I was about to reply that this was already available, but I see now that this is not the Jack and Cola that you can already get in a can, but one with the Coca-Cola brand. Incidentally, the Jack and Cola available around here (US, VA) is 7% alcohol.
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Convenience. If you want a quick Jack and Coke and don’t want to carry or keep around a bottle of Jack and a bottle or can of coke, voila. If, say, I’m out camping or on vacation, or working in another city and want a Jack & Coke nightcap without spending $10 for it at the bar, I can just pick up a single at the grocery store or gas station or whatever (laws vary by state on who sells them.) It’s not like I travel with a bottle of Jack everywhere I go. I mean, they sell chopped vegetables when it’s so easy to buy them and chop them yourself for a quarter of the price. Convenience counts for a lot.
As for canned margaritas? Ugh. Have you actually found anything that is even close to being a good one? Holy shit there is some awful “margarita” stuff out there.
Isn’t this settled? It legally qualifies as a bourbon, but is marketed as a Tennessee Whiskey. It has that charcoal filtration step at the end that makes it a little different, but still, if they wanted to, they could call it a bourbon. Or am I misremembering?
Nope, I’m pretentious when it comes to Margaritas, though.
And now I’m thirsty.
I spent the night before our wedding squeezing pounds and pounds of limes for the bartenders to use in the margaritas. I’m trying to remember what our tequila was — pretty sure it was Cazadores. Then the triple sec component was Patron Citronage. Ratio I asked for was 4:2:1 with a splash of simple syrup (I take mine without, but most people I know like a little sugar to take some of the sour edge off.)
A few months back I decided to try some canned margaritas from the grocery store. Chilled it and gave it a sip. Tasted bad to me. Read the can and discovered that the alcohol was from beer. The drink had a definite beer taste to me, and as someone who does not like beer I did not finish the can.
I suppose it’s an inexpensive way to get the alcohol for the drink. I was very disappointed.
Yeah, a lot of those drinks are malt-beverage based. I would guess – but do not know – that it’s not simply a matter of economics, but perhaps also of the various liquor laws across the States, as to where they can be sold? Also, some of these drinks lately, I’ve seen, can also be based on wine. I know there’s a brand of drinks that includes flavors like margarita, horchata, and the like that are based on orange wine. Ah, found it – both Buzz Balls and Buzz Tallz. Maybe a way to use up surplus orange juice? Another guess on my part.
You are a good man.
I imagine these will mostly be used for outdoor activities. Easier to bring a can to a picnic or an event than liquor bottles.
It’s alcohol. The only marketing it needs is “50% off”.
Note, if some mystery canned cocktail tastes like ass, it’s not like the local teenagers do not know how to buy a bottle of vodka and a bottle of soft drink and mix that up instead.
I remember hearing all the controversy about the original Four Loco. I bought a couple of cans and took them out in my kayak after work one day. I was, I believe the term the kids were using at the time, fucked up.
I think regulations are playing a part in it. Your seltzers are mostly “malted beverages” which essentially is beer from a regulatory perspective (as I understand it, in its primal form it will have basically no taste or positive attributes you might associate with beer), then they add carbonated water and some flavorings.
These are commonly sold in grocery stores, gas stations and convenience stores in many states.
There’s also a line of drinks that are genuinely a mixture of a distilled spirit and mixer. These products are often only able to be sold in liquor stores. That might seem odd because both the seltzer and the pre-mixed cocktail are often sold at around 5% ABV, but in many States the regulations aren’t based on the percentage of alcohol in the beverage, the differentiation is in how the alcohol is produced.
For example in my State (Virginia), beer is defined thus:
“Beer” means any alcoholic beverage obtained by the fermentation of an infusion or decoction of barley, malt, and hops or of any similar products in drinkable water and containing one-half of one percent or more of alcohol by volume.
Spirits are defined as:
“Spirits” means any beverage that contains alcohol obtained by distillation mixed with drinkable water and other substances, in solution, and includes, among other things, brandy, rum, whiskey, and gin, or any one or more of the last four named ingredients, but shall not include any such liquors completely denatured in accordance with formulas approved by the United States government.
Under these definitions a 5% ABV canned mixture of vodka and other stuff would be regulated as a spirit, which is more tightly regulated in Virginia than in many other States.
Nope, you nailed it right on the head.
All Tennessee Whiskey is Bourbon (legally speaking), but not all Bourbon is Tennessee Whiskey.
AFAIK there isn’t an ATF or protected designation for Tennessee Whiskey though. Tennessee state law defines it, but I don’t think that’s really binding anywhere else.
Yeah, it’s why “wine coolers” went out pretty quickly after their initial flash in the pan; making “malt beverages”, which are essentially unhopped beer filtered so as to remove any flavor, then flavored and carbonated to taste became so popular.
To the law, that Smirnoff Ice is the exact same thing as a bottle of Budweiser.
Which seems weak. If JD is 40%, a typical highball ratio is what, 3:1? 4:1? When I’ve made something like this at home I’ve split a 12 oz can and added either 1.5 or 2 oz of liquor. No idea what they’re doing at the bar though.
No, the real Smirnoff Ice (if you can find the right bottles) have vodka in them. It would probably taste good, except they ruined it by adding so much sugar.
Contrariwise, there are also strong beers with 8%, 10%, 12% ABV, possibly more. (I haven’t noticed any 18% or 40% beers in the convenience store cooler; maybe the liquor stores have them.)
I can at least attest to the first part. I’ve had South African brandy, and the ones that have made it here to SoCal have been excellent. I’m more partial to Armenian brandy, but I’d not turn down ones from elsewhere.
As for canned cocktails…yes, they are going to be weak. The way people drink from a can is completely different than the way they drink from a glass, speed-wise. They are weak on purpose.
Older drunkards might remember the line of bottled cocktails Heublein used to make back in the 70s-80s. Their Brass Monkey was our go-to camping cocktail.
Their website says “The Original Premium Malt Beverage that started it all”, so I suspect that if they once had vodka, it’s been a long time.
I suspect the move to malt beverages vs. some sort of canned/bottled highball is because they can get 5% alcohol much cheaper by brewing a malt beverage out of a bit of malt and a lot of corn/rice, and then flavor it to taste, versus combining actual booze with some sort of mixer.
Sure- depending on the state, they’re labeled differently. Up through about 2012, anything over 4% ABW (?) had to be labeled either “Ale” or “Malt Liquor” in Texas and was taxed differently. So you had stuff like Spaten Oktoberfest labeled as “malt liquor”, which was absurd.
BTW I noticed a random can of “Bacardi Mojito” at the wine+liquor store. It was indeed 5% alcohol, but the ingredients list 12.8% Bacardi rum. So you really have to check the list to know for sure. I suppose I could picture buying it if I just wanted a cocktail and did not feel like buying an entire bottle of rum, but it sounds really weak, and who knows if they controlled the amount of sugar.
In recent years, you also see canned wine (made from actual grapes 
that’s not too bad.
Monaco is one of the brands that uses hard liquor in their canned, overly sweetened carbonated drinks.