Hard Seltzer Has Gone Flat

Over the past three years, hard seltzer has been as close to a sure thing as anything else in American life. Sales of the beverages first took off during the White Claw Summer of 2019, but greatly benefited from the early pandemic, when bored people looked for novelty on the shelves at grocery stores. They found it in a zillion colorful new cans of hard seltzer—buzzy, cheap, fruit-flavored, portable, and with about as much alcohol as a light beer. Sales in 2020 more than doubled the previous year’s. White Claw is still king, but by July 2021, 150-plus brands of hard seltzer were available in the United States: Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors stocked stores with seltzerized offshoots of Bud Light, Natty Light, and Coors Light. Constellation Brands budgeted $40 million on marketing alone while launching Corona’s seltzer line.

But as 2021 wore on, the hard-seltzer bubble looked like it might be on the verge of that year—but for the first time, enthusiasm for new products and flavors didn’t seem so boundless. In July, Molson Coors announced that it was in the United States; in October, Boston Beer Company told shareholders that it had tossed of unsold Truly, the country’s second-most-popular hard seltzer. By March 2022, spending on hard seltzer had from the same period the previous year. The summer holidays, which are usually the busiest time of year for hard-seltzer sales, haven’t been much better. According to sales data from the alcohol-delivery service Drizly, seltzer sales dipped below 2021 levels during last week’s Fourth of July holiday.