In June 2006, Jackie Laumann was presented with a product brief, a one-page guide meant to point in the direction of an eventual beer for MillerCoors. Its title? “Project Riptide.”

As director of R&D and innovation, it was her responsibility to take a series of brainstormed ideas and buzzwords, and create drinkable cohesion out of a linguistic scheme from her colleagues. For a while (Laumann says she can’t remember how long), there had been talk of some kind of hybrid beer, one that mixed a traditionally-fermented, malt-based beverage with something like soda or lemonade. She saw words like “refreshing” and “thirst-quenching,” phrases that sound familiar in a marketer’s playbook, and began her own creative process of chemistry.

“It was really built around this idea of putting yourself in the experience of summertime,” Laumann says. She’s worked at MillerCoors for 36 years and helped create brands like Miller Chill, Miller Fortune, and Leinenkugel's Snowdrift Vanilla Porter. “We had looked at a wheat beer and on occasion a Hefe, but we found through experimenting that those beers worked well with what we wanted when mixed with other beverages like a lemonade or lemon-lime soda.”