Brewbound Podcast: Melvin For Sale, Pliny the Younger Sets a Record, and Early July 4 Data

[00:00:00] Jessica Infante: Heading to CBC? Kick things off the day before The Brewbound's meetup at Love City Brewing in Philly, Sunday, April 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. Connect with beer industry leaders, grab a drink, and catch up with The Brewbound team. It's free to attend and walking distance from the convention center. Head The Brewbound.com slash lovecity.rsvp. And don't forget to catch The Brewbound team at booth 956 during CBC. Another brewery is on the block, Russian River Pliny goes big, and much more on a post-4th of July Brewbound podcast. Hello and welcome to The Brewbound podcast. My name is Justin Kendall and I'm the editor The Brewbound and I am joined The Brewbound managing editor, Jessica Infante. How are you doing, Jess?

[00:00:57] The Brewbound: I'm okay. How are you?

[00:00:58] Jessica Infante: I'm surviving. That's the best I can do on a day where I'm watching a baby on a monitor and just fresh back from a doctor visit. So that's the best I can do.

[00:01:13] Melvin Brewing: Life things.

[00:01:15] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Here's our Generation Z correspondent, Zoe Licata. Welcome, Zoe. How are you doing?

[00:01:21] Melvin Brewing: Good. Good. Glad to be back.

[00:01:24] Jessica Infante: Yeah, glad to see both of you. How was your 4th of July weekend?

[00:01:28] Melvin Brewing: Mine was lovely. I went in with the mindset of not necessarily celebrating 4th of July, but more just celebrating having time off and being with friends and enjoying the summertime. And it was wonderful.

[00:01:42] Jessica Infante: How about you, Jess? You went to a big wedding. How'd that go?

[00:01:47] The Brewbound: It was great. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. One of my really good friends has been planning this wedding since 2018. So it finally happened this weekend and everybody had a great time.

[00:01:57] Jessica Infante: Awesome. And did you guys finally get simply spiked?

[00:02:02] Melvin Brewing: No, no, no. Those things are very hard to track down. I did so much online searching inventories. I went to multiple stores. I tried so hard to make it happen. I even put out a tweet telling everyone, please don't be sad if I don't have a Simply Spiked review this weekend. But fortunately, someone heard my prayers and Simply Spiked is being sent from their PR team. So we will have a Gen Z review, just not this day.

[00:02:38] Jessica Infante: Excellent. And you couldn't find it either, Jess, but you did score some hard Mountain Dew.

[00:02:44] The Brewbound: I do have hard Mountain Dew, courtesy of the powers of public relations, not from, you know, retail, because it's not available in New Jersey yet. Yeah, had some hard Mountain Dew, shared it with members of the wedding party. It's a long story, but basically my brother was in the wedding. The best man of the wedding, also a good friend of ours has a boat and he drove all the groomsmen in the boat from my house to the venue. So we had a fun little send off and yeah, everybody tried some hard Mountain Dew. The verdict was not good, but they were all pleased that it existed. We also had some neutral, which got rave reviews. Oh, interesting. Yeah, neutral is the vodka-based RTD that Anheuser-Busch makes. I think they started in Canada and then got scaled up this year. So vodka lemonade, very much enjoyed by a herd of men in tuxedos in the sweltering heat on Sunday afternoon.

[00:03:43] Jessica Infante: The official drink of weddings in Jersey.

[00:03:47] The Brewbound: Yeah, well, the rehearsal party was a block party on Saturday night and that if you didn't know any better, I would think it had been sponsored by high noon so. spirits-based RTDs abound. And I've been trying to ask people, like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this compared to a hard seltzer? And they know and care. People say, I like this because it's vodka. So. Interesting. Yeah. And I'll say like, well, they're the same, you know, alcohol content, roughly the same. No, they think it tastes better.

[00:04:19] Jessica Infante: Really? Mm-hmm. High noon, making inroads.

[00:04:23] The Brewbound: Yeah.

[00:04:23] Jessica Infante: Yeah. creating a bunch of nooners.

[00:04:26] Melvin Brewing: Yeah. I have to give a little shout out to the very awesome bands that played at Bernie's Beach Bar over this weekend on my Saturday, July 4 celebration. They're called Beach Nights and apparently our friend Fawn is a huge fan of them and told me so on my Instagram DMs. Oh my God.

[00:04:46] Jessica Infante: Is it K-N-I-G-H-T-S or N-I-G-H-T-S?

[00:04:50] The Brewbound: No, the normal N-I-G-H-T-S. I have never heard of this band and I communicate with Fawn every day of my waking life. So I will hit her up to ask what's going on.

[00:05:03] Melvin Brewing: Apparently, yeah, big fan, but they were awesome. So shout out to them.

[00:05:07] The Brewbound: Did you get 12 oysters?

[00:05:08] Melvin Brewing: No, I have to make it on my list now. It was not, everyone wasn't in the mood to get oysters. I'm like, unfortunately, which I am always in the mood for oysters. I think everyone should be. So that will be happening at some point this summer. We just got to go back.

[00:05:27] Jessica Infante: It's not far. Well, before we get too far down the road here, we talked a lot about fourth category offerings to open up this conversation. And that's going to be a conversation that we're going to have at Brew Talks on Wednesday, July 27th here in Boston at the Samuel Adams Brewery in Jamaica Plain. That's from 3 to 6 p.m. in person here in Boston. So if you're in New England, Come up, join us. If you're not in New England and happen to be in Boston, come hang out with us 3 to 6 p.m. We've got a fantastic lineup. I don't want to brag too much here, but talking fourth category options will be Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head, Dan Canary from Harpoon Parrot Company, Mass Bay Brewing, and Suzanne Chalot from Craft Beer Cellar. We're going to add one more panelist there, I think. We're working on it. We're going to talk about expanding through adding secondary taprooms as well as pop-up locations. We've got a very strong panel there with Raymond Berry, the founder of White Melvin Brewing, Adam Romanow, the founder of Castle Island Brewing, Sarah Lee, who runs business operations for Medusa Brewing, and Scott Hempstead, who is basically in charge of Boston Beer's taprooms, right? Mm-hmm. If you can make it, tickets are on sale now The Brewbound.com, so come hang out with us. But let's get into this week's news and let's start with another brewery for sale, and that's Wyoming's Melbourne Brewing. They revealed last week that they are exploring adding a strategic partner, as they put it, through GLC advisors and Ethan Stinstra from Ahead of the Curve, a consulting firm, and the E-Premise Group, which helps you build out your digital shelves or clean it up and maintain it. But they're basically shopping Melvin. What do you think of this?

[00:07:33] The Brewbound: This is interesting to me how frank they're being about it. I feel like we usually or you usually hear about who's potentially for sale and it usually all kind of happens below board. It's not really this out in the open. So interesting that they're being super frank about it.

[00:07:52] Jessica Infante: This usually happens with a deck that is shopped and it'll have a few clues, New England brewery or whatever, mountain town brewery that produces around 30,000 barrels annually with XYZ. And you kind of have to get out your new brewer and try and decode who it might be. And a lot of times you can figure it out, but they're very open. And there are a lot of reasons why you don't usually put it out there that you're for sale, whether it's confidence that your wholesalers have in you or whatever that might be. Our friends at Beer Marketers Insights really ran through some of those reasons recently. But yeah, they're pretty out there on this. And what really didn't surprise me, but we had sort of known that they'd went through a management transition a few years ago. And They weren't very public as far as, you know, co-founder Jeremy Tofty basically stepping back from daily operations. But they also have a board that's being led by Xander Dorosky, who is an independent private equity investor. And the board is really the ones who are going to be making the decision on the future of this company. And Xander has some pretty interesting ties. from working with Paul Allen's group Vulcan and some legacy investments there, whether that's the Portland Trailblazers or the Seattle Seahawks. I almost said Supersonics. So yeah, it's kind of interesting when you get below the surface, what's going on with that company. And they're really marketing it as a destination brewery in basically a mountain area, right?

[00:09:47] The Brewbound: Yeah, they really talked about how much the brand has taken off in the Mountain West region. They were also a little kind of secretive about a restaurant partner that is in play here, which is funny to me. Like, I don't know why we keep these things so secretive, but sure.

[00:10:05] Jessica Infante: Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure what's going on there. And I'm guessing that that's probably it's not Melvin branded on tap. Right? Right. It's like they're basically brewing a beer for a restaurant. And it's it's going under a different name.

[00:10:20] The Brewbound: Yeah.

[00:10:22] Jessica Infante: At least that's, that would be my guess. But I don't know. Wild speculation.

[00:10:27] The Brewbound: Totally. It'll be interesting to see how this this goes. Yeah.

[00:10:33] Jessica Infante: Something that appears to be going very well after quite a few hiccups is Russian River's Pliny the Younger IIIPA release. They raked in $6.1 million in economic impact from that two-week endeavor of the release, and they had to do it later this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They really learned a few different things from that. And it sounds like they're going to be doing the in-person releases at least next year in the spring.

[00:11:04] The Brewbound: Yeah. It's funny to me how many things have changed from COVID, but they're just going to be kind of made permanent. You know, like somebody tried out a new date for some kind of recurring event and we're like, oh, this works a lot better. So great example here. Natalie said that they asked people who came, you know, to the breweries, like, what do you feel about the dates? And they all said, this is great. Like, I can't always make the February version. But the draft rollout of Pliny the Younger will still happen at the traditional appointed time, because they do send kegs out into the market. But the bottle releases at the breweries will be at the new March, April dates.

[00:11:42] Jessica Infante: Yeah, you can do both. You can get Pliny on draft or Pliny the Younger on draft at some of your favorite California bars in February, and then go hang out with the Russian River crew later in the spring.

[00:11:58] The Brewbound: Yeah, good for them, but great to see this broke records and all the people that came out to Sonoma County for it. Events still matter, as you've typed here in our script, not to steal your line, but they do.

[00:12:12] Jessica Infante: Yeah, it's good to see that they still matter. You know, we've seen a number of events get canceled. I mean, there was an extreme beer festival event that was supposed to take place in the Bay Area, and that got canceled recently. And especially for Vinny and Natalie, they're good people. And it's nice to see Things happen to good people and they invested so much in that Windsor facility, basically a dream brewery. And you know it. Something like this hurts when you've got to take a year off and the pandemic is slammed, everybody. I'm very happy for them. And while we talk about things that are going right, it sounds like some of the COVID provisions or the COVID relief that was offered in your home state where you are right now, Jess, is being peeled back.

[00:13:02] The Brewbound: Yeah, yeah. So New Jersey, I think, flies under the radar as being a state with some wonky laws, but really, like, they're pretty crazy. So the quickest way to explain this is that the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Commission had published a special ruling that governed operations at breweries in terms of creating special licenses for them and what's allowed and what's not allowed in 2018. So this wasn't really happening through legislation. It was happening through, you know, and administration, so a little different. Craft breweries felt like they didn't really have their voices heard in 2018. A lot of uproar online, the ruling was walked back, and then the NJABC went on what it called an informal fact-finding mission, talked to the two different breweries guilds that are in the Feingarten state, the Licensed Beverage Association, the Liquor Store Association, the Restaurant Association, and the legislature and, you know, ownership breweries themselves. And it sounds like the NJABC really wants to balance the needs, wants, and concerns of everybody involved here. which can make things a little awkward because restaurants with liquor licenses, those liquor licenses are really hard to get. They're capped by population. They can be really expensive. They can sell for up to $2 million. So if you own a bar and you have invested all the time and money to get this license, and then a brewery opens in your town and they get their special brewery license, they're able to open and sell pints over the bar. I think you could see them as competition, but really they're not. You're both serving different needs. But one of the things that this new special ruling that had a lot of the things attached to it be loosened during the pandemic includes that breweries are limited to hosting 25 on-site activities per year, which includes stuff like trivia and live music. Breweries are prohibited from selling coffee on-site. They cannot collaborate or coordinate with food vendors or trucks. They can't sell food or operate a restaurant, then they would need a different license, they can't make specialty cocktails using malt alcohol, they can't offer a free drink to any guests, and they are not allowed to offer happy hour pricing, which is mostly legal in New Jersey, unlike where you guys are up in Mass and there's no happy hour. Yeah, I mean, it's tough. I don't know that there's a state where there is such, gosh, I don't want to say animosity because that's probably not the right word, but such tension between all three tiers. just talked to a brewery leader this morning. That'll be in a story that we'll have up today or tomorrow this week. And he basically explained that a lot of their self-distributing brewery and a lot of their potential retail accounts don't want to carry them because they see them as competition. But I mean, there's 9 million people living in this state. So I think you can share a bit of the pie. I mean, He pointed out, he said, you go into some of the bars and restaurants and you won't see any New Jersey breweries on tap because they think that they're competing for business, but what they're really doing is just sending this money to breweries out of state.

[00:16:09] Melvin Brewing: Right. Isn't that doing the exact opposite of what they want? It's like, wouldn't you want, you would be drawing in more consumers by having those options there. Instead, you're driving them directly to places that are going to have what they're looking for.

[00:16:22] The Brewbound: Yeah, a lot of these provisions in the special ruling date back to a law that went into effect in 2012 that rules that New Jersey breweries have to give, you have to take a tour in order to sample the beer and it's been workshopped through compromise and stuff. And now it's down to, you know, one tour per person per year, but the brewery has got to keep track because I guess the state believed that if consumers cared enough to come. All right, hold on. I'm just going to quote from the ruling here because it's interesting. Quote, in the division's view, by requiring consumers to take a tour of the brewery and allowing them to sample the beers produced on-site in a tasting room on the licensed premises, the expectation was that consumers would become more interested in the craft beers and would want to buy them at licensed retail consumption and distribution premises. So yeah, it's basically just the state just being like, hey, we wanted to inform the people. It's like, I don't know, I feel like they're trying to play a bigger role than is feasible. You know, it seems like almost like, I hate this phrase, but it almost feels like nanny state-ish kind of stuff to me. Why are you meddling? I don't know that anybody needed this from their state government. So the brewers are are concerned because they feel as though like they've given, you know, during the pandemic driven pause on a lot of this, they provided a lot of feedback to say, hey, like, here's what works for us. Here's what doesn't work for us. And they don't feel like they were hurt.

[00:17:47] Jessica Infante: Is there any sense that they're going to be heard at some point?

[00:17:51] The Brewbound: hard to say because all of this went into effect on Friday the 1st and now this is just the first day back from a holiday weekend. So I hope these conversations continue and we'll continue to keep in touch with you know like Eric Orlando who's the Executive Director of the Brewers Guild of New Jersey. So we'll see. But New Jersey's also got two Brewers Guilds which is interesting.

[00:18:12] Jessica Infante: Yeah.

[00:18:13] The Brewbound: There's the Brewers Guild of New Jersey and then there's the New Jersey Brewers Association, but the New Jersey Brewers Association is mostly volunteer run, meaning the members.

[00:18:25] Jessica Infante: It's really quite shocking, just the amount of things that they limit, just the minutiae of it. You can do X amount of entertainment, or basically showing a game counts as part of your entertainment, if you turn your TV on, basically.

[00:18:45] The Brewbound: Yeah, yeah, there's that, there's, I mean, all the things that really help drive traffic to a brewery that are very like kind of a small lift and they're easy to do and you see them everywhere else, like weekly trivia, weekly yoga classes. Those are just, you can't have that many of them. You can just really see that the legislation was done in such a piecemeal manner as the industry was taking shape. The New Jersey craft beer industry, I think, has always been slightly behind. For having the population of people that is here, I've always thought that New Jersey doesn't have as nearly a developed beer industry as others. But let's see. Yeah, New Jersey has 141 craft breweries, which ranks 21st in the country.

[00:19:33] Jessica Infante: Some middle of the pack.

[00:19:35] The Brewbound: Middle of the pack, yeah. 213,000 barrels of craft beer produced per year, 27th in the country. But this is where things get interesting, is that there's only two breweries per capita, which ranks New Jersey at 45th. So a lot of people, not a lot of breweries, and the regulatory climate isn't quite so friendly to them. So you can see why.

[00:20:03] Jessica Infante: Moving on, we talked some about fourth category options and we're going to talk a little more about that right now because it appears Bevy is a dead for now.

[00:20:14] The Brewbound: RIP Bevy, but I did see Bevy out at a liquor store in New Jersey this weekend. Took a picture.

[00:20:21] Jessica Infante: I did the same thing and if you're not familiar with Bevy, Bevy is Boston Beer Company's knockoff finish Long Drink that apparently didn't really set the world on fire. And I'm almost certain the picture I took in Wegmans here in Medford, Massachusetts was probably the same like boxes of Bevy that I took pictures of before.

[00:20:48] The Brewbound: It's possible. This was always going to be a hard sell, I think, trying to explain to people what the Long Drink even is. And it stems from the 1952 Olympics. Not 62, okay. So, you know, the middle of the last century, the Helsinki hosted the summer games and the bartenders were struggling to keep up with consumer demand. So they created this drink that could be stretched over a long period of time. I don't know if that's where the long and its name comes from, but that's kind of what I've always thought about it. It's this drink that's gin, grapefruit soda, other citrus flavors, and maybe some tonic. And they could make it in big batches and serve it over ice. So, you know, consumers weren't quite pounding it as fast as they would other things. And there's two other brands that make it in the US, and they make it with gin. Bevy didn't have gin. So it's just a hard sell. Like, here's this new drink we have. What is it? Well, it's modeled after this Finnish cocktail that has gin, but this one doesn't have the gin. Like, I don't know. I get it.

[00:21:51] Melvin Brewing: a lot of my friends had just recently discovered bevy like in this past spring and were into it but it seemed to them it was just like this is another heart seltzer that we can try and they have some new flavors for us and they seem to enjoy it i think some of them are actually a little disappointed that it's going away but i think it's going to be very quickly forgotten about because it's in that same very populated category of hard seltzers that it's not, if it doesn't have the gin in it, it's not going to really set itself apart that much.

[00:22:23] The Brewbound: Exactly. I mean, it's 5.8%, which is a little bit on the stronger side than most of the other things in this segment. Interesting thing that came from this was we, you know, we received the email that Boston Beer CEO, Dave Berwick sent out to the whole team. And Dave said that they're going to rethink their approach to innovation, which I think was big. Like that's like kind of bury the lead a little bit. They don't really see themselves doing a big nationwide launch ever again. They'll do test markets. So like, you know, test markets have been used in the past, but more often than not, I think things kind of just rolled out nationwide and ran.

[00:22:57] Jessica Infante: I feel like they've done that before though, with like wild leaf and Truro or whatever it was. And what was the other thing that 26.2 even was just like focused here, right?

[00:23:12] The Brewbound: So 26.2 really kind of like, when they took it out under the Sam brand and under the Marathon Brewing brand that was created, like that was like, we are just going fast and hard with this nationwide, go, go, go. Tura, which was the hard kombucha, that was a very, like, we are being very judicious about which markets will take this. And I think like a product like that, that's the approach you gotta have. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:23:34] Melvin Brewing: Yeah. When it's already like has such a very specific market of who is interested or already consuming that type of product.

[00:23:43] Jessica Infante: Totally. Also, I mean, being conservative with Hard Mountain Dew versus, say, Bevy, feels like a strange decision in hindsight.

[00:23:55] The Brewbound: Yeah, but Hard Mountain Dew is going out through Pepsi's Blue Cloud network, and they're still, you know, building a plane while they fly it. I think that's the delay there. I think if they could take hard Mountain Dew nationwide immediately, I think they probably would have.

[00:24:11] Jessica Infante: Yeah.

[00:24:12] Melvin Brewing: Yeah. I think it also has a little bit to do with, I think they're going to keep testing to see how, if they get those repeat buys at all. And I think testing that in the markets where you already know you have a larger, regular non-alcoholic Mountain Dew consumer base. is if you're going to have success, that's where you're going to have it. And so trying that there first is the best approach. It also there might be something to like the anticipation of things as well, like these markets where they don't have these products yet, like consumers are asking for them and there's kind of a rally and you can use that as a test to see, OK, where are the next groups of people who are asking for this the most? Where is our next pocket for success?

[00:24:54] Jessica Infante: Totally not to beat to death the decision to not have gin in this product, because let's face it, not having gin got them the lower tax rate. But did they even really care about that lower tax rate at that point? Because they were already rolling, you know, canned cocktails from Dogfish Head and really, you know, dipping their toe in.

[00:25:18] Melvin Brewing: It seems like something that Dogfish Head is more interested in exploring first before Boston Beer itself was across other products. Right. Yeah. And so now they're taking a serious look at it.

[00:25:34] Jessica Infante: Well, if they don't add gin to it in whatever second iteration that, you know, they release only in North and South Dakota to start with as a test market, then they're making a real mistake.

[00:25:48] The Brewbound: What is the Finnish American population of the Dakotas?

[00:25:52] Jessica Infante: I really don't know. Where is like the biggest Finnish population of the U.S.?

[00:25:57] The Brewbound: I don't know, but there was an American girl doll who was of Scandinavian descent and she lived in like the Dakotas, Minnesota, upper Midwest area.

[00:26:09] Melvin Brewing: According to a very quick unverified Google search, there is a part of Michigan that has the largest proportion of Finnish people or people with Finnish ancestry.

[00:26:22] The Brewbound: Well, there we go. Bevy 2.0, you're going to Michigan.

[00:26:27] Jessica Infante: And as we talk more and more about these partnerships between non-alcoholic giants and liquor companies, there's another one. Diageo is partnering with Vitacoco for Vitacoco Spiked with Captain Morgan. They join Coke and Pepsi now in the booze biz.

[00:26:51] Melvin Brewing: Captain Morgan and coconut water mix is not, I wouldn't say it's the most like intuitive combination, or it's not something I would expect. Is that something out there that people do?

[00:27:06] The Brewbound: I've never been able to get on the coconut water wagon. I know people who really like it. I just, I don't, I can't, I can't.

[00:27:14] Melvin Brewing: Yeah. The few people I know who are into it are very heavily into it and like have obsessive buying habits with Vitacoco, but it's not a large portion of people. It seems just a very interesting collaboration. Yeah. We'll see how that goes.

[00:27:34] Jessica Infante: something you both might be able to get on board with seems to be sonic hard bevs and their hard sweet tea and and slush and i don't know for my money i don't know like they're both pretty good plays for sonic

[00:27:51] The Brewbound: Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. And I think both of these products are going to do really well. Zoe and I were able to talk with Coop Aleworks slash Sonic Hard Bev's president, Sean Mossman, last week. And he told us, you know, we talked a lot about both products. So there's two new products coming. There's going to be Hard Tea, Sonic Southern Sweet Hard Tea. I think I've got that right. And then Sonic Hard Slush. And the slush does not have nearly as big a footprint as the tea does. The tea is rolling out to the full Sonic footprint later this year. But Sean had some really interesting thoughts on it because, you know, hard tea like is basically a one brand show. It's all Twisted Tea all the time. And he estimates that the hard tea segment's worth about $2 billion. And he, their data shows that Twisted Tea is about like 75 to 80% of that. So there's, still a lot of room left on the table. And Sean's thoughts were interesting. He was like, you know, a lot of people come into this and they say, we're going to take share our products different and they try to make it better for you. And the consumers don't really care. He's like the tea drinker just wants something that tastes like tea. You know, something they can count on, something that's familiar. They don't want you to fancify their hard tea. They just want tea with booze. So that is what they're doing.

[00:29:09] Melvin Brewing: And similar to the tea, the like frozen RTD market has been primarily led by one group has been by the dailies cocktails. You see those like little pouches that you can bring home and freeze of different ready to drink cocktails. And I think it's going to be, I mean, those are going to have a later rollout for a good chunk of states, but I think those are going to be very popular. Sonic already has this reputation for having these, like their slushes, which are very popular for the drive-ins. And so these Sonic hard slush pouches are inspired by those. I think it's, it's just smart to make sense with the Sonic brand.

[00:29:48] Jessica Infante: And it's a little late to market too, but as far as when they'll release here in the fall resets, you know, you think of hard tea, you know, you think about drinking it in the summertime, you think about slush, definitely want that during a warmer occasion. But I think, didn't Sean basically say that, you know, this is about setting them up for 2023?

[00:30:11] The Brewbound: He said that they're going to, the slushes are not going to be seasonal. They won't be limited time availability, but the plan is to get into test markets in the fall and then be able to run for a launch. And not all states can take them, because they kind of occupy a little bit of a gray area in terms of like, you know, regulatory issues.

[00:30:36] Melvin Brewing: Yeah, but it's all all those first states that they're going to be in in the fall are all like places that are generally warmer climates, like they are good with those more seasonal popularity type drinks. And then the other places like over here on the east coast or northeast are going to be March of 2023.

[00:30:55] The Brewbound: Yeah, and then he gave us just some updates on Sonic Heart Seltzer in general, because they've been rolling out to the more northern markets over the past couple of weeks, and things are going really well. Sean said that they've seen a 166% organic lift in velocity, and no complaints. I actually saw some back when I was still in Mass, and I bought like the last 12-pack at the liquor store in my town. So yeah, things are going well.

[00:31:25] Jessica Infante: And let's wrap this week's news up with a look at the on premise. You've got some CGA data. Zoe, what's going on?

[00:31:35] Melvin Brewing: It looks like things are generally positive despite our continuing concerns about inflation and all those fun things. CGA put out a couple of reports over the past few days just looking at what on-premise habits are happening after work. Drinks are back as people are going back to the office. drink-led occasions at nightclubs and things are back. So it seems like all those pre-pandemic habits that people had seem to be returning and just visitations in general on the on-premise seem to be doing well, even with all those other factors happening. So it seems to be generally positive. Even with the Fourth of July holiday, which is typically a very much off-premise focused holiday with people at barbecues and stuff, CJA said that it seems to still give a little uptick to the on-premise, particularly with the Monday holiday observation of people having those Sundays free to go and get beverages or go out to eat. It still sees a little uptick there. So good news for the on-premise.

[00:32:48] Jessica Infante: Good to hear and we've got some off premise data from Nielsen IQ that shows over the last four weeks through June 25. The category was in the black up 0.7%, but we'll take it. For the year, we're still down 1.1% in dollars, and that's even with a $1.32 price increase in the price of the average equivalent case compared to a year ago. So still clawing back, but maybe by the time we get the July 4 data, things will be looking up there.

[00:33:30] Melvin Brewing: We, as we speak, just got some drizzly July 4 data, so it's coming in.

[00:33:37] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Anything you see off the top before we get out of here?

[00:33:42] Melvin Brewing: Let's see. RTD is unsurprisingly doing really well over the holiday. Hard Seltzer is still keeping a solid share. Top selling beer brands for the holiday were White Claw, Corona, Bud Light, Truly Hard Seltzer, and Coors, unspecified Coors for number five. Top selling hard seltzer brands, White Claw, Truly, Topo Chico, Bud Light, and Vizzy, and then the top five RTDs, High Noon, Cutwater, On the Rocks, Jose Cuervo, and 1800 Tequila.

[00:34:21] Jessica Infante: And the Long Drink company coming in at number nine there.

[00:34:24] Melvin Brewing: Yeah, look at them made that into the top 10 for top selling RTT brands for drizzly.

[00:34:32] Jessica Infante: Yeah.

[00:34:33] Melvin Brewing: Also are often discussed brands. Happy Dad made it onto the top 10 hard seltzers. Saw a lot of that this weekend as well. Really? Yeah. Oh, interesting.

[00:34:47] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Well, we got to go for this week. We'll be back with more next week. Actually, you two will be back next week with more. I will be somewhere between here and Madrid, Iowa. So with that, we'll say that's our show for this week. Thanks for listening and tune into the Zoe and Jeff show next week.