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Boston Beer Company has found another growth driver with its spirits-based hard tea brand Sun Cruiser, which continues to deepen its distribution footprint. But the hot ticket item continues to be unable to stop flooding volume from its sibling brands, as the company recorded yet another quarter of shipments and depletions losses.
Boston Beer Company has “gotten over the hump as a supplier” and become an “important” part of its wholesalers’ and retailers’ businesses, founder, chairman and CEO Jim Koch told analysts during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings report Thursday evening.
New hard tea and hard lemonade brands continue to populate shelves, while the No. 1 hard tea brand continues to grow its share, despite being more than 20 years in the game.
Boston Beer has a full slate of innovations getting priority in 2027, but those brands remain relatively small in the company’s volume outlook next year compared to its core fourth category offerings, including Twisted Tea, Sun Cruiser and Truly Hard Seltzer.
Hard tea and boozy water maker NOCA will refresh the packaging for its Too Turnt Tea and Weekend Water franchises in early 2027.
Competition in the vodka-based tea and lemonade segment is fierce. Many brands offer similar flavor and pack formats. Packaging is often similar, with light color palettes and visual cues to the sun.
The hard tea legal battle between one of the fastest-growing bev-alc brands and the world’s largest beer manufacturer has come to an end.
The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel for Boston Beer’s rocky sales trends is coming from a product named after the sun itself. Sun Cruiser, the vodka-based hard tea launched in 2024, is on pace to double sales in 2026, founder and CEO Jim Koch said last week during the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference.
Hard tea, lemonade and boozy water maker NOCA continues to outpace the FMB segment, with additional chain retail gains coming this fall.
A leadership shakeup has happened at Pennsylvania’s New Trail Brewing. Founder and CEO David Hertwig is transitioning “into a more strategic role,” rather than daily operations, while keeping his c-suite title.
Sazerac-owned BuzzBallz is the dominant brand in the RTD segment. BuzzBallz’ dollar sales increased 65.6%, to more than $569.3 million, in Circana-tracked off-premise retailers for the 52-week period ending April 19.
With recent warmer weather comes an uptick in bev-alc dollar sales, which flipped to positive (+0.5%) in the two-week period ending April 4 – a sequential improvement from -0.8% in the four-week window and -1.2% in the 12-weeks, according to the latest analysis of NIQ data from Goldman Sachs Equity Research.
In 2025, Jiant told Brewbound that it wanted to be hard tea’s Olipop – a flavor-forward, ingredient-focused functional brand that connected with new and lapsed drinkers in the category.
One constant in beverage-alcohol’s rollercoaster 2025 has been growth in the spirits-based, ready-to-drink (RTD) canned cocktail segment. Spirits and cider sales stayed broadly stable in the two-week period ending October 18, while trends for flavored malt beverages (FMB) and seltzer worsened, according to analysis of NIQ data from Goldman Sachs Equity Research.
Boston Beer’s transformation from a craft brewer to an adult beverage company, which began in earnest about a decade ago, is looking like an even better bet as traditional beer’s declines outpace those of the beyond beer segment.
Boston Beer Company’s third-quarter shipments (sales to wholesalers) and depletions (sales to retailers) declined 13.7% and 3%, respectively, the company shared today.
If you thought Skimmers, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s (A-B) entrant into the vodka-based tea segment, looked a bit too similar to the space’s lead brand Surfside, you’re not alone. Philadelphia-based Stateside Brands LLC, the parent company of Surfside hard tea and lemonade, filed a complaint against A-B in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
