Spiked Seltzer Is Now Virtually Out-Selling All Craft Beer, Making It The Official Drink Of Summer And Beyond
We don't go a day in the Delish office without an email about, shipment of, or press release on a new spiked seltzer. So it shouldn't come as a total surprise that outlets everywhere are calling the stuff The Official Drink of Summer 2019. But to read that it—specifically White Claw—is now officially out-selling "nearly all craft beer brands in sales" is pretty wild. And yet...it makes sense. The stuff really started circulating years ago and has been slowly forming an alcoholic empire.
Per AdAge, SpikedSeltzer was the first, well, spiked seltzer and it first came about in 2012. It's no coincidence we were all pretty unfamiliar with it until a few years ago. While the brand was sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016, AB InBev only brought the stuff nationwide last year around this time.
We were all obsessed with rosé back in 2016 when spiked seltzer was circulating locally (and then Aperol Spritzes in 2017—and then frosé last summer), all while other brands began taking notice of the product and making their own versions. Along with SpikedSeltzer, brands like Truly, WhiteClaw, Nauti, Polar, and even alcohol giants like Smirnoff have gotten in on the hard seltz game.
And, sure, we could chalk the craze up to people just needing to name A Drink of Summer, but a 193 percent growth in sales over the past year for White Claw alone begs another reason for the obsession. My guess is that as a whole, spiked seltzers are lower-cal and lower-bloat than just about any beer you can buy, and we're a little sick of Spritzes and frosé by this point. Plus, you can get hard seltzer in almost every flavor imaginable now—Crook & Mark, for example, is out here debuting Blackberry-Lime and Coconut-Pineapple. Press is doing Blackberry-Hibiscus, for god's sake!!
Anyway. Enough people are buying the stuff right now that there was a net profit of $500 million on it on 2018 alone, The Observer reports. There's no way of knowing how that figure will grow in 2019 just yet, but again, more of this stuff has been flying off shelves than all craft beers (barring Blue Moon) this whole summer, CBS noted last month.
So you know where to go from here, right? (The correct answer is to buy a buttload of spiked seltzer before it really all sells out.)
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