As malt- and spirits-based seltzers and ready-to-drink cocktails (RTDs) fly off the shelves, one of America's largest beverage companies is set to spend millions to market a drink most people have never heard of: the “long drink.” With more competition across the board in beverage alcohol, it’s an example of how some companies aren’t only entering nascent categories, but are spending big to scale rapidly with the goal of “owning” a style of beverage.
Traditionally made with gin and grapefruit soda, long drinks are essentially Finland’s national cocktail—and now the race is on to introduce them to U.S. drinkers.
Boston Beer Company plans to put more than $10 million behind Bevy, its malt-based answer to the quiet success of The Finnish Long Drink, a canned, spirits-based cocktail brand that’s so far sold almost the same amount as Harpoon IPA in chain retail stores tracked by market research company IRI. Finnish Long Drink is on pace to sell about $14 million this year, almost tripling its sales from last year’s $5.3 million.
At the same time Boston Beer is planning a multimillion dollar rollout, The Long Drink Company, maker of The Finnish Long Drink, has a first-mover advantage. It secured $25 million in funding earlier this year to expand production and distribution with the goal of selling in all 50 states—it’s currently made via contract at F.X Matt Brewing in Utica, New York and distributed to 15 states. But it will have big competition: Boston Beer plans to advertise Bevy during the Olympics and potentially adjacent to the Super Bowl, with the goal of making it the nation’s top-selling non-beer draft product.
Like ranch water brands before them, the fact that two companies are already fighting for position over different interpretations of a drink unknown to most Americans indicates the potential payoff in cornering an entire style of canned cocktail. These are big bets to place on long drink, a product most Americans couldn’t even define, let alone identify its country of origin on a map.
For these companies, it’ll be a constant balancing act. Curiosity could drive sales or just cause confusion and indifference.
Thus, with big opportunities come big challenges: Companies face hurdles in marketing long drinks because of the beverage’s heritage and its actual ingredients. Long drink’s Finnish origin story isn’t as easily understood as, say, ranch water’s Western cowboy inspiration. And its gin base flavor is one that’s also proven to be a liability among some U.S. consumers. The spirit is a distant fourth in volume consumed by Americans, behind vodka, whiskey, and tequila, and has declined about -7% in sales volume over the last 10 years, as tracked by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.
Brands, then, need to find the right angle to market long drink at the same time they’re trying to explain to drinkers what it even is.
The success of long drinks hinge on consumers’ appetite for a new, cocktail-like alternative to hard seltzer or beer at a relatively moderate ABV between 5.5% and 5.8% ABV. A level of alcohol roughly equivalent with the average ABV of craft beer and potentially cause for long drink’s resurgence in its native country of Finland in recent years. In 2019, Radio Canada International reported that updated laws raising the ABV limit on drinks sold in supermarkets helped it regain popularity among drinkers, especially for a higher-strength version (5.5% ABV vs. "lighter" 4.7% ABV).
There are currently two long drink brands available in the U.S.—The Finnnish Long Drink and Hartwall Original Long Drink, a Finnish RTD cocktail brand that launched in four markets last year and expanded U.S. distribution to six more states in July 2021. Both are made with gin and grapefruit soda.
Boston Beer’s Bevy will be a flavored malt beverage (FMB) the company calls “a hard citrus refresher.” Boston Beer likely chose an FMB rather than gin-based cocktail due to legal restrictions on where spirits-based cocktails can be sold, with many states restricting RTD cocktails to liquor stores. By going the FMB route, Boston Beer can sell its products where the other versions of long drink can’t—grocery, convenience, and other heavily-trafficked stores. This builds in an advantage for Boston Beer thanks to its national distributor network and broader retail placements.
And aside from all that, the competitors to Boston Beer’s Bevy face a much higher tax rate on spirits and spirit-based drinks, giving Boston Beer greater flexibility in potential pricing.
Regardless of the ingredients, a key decision facing long drink brands will be how much they lean into the drink’s heritage. The cocktail originated at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, when bartenders came up with the gin and grapefruit soda cocktail that could be quickly served to throngs of visitors.
For The Long Drink Company, maker of The Finnish Long Drink, and for Hartwall Original Long Drink (which calls itself the original long drink served at the 1952 Olympics), Finnish heritage is a key part of the brands’ story. But in pitching Bevy to wholesalers, Boston Beer makes only a single reference to Finland, and there’s no indication that will be a component of its consumer-facing marketing. Its message to wholesalers seems to be that broad availability of Bevy in stores will be a key to its success more so than its cultural trappings.
The challenge for long drink brands is to create intrigue around the drink’s backstory without forcing a history lesson. Used as a secondary marketing point, Berkeley, California-based food and beverage marketer and consultant Josh Mohr says long drink’s history could spark curiosity.
“It’s new, it’s different, and it’s got a story behind it that’s intriguing and mysterious and organic,” he says. “Every consumer wants to be an expert. With long drink, there’s going to be someone in a social circle that knows exactly what it is and will take it upon themselves to educate their friends, and feel good about that experience.”
That could potentially translate into that person becoming something of an amateur brand ambassador for the brand, buying a long drink brand they enjoy, and explaining what they’ve “discovered” with this new category.
Mohr knows this firsthand: A friend of his brought a package of The Finnish Long Drink to a party full of guests who normally drink seltzer and craft IPAs. (The Long Drink Company’s internal research shows people who purchase its products drink primarily hard seltzer and beer.)
“It was the talk of the party,” Mohr says. “It became a whole thing: What’s long drink?”
While the Finnish backstory lends authenticity, it’s unclear what the average drinker’s association with Finland is. In 2019, just 0.2% of U.S. residents reported Finnish identity to the U.S. Census Bureau, and even an article lauding Finland as a tourist destination for U.S. visitors acknowledges it’s still “not quite on the radar.”
That’s why Mohr believes long drink brands should consider the backstory a quirky, authentic detail, rather than the entire message. Especially when shoppers are making quick purchasing decisions at grocery or convenience stores, more recognizable attributes—low-calorie, zero sugar—are likely what’s driving their decisions, rather than an affection for Finnish culture.
When discussing typical aspects of Finnish culture, The Long Drink Company’s cofounder Ere Partanen cites cold-water swimming and reindeer—not exactly a perfect fit to American lifestyle or drinking occasions. It’s a stark contrast to ranch water’s more familiar (to Americans) associations with warm weather, cowboys, horses, and the West.
“The fact that [long drink] is a ‘better-for-you’ hard beverage, that really does a lot of the work and gets that purchase intent up,” Mohr says. The fun backstory, then, is what people discuss at the party after already having bought the product.
Finnish heritage likely isn’t enough to inspire national sales for long drinks. But marketing the actual ingredients in the drink proves challenging, too.
The Finnish Long Drink, which is made with a gin base, doesn’t play up its base spirit. As the brand’s cofounder, Ere Partanen explains, that’s because most U.S. drinkers don’t think they like gin. Soda, too, has been declining in popularity for two decades. (In 2020, gin sales volume was 35% of American whiskey sales, and volume sales have been declining for the past two decades.)
“Often when they see that it’s a gin drink, people turn away, so we don’t use the word gin a lot in communication,” Partanen says. “We are adding descriptive words that it’s a citrus taste, clean and free, etc.—easy selling points that resonate with people a little more.”
He says the brand has seen success in giving drinkers samples and gaining celebrity investors, including actor Miles Teller and golfer Rickie Fowler, rather than marketing The Finnish Long Drink as a gin-based RTD. That a company with genuine Finnish bona fides has found a greater advantage leaning into celebrity culture and sampling than its actual ingredients is telling: the success for a long drink brand may come down to simply getting the product into drinkers’ hands. It’s with this that Boston Beer has a distinct contrast thanks to national distribution, but The Finnish Long Drink also has distributor might in terms of its partnership with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits of America, the largest wine and spirits distributor in the U.S. with operations in 44 states.
Like The Finnish Long Drink, Boston Beer shys away from any gin or juniper references in marketing Bevy. In a five-minute video presentation to distributors in October, Boston Beer’s head of innovation and commercialization, Robert Vail, held up a sheet of paper printed with Bevy’s elevator pitch— “a hard citrus refresher with a great story to back it up”—no fewer than five times. Despite the "great story" reference, there's no indication that Finnish culture will play a part of the product's marketing. The presentation then instructed distributors to place Bevy next to other FMBs like Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Twisted Tea, and made only one reference to the drink’s historic cocktail origins.
It’s clear that because Bevy is malt-based, Boston Beer is careful not to market it in a way that could be seen as misleading consumers into believing it has spirits in it. (Anheusur-Busch InBev is currently facing two class action lawsuits that center on whether its agave “spiked” hard seltzers mislead customers into believing they contain tequila.)
Whether the hook is citrus refreshment, a charming backstory, or nutritional attributes, long drink brands must have a clear pitch to U.S. drinkers. If brands compete too hard against each other, or draw too many distinctions between ingredients and brands, drinkers might get confused and tune out. Right now, merely getting customers interested in long drinks seems to be enough of a goal. Once the scale of the market is established, brands can carve out their shares within it.
“The vision has been, and still is, building long drinks into a category,” says Partanen. “In Finland when you go to a store, you have a long drink aisle with 50 brands, like you do with seltzer in the U.S. The vision is that long drink becomes a category in the U.S. with many players—and we are on top.”
Words by Kate Bernot