The Canned Cocktail Craze

A local-centric look inside the most popular beverage trend in the U.S.

Amidst a nationwide decline of craft beer, Right Brain Brewery owner and brewer Russell Springsteen found a bright spot in 2025: ready-to-drink cocktails.

Last year, Right Brain’s distribution team approached Springsteen and encouraged him to try his hand at creating an in-house version of a long drink. For the uninitiated, a long drink is a Finnish cocktail, historically made with gin and grapefruit soda and concocted with higher fluid volume—and lower strength—than the typical cocktail. Recently, that type of beverage has become enormously popular in America thanks to a ready-to-drink canned cocktail version branded as The Finnish Long Drink (co-owned by actor Miles Teller).

Springsteen “spent a year trying to figure out how to make a long drink,” before launching Right Brain’s version in March of this year. The brewery’s standard iteration of the beverage, simply called Michigan Long Drink, is made with the traditional grapefruit flavor and tastes similar to The Finnish Long Drink. But by swapping the grapefruit for cherries grown by local farms like King Orchards, Right Brain found its biggest seller in years.

Though he initially planned to keep the cherry version—dubbed the Traverse City Long Drink—as a summer-only flavor, Springsteen quickly realized there was more demand than could be contained within one season.

“We initially limited it to just 800 cases statewide, but I sold 50 cases through our pub during Cherry Festival week alone. We never do that on any one brand,” Springsteen says. The popularity prompted Springsteen to change course, and Right Brain is currently prepping its third batch of 800 cases for the Traverse City Long Drink.

“We just need to try to do some different things like that, because I think that’s where trends are going,” he adds.

The Alcohol Industry’s Season of Woe

Those trends have not been kind to Right Brain’s bread and butter, craft beer, as of late.

According to the Brewers Association, “overall U.S. beer production and imports were down 1 percent in 2024, while craft brewer volume sales declined by 4 percent.” Notably, 2024 marked the first year since 2005 where more breweries closed than opened, signaling the end of a near-20-year period of growth in the American craft beer industry.

It’s not just beer taking a hit. According to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine, global wine sales fell 3.3 percent in 2024, hitting their lowest levels in 60 years. U.S. exports of distilled spirits, meanwhile, dropped by 9 percent in the second quarter of this year. Even hard seltzers, which seemed downright omnipresent just five or six years ago, are bleeding: NorthJersey.com reported in September that “a company in North Jersey that produces White Claw hard seltzer” was “laying off 143 people due to what one of its executives characterized as a slowdown in the alcohol industry.”

There are lots of reasons for the alcohol industry’s moment of woe, ranging from inflation and high costs, to tariff impacts, to the fact that many Americans are simply drinking less than they used to. In a recent Gallup poll, just 54 percent of U.S. adults said they drink alcoholic beverages—lower than at any point in at least 30 years.

The Beverage of the Moment

If there’s been a bright spot for the industry amidst these cloudy trends, it’s come in the form of ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails. Though sometimes lumped in with the hard seltzer fad of the late-2010s, RTD cocktails are distinctly different. Popular hard seltzers like White Claw and Truly have no liquor in them and are made by fermenting sugar and malted grain and mixing it with seltzer water. RTDs contain actual spirits and can include a variety of mixers, though seltzer water is the most common.

Overall, RTDs in the U.S. “approached 65 million cases last year” according to alcohol industry news hub Shanken News Daily, “up from less than 10 million cases in 2019.” The Long Drink Company, which makes The Finnish Long Drink, saw 44.4 percent growth in 2024 compared to the year before, moving some 6 million cases of product.

Other RTDs are growing even faster: Take Surfside, an iced-tea-plus-vodka cocktail that saw a 270 percent glow-up between 2023 (1.3 million cases) and 2024 (4.9 million cases). And then there’s High Noon, an RTD brand that moved nearly 25 million cases of its drinks in 2024 alone, enough to make it the top-selling spirit in America.

Easy Drinking

Asked what he thinks is driving the fascination with RTDs, Springsteen says some of it has to do with customers following what’s new and exciting in the market. But a bigger part, he thinks, is the low alcohol-by-volume (ABV) metrics most popular canned cocktails are hitting.

High Noon beverages typically clock in at 4.5 percent ABV. Same for Surfside. The Finnish Long Drink is a little more potent, at 5.5 percent, but is still more crushable than popular craft brews like Bell’s Two Hearted IPA (7 percent ABV). Right Brain’s long drink also hits the 5.5 percent mark, though Springsteen accidentally made an ultra-low-alcohol version during his initial experiments.

“When I did all this at the beginning, I was trying to hit 5.5 percent, and because it’s science and math, I miscalculated,” he laughs. “Our first ones were 2.75 percent ABV, so almost exactly half of what I was aiming for. My initial feeling was, ‘Oh, that’s an embarrassing math error.’ But then I put that version on sale at half off and let everyone know what the situation was, and we just smoked through it. Soon, people were saying to us, ‘Do it again.’ It was a nice reminder that, sometimes, failure isn’t a bad thing.”

Right Brain’s core long drink flavors—the original grapefruit and the Traverse City cherry—will stay at 5.5 percent. The 2.75 percent version, which Springsteen says will roll out sometime this winter, with a bigger push next spring, will be a ginger flavor.

“My feeling is that low-ABV is what people want; it’s what they’re asking for,” Springsteen says. “So many people in the pub, they’re saying, ‘I just want a little bit of alcohol, not a lot. I’m driving.’”

With strong pub sales and a growing foothold throughout Right Brain’s distribution platform, Springsteen says the long drink has put the brewery “almost completely even” with its sales this year.

“There’s been a definite decline in beer sales in 2025, but we’ve made up for it with the long drinks and also with food, because we started doing food in the pub this year,” Springsteen says. “It’s been interesting, because I thought it was too late to the game [for RTDs]. I held off for a long time. I’d always said I’d never get into liquor. But that was a long time ago, and things have changed. And you either change with them, or you die.”

The Other Canned Cocktails of the North

In Springsteen’s defense, most of the earlier adopters in the RTD space—at least in the northern Michigan region—are distilleries, not breweries. Here are a few of the other local companies already playing in the canned cocktail sandbox.

Traverse City Whiskey Co., Whiskey Highball: Traverse City Whiskey dove into the RTD market in 2021, when hard seltzers were peaking and canned cocktails were in the early part of their upswing. TC Whiskey’s entrée into the market was the Whiskey Highball, a canned version of the simplest cocktail possible: whiskey and a carbonated mixer. The TC Whiskey version uses the company’s signature XXX Straight Bourbon Whiskey and comes in three flavors: original, cherry, and citrus. “While there are several types of seltzers on the market right now, our whiskey highballs are actually made with real bourbon and no substitutes,” TC Whiskey co-founder Chris Fredrickson said when the drinks were first unveiled.

Gypsy Distillery, Clean Cocktails: The Petoskey-based Gypsy Distillery was early to the canned cocktail movement, introducing its first foray into the style in 2020 with Clean Cocktails. “We were tired of drinking plain old seltzers taking the world by storm,” the distillery proclaimed. “As distillers, our goal was to create a canned ‘cocktail’ that changes the way people look at canned beverages. We didn’t want a malt-based beverage, but a ‘Real’ cocktail in a can full of flavor and spirit-based.”

The resulting line of cocktails features zero sugar, zero artificial sweeteners, and zero carbs, instead pairing spirits with flavored sparkling water. Flavors include wildberry pomegranate, strawberry lemon, watermelon kiwi, and blood orange. The first three are made with vodka, the last one with gin. All four hit an 8 percent ABV.

If you tuned into the Ryder Cup this fall, you might have noticed buzz about “The Mulligan,” a mix of bourbon, iced tea, lemonade, and soda water dubbed “the official bourbon cocktail” of the tournament. Starting in 2021, Petoskey’s Gypsy Distillery tried out its own version of the Mulligan, trading bourbon for vodka and offering three flavors: original, peach, and raspberry. Though it originally hit the same 8 percent ABV mark as Gypsy’s Clean Cocktails, the Mulligan has been scaled down to 6 percent recently, timing perfectly with a new-this-year partnership with the Michigan PGA.

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