Lime-A-Ritas recently expanded into wine cocktail-inspired beverages called Ritas Spritz. These types of beverages are among the few in the beer industry that are growing in sales, up 10.7 percent to nearly $2.6 billion in 2018. It’s all indicative of the rise of the “flavored malt beverage,” canned alcoholic drinks that aren’t exactly beer but will get you drunk at roughly the same pace, and taste like some concoction of light beer, seltzer, syrup, and a bunch of unpronounceable chemicals. Corona, which is owned by the third-largest beer supplier in the world, is also launching its first beer alternative, Corona Refrescas, nationally in May. Natty Light is just one of many beer brands trying to appeal to the craft beer–indifferent: Bud Light, which is also owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, has seen its Lime-A-Ritas “margarita in a can” line explode into 10 flavors since its inception in 2012, and this year launched a sparkling wine-inspired version, Ritas Spritz. More breweries are targeting people who don’t like beer Since Naturdays launched in late February, Blake says it’s on track to sell three times as much as the brand had expected by the end of the year. Yet despite the rising interest in craft beers - the industry has grown by 500 percent in the past decade in large part thanks to the explosion of microbreweries - Natty Light’s strategy of selling beer that tastes even less like beer appears to be working. More significantly, Naturdays tastes better than Natty Light, at least for those who like their beers to taste a little less like beer and more like strawberry lemonade. Yes, Naturdays already has a presence at Nascar. Like Natty Light, it has low alcohol by volume (ABV) at 4.2 percent and marginally more calories (132 per 12-ounce can compared to Natty Light’s 95). That resulting product is Naturdays, a strawberry lemonade-flavored light lager that comes in a shockingly gorgeous can, composed of a pink-yellow gradient and decorated with tiny flamingos (an homage to pool floats and swim trunks, Blake tells me). We wanted to launch this new product to hit on that big barrier.” “Obviously, price isn’t really a barrier to Natty, but flavor was the interesting one. “Two of the reasons why people are turning away from beer that really jumped out to us were price and flavor,” says Daniel Blake, senior director of value brands at Anheuser-Busch. Even though total beer sales rose in 2018, that money is being spent less often at places like gas stations, pharmacies, and grocery stores - in other words, the kinds of places one might expect to pick up a 24-pack of Natty Light.įor a brand owned by the biggest brewery in the world, this was concerning, and made more so by the fact that Anheuser-Busch InBev’s market research showed that if people don’t drink beer when they’re between the ages of 21 and 25, they probably aren’t ever going to start. Those hit the hardest? Domestic brands like Budweiser, Miller Light, and Coors Light, whose sales in 2018 declined 4.2 percent to about $12.6 billion. Even on the beeriest day of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, in 2016 one Harris poll reported that 20 percent of young drinkers would rather drink wine and another 20 percent would rather sip liquor. Between 20, beer lost 10 percent of its market share to wine and liquor. The problem was the same as the one faced by pretty much anyone in the business of selling beer in the latter half of the 2010s: Young people aren’t drinking as much of it as they used to. The problem was not, as one might suspect, with the product itself - the watery pilsner most commonly used as a punchline in lazy jokes about disgusting frat houses and which currently rates as “awful” nevertheless remains one of the 10 most-sold brews in America.
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