Canned cocktails are the fastest-growing trend in liquor — here are the best we tried from Virginia

We can all be forgiven if we want this year to be easy.

And there is nothing in this world easier than a cocktail in a can, a smashable quaff for those who can’t even be bothered with an ice cube. After spending its early years in obscurity, the frothy canned tipple has finally found its moment.

Since the start of the pandemic, when drinking at bars became a fond memory, an effervescent wave of aluminum-swaddled booze has washed ashore at local grocery stores — a rainbow tide of vodka smash and whiskey mule. Alongside the meteoric rise of the hard seltzer, canned booze ranks among the fastest growing categories of hooch in America. As of August 2020, Nielsen data showed more than 85% growth since the previous year.

And even though crisp cans of cucumber-lime vodka might seem made for summer, these days we’re taking what we can get. A can of gin-and-tonic might be the safest and easiest way to get someone else to mix a drink for you during a pandemic, even as takeout cocktails continue to flow from local restaurants.

“We had our hugest month ever in December,” said Bobby Rohla, manager at the Roseland distillery of Devils Backbone, one of the earliest makers of canned cocktails in Virginia. “There’s some seasonality, but the growth is big. People are looking for something fun; it’s lighthearted.”

Canned cocktails, to be clear, are not hard seltzers, even though the packaging might look similar. Seltzers are generally brewed malt beverages, descendants of Zima and Smirnoff Ice. This new wave of cocktails is made instead with actual distilled liquor: vodka, tequila, whiskey or gin.

They arrived in Virginia in 2019, after a little-noticed state law that gave distillers license to make and sell them. As long as their alcohol percentage remains below 7.5%, the cocktails are also welcome on grocery and 7-Eleven shelves. Legally, they’re considered the same thing as a wine cooler. (That said, they’re often cheapest at the ABC store, or at the distillery that makes them.)

But does a cocktail actually taste good in a can? With a combination of crisp temperatures and rising coronavirus cases making bars inhospitable, we figured it was a good moment to test out the new crop of Virginia-made canned cocktails available in Hampton Roads.

We assembled a small and socially distanced crew for a fireside outdoor tasting, including local reporter Ben Finley and Norfolk bartender Josh Seaburg, who writes about spirits for our sister publication Distinction Magazine.

We assessed each drink with meticulous care and discerning palates, according to some very serious criteria: How much would we like to drink this cocktail while lounging atop a pool floatie shaped like an avocado? If we reached deep into an ice-filled cooler and this is what showed up in our hand, would we happily keep it? Or would we secretly wish it were a Bud Light?

It turns out that canned cocktails are often closer to seltzers than a drink at a bar. But our favorites were the cans that actually tasted like the cocktails they purported to be — no mean feat for drinks limited by law to 7.5% alcohol. As a rule of thumb, higher-alcohol cans offered more oomph. Natural fruit juice did better than artificial flavors, though not all fruit translated well to a can.

Oh, and just like Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost, it’s best to move toward the light. Cans made with darker liquors often just tasted weird.

Here are the Virginia cans we’d most welcome on our imaginary party boat.

Beach Parties in a Can

Vodka Orange Crush, Coastal Cocktails

7.5% ABV; $12 a four-pack at Tarnished Truth Distilling; also at Total Wine and soon most local supermarkets

Nix the pebbled ice, and this is the beachy and bubbled spirit of Virginia Beach in a can. Of all we tried, these festive cans from the Beach’s Tarnished Truth Distilling are the most what they say they are: silly, fun orange drinks for the Bermuda-shorts set, an endlessly crushable froth of actual orange with just enough bubble to mimic its namesake cocktail’s splash of Sprite.

To make it, says Tarnished Truth co-owner Andrew Yancey, they had to go through multiple rounds of trial and error.

“It was not an easy process to figure that out,” Yancey said. “We started the process with a flavoring company and a chemist using artificial flavors. But there was no way to reproduce a quality cocktail with artificial ingredients. It didn’t taste right. So we decided we had to find someone to get real juices, get them in the can in a way they won’t degrade.”

They worked it out with a fruit company in the Pacific Northwest, pasteurizing the juice so it wouldn’t ferment — and to make sure it’s right each time, they send samples of each batch to a lab.

The result of all that work is the unbridled taste of low-effort summer in a can, what one taster called the “fulfilled promise of the canned cocktail” and another called an essential tool for being “basic by the swimming pool.” And if being basic by the swimming pool isn’t the real promise of the canned cocktail, we don’t know what is.

Fresh Hop Gin & Tonic, Devils Backbone

7.5% ABV, $6.50 a four-pack on clearance at ABC stores in Chesapeake and Portsmouth

We apologize for this, but one of our favorite Virginia canned cocktails is no longer in production. As of press time, only about 20 more people in Hampton Roads can pick up a cheap clearance four-pack from an ABC store in Chesapeake or Portsmouth.

Do so if you can. Gin fans will find a beautifully easy-drinking and surprisingly complex take on the gin and tonic — plenty of juniper in the back, fun floral notes from fresh hops preserved as aromatics in Devils Backbone’s Fresh Hop Gin, and the sweet-mineral tang of tonic extract. This, like the Crush, was one of the only two to capture the actual feeling of a cocktail in a can, even with the lower alcohol content.

“That’s straight-up juniper at the end,” exclaimed a taster who might have been me. “Well done, AB InBev, you sly dogs!” (Devils Backbone, though founded in Virginia, was bought by the multi-national beer conglomerate in 2016.)

Most of Backbone’s other canned cocktails never made it to Hampton Roads; the other that did, a blackstrap rum ginger, was leagues less successful. But distillery manager Rohla says a whole new line of canned cocktails will be rolling to southeastern Virginia starting in March: a variety pack of flavored vodka smashes, and a take on the margarita.

Judging from the evidence in this can, we’ll look for them.

Blood Orange & Soda, Belle Isle Moonshine

6% ABV, $9 a four-pack at Total Wine locations

Richmond-based Belle Isle is clearly aiming dead-sights for the seltzer crowd with their line of clean-flavored moonshine highballs, advertised at a mere 110 calories a can. But in contrast to many other canned cocktail brands, its fruit flavor is coming from the distilled spirits, not from additives mixed after the fact.

And so Belle Isle’s canned cocktails taste cleaner and simpler than pretty much anybody else’s, if also much subtler in their flavors. Among them, the Blood Orange packs the most flavor wallop. Expect a soft tinge of its namesake fruit, and bracing effervescence.

And if it’s not quite the party in the can offered by the Coastal Orange Crush, it also feels more dignified — a lower-alcohol cousin to the crisp Toki highball. Aside from the fact it’s moonshine, you could maybe see the Japanese drinking this. “I quite like it,” said Seaburg. “I’m thinking pool party beach day. It feels a little more hydrating.”

It also doesn’t hurt that Belle Isle’s prices are among the lowest, at $9 for a four-pack.

Also Refreshing

Pineapple & Honey Hab, Belle Isle

5% ABV, $9 a four-pack at Total Wine

First off, we didn’t really taste the pineapple a whole bunch. But the light acidity came through, backed up by a honey-sweet roundness and then a slight edge of habanero-pepper heat, which lingered at the tip of your tonsils as a faint memory of what it is to burn.

Alongside the blood orange, this was again the most oomph-packing of the otherwise gentle Belle Isle cans. But that hot-pepper tingle led to varying reactions. Finley ranked it among his favorites of the tasting — a relief from the unrelenting subtlety. Seaburg declared it not really his thing, but conceded, “I wouldn’t hate you if you said it was your thing.” But one way or the other, it was one of the most interesting cans.

Vodka Grapefruit, Coastal Cocktails

7.5% ABV, around $12 a four-pack

Coastal also succeeded with their greyhound in a can, lightly sweet and without the tart hit feared from the often puckery fruit. While it got nowhere near the high marks of their Orange Crush, the grapefruit flavor got in and got out cleanly, without any off notes and a lingering sweetness. One taster still wasn’t sure they’d prefer it to the strange pull of a White Claw grapefruit. Nonetheless, compared to other grapefruits we tried — including a California-made High Noon — Coastal’s tasted much more like the fruit.

Sadly we weren’t able to try Coastal’s Vodka Cranberry — a nationwide aluminum shortage meant they briefly stopped canning it — but their success with the vodka fruit flavors so far means we have high hopes when it returns in a month or so.

Shine & Soda, Belle Isle

5% ABV, $9 a four-pack at Total Wine

Shine & Soda tastes like nothing. It is the nothing that nothings, the unseen nemesis of The Neverending Story. And yet, it also gets you tipsy. You could swap this unflavored moonshine and soda with somebody’s sparkling mineral water at a dentists’ convention as a prank, and they’d never know what hit them till they started telling the really good Novocaine anecdotes.

One taster wasn’t having it. “I don’t see the point of this,” said Finley. “Is this for teenagers?”

But Seaburg was more sanguine on the subject: “Isn’t cleanness its own virtue?”

Divisive, but with merits

Copper Mug Mule, Bold Rock Cidery

7.5% ABV; $14.59 a six-pack at ABC stores, also at grocery and Total Wine

Bold Rock’s cans lived up to their name, each one bold. The Richmond-based cidery leaned into its roots by sweetening each can with Blue Ridge apple juice. But this may have left some of the concoctions strange and muddy. The Mule is by far the best of them, aided by a strong ginger kick that leaves the whole production tasting almost more like ginger beer than a vodka cocktail, with a lingering aftertaste of lime zest. It announced itself with gusto, and won the strong favor of one of our tasters. Others didn’t really know what to do with it. But the soft carbonation and the full-bodied mouthfeel of the drink were appreciated.

Ruby Red & Soda, Belle Isle

5% ABV, $9 a four-pack at Total Wine

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“This is like if grapefruit was made by someone who had only ever heard the description of a grapefruit,” said Seaburg. “Or it’s like if you were sipping a seltzer, and someone whispered the word ‘grapefruit.’” This wasn’t necessarily unpleasant: Belle Isle seemingly doesn’t have an off flavor in its repertoire. But it was still the least popular of their varieties — the most like that eerie flavor of radio static familiar from hard seltzers. Fans of La Croix would know it as their own.

Vodka Citrus Squeeze, Waterbird Spirits

5% ABV, $16.99 as part of a variety 6-pack at Total Wine

If Belle Isle’s orange cocktail tasted like a faint memory of an orange, the cans from Charlottesville’s Waterbird Spirits taste positively space-age. Specifically, they taste a lot like Tang, the orange-flavored refrigerator staple drunk by astronauts.

For some, this was fond nostalgia for times of Sunny D. For others, less so. But the Citrus Squeeze was the most successful of the three potato-vodka quaffs from Waterbird we tried — which arrived together in a variety pack and are sweetened with cane sugar. The cucumber-mint tastes a bit like an overmuddled mojito, but also has its place in the world. We were universally not fans of the watermelon basil.

Also tasted: Bold-Fashioned (Bold Rock), Vodka Soda Lime (Bold Rock), Whiskey Lemonade (Coastal Cocktails), Gingerdise Rum & Ginger (Devils Backbone), Vodka Cucumber Mint (Waterbird), Vodka Watermelon & Basil (Waterbird)

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com