Can people just stop pretending that they’re drinking hard seltzer because it supports their wellness lifestyle - and admit they’re just drinking it to drink? What I love about the arrival of Surge is that it exposes this healthy-alcohol fallacy. Once you’re in the 220-calorie range, as is the case with Surge, it’s going to be tricky to sustain the illusion that you’re choosing the beverage for physical fitness. At 100 calories, it’s barely less than a 12-ounce Bud Light (110 calories) or a 6-ounce glass of wine (about 120 calories). Like Colt 45 or Smirnoff Ice, it’s derived from fermented malted grains, then carbonated, sweetened and flavored with artificial additives.įor those counting calories, the original White Claw isn’t actually all that impressive. Despite the lighter-than-air connotations of “seltzer,” the product is in fact malt liquor. I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating: There’s nothing natural, and nothing especially healthy, about White Claw in any of its iterations.
“Tastes like the hardest seltzer in the universe (literally).” “This hard seltzer goes as HARD as the name suggests,” says the website description of Four Loko’s black cherry flavor. With Surge, it seems, the quarterback is trying to take a cue from Four Loko’s outlaw punk kid who’s skipping algebra to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom. If hard seltzer brands were high school students, White Claw would be the football team quarterback: popular with everyone, always winning, clean-cut. ABV-wise, that’s basically like drinking four glasses of wine. Four Loko’s hard seltzer clocks in at 12% alcohol, in 23.5-ounce cans. The innovator there is, of course, Four Loko, the alcohol brand that goes so hard it’s sometimes had to be shut down by the government. White Claw is hardly the first to come up with the idea of a higher-impact hard seltzer. Instead of 5% ABV in a 12-ounce can, Surge packs 8% ABV into a 16-ounce can. White Claw Surge, a new higher-alcohol hard seltzer.
It’s not surprising that this line of thought has caught on with the masses: It conveniently allows you to tell yourself that you’re drinking alcohol in order to do your body a favor. Seltzer’s not alone prefixes like “clean” are now proliferating in wine and spirits marketing. While Millennials’ thirst for hard seltzer has remained strong, they’re still not buying as much wine as previous generations did at their age. Millennials have driven much of hard seltzer’s rise, and their preference for the beverage - informed, no doubt, by their interest in wellness - may be eating into sales of other drinks. Even country music star Blake Shelton has a hard seltzer now. White Claw remains the biggest player in the space - together with Truly, it represents 75% of the total market, according to Nielsen data from last year - but new players are trying to get in on the gold rush all the time. Nielsen data shows that hard seltzer sales reached $4.4 billion, a jump of 121%, in the year-long period ending March 27. Since it first exploded in popularity in 2019, the hard seltzer category has continued to climb, part of the larger trend of “wellness”-oriented alcohol.
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