The Battle for Hard Tea Is Starting to Get Steep | October

The founders of Owl’s Brew, a beverage company focusing on boozy tea.

This article was originally published in October.

Kyle Cooke had a little hangover. Sometime around 2001, the Bravo Summer House star was hanging at his friend’s New Hampshire lake house, sun beaming on a hot Saturday, last night’s drinking weighing heavy on his head.

“The last thing I wanted to drink at that point was a beer,” Cooke says. Instead, the friend handed Cooke something called Twisted Tea, a then-new beverage based on lemon-squeezed iced tea. “I was like, Oh, my god. This has alcohol?” Cooke recalls.

Sweet and easy-drinking Twisted Tea, with no carbonation and 5 percent ABV, became part of his party arsenal—and our drinking nation too. Hard tea is no teensy niche. Last year, the category accounted for more than $400 million in sales, according to Nielsen, and Twisted Tea still owns the category it created. The brand controls more than 90 percent market share, and sales have increased more than 30 percent this year.

“Year-over-year, we’ve seen continuous double-digit growth,” says Lesya Lysyj, the chief marketing officer for Boston Beer, which also makes Samuel Adams beers and Truly hard seltzers.

The battle for hard teas is starting to get steep. “People that are looking at the market and saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. This company is just owning it,’” says John Newhouse, the manager of product for Pabst Blue Ribbon. The company now makes a bubbly, 100-calorie peach hard tea. “Why shouldn’t we throw in some competition?”

I’ve never much had a taste for iced tea, hard or otherwise. Then again, I grew up in suburban southwestern Ohio, the son of expat New York Jews who drank espresso and stocked our garage with pyramids built from two-liters of Diet Coke. We did not drink iced tea swirled with white sugar and finished with a lemon squeeze, poured from a plastic pitcher as the summer sun set over our porch. For others, especially Southerners, hard tea can be a liquid teleportation device to bygone youth, a little alcohol to smooth and brighten the past.

Hard tea “definitely reminded me of my childhood,” says Lindsay Dorrier, who grew up in rural Virginia with plenty of home-brewed sweet tea in the refrigerator. “We made it with Lipton black tea bags and sugar.”

Dorrier is the brand manager for Bold Rock, a Virginia-born cider company that’s recently expanded into hard seltzers and canned cocktails. “We want to do everything but beer,” Dorrier says. This summer, Bold Rock launched new lines of boozy lemonade and tea, two categories that he views as “wide-open space. There’s not really any regional competition.”

Bold Rock’s lemony Hard Tea and Half & Half, an alcoholic take on the blend of tea and lemonade, aim for a balanced sweetness, the sugar taming the tannins. The standard Hard Tea is plenty drinkable and surprisingly refreshing, in the same saccharine manner of cold Gatorade after a long bike ride or run.

“It’s not so sweet that you can’t drink two or three of them,” Dorrier says. “Velocity is our philosophy, and we want people to enjoy more.”

Personally, I’m plenty good after one can. The sugar content is insidious and slowly builds in my bloodstream, 25 grams per 12-ounce serving. (That’s similar to Twisted Tea’s 23 grams of sugar; for comparison, Coke contains 39 grams of sugar.)

“We’re not saying it’s a health drink,” Dorrier says, noting that sweetness is “what the consumer looks for in that space.”

A suspension of dietary disbelief helps explains hard tea’s appeal. This spring, Narragansett Brewing released Del’s Rhode Island Hard Tea, laced with lemon and…just how many grams of sugar? “If you’re asking, then you shouldn’t be drinking it,” Narragansett president Mark Hellendrung says, laughing. “Honestly, I don’t even know.”

Narragansett’s hard tea doesn’t taste quite so cloying, and that’s due to a gentle fizz. Carbonation lessens the human perception of sweetness, a fact played out if you’ve ever sipped a flat soda. “It was a little bit of a risk,” Hellendrung says, but sales point toward bubbles being a winning bet. The hard tea spent all summer out of stock.

For two decades, hard tea has thrived on a contradiction. “Outside of the alcohol category, tea is considered a healthy drink,” says Cooke, of Summer House. “It makes zero sense that hard tea is the exact opposite and it’s completely horrible for you.”

Hard tea’s huge sugary hit started dawning on him while filming the reality show, which chronicles friends living in a Long Island beach home. “I got the whole house hooked on Twisted Tea, and it was catching up to us,” he says. “We were waking up with gnarly hangovers, thanks to the sugar. We needed an alternative.”

Cooke, who might be on the only guys on Bravo with an MBA, decided to create Loverboy, a brand of sparkling hard teas with a healthier veneer. Instead of “diabetes in a bottle,” as he calls some hard teas and flavored malt beverages, the zero-sugar Loverboy is 90 calories and naturally sweetened with monkfruit. Fruits, botanicals, and organic teas flavor varieties such as the gingery Lemon Iced Tea and Hibiscus Pom.

To me, Loverboy is basically a more flavorful hard seltzer. It’s a value proposition that is proving hugely popular. “Since April, we’ve been running on zero inventory,” Cooke says, explaining that Loverboy goes straight to distributor, not a single slim can in the warehouse.  “We literally can’t make enough Loverboy.”

Maria Littlefield is bullish on hard tea. In the alcohol category, “I think it’s going to be the next iteration of better for you,” says Littlefield, a founder of Owl’s Brew, which makes Boozy Tea flavored with matcha, chamomile, and fresh fruits such as watermelon and pineapple. In addition to a more pronounced taste and scent, the Boozy Teas of Owl’s Brew are attractively tinted, ranging from rosé pink to hazy peach. They pack just 120 calories into 12-ounce can, hard seltzer’s game with a flavorful new angle.

 “There are a large group of consumers who don’t actually like hard seltzer and want something that has a little more flavor, that’s not necessarily as artificial tasting,” says Carrie Shafir, the general manager for Blue Point Brewing Company. “Tea is just a really natural way to incorporate flavors.”

This summer, Blue Point released the LIIT line of Long Island Iced Teas, a play on the brewery’s Long Island location and the Long Island iced tea—the sobriety-smashing cocktail that’s a college rite of passage. “The name was too good to pass up,” Shafir says.

The sparkling hard teas are too. The five grams of sugar and 120 calories (per 12-ounce can) check the better-for-you box, but the vibrant colors and flavors are the bigger selling point. The Raspberry Lime Hibiscus tasted as electric as a sour fruit smoothie, a hard tea I could drink by the two or three.

 We’re seeing, and drinking, the cleaving of a category. Hard tea is no longer a Twisted monolith. You can go sweet or low (calorie), a decision many of us make on a daily basis. “People still eat Chips Ahoy, right?” says Newhouse of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “But there also lower-sugar and lower-calorie cookies. It’s a different consumer occasion. Sometimes people want something that’s high sugar and don’t give a crap, and sometimes they want something they’ll feel less guilty about.”

Boston Beer can also read the tea leaves. It’s looking to 2021 to “appeal to those looking for a lighter tea with less sweetness,” according to Lysyj, and Truly Iced Tea Hard Seltzer—yes, you correctly read those words—is coming in January.

It’s an unlikely month to debut an alcoholic iced tea, but “people are killing it with iced coffee year-round,” says Hellendrung of Narragansett. “I think hard tea is a year-round drink.”

I drink cold brew in December and July with equal enthusiasm. Seasons no longer correlate to consumption. Calories, flavor, and healthful vibes are more important than any calendar.

“I’m not trying to gain 20 pounds in the winter,” Cooke says. “Why would I want something that’s better for me, that’s light and refreshing, only when it’s warm out?”