Step aside, Bud, the United States has a new favorite brew: hard seltzer.
This summer, consumers ditched Budweiser and other popular light beers in search of something new. White Claw, an alcoholic flavored seltzer, did so well in July and August that the company claims it outsold Budweiser, the classic beer-flavored water that claims to embody America.
Some cheap beer diehards were skeptical of these claims. But Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association, granted that White Claw appears to have beaten Bud — but “only in very specific weeks.”
“We don’t have a ton of data. Hard seltzers are new, they’re emerging,” he explained to Axios. “They appear to have very strong seasonality, so late summer they really seem to have peaked and I think were taking some share from particularly light beers and other kind of macro lagers.”
For every 19 cans of beer sold, one can of hard seltzer sold this summer. That’s a 5% share of the cold-carbonated-in-a-can-alcoholic-drink market. Not too shabby. Between April 2018 and April 2019, hard seltzer sales tripled, according to new data. White Claw alone experienced a 200% sale increase over a four-week span in July.
To adapt to the changing market, beer companies have created their own hard seltzers. Anheuser-Busch has Bon & Viv; MillerCoors has Henry’s Hard Sparkling Water; and Sam Adams’ parent company has Truly, the second-best-selling hard seltzer on store shelves.
This pivot is easier for beer companies than it might seem because hard seltzers are brewed just like beer: “We ferment gluten-free grains to create alcohol,” Sanjiv Gajiwala, senior vice president of marketing for Mark Anthony, the company that owns White Claw, told the Daily Beast. “We then run it through our own proprietary Brewpure process to create colorless, flavorless liquid. We add carbonated water, flavors, and a little bit of cane sugar to bring out the flavor.”
The result is a gluten-free, low calorie, sparkling drink that flies off store shelves and dominates the selfie scene. “It hits the rare sweet spot of flavor, refreshment and functional benefits that make it much more than a boom and bust,” said Lesya Lysyj, the chief marketing officer for the Boston Beer Company.
White Claw’s sales just go to show that with a bit of alcohol, you can convince consumers to shell out for just about anything.
