Beverage Dynamics is the largest national business magazine devoted exclusively to the needs of off-premise beverage alcohol retailers, from single liquor stores to big box chains, through coverage of the latest trends in wine, beer and spirits.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/705687
Non-Beer Brews www.beveragedynamics.com Digital Edition Exclusive 2016• Beverage Dynamics 2 beer beers. "But if you tell me the person who wants to drink dry cider is the same person who drinks hard sodas - yeah, right. Those people are on different ends of the spectrum." ALL ABOUT THE MALTS Wine coolers—home- or bar-made concoctions of wine, fruit juice and a carbonated beverage—emerged as commercial prod- ucts in the 1980s. When tax codes and distribution tilted to favor beer-based beverages over wine-based beverages, these casual brands, whose fl avors had next to nothing to do with their source of alcohol, fl ipped recipes. Thus, the Fla- vored Malt Beverage (FMB) was born. FMBs have also been dubbed as "malternatives," or "alcopops" by oppo- nents alarmed by their potential appeal to underage drinkers. Many owe their char- acter—and a permissible amount of their alcohol content—to distilled spirits used for fl avoring beer-strength beverages that sailed under the fl ag of spirits brands. As a category, FMBs grew by 6.7% in 2015 (all data from The Beverage Information Group), led by Bud Light Ritas, Mike's Hard Beverage and Twisted Tea from Boston Beer, which showed the most dramatic growth in the category at 14.1%. Each of these names actually refers to a family of beverages produced in as many as a dozen fl avors, novelty being one of the powerful drivers of FMB sales. Pomegranate, acai berry, goji berry—if consumers didn't fi rst encounter these obscure fruits in the vodka aisle, they met them in a newly-released FMB. Chris Ciskey, owner of Yankee Wine & Spirits in Newtown, CT, and the store's chief beer guy, fi nds that the FMB category is very sensitive to seasons. "The Mike's, the Smirnoff Ice, the Bud Light Lime a Rita, those are very summery. Hard lemonades and the fake margaritas, they're warm weather kind of drinks." And, he adds that a lot of the consumers are women. "The FMBs skew mostly female and young, too. They want alcohol that doesn't taste like alcohol." Total Wine's Bardill sees the FMBs as the logical choice for younger drinkers. "If you look at what Millennials have been drinking and what they've been trending across other categories, wine and spirits, it's a somewhat sweeter palate. That's true of almost anyone at a young age." NOT YOUR FATHER'S SODA POP Hard sodas are either a new category or an addition to the fl avored malt beverage category, depending on who's compiling the data—many analysts and retailers fi nd them different enough to warrant keep- ing sales data separate. Barely a year old, hard sodas differ from the rest of the fruit-, tea- or cocktail-fl avored FMBs in that they are modeled on soda pop, but with a kick. But they, too, are malt-based. The category roared onto the scene in the summer of 2015 with Not Your Father's Root Beer, which blended a hand-made aura borrowed from craft beer with old timey nostalgia. The Not Your Father's brand stirred interest among tradi- tional and craft beer drinkers usually resistant to FMBs, as well as a younger audience. Henry's, grounded in the traditions of LEADING BRANDS OF CIDER, 2014-2015* (000 2.25-gallon cases) '14/'15 BRAND SUPPLIER 2014 2015* % CHG Angry Orchard Boston Beer Co. 14,300 16,351 14.3% Crispin MillerCoors 1,900 1,995 5.0% Woodchuck Vermont Hard Cider Co. 2,350 1,975 -16.0% Strongbow Heineken USA 1,250 1,898 51.8% Smith & Forge MillerCoors 1,270 1,473 16.0% Johnny Appleseed AB InBev 1,350 1,375 1.9% Stella Artois Cidre Ab InBev 1,040 1,195 14.9% Total Leading Brands 23,460 26,262 11.9% Total Ciders 28,170 30,875 9.6% *Preliminary. Source: The Beverage Information & Insights Group. For more data, visit www.albevresearch.com. These beverages, so diff erent in character and principal ingredients, seem to share only one quality: SOCIAL FUNCTION. They are all relatively low in alcohol, dilute, and aff ordable.