I was just wondering if any of the forum readers with connections to the commercial brewing industry can furnish estimates of how much more profitable the hard seltzers are than beer of the same ABV. I think it’s a “gold mine” for them.
As I understand it, hard seltzers are just water, sugar, yeasts and flavorings.
No grain that has to be grown, harvested, malted, shipped, stored, crushed, etc. like is necessary for beer plus hops etc.
You can just go to another step and get natural spirit in barrel and mix dearaited water, flavoring and spirit together, in-line carbonate it and package it in the same day.
There as a craft for you.
Bring back Zima but get guy fieri to make it seem hardcore for bros, you can call it Zimo. I’ll be waiting for my check.
Zim-bro ??
Hard seltzer and craft can’t actually be used in the same sentence. Just sayin. 
the genius of hard seltzer was that its brewed, bypassing the difficulties of distilled alcohol based coolers in many jurisdictions. thats why smirnoff ice is made from a malt-liquor(or something, non-distilled anyway) base in many jurisdictions to be taxed and sold (in location and times) differently
Beervana (I think) proposed the idea of taxing alcoholic beverages based on the end-strength of the packaged beverage rather than the source of the alcohol (spirits vs. flavored Malt beverages vs. fruit vs. honey vs. etc).
Thus a 4% ABV seltzer (FMB) and a 4% pre-mixed cocktail (spirits) would be in the same tax bracket rather one being taxed as beer and the other as liquor.
Sounds like a reasonable and simpler system than the current; so of course it’ll never happen.
Kind of an interesting read if you’re into accounting. It is from 2012, and I don’t know if the haze craze and new hop varieties have changed this but seems to indicate that 4-7% of your cost should be raw material. Do seltzer ferment/clean up a lot faster than beer? Might be some savings there too. Seems like if you’re Sam Adams then dropping your cost 3% would be big deal. Or if you haven’t been managing your ingredient cost that well and it’s 10-15%. Feels like it’d be something that’d help bad businesses get by, big businesses rich, and everyone else about the same.
https://www.brewersassociation.org/attachments/0000/8424/JF_TNB12_Beer_Costing-1.pdf
Since you don’t want any natural flavor, I assume they just filter out all of it (good and bad) like they did with Zima. At this point it’s more like making wash for distilling than quality beer.
i tried making a hard-seltzer type thing, it took me a minute to remember how it was, and unfortuantely i guess i didnt write down tasting notes, but i remember from the get-go the flavour was sort of okay but it would have been much better if it was really commercial-level-ly filtered. it did not taste remotely like the store stuff even though i was attempting to get ethanol in water with the lightest fruit (i think lime) flavouring. i ended up drinking most of it but it was not good.
i did make sugar wine right after that to see if i could get an alcohol with that profile but ~12%+ ABV, as a real get-drunk incredibly cheaply experiment. it was almost undrinkable, though did end up around 12%ABV. the FG was 1.024 and i could not get it down any further. i think i was aiming for 15% ABV or more. the plus side is i’ve been using it as a really useful cooking wine for almost 2 years now. cooking wine for a dollar a bottle, when in canada wine at the store has a minimum price of $10.
I’ve made a few seltzers. They are easy too make and cheap to boot. You definitely need nutrients (DAP and yeast energizer) but Omega makes it easy and puts it all in one charge you can put in at the end off the boil.
The filtering is the hard part. Without a filter they are difficult to make look like what people expect.
All the water fountains in Flavor Town will be converted to dispense Zimo. The choice of human Troll dolls everywhere.