I can be a little suspicious of THC seltzers; ask anyone. Something about most THC drinks tends to give me a headache or a weird sickly feeling. But when I made an impromptu stop at Radio South for their bluegrass night, a can on the counter caught my eye. A vibrant coral color featuring a man in a cowboy hat with a revolver in his hands and a blunt between his lips, the can of Tejas Tonic called for me almost by name. 5mg of THC and “terp boosted” read the label. I might as well have been Alice in Wonderland, and the can might as well have had a “Drink Me” label dangling from the tab.
I sat down outside (unseasonably but predictably warm for winter) and settled in to watch a family play a competitive round of Clue. I noticed immediately that something was different about the taste, the feel, and the pleasant high that washed over me in the next half hour. The copy on the can read: It ain’t alcohol. It ain’t synthetic. It’s tasty & all natural.
I sat down with Aaron Owens, founder of Tejas Hemp and Tejas Tonic, to ask him about his story.
Owens is old-school Austin. Like a lot of other free-thinking, small-town Texas young people (myself included), he got to Austin as fast as he could, where he spent a couple of years being “a complete hippie.” He is a self-studied cannabis expert, passionate about the plant and the business. And like a true cowboy, Owens is a trailblazer. Back in the day, his desire to be in the cannabis industry meant that he either needed to move to California (the only legal state in the early 2000s) or risk prison, and neither one sounded like good options to him.
Instead, he went back to his roots of West Texas ranching. He went back to full-time agriculture and over 16 years worked his way up to a full-time cattle and goat ranch operation. Around 2014 came the pilot program for industrial hemp. Owens got a call from one of his buddies in Colorado – they were extracting CBD from hemp, it was legal. Okay, Owens thought: Here we go.
At the time, Owens was down on the Rio Grande riding horses and running cattle. His saddle-maker had been diagnosed with a severe case of Parkinson’s disease. Owens describes him as “a man who had drank three beers his entire life and never smoked weed.” They talked him into trying CBD oil – 25mg twice a day. In five days, this 72-year-old man’s physical pain had been drastically reduced, he was able to sleep at night, and most importantly his hands quit shaking, essential for a man who built saddles for a living. He was able to keep his business open for two more years.
Owens got the chills as he told me this story. That was it for him. This was going to help people. In 2017, Owens hired a kid from Dripping Springs to look after his ranch and came back to Austin, hitting up all the Parkinson’s support groups in Travis County, trying to go directly to the people. But he was way ahead of the curve and people weren’t ready. Owens formed Tejas Hemp on paper in April of 2017 after selling legal full-spectrum CBD to ranchers in West Texas for about a year. In 2020, he started farming his own hemp because Texas allowed it for the first time.
Owens explained that if you consume CBD in its isolate form, it’s about 1% as effective as it is in its natural full-spectrum form. In true Texan fashion, Owens described this to me with a football metaphor. “It’s like taking the quarterback of a football team and forcing him to play a whole football team by himself.” Owens’ mission when he started was to take the full-spectrum CBD that he knew how to create and knew could help people and put it into water. And they did – two weeks before COVID. The world shut down and everything came to a halt.
Two years later, as the world started to turn back on, people had started to sell Delta-8. Owens declares that he never sold it and never would sell it. He described it as the lab-manufactured equivalent to his earth-grown plants and “the scariest thing [he] had ever seen.” The positive outcome is that it normalized THC and enabled the industry to start blooming. This allowed Tejas Tonic to be born – a water infused with full-spectrum THC. In November 2022, Owens finally sold everything in West Texas – his livestock, his 4,000 acres, everything except his two favorite horses and his dog, and went all in on Tejas Tonic.
Owens opened the THC water category in Texas. Then all the “big boys” with their money and resources came crashing in (a classic Austin tale). They were making their money on synthetics. “It’s much easier to build a quarterback out of Styrofoam than build a 130-person football team.”
But why do we actually need the whole team? Put simply: efficacy. THC by itself is not going to calm your central nervous system. If you’ve ever gotten an uneasy feeling from a seltzer, you might know what he’s talking about. The full spectrum of cannabinoids together along with the essential oils (terpenes) from the plant can lower people’s anxiety. The difference for the consumer experience is vast.
I asked Owens about his strategy when it comes to the political landscape. He spoke about the advocacy of himself and others in 2025. Texans spoke up, and Texans listened. “We lost to the bill, but we won through the veto. Texas is finally on the map, and we are pro-hemp.” He admits that the ag appropriations bill was a surprise that “kicked our teeth in.” Owens expects at least one more battle at the federal level.
“In the big picture, we’re winning,” he told me. Despite the instability in the market, Owens’ team plans to get lean, get mean, and hang in there. “We don’t have oil money behind us,” he says. “We sold some goats to get this started.”
Owens’ biggest advice for consumers: trust local. Way before legal cannabis, the hippies in Austin were all about supporting local. Find people who can either grow their own stuff or tell you where it was grown, Owens says. In other words, keep Austin weird.
“Don’t lose the faith, we’re winning,” Owens told me. “The plant provides, and it always has and it always will.”
Is Smokable Hemp About to Be Banned in Texas?
You may have heard that DSHS is about to tighten the noose with new rulemaking on hemp. I spoke with Nick Mortillaro, cannabis consultant, co-owner of LazyDaze, and executive director of Hemp Industry Leaders of Texas, to get his perspective. He told me, “Smokable cannabis is being taken away by a rulemaking agency (not the Legislature) and almost 10,000 businesses will be impacted, more than 6,000 are estimated to close. These products have been available in stores across Texas for more than seven years. My licensing fees will be increasing 90 times, from ~$500 to $45,000,000.”
These drastic measures are not new. Back in 2020, there was a lawsuit addressing DSHS exceeding its authority with a ban on distribution and sale of smokable hemp. At the time, the state conceded, but with the change in the compliance threshold, the agency is trying the same tactic again. If you are concerned about losing your smokables, participating in a grassroots public effort by reaching out to DSHS about the proposed rules might just make a difference.
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This article appears in January 23 • 2026.