A Fireball Spinoff, a Prolific Class-Actioneer, and the Fate of Beer’s C-Store Dominance
The other day, I filed an analysis for VinePair on the latest developments in the court-ordered receivership of Uncle Nearest, Inc., the high-flying Tennessee liquor firm that’s been laid low by the pesky matter of $108 million in defaulted debts. Firms are incentivized to settle or stem litigation in order to keep themselves out of court and outside the public eye, I wrote, so the fact that that situation is playing out on the record in federal court is a rare privilege. More:
Last time it actually happened was when Anheuser-Busch InBev and Constellation Brands slugged it out before a jury — a jury! — over the definition of hard seltzer in 2022. We came pretty close again in 2023, when Diageo appeared to be intent on fighting Sean Combs in open court over allegations that it had deprioritized Cîroc Vodka and DeLeon Tequila in its portfolio in violation of the parties’ arrangement. (That one faded after Diddy found himself in a different court for much grimmer reasons.)
Earlier this year, Diageo was targeted with more litigation, this time over the marketing of its Don Julio and Casamigos brands. Maybe we’ll get to watch a jury deliberate tequila purity at some point. But while those cases wind their way through their respective courts, let’s turn our attention to another one that’s much closer to fruition — and much more relevant to the interests of the United States’ beleaguered brewing industry.
In April 2023, The Sazerac Company was hit with a suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) alleging that its 16.5 percent alcohol-by-volume malt-based Fireball Cinnamon was misleading customers to believe they were buying the firm’s original, almost eponymous 33 percent ABV whisky liqueur. After two-plus years of docket-jockeying, federal judge Kenneth M. Karas finally ruled to advance the suit (which is now bundled with a similar one about Sazerac’s malt-based spinoff of Parrot Bay rum) by certifying the plaintiffs as a class.
“Even if parts of the label like the ‘malt beverage’ font are larger, other aspects of the label that could have misled consumers like the name ‘Fireball,’ Dragon logo, ‘Red Hot’ tagline, and ‘Cinnamon’ statement are also larger,” wrote Hizzoner in the 23-page document. Whether that sort of labeling is confusing enough to make “a reasonable consumer to think they are buying whisky or rum instead of malt” is a question for a jury. But in affixing his signature at the bottom of the Sept. 18 memorandum, Karas allowed the plaintiffs to take a big step toward an answer.
Brewing-industry insiders will be looking forward to it. Among the tectonic shifts reshaping the American beer aisle over the past decade, one of the biggest and most jarring has been what I like to call the “alcopop redemption arc” — i.e., the surprising resurgence and normalization of flavored malt- and cane-based beverages (FABs) as legitimate mainstream alternatives to beer-flavored beer’s traditional hegemony. Brands that were goofy novelties and misogynistic punchlines 20 years ago — Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Twisted Tea chief among them — are now serious volume players, and they took some of said volume from beer. White Claw, which gained traction in the late teens as a stupid-simple counterpoint to the then-peaking craft-brewing segment’s more esoteric, full-flavored offerings, took more. The fact that it drinks a lot like a vodka soda without requiring the hassle of a bar, mixers, etc., was also a key part of its early appeal.
Sazerac’s introduction of the FAB version of Fireball in 2020 tracked with these themes, extending the liqueur’s burning cinnamon flavor into a grab-and-go package formulated to take advantage of beer’s distribution footprint, which is approximately five times bigger than that of spirits nationwide. Thanks in part to a distribution arrangement with Anheuser-Busch InBev, Fireball Cinnamon grew rapidly, and the rest of Sazerac’s FAB-rications with it. Longtime Hop Take readers (Hopheads?) may recall that by the end of 2022, the firm already had the 22nd-largest “beer” brand family by dollars in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana. Scanner data from the same source through Sept. 7, 2025 now puts it at the 16th largest.
Spencer Sheehan, the attorney representing plaintiffs Sharon Pizarro (who initially filed over Sazerac’s Fireball FAB) and Cindy Koonce (Parrot Bay), argues that some of that success has been earned under false pretenses. “If you’re buying something and you think it’s one thing, then it should be what it’s claiming to be,” he tells Hop Take in a recent phone interview. Such potential confusion has been a point of policymaker and trade concern at the nexus of soft and hard beverages, where underage drinkers have occasionally wound up with the alcoholic version of a familiar non-alcoholic beverage brand. The dynamic animating this class-action suit against Fireball is similar (and ditto, the one Sheehan brought against Coca-Cola over its tequila-free Topo Chico FAB “Margarita” pack a few years ago; he lost). But it’s diametrically opposite with regard to booze content. “The theory of the case,” says Sheehan, “is ‘you’re not giving us enough alcohol.’”
Sazerac’s global communications director, Victoria Zabel-Wirdak, says the company does not comment on pending litigation.
As I noted in early 2023, Fireball’s website features an FAQ answer that delineates between Fireball Whisky and Fireball Cinnamon. (The copy has changed a bit since then, but it still does.) And if you look closely at the labels in Pizarro’s original filing from 2.5 years ago, you can tell the products apart. But as Judge Karas noted in his memo last month, they’re close enough that they could have misled consumers, so the case rolls on. If it makes it to trial and a jury decides in the plaintiffs’ favor — still enormous “ifs,” at this stage — Sazerac could find itself on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. Such a breakthrough in litigation would also likely force Sazerac and its peers in Big Liquor to reconsider whether such a risk was worth the reward of the broader retail placements and incremental revenues that come from FAB line extensions. The brewing industry has been bemoaning its spirits-slinging foes’ encroachment on its brick-and-mortar turf and tax advantages for years (even as many brewers have added distilled-based product lines of their own). In that sense, Fireball’s loss would be their collective gain.
Quibbling over ABVs and label semantics — would a normal person assume “natural whisky and other flavors” means Fireball’s FAB contains a “natural whisky [and, additionally] other flavors,” or natural flavors, one of which tastes like whisky? — seems silly. But to Sheehan, who is known to the trade and the tabloids as the “Vanilla Vigilante” for his prolific, quixotic class-action litigation against consumer-packaged-goods brands (and has faced sanctions in the past over the supposed spuriousness of those hundreds of suits), the seeming frivolity of FAB-ricated Fireball belies a more serious reality. People scoff at his class-action suits because “the damages are relatively very small on an individual basis,” he says, “but the alternative is just to do nothing. I don’t think that’s a good option.”
It certainly isn’t a good option for a beer category that has been battling for coveted placements and attention in the country’s overstuffed convenience stores. As Dave Williams of Bump Williams Consulting told me when I first covered Fireball Cinnamon 2.5 years ago: “Consumers have shown that they want new, different things. If you can keep some of those occasions under your umbrella, then that just means that you’re winning and someone else is losing.” One of the somebodies in that equation has been brewers, who have seen diminishing returns from high-octane juice bombs as FABs have moved in on the channel. (Another has been liquor-store owners, who are none too pleased that customers now have somewhere else to go to buy versions of Fireball, et al.) It’s not likely that Fireball Cinnamon’s 50-milliliter bottles are supplanting stovepipes of Voodoo Ranger in the c-store. But what about the latter brand’s Mini Rippers?
That’s not what this lawsuit is about, of course. And Sheehan is no friend to the brewing industry: While CPG firms have borne the brunt of his class-action crusade, he’s brought suits against ABI and Heineken, and Molson Coors Beverage Company produced the Topo Chico hard seltzers over which he sued Coca-Cola. It might be a privilege for us to watch litigation go down, but it has real costs — in dollars, bad publicity, and potential regulatory scrutiny — that the category would prefer to avoid if possible.
Still, they say the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and while Fireball Cinnamon isn’t quite beer’s enemy, it’s no friend, either. Savor the flavor, brewers.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
It’s not the best time to be raising money from traditional capital markets for your beer brand. But there’s always “Shark Tank.” The upstart Dad Strength Brewing made an appearance on the season premiere of the bizarrely popular ABC series last week, netting (ahem) a $300,000 investment from a trio of the “sharks” in exchange for a 12 percent stake in the business. More shocking than somebody throwing six figures at a session beer brand iN tHiS eCoNoMy? One of the guest sharks on Season 17 (!!!) of the show is none other than Fawn Weaver of Uncle Nearest. Which raises the obvious question: Can a guest shark pitch other sharks? How non-traditional is this capital market?
📈 Ups…
Sure, why not, Godzilla PBR… The alcohol lobby got over on the World Health Organization in its campaign to water down the United Nations’ latest declaration of risk… “Sit At The Bar September” is dead, all hail “Come Over October” (I guess?) but NOT “Sober October” (OK?!)… Heineken’s $3.2 billion acquisition of FIFCO’s operations in Central America and Mexico will not affect the latter’s stake in Genesee Brewery…
📉 …and downs
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) has scaled back to essential services only thanks to the Republican government shutdown… Another month, another gnarly tax-paid snapshot from the Beer Institute, with shipments (not including imports) down 11.4 percent in August… Trump’s cuts to SNAP could cost food retailers $1.6 billion upfront and $759 million each year…
The article A Fireball Spinoff, a Prolific Class-Actioneer, and the Fate of Beer’s C-Store Dominance appeared first on VinePair.