While a student at Anne Arundel Community College, Billy Fanshawe had an epiphany. He liked to party but he needed to study — and the effects of one undermined the other.

“I was a social guy, but I had hangovers for those early morning classes,” said Fanshawe, of Elkridge. “I’d heard that electrolytes might [cure] hangovers, so I began mixing cheap vodka with Gatorade.”

Then he scrawled the idea on a slip of paper and kept it for years before acting on it.

Fourteen years later, Fanshawe is the founder/owner of Lytos Vodka, an electrolyte-enhanced spirit, and the first vodka to receive a patent for the same. The patent, approved Feb. 18, ends a 3.5-year exchange with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and gives closure to Fanshawe, 33, a Towson University alum.

Annual sales number about 7,000 bottles of the vodka, which is infused with a mixture of salt, potassium and phosphorus. Some studies have shown that electrolytes help replenish fluids in the body after drinking alcohol, and evidence suggests they may stave off hangovers as well.

Fanshawe devised the formula, mixing and matching powdered electrolytes in a trial-and-error process over a five-week period.

“I failed chemistry in high school, but I wound up getting a chemistry patent,” he said. “I’m very engaged in the subject now.”

Lytos Vodka, which has been on the market for four years in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia, is produced at a co-packer and distillery in Columbia. Two-thirds of its buyers are women, most between 35 and 54 years of age.

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