in our conversation is filled with me quietly mouthing aloud, with a subdued awe, “Wow—yeah. . . this is nice. I feel good.”

The idea for Kin came to Batchelor—well, wait: Let’s call her Jen. Full disclosure, I’m on Kin again—I thought it might be helpful while writing this piece—and, well, last names are just so formal! So: The idea came to Jen two years ago as a kind of philosophical revelation during a brainstorming chat with Matthew Cauble, with whom she’d been working on various ideas to transform the wellness space. “It came out of this frustration at not being able to walk into Whole Foods and grab something off the shelf that wasn’t alcoholic or toxic to the body that was geared to stress relief,” Jen says. “I had to go to the nutritional aisle for something to spray under my tongue thirty minutes before a stressful meeting. It took all the sensuality out of it—and so I wondered: Where’s the thing that I can sit at the bar and order—or that’s sophisticated enough for me to bring to a friend’s house?”

In short order, Jen and Matt—let’s just call him Matt, yeah?—set up a makeshift lab at Matt’s house in Seattle and started experimenting. Matt lived off the first formulation of Kin for thirty days—and had his vitals read every three days. Instead of water, he drank Kin. One week he’d eat whatever he normally ate; the next week, just soup; the next week, no carbs. One week he’d smoke weed, the next not; one week he’d drink alcohol, the next not. The goal was to learn what Kin did to his energy levels, his sleep, his eating habits, his vitals. In short: Every day in every way, all of the above just kept getting better and better. His blood pressure dropped healthily, as did his cholesterol; he’d never slept better.