There used to be a fierce semantic debate over what constituted “craft” beer. Some guy even sued Blue Moon over it at one point. (He lost.) The Brewers Association, as the segment’s trade group, has put forth its own definition over the years, revising it to the point that it now includes firms like Monster and excludes firms like Sapporo-Stone with a logic that is both technically sound and practically inscrutable. Everything is craft, and nothing is craft, but somehow the segment is still down year-over-year. A riddle for another day.
There’s been no such formal jockeying over the definition of beer. In the United States, at least; Germans used to get their lederhosen in a bunch about it, but even they seem to be less dogmatic about it these days. Stateside, the beer aisle is no longer beer’s sole purview, for reasons we’ve discussed at length. Today’s drinking public is apathetic, base-agnostic, and omnibibulous. Above all else, they care about what stuff tastes like. As the BA’s chief economist Matt Gacioch told attendees of a data session at the Craft Brewers Conference in Indianapolis late last month, when shopping for beverage alcohol, “consumers are chasing flavors rather than specific products.” The Reinheitsgebot? Did somebody sneeze?
I make no moral judgment on domestic beer’s recently fluid (ahem) definition. If anything, I think it’s probably for the best that brewers have entrée to a world of flavorful products made with fermented malt and/or cane beyond traditional beer, for the simple fact that many of them are not selling enough beer-flavored beer to stay afloat. Examples abound, but I’m thinking specifically about Boston Beer Company (BBC) and its Ship of Twea-seus here. Not only because Twisted Tea’s tremendous performance this decade has buoyed that of Samuel Adams and Dogfish Head, though it has. Earlier this year, the firm announced the upcoming trial rollout of Just Hard Squeezed, a carbonation-free, cane-based “hard juice” that clocks in at 4.2 percent alcohol by volume.
Is “hard juice” beer? Technically speaking, of course not. As far as I know, the Siebel Institute isn’t teaching brewers how to make it, and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) categorizes it differently, too. But it taxes it the same way. And practically speaking… I mean, hard juice is not not beer. It can be produced in a brewery. It can be sold in the beer aisle. It is bursting with fruit flavor, which has been the — and damn near the only — winning proposition for mass-market India Pale Ales for the past few years. When BBC introduced Sam Adams’ Wicked Hazy line a few years ago, it touted it thusly:
Super-juiced with haze for days. How about a rush of pineapple over here? How about a one-two punch of mango and peach over there? Wicked Hazy is a little bit extra — a blast of tropical fruit, with a smooth, silky finish.
Does that sound like beer to you? Or juice? Or some liminal space between the two?
The point is not that BBC is barely a craft brewer in any sense of the word due to the vanishingly small volume of beer-flavored beer it sells in comparison to Twisted Tea et al. That’s between Jim Koch and the BA, and I don’t particularly care. No, the point is that the firm — which, among its many missteps, has cracked not one but several market-making codes along the beer/FMB spectrum — is chasing a strong thesis with Just Hard Squeezed. And it’s not alone.
For the past few years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the emergence of the nascent hard juice subsegment. With respect to SunnyD vodka seltzer (however much is even due), this is a space that brewers have the wherewithal, incentive, and opportunity to own outright. Theoretically, they’ll have to compete with winemakers to be hard juice’s top squeeze, given that wine is literal juice, but the reality is that mass-market wine brands have been even slower to accept the gospel of flavor than their counterparts on Team Beer, and have neither the package mix nor the distributor relationships to capitalize on this moment. Cidermakers just unlocked high-ABV stovepipes and still struggle under an unfavorable tax profile. Distillers are boxed out by placement restrictions and hobbled by higher excise taxes. Brewers have the best angle on hard juice, and slowly but surely, some of them have been taking it.
In 2022, COOP Ale Works (the Oklahoma producer behind Sonic’s hard-seltzer line) announced a deal to produce hard fruit punches for Tampico, a (soft) juice brand; that same year, Anheuser-Busch InBev signaled a partnership with Mexico’s fruited soda brand, Jarritos. In 2023, New Belgium Brewery launched Wild Nectar, a hard juice line with bright, electric branding, while Two Robbers, Philly’s beyond-beer hustler, launched its 8 percent Double Punch entrant. In 2024, AriZona Beverages and Grupo Jumex launched Jumex Hard Nectar, which is not to be confused with Nectar Hard Juice, launched that same year by Asian-inspired hard seltzer slinger Nectar. Also in 2024, Tröegs Independent Brewing launched Freaky Squeeze, boasting “a much fuller, authentic fruit flavor with softer carbonation, hint[s] of tartness, and beautiful color,” compared to hard seltzer. Quirk, Boulevard Brewing Co.’s shockingly successful hard seltzer brand, spun off a low-carbonation, fruit-forward Quirktail line. And so on, and so forth.
Not all of these brands are archetypical hard juice in the sense of “juice plus alcohol.” Some skew toward lemonades and fruit punches/cocktails flavor-wise; others have bubbles. The cohort is still taking shape, and not just in terms of value propositions and drinker expectations. The market-research firm NielsenIQ currently tracks “hard juice” as a tranche of products, but it includes a mix of brands that are clearly hard seltzers (like Topo Chico) or hard lemonades (the red-hot NOCA). Everybody is still figuring it out, on the shelves and in the scan data. “I think it will take some time for this [segment] to get sorted out,” Mary Mills, an industry consultant with 3Tier Beverages, tells Hop Take via email. “But I think it’s still fair to say it’s a pretty big and growing space that’s worth paying attention to. Similar to hard tea, it is one of the drivers of FMB growth right now.”
Some of the brands I mentioned above have already failed, or are down big. Not surprising, given the challenge of carving out a differentiated niche with consumers, retailers, and distributors all at the same time. But others are flying high. In the NIQ-tracked hard juice subsegment, AriZona is flying the highest. Not only is its house brand, AriZona Hard Juice Cocktails, leading the pack with over 1,200 percent year-over-year growth in both dollars and volume on a not-so-small denominator; Jumex Hard Nectar is going berserk, too, notching eye-popping growth this year in six Southwestern states and announcing a national rollout with Walmart and a new 22-ounce single-serve can in late April. “Consumers are still looking for flavor and hard juice fits the bill,” says Mills.
Whether craft brewers fit hard juice into their portfolios… well, that’s another question. It’s not beer, after all, and a lot of them got burned trying to do “artisanal White Claw,” or whatever. Some of them are currently getting burned trying to take some share off Twisted Tea. Traditional beer — the stuff that, by definition, they got into business to brew — is not exactly selling itself these days, and the smaller the firm, the less focus it can spare on standing up another new brand in a still-coalescing subsegment. Hard juice won’t be worth the squeeze for every brewer. But between the complementary flavor profiles to fruit-forward IPAs, the relatively similar route to market as traditional beer, and the potential to differentiate with premium ingredients, there’s an incremental sales opportunity here for some of them.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Thanks to Truly’s stumbles and tumbles, hard seltzer is mostly just “White Claw plus everyone else” these days. But “everyone else” still includes some hot brands trying to climb the ladder of the struggling segment. Chief among them: Happy Dad, the MAGA-djacent flavored malt beverage launched by the YouTube edgelords known as the Nelk Boys. The brand is up over 16 percent in grocery store sales through March 20, according to market research firm Circana, and its non-vlogger chief executive is aiming even higher. “We really want to pass Topo Chico in sales this year, and then next year, we want to pass Truly,” he told Brewbound. “And then, 2027 is where us and White Claw are going to compete.” Happy Dad’s recently announced move to beer wholesalers should help; the reactionary right-wing politics of its celebrity backers, maybe less so.
📈 Ups…
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2025 World Beer Cup… The Beer Institute estimated the industry’s economic impact last year at $470.96 billion, up over $61 billion since 2022… The on-premise is still showing strength in the face of the trade war, with restaurants adding 17,000 jobs nationwide in April… Tilray Brands is on the verge of being delisted by the NASDAQ, but chief exec Irwin Simon remains bullish on beer (and very quotable)…
📉 …and downs
Every category is hurting in the off-premise right now, but Bump Williams’ latest analysis of NIQ scan data suggests beer is hurting the most… Ball Corporation’s CEO called for large brewers to cut prices to preserve volume; how about some subtlety here, buddy?… BrewDog got hosed stateside last year, recording a ~$9 million loss and brewing at just 30 percent capacity…
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