“Would it even have been 2019 without a hard seltzer festival?” Jake Browne tells me. “It’s so of-the-moment and for us it's a no-brainer.” The former cannabis critic for The Denver Post, Browne has something of a nose for what’s of-the-moment. He hopped on the legal cannabis wave back in 2009, when medical marijuana was just taking off in Colorado. So when word got around that Browne was trading (or at least supplementing) terpenes with hard seltzer, I was curious. And when I found out that more than a hundred brands of hard seltzer had requested to be part of Fizz Fight, which bills itself as the country’s first hard seltzer festival and tasting competition, I decided to give Browne a call. “Summer’s winding down in Denver and we thought why not just have a crazy day with a bunch of hard seltzer tasting,” Browne says. When September 14 rolls around, participants will be able to taste more than 60 flavors of hard seltzer from around 20 breweries, while a panel of “educated palates” votes on which entry is the best. Also, because this is 2019, there will be food trucks and some very social media-friendly installations by local artists.

You have a new generation that wants to drink something with flavor that isn’t terrible for them.”

Like many people, I’ll admit that I was skeptical when press releases from White Claw started flooding my inbox last spring. I chalked it up to something for the CrossFit set, for people who get genuinely excited about popping open a can of LaCroix Pamplemousse and will ruin a perfectly good bar crawl by telling you that your bourbon barrel-aged stout has as many calories as a slice of cheesecake. Surely, I thought, once Natty Light starts tweeting, “That's right, we made a f***ing seltzer” it must be the beginning of the end. But it wasn’t. Suddenly there were cans of hard seltzer in friends’ coolers, at beaches and birthdays and all over the damn place. Some of the reactions were tepid, others predictably mocking, but even the people rolling their eyes at the concept were still drinking the stuff Stranger still, some of the hard seltzers hitting the shelves were… surprisingly drinkable.



It turns out that sales spiked by 164.3 percent in a month this summer, according to Nielsen data, and that if they continue on their current trajectory, they could hit $2.5 billion by 2021. “You have a new generation that wants to drink something with flavor that isn’t terrible for them,” Browne says. “There’s a lot less bro-shaming going on. It used to be the manly thing of, ‘Oh, I’m gonna crush these beers and eat whatever I want,’ but I think we’re just starting to learn more about our bodies.” Browne has been a beer-lover for as long as he can remember, but he counts himself among the converts. Rather than substituting IPAs entirely for hard seltzer, he views it as a means of adding a little bit more balance to the equation. As a 36-year-old, he realized neither his metabolism nor his liver could handle high-ABV beers the way they once had.

You have craft brewers that can make a couple of kegs of this stuff at a fifth of the cost of an IPA. It lets them reach out to a different crowd that doesn’t want to drink 8% beers all afternoon.”