Sorel Liqueur was born long before it reached store shelves, was carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, preserved in Caribbean kitchens, and passed down through generations that refused to forget who they were.
Today, that history lives inside a bottle created by Jackie Summers, founder of Jack from Brooklyn and the first black person to be granted a license to make liquor post-prohibition in U.S history.
With Sorel Liqueur, Summers did more than launch a spirits brand. He reclaimed a cultural legacy and forced an industry to reckon with who gets credit and capital in American business.
“Sorrel has been part of Caribbean culture for generations,” Summers said. “You can trace it from West Africa to the Caribbean. It survived because our ancestors made sure it did.”
Made from dried hibiscus flowers with spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. The result is a deep red, aromatic liqueur that’s tart, lightly sweet, and warming, often described as tasting like cranberry, pomegranate, and spice.
Summers’ grandparents, immigrants from Barbados and Nevis, passed the sorrel recipe down through his family. For nearly two decades, he brewed it quietly in his Brooklyn kitchen for friends and the community.
Everything changed in 2010. Doctors discovered a tumor inside Summers’ spine and told him he had a 95% chance of dying and a 50% chance of paralysis if he survived. He lived. He walked. And he walked away from a 25-year corporate career.
“That was the moment,” Summers said. “I decided to leave corporate life and put my heritage in a bottle.”
Turning a homemade cultural staple into a shelf-stable, commercial product took 624 attempts. The result was that Sorel now sold in 40 states and six countries and was recognized as the most awarded American-made liqueur of all time.
Yet Summers says visibility has lagged behind impact.
“I can say I’m America’s first licensed Black distiller, and people still don’t know who I am,” he said. “Storytelling is how we build legacy while we’re alive, not monuments after we’re gone.”
His experience reflects a broader reality: less than 1% of venture capital and private equity funding goes to Black founders, despite their outsized cultural influence.
“Brilliance is just the price of admission,” Summers said. “What matters is what you do with the gift.”
Often the only Black person in rooms shaping billion-dollar consumer decisions, Summers sees his presence as purposeful, educating distributors, advising national brands, and reshaping how companies approach communities that don’t resemble them.
“I’m there to teach them how to sell to people who don’t look like them,” he said.
For Summers, excellence is non-negotiable. “It wasn’t enough that Sorel was good,” he said. “It had to be the best. That’s the baseline.”
That philosophy now extends beyond spirits. Through partnerships with Black-owned businesses nationwide, Summers is expanding the sorrel flavor into snacks, skincare, and specialty foods, preserving culture while creating economic opportunity.
“We’ve been doing this for centuries,” he said. “What was taken from us was the ability to monetize it.”
As his product enters a Series A funding round, Summers plans to launch multiple additional brands over the next decade, each rooted in Caribbean tradition, stabilized through science, and scaled without losing soul.
Summers’ influence extends beyond spirits into food, culture, and media. In 2014, Brooklyn Magazine named him one of the 50 most influential people in Brooklyn’s food scene. He was listed among Drinks International’s 100 most influential people in the bar world six of the last seven years.
When asked how he defines success, he returns to the topic of legacy.
“My mother used to say, ‘May you live forever,’ and the response was, ‘May you never die,’” Summers said. “It’s not about how long you live. It’s about whether you lived a life worth telling stories about.”
With every bottle of Sorel Liqueur, Summers tells one honoring ancestors who endured, cultures that survived, and a future that refuses to be erased.
