Toni L. Sandys The Washington Post
On store shelves packed with more hard seltzer varieties than you’d ever want to sample, Drunk Fruit stands out. It’s not just the colorful, cartoony cans, so vibrant and appealing next to the generic white labels wrapped around the biggest-selling brands. It’s not just the flavors, which highlight yuzu and litchi instead of the yawn-inducing black cherry or grapefruit. And it’s not just that Drunk Fruit’s seltzers are seriously tasty — so tasty, in fact, that one of D.C.’s top chefs put them on his restaurant menus after Drunk Fruit’s founders slid into his DMs to ask if he’d be willing to try them.
When you add it all up, it’s easy to see why Drunk Fruit belongs in your picnic cooler this summer.
Drunk Fruit, which launched in late 2020 and is sold at 210 locations, including Total Wine and Whole Foods stores in Virginia and D.C., had its genesis during co-founder Kenn Miller’s 2019 honeymoon in Japan. After he returned, Miller told a group of college friends — all Asian American, all “really big fans of hard seltzer” — about the flavors he’d sampled abroad. As the group talked, says co-founder Steven Tang, “we thought we could do better” than mainstream seltzers they’d been drinking.
The branding and marketing of those seltzers “didn’t really speak to us and didn’t feel like it really represented us,” Tang says. Neither did the flavors: “We’re trying to take the flavors from the Asian grocery store and share them with the world. We know litchi, we know yuzu. We know how amazing these fruits are.”
Miller, who is half Japanese, says there’s a degree of nostalgia, too: Drunk Fruit’s Melon flavor is inspired by Melona, a honeydew melon-flavored frozen treat from South Korea.
Dorian Qi
Drunk Fruit was created by four college friends: From left to right, Steven Tang, Kenn Miller, Will Zeng and John Zhang.
Though their backgrounds are in tech and business, not fermentation, Miller, Tang and their friends William Zeng and John Zhang, all ages 31 to 33, went into start-up mode. Miller taught himself the basics of making hard seltzer by watching YouTube videos: “There was a lot of benchtop testing with the different flavor profiles, thinking about the different [fruit] extracts.” The early batches, Miller and Tang say, were not all successful — Miller describes some as having a “Captain Crunch smell and taste” — but they eventually improved enough to begin actual brewing of the seltzer at Beltway Brewing, a production facility in Sterling. (Recent batches of Drunk Fruit have been produced at Old Bust Head, a craft brewery in Vint Hill, Va.)
The three flavors show they’ve come a long way since those YouTube experiments. The Lychee is complex — sweet and tart, with notes of pear and white grape. Yuzu is very dry, with an appealing citrus sweetness falling somewhere between a lemon and orange, and just a hint of tartness. Melon is the sweetest of the three, full of kiwi and green Jolly Rancher, but dry and appealing, and reminiscent of melon soju highballs found at bars in Annandale. Like most other hard seltzers on the market, Drunk Fruit contains no sugar, is between 4.5 and 5 percent alcohol by volume, and is 100 calories per 12-ounce can.
Drunk Fruit’s founders were so confident in their product that in January, they sent an Instagram message to chef Danny Lee, whose projects include Mandu, Anju and Chiko, asking for a meeting. “I tasted them, and I thought it was really unique and fun,” says Lee, whose favorite was the Lychee. “It’s a really light, subtle flavor. You don’t get that artificial sweetness,” that’s so prevalent in other seltzers. He agreed to stock Drunk Fruit at all of his D.C. restaurants.
Lee says that some of his bartenders have experimented with creating low-ABV cocktails with Drunk Fruit, but mostly, they sell it by the can. “People think it’s really fun,” he says. “That’s the word we hear over and over again.”
[Happy hour again: These are the new bars you might have missed over the past year]
Toni L. Sandys
The Washington Post
Co-founder John Zhang drew the drunk fruit on the eye-catching labels.
“Fun” is the right word for Drunk Fruit’s eye-catching labels, which feature cheerful cartoon fruits — “very kawaii,” Tang says, using the Japanese word for “cute.” The mascots “were originally kind of an homage to some of the things you see in an Asian grocery store. A lot of the products imported from Japan and China have cute little mascots like this, and the idea was that these mascots bring a little bit of an Asian element and Asian look and feel to the packaging.”
Take a closer look at the fruit on the labels, and you’ll see they really are drunk: “You’ll notice they all are blushing a little bit, which is a little reference to the Asian glow meme that, you know, Asians get red when they drink,” Tang explains. “We’re kind of trying to be a little bit of tongue-in-cheek with these characters.” The fruit, drawn by co-founder Zhang, have become a key part of the brand’s identity; Yuzu, in particular, shows up on Drunk Fruit’s Instagram feed wearing costumes on Halloween, or appearing in “behind the scenes” photos from online video shoots.
[What’s the best hard seltzer? We tried 18 new flavors to find out.]
Drunk Fruit officially launched last October in Northern Virginia and Los Angeles, which sounds like an odd geographical split, until you learn that Miller lives in Northern Virginia, near his family, and the other co-founders are based in L.A. In December, Total Wine began carrying the cans in its Virginia stores. More recently, they’ve been picked up by BevMo in Southern California, as well as Whole Foods in the Washington area. In the future, they’re planning to expand into Maryland and New York, as well as increase their distribution in California. (Also, Tang and Miller joke, they might start selling plushies of the fruit mascots, which some of the co-founders were pushing before the hard seltzer ever hit the market.)
More than anything else, Drunk Fruit is giving itself a niche in an overstuffed market. The founders say they’ll keep working with Asian American businesses — look for an event pairing Drunk Fruit and local bao favorites Bun’d Up coming later this summer — and showing that hard seltzer can be more diverse than #WhiteClawSummer would have you believe.
“Our whole mission is to bring people together through Asian American culture,” Miller says. “These flavors are really nostalgic to us, growing up, and we wanted to share a little slice of Asian culture through that lens.”
Toni L. Sandys
The Washington Post
Aslin’s first batch of Vibez hard seltzers featured such flavors as black cherry, lime and grapefruit.
Also buzz-worthy
Celebrities and national brands continue to launch new flavors of seltzer, but don’t overlook the hard seltzers made by craft breweries in our own backyard.
Aslin Vibez: Summer Nights
When Aslin dropped its first Vibez hard seltzer variety pack last June, the flavors were familiar to anyone who’d ever walked down a hard seltzer aisle: Black Cherry, Lime and Grapefruit. It was a surprisingly pedestrian turn from Aslin, a brewery known for creative IPAs with tropical-fruit aromas, and for aging stouts with bacon, cocoa nibs, coffee or marshmallow. “I think we were very shortsighted and tried to just match a gap in the market,” says co-founder Andrew Kelley. “We quickly realized that that gap really didn’t need to be filled, and we needed to identify where our place was.”
Subsequent releases of Vibez have had more of what Kelley calls “that Aslin flair,” including Pineapple Coconut and, last fall, Pumpkin Spice. The new Summer Vibez pack is a nostalgia trip for ’80s and ’90s kids. Blue Ice has the garish color of Fla-Vor-Ice and that sweet, fake raspberry taste of, well, anything “blue raspberry”: slushees, Gatorade, Nerds. (It can be a little cloying.) Tropical Punch is a dead-ringer for Hawaiian Punch. Sun Surfer? Think Smarties.
Later this summer, Kelley says Aslin will release Vibez Extra, its first “smoothie seltzers” — a richer, higher-alcohol style of seltzer, made with fruit puree, which is often closer to a canned cocktail than flavored carbonated water. Kelley also says Aslin will unveil “Vibez bars” in the brewery’s beer gardens, including Vibez cocktails made with the products.
Contains 12 16-ounce cans of Blue Ice, Sun Surfer and Tropical Punch. $18.99 from aslinbeer.com. Also available in stores.
Toni L. Sandys
The Washington Post
DC Brau’s Full Transparency Crush seltzers.
DC Brau Full Transparency Crush Variety Pack
DC Brau launched its first Full Transparency Hard Seltzer in November 2019, riding the tail-end of White Claw Summer. Co-founder Brandon Skall had started drinking hard seltzers as a lower-calorie alternative to beer and noticed more people buying them in stores. “I wanted to put our flag down early,” he says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we brought the same sort of mentality that we brought to beer when we started DC Brau, making a local one, with an emphasis on flavor, to really do it the best that we could.”
As it turned out, that early start was essential to getting Brau through a tough year. “Historically, 60 percent of our revenue comes from sales at bars and restaurants,” Skall says. But on the other hand, “Seltzer is really a retail-oriented product. Ninety-nine percent of its production is in cans, sold in retail in variety packs.” At least 20 percent of all of DC Brau’s sales in the last year were seltzer, he notes.
Orange Crush, inspired by the popular Maryland-born beach cocktail, launched last summer, and in April, the brewery released “the Crush Variety Pack,” with Grapefruit Crush, Key Lime Pie Crush and Peach Melon Crush joining the lineup. Grapefruit is the star addition; the others veer toward the sweeter side of the spectrum.
Earlier this year, DC Brau partnered with Washington Nationals first-round pick Carter Kieboom on Kieboom Crush, a peach lemonade seltzer closer to an Arnold Palmer, with a bit of candy lemon. Kieboom might not be ready for the big leagues right now, but the seltzer has proved popular. Look for it when DC Brau unveils a beer garden in the parking lot behind its Woodridge brewery on June 11.
Contains 12 12-ounce cans of Orange Crush, Grapefruit Crush, Key Lime Pie Crush and Peach Melon Crush. $19.99 from dcbrau.com. Also available in stores.
Toni L. Sandys
The Washington Post
MoCo Hard Seltzer from Denizens Brewing Company.
Denizens MoCo Hard Seltzer
Denizens’ hard seltzer line is unabashedly local. Originally developed with the hyperlocal MoCo Show website, the cans of Blood Orange flavor read, “MoCo Goes Hard. This is Montgomery County’s hard seltzer.” It’s available at shops in Montgomery County, as well as in the brewery taprooms in Silver Spring and Riverdale Park (which is admittedly in Prince George’s County).
But MoCo’s branding might be holding it back: “Later in 2021, we plan to convert from the ‘MoCo’ moniker to a more generic one that will enable us to distribute throughout our distribution footprint in Northern Virginia, D.C. and Maryland,” Denizens co-founder Emily Bruno says in an email.
If that helps MoCo get in front of more customers, it’s a good move: MoCo’s flavors are drier than some of its competitors, but also more natural and more subtle. If you’re looking for a hard seltzer that could be confused for a can of LaCroix or Spindrift, reach for the Lime, or the light-bodied Blood Orange. Coconut overwhelms pineapple in the Piña Colada, but that also makes it an interesting mixer with your favorite rum.
Six-packs of Blood Orange, Lime, Pina Colada or Strawberry Cucumber (no mixed packs). $9.99 each from denizensbrewingco.com. Also available at retailers in Montgomery County.
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The Link LonkMay 26, 2021 at 02:00PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/drunk-fruit-hard-seltzer/2021/05/26/b466e276-bca5-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html
Move over, White Claw. Drunk Fruit is the hard seltzer you should be drinking this summer. - Washington Post
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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