The mix of all five Truly flavors was by far the best combination. Moderate alcohol consumption during adult life, drinking patterns, and breast cancer risk. It’s one of the most accessible ways to get a buzz, while also carrying a veneer of something a little bit fancy. There is always going to be a far more delicious way to get drunk: Hard seltzer is never truly enticing in the way a dry rosé with an ice cube in it next to a pool can be, nor as soul-hugging as a bready IPA in an air-conditioned brewery. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts to all who need them. It’s water with bubbles that also has alcohol in it. What that alcohol is made out of can differ — usually it’s just fermented cane sugar with added fruit flavors, but sometimes, like other “flavored malt beverages” such as Bud Light’s Lime-A-Ritas, it uses malted barley. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Industry experts and retail trend professionals have spoken to pretty much every publication about hard seltzer’s skyrocketing popularity. There is a not-insignificant amount of irony when we talk about hard seltzer — for all its supposed aspirational qualities, you’re still drinking malt liquor out of a can — but particularly in the way men talk about it. According to the companies, Truly Wild Berry was the first hard seltzer available in-flight. At its most basic level, hard seltzer is seltzer with alcohol in it. “This makes sense from a business perspective,” she writes. As one self-identified bro told Business Insider, White Claw is “ridiculously good. LaCroix’s moment in the sun didn’t last long — by 2019, its parent company’s sales had dropped 62 percent over a year due to increased competition from brands like Spindrift. A 12-pack of White Claw retails for about $15, which is about the same price as a 12-pack of domestic light beer. This type of alcohol is produced by the fermentation of yeast, sugars, and starches. Truly is engineered to be easy-drinking. And I fully acknowledge being basic when I drink them. “‘Wellness’ is for financially secure people with time to spare — on their skin, on their bodies, and on their diets.”. Millions rely on Vox’s explainers to understand an increasingly chaotic world. In 2019, “Spiked and Sparkling” was quietly swapped out for “Hard Seltzer,” likely because its competitors use that nomenclature. However, ethanol also has harmful effects on the body. And the fact that it’s lightly flavored makes it a perfect mixer come holiday season (so far, there is no pumpkin spice hard seltzer, but Bon & Viv does have a cranberry flavor). Truly- Spiked and Sparkling alcoholic drink (1 net carb) I am usually not one for Smirnoff type drinks or coolers but as I have stayed on keto I am getting tired of liquor on rocks or miller lite. GBD 2016 Alcohol Collaborators. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3. Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. It and … It is difficult to overestimate the hugeness of hard seltzer to people who study the business of alcohol, but here are some exact figures: Hard seltzer is currently a $550 million business and is projected to keep growing, with one UBS analyst estimating to Business Insider that it could be worth $2.5 billion by 2021. Today’s male hard seltzer drinkers are just as aware of their chosen drink’s reputation as they were in the Zima days, but the difference is that in 2019, it’s far more culturally acceptable to embrace it. Today, Truly boasts more than a dozen flavors, with such recent additions as Watermelon and Kiwi available in its Tropical Variety Pack. 1. Truly Spiked & Sparkling contains alcohol made from cane sugar. Incidentally, Truly Wild Berry was the preferred Truly flavor in a VinePair spiked seltzer ranking. Wine drunk offers the soothing comfort of a memory foam pillow in liquid form. You can have drunkenly deep, intelligent conversations, you can go to some place with a good vibe and dance, or you can legitimately call it a night and go to sleep. What’s more innocent-sounding than seltzer? We all wanted to keep drinking the mix, which we didn’t with the individual flavors. Read on for 10 more things you should know about Truly Hard Seltzer. Truly refers to its flavors as "Styles," which include pomegranate, grapefruit and pomelo and lime, and promotes itself as "just like sparkling water, but with 5% alcohol by volume." Finally, and perhaps most importantly, hard seltzer is fine. And earlier this year, both Bud Light and Corona came out with seltzer-adjacent lighter, fruitier versions of its flagship beverages — Bud Light with a line of Ritas Spritz, and Corona with Refrescas. Truly Hard Seltzer is a refreshing alternative to beer, wine, & cocktails. Most hard seltzers’ alcohol content hovers between 4 and 6 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), which is about the same as a light beer. Today, there are dozens of similar brands, from White Claw to Truly, Henry, Nauti, and Press. International Journal of Cancer 2017; 141(5):916-924. When Truly Hard Seltzer debuted in 2016, it’s safe to say no one saw what was coming. It’s not a coincidence that hard seltzers arrived on grocery store shelves at the same time LaCroix became a strange kind of status symbol. There will always be a summer drink. Paleo diet adherents will like that Truly boasts just two grams of carbs per serving. Truly Black Cherry has a deep and dark flavor that recalls a slightly over-ripened cherry during the height of cherry season. To be fair, it’s not only hard seltzer that’s benefiting from its canned-ness; canned wine has been an increasingly popular choice over the past few years, and ready-to-drink cocktails in Instagram-friendly cans like Mezzo Spritz and Pampelonne are all over grocery store aisles. To Each Their Own Flavor. As Jaya Saxena notes in an Eater piece on hard seltzer and wellness, alcohol is often considered a vice. The alcohol (ABV 5%) comes from fermenting all-natural cane sugar. “This is not a fad,” Ricardo Marques, vice president of core and value brands at Anheuser-Busch, told CNN. In consuming a historically feminine-coded beverage, straight men often will counter it with hypermasculine language (the tagline, “No laws when you’re drinking Claws,” which comes from a YouTube parody of a bro who’s obsessed with hard seltzer, is an example — although the Portland, Maine police department had to issue a statement on Twitter that laws do, in fact, still apply while drinking Claws). The upward trajectory is expected to continue in 2020 and 2021. However, as per our research, both statements can be true. And when it launched, the beverage was available in not-as-convenient glass bottles, sold as six-packs. And as of this year, most major beverage companies have their own offerings: PBR recently announced its 8 percent ABV Stronger Seltzer, while Four Loko topped it with a 14 percent offering that comes in flavors like “Sour Blue Razz.” Natty Light also just debuted a much-hyped seltzer that even has its own GIFs on Instagram Stories (one of them features a White Claw pouring itself into a dumpster). It and the next leading brand, Truly, which is owned by Boston Beer Company, together make up about 85 percent of total hard seltzer sales. So what’s the difference between a beverage like Boston’s Truly Spiked & Sparkling, Connecticut’s SpikedSeltzer or Chicago’s White Claw and simply pouring seltzer over vodka on the rocks? Sales of hard seltzer have grown about 200 percent over the past year, with 164.3 percent of that growth occurring in July alone, according to Nielsen. It’s just that hard seltzer happens to fit neatly into society’s current ideas about men’s consumption habits. Together, the nearly identical products comprised about 85 percent of total hard seltzer sales as of July 2019, with White Claw claiming an estimated 54 percent share, and Truly a 29 percent share as of August 2019. None of this explains why these things are so popular, though. Calories aside, many millennials are trying to cut down on drinking or identify as “sober-curious,” leading to a rise in low- or zero-alcohol beverages, a category that’s expected to grow by 32 percent between 2018 and 2022. What Truly lacks in carbs it makes up for in flavors. Truly’s parent company, Boston Beer, announced the five-year partnership with the NHL in September 2019. Hard seltzer mimics the flavors drinkers already know and love, like black cherry, raspberry, and lime. Alcohol is a drug. The rise of crossfit alongside paleo and keto diets gave men permission to be more publicly and proudly health and image conscious than most of their predecessors.”. Wine is the only alcohol that allows you to turn up and turn down simultaneously. “The success of White Claw … [is] indicative of the 2019 type of hypermasculinity that is currently en vogue,” McCarthy writes. ), A post shared by White Claw (@whiteclaw) on Jul 14, 2016 at 3:25pm PDT. Cans are far more low-maintenance than glass: Not only are they more portable, but you can bring them to the beach or the park disguised as regular soda, no corkscrew needed. ... "First, it is not truly non-alcoholic, it does contain a small amount of alcohol which alone could trigger a relapse for some." Hard seltzer is also not new. Zima left the shelves in 2008 and, despite a brief resurrection in 2017, is now no longer in production (you can still get it in Japan, though). It truly depends on the “alcohol content of beer.” “Cheers to healthy alcohol consumption next time.” That hard seltzer has a relatively low ABV and little or no additional sugar allows most versions to remain in the 100-calorie range, which is pretty much as low as you can go if you’re drinking alcohol (a shot of vodka, for example, has about the same number of calories). Truly Hard Seltzer first launched on the market in April 2016, debuting a low-calorie alcoholic beverage in three flavors: Colima Lime, Grapefruit & Pomelo, and Pomegranate. Yes, Truly contains 5% Alcohol per can, and the alcohol comes from fermented cane sugar. Truly Hard Seltzer is pure and clean. The goal, according to the announcement, was to make the lightly boozy seltzer “even more crisp, clean, and refreshing,” as well as “more drinkable with no lingering bitterness.” In other words: as little like beer as possible. In some cases, binge drinking is a warning sign of alcohol use disorder, or alcoholism. © 2014 - 2020 VinePair Inc. — Made In NYC, Next Round Live: What's Happening in the Drinks Industry Now, These Graphic Tees Will Help You Say Cheers in Other Languages, Best Practices: When Making a French 75, Good Bubbles Are Key, Sip Trip: Sicily, Crossroads of the World, The Differences Between Bitters, Tinctures, and Shrubs, Less Is More: Why Small-Format Wine Bottles Are Trending, 10 Things You Should Know About Cîroc Vodka, 10 Things You Should Know About Truly Hard Seltzer | VinePair, https://vinepair.com/articles/truly-hard-seltzer-guide/, wbs_cat Beer, wbs_type Hard Seltzer, wbs_brand Truly Hard Seltzer, flavored malt beverage, hard seltzer, spiked seltzer, Best Practices: When Making a French 75, Good Bubbles Are Key | VinePair, https://vinepair.com/articles/dos-donts-french-75-recipe/, wbs_cat Spirit, wbs_cat Wine, wbs_type Champagne, wbs_type Cognac, wbs_type Gin, bartender, cocktails, Cognac, gin, Sparkling Wine. The best (and worst) alcohol for the keto diet No matter what proof (80 through 100), gin, rum, vodka, and whiskey all have 0 grams of carbohydrate in a jigger (or 1.5 ounces). As one 30-year-old advertising creative in Brooklyn told W Magazine, she loves hard seltzer because “they go down super easily and then suddenly I’m drunk. Chip in as little as $3 to help keep Vox free for all. Likewise, JetBlue was the first and only commercial airline to serve the spiked sparkler. It’s the unofficial drink of summer 2019, but the cheap, low-cal, gender-neutral canned cocktail has serious staying power. They’re also great for the beach, and White Claw is the best brand. It is also what’s allowed hard seltzer brands to market their product as adjacent or somehow contributing to the idea of “wellness,” because it at least has fewer calories than a real cocktail. Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that empowers you through understanding. Hard seltzer requires almost zero explanation. “Throughout the NHL season and into the Stanley Cup Playoffs and Final, Truly will engage with NHL fans in numerous ways, including trying new flavors as they are released,” Truly said in a press release. How can I find out the calories, carbs, sugar, and alcohol content of Truly Hard Seltzer®? This last characteristic is what separates wines and beers from the so-called hard liquors … Truly Spiked & Sparkling has launched a new range of spiked sparkling waters an alcoholic twist on sparkling water. But despite its just fine-ness, hard seltzer may have the most staying power out of all three: It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it has a sense of humor about itself, making it slightly more immune to derision. (Yes, it is also that!) It also plans to launch Truly Hard Seltzer Lemonade in 2020. Truly regularly puts out new flavors, and consumers might … But it’s a beverage whose existence makes so much sense for so many reasons, and feels so perfectly positioned in this particular period of time, that it has helped define what exactly this period is. Conversely, it’s difficult to really despise hard seltzer, because there’s barely anything in it to hate. Note that .05 = 5%, and .40 = 40%. The irony, of course, is that alcohol isn’t actually good for you and neither is seltzer (it kind of rots your teeth! Hard seltzer is the ultimate beverage for summertime chilling. And that’s not even including the kinds of alcohol that are essentially just dessert! Is it gluten free? The fact that it’s considered more upscale than other malt liquor offerings (you can buy it at Whole Foods, for instance) helps sell it as aspirational. Truly beats almost all hard seltzer competitors except one: White Claw. In 2015, Mary H.K. It’s a drink for doing summertime things: concerts, beaches, and boating. Truly markets itself as a sort of high-end mixer that won’t dilute your drink, so perhaps this discovery speaks to Truly’s powers as a mixer. There’s a performative aspect of men’s somewhat ironic enthusiasm for hard seltzer, too: In doubling down on how much they love it, men get to embrace something they’re usually discouraged from enjoying. Half of those sales are concentrated on a single brand: White Claw, which is owned by Mark Anthony Brands, the owner of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. If I’m at a party now and someone offers me an IPA or a White Claw, I definitely take a White Claw … I do dude things and get stoked and all that. At the same time, more Americans were giving up soda, and waiting for them on the other side was flavored seltzer, which didn’t have the sugary sweetness or the calories that came with it. 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