Spill It — Twisted Tea’s Unpredictable, Unparalleled 21-Year Success Story

If a contemporary drinker with access to a time-travel machine went back just 20 years in the past, they would likely be amazed by the state of the U.S. alcohol landscape. At the turn of the millennium, beverage alcohol still functioned like a historical village: quaint, contained, and only distantly recognizable.

Back then, alcohol brands neatly fit into defined categories: beer, wine, or spirits. Craft beer of any sort was a niche product. In 2001, Bud Light overtook Budweiser to become the country’s best-selling beer. South African Breweries (SAB) publicly announced its intention to acquire Miller. Samuel Adams Boston Lager was the U.S.’s top craft beer, but the industry was also taking note of a “quirky, laid-back” company out of Fort Collins, Colorado: New Belgium Brewing Company. 

Disrupting this staid order, however, was a new beverage category clawing its way to popularity. Zima had launched in the U.S. in 1993, wooing wine-cooler drinkers and selling 1.2 million barrels the following year (roughly equal to Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s total production in 2020). Both Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice debuted in the U.S. in 1999, forcing the industry to coin a term for these malt-based, but not-quite-beer, products: “malternatives.” And hardly any other malternative would prove to have more enduring popularity than the one Boston Beer Company launched in 2001: Twisted Tea. 

Twenty-one years later, Twisted Tea has become the number-one flavored malt beverage (FMB) in the U.S.—and one of the most successful alcohol brands in the country, full stop. Today it outsells Boston Beer’s flagship Samuel Adams beer family 3 to 1 in chain retail, when it lagged behind that beer line as recently as five years ago. It’s now solidly the number-two brand in the company’s portfolio, behind Truly Hard Seltzer. 

While there’s plenty of sophistication to how Twisted Tea is sold, the product itself is easy to explain: It’s iced tea, but with alcohol. And U.S. drinkers have proven to gravitate to that easily grasped flavor, and a brand whose number-one objective is, unironically, “fun.” 

“I wouldn’t call it a simple brand, but it’s not complex,” says Twisted Tea’s events manager Billy Grotto. “With Twisted Tea—our brand, our drinkers, our internal team—what you see is what you get. And luckily, that’s good stuff.”

STARTS, AND FITS

While he didn’t fully foresee the rise of FMBs as the juggernaut they are now, Boston Beer’s founder and president Jim Koch was an early advocate for Twisted Tea. No doubt he had an eye on the rise of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, but Boston Beer’s official account is that Koch also figured that brewing tea in the same tanks where beer is brewed made some logistical sense. (Twisted Tea still touts that it’s made with “real brewed tea,” not that the final product tastes anything like unsweetened Lipton.)

This is as much as Boston Beer will share about Twisted Tea’s origins. Even a former Boston Beer employee who worked in marketing during the brand’s early years declined an interview for this article, saying the company had a policy against speaking about it publicly. Boston Beer also didn’t make Koch available for an interview, leaving unanswered questions about how, exactly, a niche product became one of the most successful alcohol brands in the country.

But Koch himself divulges a bit more in his 2016 book, “Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over A Beer or Two,” noting that when Twisted Tea was in development, Boston Beer was already contract-brewing the Tradewinds brand of non-alcoholic iced tea at the company’s Cincinnati brewery. The early 2000s were an era of “experimentation” in both products and promotional concepts, as Koch writes in his business-focused memoir, and he thought Twisted Tea showed promise. He assumed a hard tea product would appeal to rural drinkers and women, two groups that Boston Beer’s portfolio hadn’t reached in meaningful ways. 

“We targeted [Twisted Tea] at more rural drinkers, the kind of people who drank Jack Daniel’s,” Koch wrote in his book. “[Twisted Tea], I thought, would evoke the simple pleasures of spending time outside or whiling away a hot afternoon on the porch.” 

“We targeted [Twisted Tea] at more rural drinkers, the kind of people who drank Jack Daniel’s. [Twisted Tea], I thought, would evoke the simple pleasures of spending time outside or whiling away a hot afternoon on the porch.”

Koch’s assumption proved to be only partially true—yes, rural drinkers liked Twisted Tea, but the brand actually turned out to attract more men than women. Still, the gamble paid off: More than two decades later Twisted Tea continues to win over new fans. An entire generation after its launch, it’s the number-14 overall “beer” brand in the U.S. The Twisted Tea family increased chain retail sales +185% between 2016 and 2021 and, until now, has had virtually no draft presence in bars or restaurants. At the beginning of its third decade, the hard tea is set to get a national marketing campaign from Boston Beer, a kegged product, and a greater share of the company’s financial resources.   

This would be a remarkable trajectory for any brand, but it’s even more impressive given how many of Twisted Tea’s competitors are now mere historical footnotes—RIP to Bacardi Silver, Skyy Blue, and Stolichnaya Citrona. Twisted Tea hasn’t just endured, it’s thrived while fending off threats from craft beers and hard seltzers that claimed the shelf space of those other early-2000s malternatives.

This isn’t to say Twisted Tea hasn’t stumbled. The brand had to relaunch within its first year of existence, after its original name—BoDean’s Twisted Tea—prompted a successful lawsuit from Milwaukee rock band The BoDeans. Koch writes in his book that Boston Beer named the product for two employees, Bo and Dean, who’d worked on the product. But later, Boston Beer seemed to reference the band in advertisements without considering that the homage was likely to be read as copyright infringement. “I’m glad this is finally over,” The BoDeans’ singer/guitarist Kurt Neumann told the Milwaukee Business Journal in 2001. “Fans were asking us about our tea.” (Apparently the product’s connection to the band didn’t register everywhere; a Billings, Montana liquor store repeatedly ran newspapers ads in 2000 referencing “Bodeen Twisted Tea.”) 

Some flavor forays have also proven unsuccessful. A lemonade spinoff called Twisted Lemonade launched seven years ago and was swiftly discontinued. Boston Beer surmised that not enough drinkers were familiar with the original Twisted Tea to make a spinoff successful—plus, Mike’s Hard Lemonade had firmly planted its flag in that territory. Backyard Batch was another Twisted Tea flavor consigned to the history books. Intended to be a sweeter, “sun-brewed” version of Twisted Tea (the Original version contains 23 grams of sugar), it turned out that either drinkers didn’t like the additional sweetness or they just didn’t know what “Backyard Batch” meant.

Despite missteps large and small, Twisted Tea has managed an unprecedented upward trajectory. What explains its 21-year reign? 

Twisted Tea, whether consciously or not, presaged what is now conventional wisdom in alcohol advertising: Listen to your fans, behave like a lifestyle brand, and lead with easy-to-understand flavor. Staying true to those tenets has earned Twisted Tea some of the most loyal—rabid, even—customers in all of alcohol, and acts as a rebuff to critics who would dismiss the product as sugary booze for college kids. In 2022, when companies launch and discontinue line extensions and new flavors at a dizzying rate, a relatively unchanged Twisted Tea is more relevant than it’s ever been in its 21-year history. 

WHITE SPACE

What Twisted Tea and its FMB competitors saw, as far back as 2001, was a huge market of drinkers that other alcohol brands had largely ignored. The white space was obvious to Anat Baron, who was general manager of Mike’s Hard Lemonade from 2001 to 2005, during which time the FMB landscape was essentially dominated by three brands: Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, and Twisted Tea. (As 2022 begins, Twisted Tea is outselling Mike’s Hard Lemonade in chain retail for the first time ever.) Those FMB brands connected with people who didn’t like the taste of beer, but who wanted a casual and fun drink to enjoy at events like tailgates, concerts, and barbecues. 

“It looked like the same bottle as a beer, had a cool factor, didn’t taste like beer, still gave you a buzz at the same ABV, and made you feel, as a customer, that you fit into a beer-drinking occasion,” Baron explains. 

Et tu, White Claw? Critically, hard seltzers also capitalized on something Twisted Tea had learned years before: Marketers shouldn’t pigeonhole their products by gender. Originally, Baron says, she assumed Mike’s Hard Lemonade would skew female (Twisted Tea thought this too), but quickly realized that men and women were gravitating to it at similar rates. Today, 60% of Twisted Tea’s consumers are men.

“[In the data], we’d see these pockets of Twisted Tea drinkers, and when we met them, we were like, ‘Wait, it’s you?’” says Erica Taylor, Twisted Tea’s brand director, who has been at Boston Beer Company for 15 years. “It was these guys that traditionally maybe drink light beer—and drink more than one, for sure.”

Koch put it even more bluntly during Beer Business Daily’s 2022 Beer Industry Summit: “We thought [the market for Twisted Tea] was gonna be yuppies who drink Snapple, and it turned out to be blue-collar guys.”

He elaborates further in his book, writing: “These were not low-wage service workers or factory workers, but craftsmen who worked with their hands or had real skills—construction workers, cable TV repairmen, telephone line men, plumbers, electricians. They made decent money on account of their skill, and they appreciated a refreshing tea beverage that was high-quality and unique.”

“It was the beginning of talking about consumer choice. But I’d say pretty emphatically that I don’t think anybody had any idea how big this category was going to get.”

Twisted Tea found early success in rural, Northeastern states including New Hampshire and Maine. From there, the brand sought out “like markets,” Taylor says, with rural population bases and a foundation of Light Lager drinkers who might make the switch to Twisted Tea. Montana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania proved to be strong states, too. Across geographies, 24oz single-serve cans of Twisted Tea played well in gas station convenience stores, where Taylor says the core customer was regularly buying lunch or groceries for the week and picking up Twisted Tea as part of that routine. 

It was a different demographic than Boston Beer thought Twisted Tea would reach, but the brand won by listening to the real people drinking it—not focusing too narrowly on who executives assumed should drink it. The refocus on blue-collar male drinkers was a gamble, but Koch writes that he believed in it because consumers in core markets like Maine, Michigan, and Montana were enthusiastic in their affinity for the product. He bet (correctly) that if Twisted Tea could listen to its biggest fans, it could find ways to connect with new drinkers. 

And because Twisted Tea was, for most of its existence, the only major hard tea product, it was relatively easy for distributors and retailers to relay to Boston Beer when customers and accounts were asking for it. Additionally, non-alcoholic iced tea is so widely consumed that Taylor says it was natural for Twisted Tea to eventually begin expanding beyond the rural, majority-white and male fan base with whom it had found initial success. (Since 2021, 27% of households purchasing Twisted Tea for the first time have been headed by non-white drinkers, according to Boston Beer.) 

Cross-gender alcohol marketing may not seem revolutionary today, but it was new for an industry in the early 2000s that still assumed women wanted to drink wine (or wine coolers) and men wanted to drink full-strength beer. What upstart brands like Twisted Tea proved is that drinkers were eager for something beyond the binary, both in terms of gendered marketing and in terms of the product itself. The blurred lines that are now an obvious part of the alcohol industry were beginning to fuzz, thanks to FMBs like Twisted Tea. 

“It was the beginning of talking about consumer choice,” Baron says. “But I’d say pretty emphatically that I don’t think anybody had any idea how big this category was going to get.”

MAYBE BRANDS ARE YOUR FRIENDS

In Nielsen’s recap of 2021’s top-gaining brands, Twisted Tea tied for third place with Michelob Ultra and Corona, behind only Modelo Especial and Truly. Yet Twisted Tea still seems to fly under the radar, not only for the media, but among mainstream drinkers. Google News results for Twisted Tea show that almost all media attention for this brand comes from trade publications or motorsports websites covering Twisted Tea-sponsored events. 

Taylor says panel data shows Twisted Tea has about 4% household penetration (a measurement of the percentage of U.S. households that buy a particular brand) compared to competitors like Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff FMBs that have 8-9% household penetration. That’s remarkable, given that Twisted Tea has more than doubled its share of non-seltzer packaged FMB sales from 10% in 2017 to nearly 23% in 2021. Last year, Twisted Tea’s chain retail sales growth rate was triple that of the overall FMB category.

It seems paradoxical: How can Twisted Tea grow so much while still not reaching as many drinkers as its FMB competitors? Partially, it’s because Twisted Tea hasn’t been available in as many states as Mike’s Hard Lemonade or Smirnoff. As its geographic reach increases and as Boston Beer puts greater marketing emphasis on the brand, Twisted Tea has been giving its FMB cohort a run for its money: In the 52-week period ending February 20, Twisted Tea has been up +25% in chain retail while Mike’s Hard Lemonade has declined -0.2% and Smirnoff FMBs have fallen -7.5%. 

“We are really in touch with what the drinker is doing, what they’re wearing, what occasions they see Twisted Tea fit in. I think that’s really helped us stay relevant over 20 years—’cause 20 years is a long time.”

But perhaps even more important to Twisted Tea’s rising fortunes are its rabid fans. Talk to them about what they drink and their devotion to the brand becomes abundantly clear: They are, in many cases, nothing short of obsessed. They have Twisted Tea tattoos. They submit their own photos for Twisted Tea labels. They talk about the brand, Taylor says, like it’s a friend present for some of their favorite memories and pastimes. 

“People assume I’m sponsored by [Twisted Tea], but they’ve never asked me to post or say anything on their behalf. It’s just my sole feeling about it,” says Tim Sipper, a 26-year-old resident of Fort Myers, Florida, who works in construction and tweets from the account @TwistedTea_Man. “I just changed my Twitter name to that. I was like, ‘You know what, I love drinking it, so I’m going to share my love with everyone else.’”

Sipper is effusive about Twisted Tea, and not just online: He and his wife own matching Twisted Tea bathing suits and he says he introduced most of his friends to the beverage, which is now the only alcohol they drink besides liquor. Part of the appeal for Sipper is Twisted Tea’s flavor and the fact that it doesn’t upset his stomach the way beer generally does. But there’s no other product—alcohol or otherwise—he feels this strongly about, and that has to do with Twisted Tea’s highly interactive marketing. (The brand has never paid Sipper to promote it, but has occasionally sent him swag like hats and koozies.) 

“Maybe it’s because I’m part of this new generation of social media being everything,” Sipper says. “Me being active on social media and them being actually able to respond means a lot. You see all those big-name companies who don’t take time out of their day to respond.”

Taylor says Twisted Tea has always made it a priority to find out where its drinkers are, geographically and in terms of the activities they enjoy. For roughly 15 years, the photos that drinkers have submitted for potential inclusion on the beverage’s back label have provided a visual portal to who the brand’s biggest fans are, where they are, and what they love. She likens the back label submissions to “tagged photos before there were tagged photos.” And while some snapshots repeat common themes—lots of day drinking, lots of outdoor activities, lots of selfies—there are also unexpected gems among the submissions, including photos of grandmothers enjoying Twisted Tea.

“We get, strangely, a lot of people taking pictures wearing 12-packs on their head like a hat,” Taylor says. “Which is an interesting behavior.”

It’s not just free marketing content for the brand, it’s the kind of authentic consumer research that money can’t buy. And for Twisted Tea’s passionate drinkers, having their photo on the label is the ultimate fan experience. The win-win for the brand and its customers is what’s kept this marketing tool going throughout most of Twisted Tea’s history.

“We are really in touch with what the drinker is doing, what they’re wearing, what occasions they see Twisted Tea fit in,” Taylor says. “I think that’s really helped us stay relevant over 20 years—’cause 20 years is a long time.”

FROM NICHE TO NATIONAL

Some of the smartest brands in alcohol have capitalized on what at first seem like narrow niches. Take Modelo Especial, long popular among Mexican-Americans, which has seen its household penetration rise +20% among non-Hispanic drinkers in the six years since it launched English-language ads in the U.S., according to VinePair. Twisted Tea has also proven that early success among passionate fans can slowly translate to widespread, mainstream appeal. 

Early on, Boston Beer treated Twisted Tea as a regional play. That segment is still crucial to Twisted Tea’s sales, but the brand has proven it has legs in suburban and urban markets, too; today, large and geographically diverse states like Texas, New York, and California have become strong markets (as they are for other beer brands). Philadelphia is also a top market for Twisted Tea, and is the number-one market for Twisted Tea Light. 

This geographic expansion came slowly, one market at a time. The brand has only recently made meaningful sales inroads into major states like California, Texas, and Florida. This means Twisted Tea has managed to become a top national brand without, for years, a presence in the country’s largest markets. (Twisted Tea Light also debuted nationally for the first time in February.) Taylor calls this incremental territorial growth a lesson in patience and persistence. She says Twisted Tea needed to build organic awareness in states before it could launch successfully; the brand wanted to hear that retailers and distributors—as well as customers—were eager for the product before committing. Slowly, Twisted Tea leaned into a broader marketing message around day drinking, outdoor activities, and an up-for-whatever attitude that had appeal beyond its original, rural roots.

“Twisted Tea drinkers want to get that group of friends together and let the day go where it takes them. So to us, the mindset’s really important versus just thinking about the demographic,” Taylor says. 

That strategy has informed the brand’s events-based marketing, which encompasses everything from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to The Esports Awards to college football tailgates and country music festivals. Grotto says Twisted Tea selects partnerships based on the hobbies its fans are vocal about, something that social media and the back label submissions illuminate. Then, it sticks with them. When COVID-19 canceled in-person motorcycle rallies, Grotto showed up to them virtually, even though he couldn’t offer free Twisted Tea samples as he normally would at such events.

“To show up as a bona fide participant in an event that they are in love with, that lends a lot of credibility to what we do makes it real,” Grotto says. 

The goal for Twisted Tea in 2022 is to expand beyond the deeply loyal fanbase it’s built among these niche communities and disparate geographies. This is the first year the brand will have a national, year-round advertising campaign, a sign of the growing importance hard tea plays in Boston Beer’s overall portfolio. Taylor says that while Twisted Tea sales are highest during the summer—as are overall beer sales—they’re also strengthening during the fall (college football) and winter (snow sports season). Boston Beer put $5 million behind a winter 2022 marketing campaign for Twisted Tea, Brewbound reports, which included TV and streaming ads on Hulu; HBO Max; during the NHL All-Star Game; and on local NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Miami-Fort Lauderdale.   

As Boston Beer has effectively become an FMB and hard seltzer company rather than a beer company in recent years, it’s come to see—and invest in—the leading role Twisted Tea will play in its future. 

‘THE 300-LB. BULLY’

If the priority for Twisted Tea is to continue expanding its consumer base, some existing fans want assurances that Boston Beer will be able to meet existing demand for the hard tea.

Ed Bond is the owner of Beer Baron, a beer and convenience store in northeast Philadelphia. He says Twisted Tea is the store’s number-two seller, only slightly behind Miller Lite, but that Boston Beer (like other companies) struggled with supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, resulting in unavailability of Twisted Tea Light at his store for months at a time. 

Because the light version wasn’t yet available nationally, Bond suspects that producing and packaging it wasn’t as much of a priority for Boston Beer as other Twisted Tea products like its 12-can Party Pack (Half & Half, Peach, Raspberry, and Original flavors) and its Original flavor. Bond says his customers wanted their favorite and it was a huge problem to not be able to get his hands on what’s normally the second-best-selling product in his store. (Original is still Twisted Tea’s best-seller nationally, accounting for more than half its sales. Bond estimates Light makes up 70% of his Twisted Tea sales.)

“When they couldn’t get Light here, my customers were not happy. It’s that big of an item,” he says. “There were a couple companies that were trying to capitalize on [the shortage]. Arnold Palmer has a spiked tea and lemonade mix; Bold Rock did the same thing.”

Hard tea competitors exist, both in the FMB category and in hard seltzers, where both White Claw and Truly have released iced tea flavors. They could conceivably muscle in where Twisted Tea fails to deliver, but thus far no competitor has proven able to meaningfully shake Twisted Tea’s dominance of the hard tea market. The Twisted Tea brand family commands 93% of the hard tea market in the U.S., and it grew +28% in chain retail sales between 2020 and 2021, compared to the Arnold Palmer FMB family, which grew +16.5% during the same period.

Bond calls Twisted Tea “the 300-lb. bully” of the category. (Even Mike’s Hard Lemonade abandoned its hard tea product in the early 2000s.) 

“Mike’s Hard Lemonade, that’s been around the same length of time, and Seagram’s Escapes. But they don’t sell like this,” Bond says. “Seltzers are knocking on the door a little bit. But none of them are touching Twisted Tea, at least not here.”

Beer Baron customers who purchase Twisted Tea run the gamut demographically, and Bond can’t fully explain their affinity for the product. If Boston Beer wants to sell more Twisted Tea, he says, he has only one suggestion. 

“Tell them to make more product for crying out loud. They need to make more!”

Words by Kate BernotPhotos by Stephanie Byce