![]() In the following year, I tried too many other brands of hard seltzer to count-dug out of coolers, passed to me at rooftop parties, sipped furtively on blankets at the park. I know why people get so drunk off these, I thought to myself. The longer it sat on the counter in front of me while I chatted with my co-workers, the more noticeable the taste became. Within a few minutes, the drink tasted more like a product of chemical engineering than a squeeze of lime and a splash of booze in a cold glass of seltzer. It felt like it was coating my tongue, and suddenly there was an aftertaste that reminded me of diet, off-brand lemon-lime soda, except more concentrated. What had been crisp and fizzy began to flatten out, and the flavors sagged under the weight of their artificiality. After the White Claw had been out of the fridge for a few minutes, the drinking experience deteriorated with extraordinary speed. For the price-currently $1 to $2 per can for a 12-pack at grocery stores near my Brooklyn apartment-that was plenty.Īs I worked my way through the can, though, I had an experience that I suspect many of you will find familiar. The taste wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, but it did what it said on the tin. The drink’s popularity made immediate, intuitive sense, especially as something to take to the beach in a cooler or drink at a friend’s cookout. The first sip was great: cold, slightly fizzy, not too sweet, identifiably lime-flavored. So back in 2019, when I popped open my first can of hard seltzer-a lime White Claw handed to me one afternoon in The Atlantic’s office kitchen-I was ready to love it. According to Liz Paquette, Drizly’s head of consumer insights, Millennials account for 63 percent of hard-seltzer sales on the platform. I’m also 36, which puts me squarely in the middle of hard seltzer’s target demographic. I have taken more than one Jell-O shot in the past year. I was simply a townie.) I love a beer-and-a-shot combo deal or a pitcher full of cold American macrobrew or whatever a bartender has available that is cheap and in a can. (Please do not assume that means I went to grad school. I went to a party school, and my drinking habits still reflect six formative years in that environment. I am many things, but no one would accuse me of being a booze snob. But also, here’s the thing: Hard seltzer just isn’t very good. ![]() ![]() Maybe the market grew so quickly that it has already reached something of a natural ceiling. Inflation might have tightened seltzer budgets. ![]() Crowds have returned to bars and restaurants, where the drink isn’t very popular. Hard seltzer might be flatlining for obvious reasons. According to sales data from the alcohol-delivery service Drizly, seltzer sales dipped below 2021 levels during last week’s Fourth of July holiday. The summer holidays, which are usually the busiest time of year for hard-seltzer sales, haven’t been much better. By March 2022, spending on hard seltzer had fallen almost 2 percent from the same period the previous year. In July, Molson Coors announced that it was shutting down Coors Seltzer in the United States in October, Boston Beer Company told shareholders that it had tossed millions of cases of unsold Truly, the country’s second-most-popular hard seltzer. People didn’t stop buying seltzer-overall sales still grew 16 percent that year-but for the first time, enthusiasm for new products and flavors didn’t seem so boundless. Constellation Brands budgeted $40 million on marketing alone while launching Corona’s seltzer line.īut as 2021 wore on, the hard-seltzer bubble looked like it might be on the verge of bursting. White Claw is still king, but by July 2021, 150-plus brands of hard seltzer were available in the United States: Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors stocked stores with seltzerized offshoots of Bud Light, Natty Light, and Coors Light. Sales in 2020 more than doubled the previous year’s. They found it in a zillion colorful new cans of hard seltzer-buzzy, cheap, fruit-flavored, portable, and with about as much alcohol as a light beer. Sales of the beverages first took off during the White Claw Summer of 2019, but greatly benefited from the early pandemic, when bored people looked for novelty on the shelves at grocery stores. Over the past three years, hard seltzer has been as close to a sure thing as anything else in American life.
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