Sales of hard seltzers and ready-to-drink canned cocktails were valued at nearly $10 billion in 2021 by the Grand View Research firm, which expects them to grow by double digits in coming years. “It’s only really in the last three to four years that it’s become a major category,” Nadine Sarwat, a beverage analyst at Bernstein Research, said. This isn’t the first time a new type of alcoholic beverage exploded in popularity but some earlier fads were associated with single products like Zima, Smirnoff Ice or Four Loko. Although these products differ in primary ingredients and how the alcohol is processed, all typically are flavored and packaged for casual consumption. In recent years, those lines have blurred, and a fourth category of ready-to-drink beverages has emerged - hard seltzers and other flavored malt beverages, wine coolers and canned cocktails. Hard Mtn Dew reflects a major change in the alcohol industry, which for the last century mainly produced drinks categorized as beer, wine or spirits. Although the brew bears little resemblance to its ancestor, its alcoholic content is “exactly what Mountain Dew is all about,” Charles Gordon Jr., owner of Tri-City Beverage, said.
At a One Stop Wine and Spirits frequented by students from East Tennessee State University, the new 24-ounce cans are prominently displayed. In a way, Mountain Dew came full-circle last year when PepsiCo turned the brand toward a new alcoholic beverage: Hard Mtn Dew. It wasn’t until after PepsiCo bought the company in 1964 and eventually built a global youth-oriented brand, one marketed by extreme sports athletes, that the soft drink left its Appalachian roots behind. Labels on early soda bottles promised it was “specially blended in the traditional hillbilly style.” “Mountain dew” is also a nickname for moonshine, which farmers sometimes processed from leftover crops. The soda was originally uncolored and lemon-lime flavored, and its inventors used it as a mixer with bourbon. On a quiet street corner, a sign marks the birthplace of a beverage behemoth: Here, in 1954, the Tri-City Beverage Corporation bottled its first case of Mountain Dew.
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