While the wheels of justice roll forward on whether Corona hard seltzer is beer (compositionally speaking), I want to air a little theory I’ve been mulling over about where the mass-market U.S. beer business is headed (also compositionally speaking.) I’ve argued before that the beverage-alcohol business is racing towards a singularity where every brand is available both soft and hard format, and I think that’s true, so long as regulators don’t head them off at the pass first. But I’ve mostly envisioned that singularity as a deluge of hard seltzers, alcopops, and canned cocktails that look and drink like soda, seltzer, etc.
That evolution has already put traditional brewers at a disadvantage, because traditional beer can’t be alchemically turned into a crystal-clear tabula rasa to be infused with flavor extracts further down the manufacturing line.1 Many of them have tried to pivot into hard seltzer, hard tea, hard kombucha, even spirits-based canned cocktails, with mixed results. But there’s another type of drink that has a lot more compositional and flavor overlap with beer (especially popular craft styles like hazy India pale ale, and the criminally underappreciated shandy/radler family) and savvy brewers are starting to take it seriously.
I’m talking, of course, about juice. Juice? Juice! The stuff that comes out of fruit! As I’ve written, breweries of a certain size have to transcend “beer-flavored beer” and focus on “total beverage” (industry jargon making a lot of different things for people want to drink, rather than “just” beer) to survive. While this is a mild bummer on a personal level because I like beer-flavored beer, a lot of people don’t, and breweries with tons of overhead can’t really afford to ignore the will of the people. I think most of the 9,000+ breweries across the country will keep on making lagers and ales in the traditional-ish fashion, but the biggest ones—the macros, plus the top 10-15 craft producers—must diversify to survive beer’s downturn. They can’t compete directly with the flavor spectrum and premium perception of spirits-based cocktails (last time they tried, we got malt liquor, and look how that turned out.) Lord knows they don’t want to go the way of America’s wineries, which struggle to move cases in beer’s pricepoint. But breweries have the flavor purview, branding adjacencies, and general wherewithal to make hard juice a thing2, and a few of them are already trying.
In 2021, Firestone Walker acquired Cali-Squeeze, a fruit juice-infused hefeweizen brand. In 2022, COOP Ale Works (which previously ushered Sonic hard seltzer into America’s beer aisles) announced a partnership to produce a line of alcoholic fruit punches with Tampico, a popular juice maker. New Belgium Brewery’s Voodoo Ranger Fruit Force, a molar-rattling “fruit punch IPA,” is a top-30 brand in the off-premise after just two months on the market; its big brother, the also-quite-fruity Juice Force, is one of the best-selling beers in the country after just one year. And this month, New Belgium and Boston Beer Company both made new moves into the juice-forward beverage-alcohol space. The former announced a new “hard juice” called Wild Nectar, and the latter gearing up for the rollout of Epic Squeeze, a new line of ales that you have to squint kinda hard to see the word “ale” on:
How times have changed. For decades, American craft brewers have been dogged by the vaguely/narrowly true negative stereotype that they produced “fruity” beers. But times and tastes have changed enormously even since 2015, when Anheuser-Busch InBev smeared the category as effete for making “fuss[y]… pumpkin peach ale” in a notorious Budweiser ad. Nobody cares any more! Fruit won the battle for the mainstream American beer-drinker’s palate3, which is why the same dudes who thought ordering a Blue Moon with an orange slice4 made you gay at the beginning of the past decade closed it out guzzling black cherry hard seltzers by the 12-pack. With no qualms about chasing trends and no self-imposed limitations about whether something is/isn’t craft, Big Beer was quick to move on this palate shift with stuff like The Ritas and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and craft breweries have found their own way to capitalize, with fruited kettle sours and hazy IPAs that derive coveted “juiciness” from hop varietals. But those are still indirect plays at what this nation’s sweet tooth-havers are gravitating to, which is straightforward fruit drank. Beer will never be able to match liquor’s cocktailability (not a word, but you know what I mean), but it is very capable of getting fruitier with punches and even—that’s right baby—straight-up hard juice.
Which brings us to my theory. A lot of folks, your fearless Fingers editor included, have come to view hard seltzer as both a reaction to craft beer (which came to confound, fatigue, and fill up mainstream drinkers) and as runway product for spirits-based canned cocktails (which drinkers like because “vodka soda” is easier to understand than “fermented cane sugar-based seltzer,” and diversified producers like because of the premium pricepoint.) As for craft beer, it’s already proven a worthy runway for hard tea brands; Boston Beer Company’s Twisted Tea is a beast, and New Belgium is reportedly headed that direction now, too. Hard juice could be next: the brand overlap is substantial, the know-how is obtainable, and the drinkers are there. Whether more breweries follow depends on how deeply they consider themselves beer brewers vs. companies that make beer and could brew other stuff too. And I think we’re even closer to mass adoption of that paradigm shift than it seems.
🤝 Subscribe to this week’s Fingers Weekender in your inbox
It drops every Sunday exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, and you’re gonna love it! It’s a digest of items that don’t fit into the regular boozeletter, with smart, punchy analysis from yours truly. It’s a wonderful alternative to mindlessly scrolling through TikTok in bed during your Sunday morning hangover. Hit the button below for more details:
📬 Good post alert
See a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about? Please send me that good post via email or Twitter DM.
✍️ The WSWA’s still got it!!!
