“The fourth category,” as Boston Beer Company (BBC) co-founder and recently reappointed chief executive Jim Koch is fond of saying, is “where the growth is.” This is an expedient thing for the leader of a company whose fortunes have long depended more on non-traditional products like Twisted Tea and Sun Cruiser than beer-flavored beer. The logic has a self-affirming circularity to it, too. Much like Brawndo, the fictional sports drink from the 2006 film “Idiocracy,” has simply “got what plants crave,” the fourth category can be anything that has “got growth.” It’s defined by what it does, not what it is.
The beer category isn’t doing a lot of growing these days. As editor Justin Kendall noted for Brewbound, the latest batch of tax-paid data from the Beer Institute show the industry’s shipments were in the red for every single month of 2025. Earlier this week, Bank of America projected that figure would hit a 37-year low after years of post-pandemic declines. The United States’ brewers shouldn’t expect any short-term help from the export markets, either; those may have looked moderately promising a few years ago, but thanks to the Trump administration’s destructive and illegal trade war, not no’ mo’.
It’s enough to make even proud brewers of good ol’ lagers and ales (that’s G.O.L.A.s, in Hop Take’s needlessly acronymic house style) strike out in search of some of that fourth-category growth that has buoyed BBC for years. Results have been decidedly mixed. With few exceptions, hard seltzer has hardly panned out for craft brewers — or Koch et al., who have had a Truly agonizing go of it. Cheladas have mostly been the purview of macrobrewers with Mexican imports, though stateside interlopers like Monster and BeatBox have lately decided to take a run at it. The road to the beer aisle is littered with other flavored alcoholic beverages (FABs) that have struggled for traction with the American drinking public. Hard kombucha never really found meaningful scale outside of Southern California; hard soda went flat so long ago that an entirely new generation of brewers is getting ready to try again; hard juice remains an open question; hard milk, merely a glimmer in my eye.
Against this backdrop of fourth-category failure, some big brewers have achieved some modest success this decade with what I guess they expect us to call “hard refreshers.” It’s another catch-all term for non-carbonated, fruit-forward fermentables, and its standard bearer is New Belgium’s LightStrike, which looks and — I’m told, drinks — more or less like a Powerade at 5 percent alcohol by volume. There’s also Happy Thursday, a deeply sad 2024 Molson Coors launch that boldly answers the question, “What if you made the entire FAB out of focus group?” Distillers, meanwhile, have savvily treated their fermenting frenemies as stalking horses to vet out the opportunity in nascent fourth-category fads like hard tea and hard lemonade before swooping in with spirits-based versions that read more premium to John and Jane Q. Guzzler. See High Noon following White Claw; Stateside following Twisted Tea; Lucky One et al. following Mike’s Hard. You can probably sense where this is headed.
No, not vodka-based Brawndo. But not that far from it, either. “The evolution [of hard refreshers] is inching closer to the actual ‘sports drink’-ness of it all,” says Kate Bernot, a senior analyst for Feel Goods who has researched this emerging pseudo-segment. In a tidy inversion of the broader consumer packaged good (CPG) industry trend of cramming protein and probiotics into previously unwholesome foodstuffs, drinkers also appear newly amenable to fitness-coded flavors being spiked with unwholesome alcohol. With respect to Hop’n Gator (et al.), this plays to liquor’s strengths. “Where spirits have it easy is that ‘sports drink plus vodka’ is a lot easier to understand than ‘sports drink plus neutral malt.’”
Put another way: The Team Ade bus is rolling out for a barnstorming tour, and precious few brewers are on it.
In January, Stateside announced plans for the first additions to its portfolio since Surfside really began ripping earlier this decade. One will be Super Lyte, a non-carbonated, vodka-based drink that clocks in at 4.5 percent ABV and “tastes an awful lot like Gatorade,” according to comments co-founder and CEO Clement Pappas made at the Beer, Wine & Spirits Summit, hosted by Beer Business Daily and Wine & Spirits Daily in Coronado, Calif., in January. (The other, tellingly, will be a 10 percent ABV hard soda.) The flavor combination is intuitive to anybody who spiked sports drinks with liquor to sneak drinks underage, and the 12-ounce slim-can package is intuitive to anybody who’s ordered a Surfside in the past few years — a deliberate choice, Pappas said at the conference, after Stateside watched other aspiring “ade” brands deal with retailer and customer confusion at bottles.
(This was almost certainly a reference to LightStrike, whose 16.9-ounce wrapped polyethylene terephthalate bottles, though truer to the sports-drink aesthetic, were reportedly a hassle to co-pack. The shrink-wrapped 4-packs NBB sent to grocery stores also may have stymied trial a bit early on: “That was just way too much of a commitment for consumers who didn’t even know what it was,” says Bernot. Singles of LightStrike enjoyed quicker uptake in the convenience channel, where the Kirin subsidiary has dominated with Voodoo Ranger.)
Also in the race to corner the sports drink game is Spiked Ade, and with that same vodka-based 4.5 percent ABV 12-ounce slim can, to boot. The brand, launched by a consumer-packaged-goods vet in New Jersey in 2025, just announced in January it had secured $10 million in new funding to expand to more states. Its tagline, “the official vodka drink of your social life, made with sports drink flavors,” is almost Brawndonian in its inscrutable claims. (Why do they use electrolytes to make Brawndo? “Because Brawndo’s got electrolytes,” of course.) But nobody ever went broke underestimating the American drinking public, and Spiked Ade claimed in a press release last month that its “clear point of view and immediate traction” in the Garden State, along with a new business partner in Manhattan Beer & Beverage Distributors, have set up “multi-market expansion to 15 to 30 U.S. markets by March.” Meanwhile, Vodkade — a totally different brand, mind you — claims to have “created the original that started it all, a refreshing, non-carbonated vodka cocktail inspired by classic sports drink flavors.” It launched this past spring in 12-ounce slim cans at 5 percent ABV.
Of course, just because there are spirits-based competitors in the market doesn’t mean brewers are completely boxed out. In fact, a few of them were there before the first whistle. American Solera has been marketing Quench, its own “hard sports drink,” since 2019. Feel Goods reported that the Tulsa brewery had even used Gatorade to brew some of its limited-edition flavors. “I’m usually known as the ‘adult Gatorade’ guy amongst the parents at sports tournaments,” co-founder Chase Healey told Bernot.
Whether there’s room for many more malt-based players on this fourth-category roster remains to be seen. If recent RTD history is any guide, once the ball starts rolling toward liquor, it’s tough for malt- and cane-based stuff to effectively counter. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of breweries out there that could use a growth ade.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Coca-Cola recently sent a letter to its domestic distributors with bad news: Due to “facility upgrades at the water source and production facilities in Mexico,” its glass-bottled Topo Chico mineral water will be unavailable stateside until the third quarter of this year. (The American soda giant acquired the Mexican brand in 2017.) But the eponymous hard seltzer will remain available throughout this stretch, because Molson Coors has always manufactured it without the famously fizzy waters of mountainous Monterrey. Which could be good news if you like that stuff… or more bad news, if you’re just now learning that it’s never been the genuine article. Don’t say Hop Take didn’t try to warn you!
📈 Ups…
SCOTUS tossing Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs won’t help aluminum prices, but may offer cost relief on some ingredients “at least temporarily,” said the Brewers Association… Trade groups in Colorado are raising alarm over state lawmakers’ latest push to raise taxes on beer… Lawson’s Finest Liquids is really ripping, up almost 16 percent year-over-year in grocery… The BA’s new board of directors has officially kicked off this year’s term… The National Beer Wholesalers Association’s monthly Beer Purchasers Index was up a hair for February, its first year-over-year growth in 13 months… The Teamsters announced the ratification of a new contract for 245 workers at Anheuser-Busch InBev’s can factory…
📉 …and downs
Armed Forces Brewing Co., which kinda-sorta still exists, is now raising money for [sic] “STANDING UP TO CANCEL CULTURE……. IN COURT”… State lawmakers in Hawaii are making a run at tax equivalency based on ABV, not base, which would erase beer’s longstanding advantage… BBC posted its fourth straight year of shipment and depletion declines…
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