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(Courtesy White Claw)
American Craft Beer doesn’t consider Hard Seltzers to be beer. They’re not nearly as interesting to us as beer and their popularity, which soared at the height of the pandemic, appears to have peaked.
For more than five years Boston Beer’s Truly Hard Seltzer had been the company’s main profit driver, far outselling its Samuel Adam’s family of beers and they expected it to be their future before the segment hit the wall.
In 2021, Boston Beer Founder Jim Koch told CNBC that the company had ended up throwing away millions of cases of its hard seltzer, due to the unexpected category slowdown…
“We were very aggressive about adding capacity, adding inventory, buying raw materials, like cans and flavors, and, frankly, we overbought,” Koch, said in an interview on “Closing Bell.” “And when the growth stopped, we had more of all those things than we were going to be able to use, because there is a shelf life.”
The hard seltzer category became a “crazy gold rush,” Koch added. “I think us and [Mark Anthony Group’s] White Claw together are close to that 70%, and then there’s a lot of clutter, and I think a lot of that long-tail clutter will go away.”
At its peak we saw even the most committed craft brewers tentatively introducing their own hard seltzers brands (the clutter that Koch refers to) and most have of those same brewers are no longer making them today.
Most craft brewers weren’t into them to begin with, and when interest in hard seltzers waned they couldn’t drop them quick enough.
And now White Claw, still the #1 hard seltzer in the US, has introduced its own vodka line. And while the company is still profiting from hard seltzers, the Drinks Business is suggesting that that introduction might point to the fact that they too are losing faith in their core brand.
“As part of its expansion into vodka, White Claw has also revealed the release of a range of ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails named White Claw Vodka Sodas. The 100 calorie RTD variants will be available in peach, wild cherry, pineapple and watermelon flavors and have been made with the same White Claw vodka that’s sold in bottles.”
Unfortunately the decline of hard seltzers doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers who may have migrated from beer to hard seltzers are returning to beer…
A recent study by ISWR found that sales volumes of spirit-based RTD cocktails are set to overtake hard seltzers by 2025 with cocktail products commanding 26% of the total category, compared with hard seltzer lagging behind with just 20%.
