Hard seltzers are a fresh alternative to beer and cocktails
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, this is Jeff and you’re listening to Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/474.
Coming up today: beer, wine, or liquor. With few exceptions, those were your options if you wanted an alcoholic drink on a night out. But now, an entirely new category has burst onto the scene: hard seltzer. In today’s lesson, I’ll tell you all about this new type of drink. And on Thursday, I’ll reveal the results of my blind taste test. In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you how to use the phrase “fit the bill.” And I have a quote of the week. Let’s get started.
Hard seltzers quench thirst for a low-calorie beer alternative
When you go for a night out, or have friends over for a party, what drink do you reach for? Do you go for beer? Or do you prefer wine? Maybe you’re like JR and you like to mix cocktails. Or maybe you keep things simple and drink whiskey, bourbon, tequila, or other spirits straight.
But these days, if you’re like many younger consumers, you might be reaching for something new: a hard seltzer.
Hard seltzers are taking the beverage industry by storm, led by health-conscious consumers who want a simple and lower-calorie alternative to beer, wine, and fruity cocktails. Seltzers fit the bill : they usually come in 12-ounce cans, have about 100 calories, are gluten free, and have just a few grams of sugar. By volume, they’re about five percent alcohol, on par with light beer.
If you’re not familiar with this drink, here’s a primer. Seltzer is simply carbonated water; it’s basically Coca-Cola without the syrup or the flavoring. Hard seltzers combine alcohol with flavored seltzer water: it’s like alcoholic soda. The flavors might remind you of a candy aisle: watermelon, strawberry, mango, passion fruit, lemon-lime, peach, kiwi, and cherry are all popular flavors.
All alcoholic drinks are fermented, meaning that some kind of sugar combines with yeast to produce alcohol. In wine, the sugar comes from grapes; in beer, it’s grains. In the case of hard seltzers, it’s often just cane sugar. The producers then mix in the fruit flavoring.
The result is a refreshing, clear beverage that’s lower in calories and has a touch of fruit flavor. And they are a huge hit in the U.S. Consumers like them for different reasons. Beer drinkers like it because it feels familiar, but it’s lighter in your stomach. Cocktail drinkers like it because it’s more convenient than mixing a drink. Unlike wine, it’s lower in alcohol, so you can sip it for a while. And health-conscious consumers like the lower calorie count.
White Claw is the most popular brand. It’s made by a Canadian company, the same company behind Mike’s Hard Lemonade, another beer-alternative drink and it was introduced in 2016.
Let me give you an idea of how quickly the industry has grown. In 2017, just five years ago, the whole industry generated $39 million of revenue. By 2021, it had grown to $4.9 billion, with a “b.” The pandemic supercharged the trend, as consumers were drinking fewer (or no) cocktails at bars and they were looking for a more health-conscious alcoholic choice. Many areas relaxed rules about take-away beverages, too, making these ready-to-drink beverages easy to buy and consume one by one.
Now, everyone wants a piece of the action. Big beverage companies started to develop their own seltzers. AB InBev, one of the world’s biggest brewers of beer, recently released Bud Light Seltzer, which—thanks to an intense marketing campaign—is now the third most popular in the U.S. The second most popular is called Truly; that’s made by the Boston Beer Company, a medium-sized beer brewer in the U.S. Corona also has a seltzer.
The seltzer industry markets itself differently from other alcoholic beverages. The alcohol industry is often segregated based on crude stereotypes. Light beer is for regular guys. Craft beer is for snobs. Fruity cocktails are for women. Wine is more for women, unless it’s with an expensive meal. Tequila shots are for real men who can hold their liquor.
Seltzers are a new category, so they don’t carry any type of stereotype. The result is that seltzers are equally popular among men and women. They’re affordable and the flavors are familiar to anyone who used to like fruit candy as a kid. In other words , seltzers have been careful to market themselves as a drink for everyone.
The brands have used social media to listen to and respond to consumers’ opinions when deciding on new projects. For example, White Claw has 12 flavors and they sell cases with many combinations of flavors, perfect for a party where everyone likes different flavors.
So now that you know about hard seltzers, I’ll tell you about my blind taste test on Thursday.
A popular party choice
To give you an idea of how popular these are now, I had a party a few weeks ago with colleagues from work. And full disclosure, I was the oldest person at the party! I had about ten or twelve colleagues over to my house on a Friday night. And I started us off with two cases of beer, two bottles of wine, and a case of about 12 seltzers.
When the night was over, all my original seltzers were gone. People had gone out to buy more cases of seltzer, and I had more than half the beer left that I had bought. Nobody touched the wine.
Then, we went out to play pool at a place near my house…and at the bar, most people ordered seltzers. So that’s just one example, but seltzers barely existed five years ago, and now they’re the most popular drink at a party at my own house!
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