Alcopops, grown up: a wave of hard seltzers has hit Australian shores

Walk up to the fridge of an Australian liquor store at the moment and you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered into an inner-city health food shop. Rows of cans proudly tout their low calorie, “natural” and low sugar credentials. They have vaguely beachy names such as Sips, Good Tides, Ray, Sunly and Tidal, and all seem to share the aesthetics of a cool child’s bedroom.

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Hard seltzers have arrived in Australia. More are on the way, with retailer BWS stating they will be doubling their hard seltzer range for spring and summer. Hard seltzers are essentially flavoured, alcoholic soda waters. They are lower in carbs and calories than most premixed alcoholic beverages, and mostly taste like drinking fizzy water in the same room as someone painting their nails.

While technically classed as ready to drink (RTD) beverages, hard seltzers are a lifetime away from the sweet, garish alcopops millennials sucked back as teens. In marketing material, hard seltzer cans are almost universally shown on beaches, in parks, near bodies of water, or styled next to sunscreen bottles.

Some of these brands are small, independent businesses, while others are products of huge alcohol monoliths. But wherever they’re from, they all want you to think of hard seltzer in the same way: as a breezy, health-conscious-but-fun summer drink (I’m not like other alcopops, I’m a cool alcopop).

All of these arrivals, big and small, locally made or imported, are riding the same fizzy wave from across the Pacific. In 2019 the US developed an insatiable thirst for hard seltzer. Or, to be specific, one brand of hard seltzer: White Claw.

For anyone catching up, White Claw is a flavoured soda water “spiked” with fermented cane sugar. Since launching in North America four years ago it has emerged as the crown jewel among an ever-expanding cabal of vaguely “healthier”, wellness-adjacent booze options.

The brand’s popularity is partly due to what the New York Times has called the “seltzer bubble”: a billion-dollar industry of well-branded, lightly flavoured, sparkling waters that span established icons such as LaCroix and elegant startups with venture capitalist backing. But the seltzer bubble doesn’t quite explain the cultural phenomenon that has formed around this pretty unremarkable beverage.

Not since the soy latte has a drink come to define such a specific cultural space. It’s not a reach to call White Claw a drink for the internet generation. It has come to exist in the space between gentle Instagram aesthetics, meme culture, and self-aware irony. ‘Health-conscious alcohol’ may be a joke – but its drinkers are in on it.

Between 2018 and 2019 sales of White Claw in the US grew 320% – in contrast beer sales by volume fell by 2%. When several US publications named 2019 “White Claw Summer” no one disputed it. By the end of the season the country was literally facing a nationwide shortage. The coronavirus pandemic has only hastened hard seltzer’s ascent, prompting Nielsen to label it “the most resilient alcohol segment in the US.”

With brand recognition like that, it wasn’t a surprise to hear Lion was partnering with Mark Anthony Brands to bring White Claw to Australia in October. The news came with the caveat that our version would have a slightly lower ABV (4.5% rather than the original 5), but that didn’t seem to bother anyone. The announcement was covered with the breathless, blow-by-blow accounts that usually precede a royal tour. Millennial-focused culture, food, business, and trend publications all reported it with equal zeal.

Younger Australians’ contact obsession with White Claw and hard seltzers in general isn’t surprising. Australia has a rich history of RTDs. In the early 2000s they were a national fixation. Parents, broadcasters, community leaders, and politicians wrung their hands over how they were corrupting the youth by introducing teens to habitual drinking.

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In 2008 concern over their popularity saw the Rudd Government introduce a 70% tax increase on them, in the hope a price rise would dent their popularity with young people. The move apparently worked: by 2015 a University of New South Wales-led study showed a significant decrease in people presenting to emergency departments for alcohol problems. At the time Drink Tank (an initiative of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education) reported: “The alcopops tax, which increased the price of alcopops, was associated with a significant decrease in presentations in males aged 15-49 years, and females aged 15-64 years, particularly in 18-24 year old women.”

The taste for RTDs might have been curbed, but it wasn’t satiated. In 2014, six years after the tax bump, consumer advocacy group Choice noted that alcopops were still “the most commonly consumed forms of alcohol by 12- to 17-year-old girls, (and) are considered an initiation drink by many young people”.

Since 2015, sales of non-sugar sweetened beverages have outstripped their sweet counterparts in Australia. Viewed like that, it’s not so surprising that a generation of teenagers raised on alcopops but fearing sugar grew up to be White Claw meme devotees.

Which brings me back to the wall of hard seltzers. RTDs are still taxed at a significantly higher rate than beer, but elegant branding and low-cal promises mark hard seltzer out as a more “premium” product, with prices to match.

It may not be summer yet, but the BWS premix category manager Henry Gordon states that between April and July “we’ve seen close to $2m worth of sales being generated … with our current seltzer range”.

In addition to marketing their low-caloric content, many hard seltzer brands also highlight their locally-made credentials. And they are distinctly Australian, but not in the way the brands would like you to think. At the edge of the world, more cut off than ever from joining the culture we consume online, we seek out imprints the best we can.

This speaks to an Australian desire to fit in, be part of a trend, get the joke – and look good doing it. After all, what’s more Australian than attempting a White Claw Summer during a freezing Melbourne winter, while knocking back a Sips?