It’s the summer of 2019, and you are drowning in hard seltzer. Those White Claw variety packs are everywhere you look, from the park to the barbecue to the grocery store checkout aisle, where the customers in front of you and behind you are loading up on 100-calorie cans of gluten-free, ruby grapefruit-flavored fizz. You’re probably, inexplicably, drinking hard seltzer all of a sudden, even though 10 months ago you didn’t know such a thing existed, and you’re still not quite sure it’s actually seltzer, and you don’t know how this can got into your hand.
Hard seltzer is “the drink of the summer,” according to the Washington Postand every other media outlet. White Claw, the brand which if we’re splitting hairs is the actual drink of the summer, has transcended its existence as a mass-produced canned beverage and transformed into a series of viral memes. The comedian Trevor Wallace had a particularly successful run satirizing the prototypical “White Claw guy” on social media — so successful that when he tried to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “AIN’T NO LAWS WHEN YOU’RE DRINKING CLAWS,” he got a cease and desist from the company’s legal team. (“We are incredibly grateful for all the support,” says Sanjiv Gajiwala, White Claw’s vice president of marketing. “Unfortunately we do have a trademark. There are laws.”)
When Four Loko announced that it would also be getting into the hard seltzer game, we started to get a sense of what this category will look like when taken to its illogical extreme. “Hard seltzer ran so we could fly,” read the tweet that introduced Four Loko Seltzer Sour (flavor: “with a hint of blue razz”), identified on its label as “the hardest seltzer in the universe,” at a lofty 14% alcohol by volume. (The other hard seltzers, by comparison, are between 4% and 5% abv, though Natural Light and Pabst have announced plans for future releases that will clock in, respectively, at 6% and 8%.)
By the beginning of this summer, hard seltzer sales were up 193% year over year, said a Nielsen report. Beer sales, by contrast, declined by 1.6% last year. White Claw, which comprises 9% of the total flavored alcoholic beverage category (and about 60% of the hard seltzer category specifically, the company says), was up 289% by volume in 2018 over the previous year, according to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis; Truly, a close second with 6% of the category, was up 278%. The Bay Area loves White Claw even more than the rest of the country, it seems: Sales in San Francisco and Oakland are up 791% over last year, even outpacing the 524% growth in California as a whole.
No wonder, then, that nearly every beverage behemoth has launched an entry: White Claw is part of Mark Anthony Brands, which also makes Mike’s Hard Lemonade; Truly is from Boston Beer Co., which you know as Sam Adams; Bon & Viv belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev; Henry’s is MillerCoors’; Crook & Marker is from the makers of antioxidant water Bai; Corona is behind Refresca. Smirnoff makes the unimaginatively titled Smirnoff Spiked Sparkling Seltzer. While beer sales fall, these companies aren’t going to get caught without a hard seltzer brand to ride that wave.
The forebear of today’s hard seltzer boom, of course, is Zima, MillerCoors’ clear, carbonated malt beverage that would definitely have been a viral meme if viral memes had existed in the 1990s. (Zima was discontinued in the U.S. in 2008 but MillerCoors revived it in 2018, announcing in a press release that it was bringing back “Z2K” for a limited release.) But Zima was typecast as a girly drink, with all the virility of a white wine cooler.
The bonkers achievement of the current hard seltzer mania, unlike Zima, is its ability to appeal to men as well as women — an achievement made possible, Amy McCarthy noted in Eater, by the contemporary conception of the “evolved bro” who enjoys “crossfit alongside paleo and keto diets.” This bro, McCarthy writes, has updated patriarchal values with “face masks, potentially disordered eating and an open and honest affection for spiked seltzer.” (...)
But here’s the thing. It’s a lie. Hard seltzer is not seltzer. Seltzer is carbonated water. “Hard seltzer” is a flavored malt beverage — essentially the same as a Lime-A-Rita or a Colt 45 or a Smirnoff Ice. These products derive their alcohol from fermented malted grains and are then carbonated, flavored and sweetened.
[ed. Ack.]
Hard seltzer is “the drink of the summer,” according to the Washington Postand every other media outlet. White Claw, the brand which if we’re splitting hairs is the actual drink of the summer, has transcended its existence as a mass-produced canned beverage and transformed into a series of viral memes. The comedian Trevor Wallace had a particularly successful run satirizing the prototypical “White Claw guy” on social media — so successful that when he tried to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “AIN’T NO LAWS WHEN YOU’RE DRINKING CLAWS,” he got a cease and desist from the company’s legal team. (“We are incredibly grateful for all the support,” says Sanjiv Gajiwala, White Claw’s vice president of marketing. “Unfortunately we do have a trademark. There are laws.”)When Four Loko announced that it would also be getting into the hard seltzer game, we started to get a sense of what this category will look like when taken to its illogical extreme. “Hard seltzer ran so we could fly,” read the tweet that introduced Four Loko Seltzer Sour (flavor: “with a hint of blue razz”), identified on its label as “the hardest seltzer in the universe,” at a lofty 14% alcohol by volume. (The other hard seltzers, by comparison, are between 4% and 5% abv, though Natural Light and Pabst have announced plans for future releases that will clock in, respectively, at 6% and 8%.)
By the beginning of this summer, hard seltzer sales were up 193% year over year, said a Nielsen report. Beer sales, by contrast, declined by 1.6% last year. White Claw, which comprises 9% of the total flavored alcoholic beverage category (and about 60% of the hard seltzer category specifically, the company says), was up 289% by volume in 2018 over the previous year, according to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis; Truly, a close second with 6% of the category, was up 278%. The Bay Area loves White Claw even more than the rest of the country, it seems: Sales in San Francisco and Oakland are up 791% over last year, even outpacing the 524% growth in California as a whole.
No wonder, then, that nearly every beverage behemoth has launched an entry: White Claw is part of Mark Anthony Brands, which also makes Mike’s Hard Lemonade; Truly is from Boston Beer Co., which you know as Sam Adams; Bon & Viv belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev; Henry’s is MillerCoors’; Crook & Marker is from the makers of antioxidant water Bai; Corona is behind Refresca. Smirnoff makes the unimaginatively titled Smirnoff Spiked Sparkling Seltzer. While beer sales fall, these companies aren’t going to get caught without a hard seltzer brand to ride that wave.
The forebear of today’s hard seltzer boom, of course, is Zima, MillerCoors’ clear, carbonated malt beverage that would definitely have been a viral meme if viral memes had existed in the 1990s. (Zima was discontinued in the U.S. in 2008 but MillerCoors revived it in 2018, announcing in a press release that it was bringing back “Z2K” for a limited release.) But Zima was typecast as a girly drink, with all the virility of a white wine cooler.
The bonkers achievement of the current hard seltzer mania, unlike Zima, is its ability to appeal to men as well as women — an achievement made possible, Amy McCarthy noted in Eater, by the contemporary conception of the “evolved bro” who enjoys “crossfit alongside paleo and keto diets.” This bro, McCarthy writes, has updated patriarchal values with “face masks, potentially disordered eating and an open and honest affection for spiked seltzer.” (...)
But here’s the thing. It’s a lie. Hard seltzer is not seltzer. Seltzer is carbonated water. “Hard seltzer” is a flavored malt beverage — essentially the same as a Lime-A-Rita or a Colt 45 or a Smirnoff Ice. These products derive their alcohol from fermented malted grains and are then carbonated, flavored and sweetened.
by Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle| Read more:
Image: Russell Yip / The Chronicle[ed. Ack.]
