Welcome to Alcohol’s Slop Era
Over the past two years, BuzzBallz has been beset by imposters.
The Texas-based canned cocktail company was one of beverage-alcohol’s last true innovators, coming up with its signature vacuum-sealed spherical packaging in 2009 and kicking off a decade-plus of breakaway success. BuzzBallz, now owned by Sazerac, has fended off its fair share of ripoffs in the time since, and the imposters have accelerated at a disorienting rate.
The most recent barrage started with Vancouver-based PartyBallz in 2023. Months later, BuzzBallz began an ongoing sparring match with MPL Brands, makers of the dubiously branded Big Sipz. In June 2024, it was Beverage Ranch and Slam Zees on the docket, and just this year, MPACT Max.
While the courts grapple with the question of what constitutes Ballz or Sipz or a simple Zee — and whether these novelty beverage units are legally distinct — the consumer is left to wander liquor store aisles unawares. It’s all too reminiscent of another phenomenon happening across our phones and browsers daily.
Brain rot. Enslopification.
Slop started as a way to identify cheap and quick-to-produce AI content. But it’s quickly become code for anything that’s derivative, stitched together haphazardly, and delivered to us unbidden via algorithms. As New York Times opinion columnist David Wallace-Wells aptly put it, “We’ve sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I.”
In 2025, slop has transcended the internet and become one of culture’s dominant aesthetics. You can now find slop has infected not only technology but also art, music, scientific research, and daily work. And now, the so-called “zombie internet” is lurching out of your phone and onto store shelves.
Heard of Athletic Brewing? Or maybe it was Runner’s High? Fancy a BeatBox? So do the makers of ViBE Twisted Sips and BuzzBox. It all makes for an uncanny trip to the ShopRite, and if BuzzBallz has taught us anything, you can’t depend on the courts to make sense of it. For every MPACT MAX, there are countless others popping up unbidden into alcohol’s growing slopverse that’ll never be seen by an appellate judge — only a slew of overstimulated shoppers unable to distinguish the Surfsides from the Skimmers, the BuzzBallz from the Bombtails, and whatever may spawn next.
Dawn of Slop
When Robert Cumbow first became a lawyer in 1993, it was the early days of the World Wide Web. Back then, trademark law was unremarkable, but the internet brought a sudden urgency to the field.
“All of a sudden we found ourselves in a world where it was so easy to copy anything without permission and for a long time not get caught at it,” Cumbow recalls. “Brands that were very, very similar to each other in their trademarks, but might’ve been geographically worlds apart, would never have crossed each other and never have been confused for each other in the old days, were all of a sudden one click apart.”
Cumbow, now a partner at Washington firm Miller Nash LLP with a specialty in the drinks business, sees the dawn of AI as another watershed moment in trademark and copyright law. The proliferation of also-ran brands is nothing new in beverage-alcohol or any other market, really. It’s an established dynamic: A pioneer brand breaks new ground in a category, and copycat brands draft in on their coattails. This sort of competition is anti-monopolistic and legally protected — but what the internet did is accelerate the iteration process and provide new pathways to infringement.
Social media and AI have pushed the accelerator through the floor. Mark Gallo, director of commercial services at Manna Beverages, calls IP infringement “the quiet plague” of the beverage industry. And even though creating an alcohol product is still a time-intensive process, anyone can spin up a logo, website, and social presence scrapped together from whatever references appear at the top of the search results.
“Once something breaks through — a flavor, a can design, a brand voice — it’s replicated at lightning speed,” Gallo says. “The difference today is the sheer velocity and volume. Digital printing, social media virality, and fast-turn contract manufacturing have lowered the barriers to entry so much that a brand can be cloned rapidly.”
Of course, AI alone is responsible for cursed takeoffs like “Firebull,” but the tech is a capitulation of a wider culture of wanton copying, lack of attribution, and rapid iteration. It’s no longer just the province of algorithms alone. When this is done for a competitive reason, Cumbow doesn’t see an issue. But there is a lot at stake when it’s pure slop.
“Brands can be quite similar, as long as consumers aren’t likely to be confused, but if they are so similar that consumers are likely to be confused or deceived in the marketplace, that’s when trademark law kicks in,” Cumbow says. “It’s not theft, it’s infringement, and it’s potentially even worse.”
The Smooth-Brain Future
The alcohol market is in decline, and Cumbow assumes that this kind of competition could lead to more desperate, deceptive behavior from alcohol brands — especially established juggernauts fending off upstarts from taking their market share.
“Alcoholic beverage manufacturers are having to decide, ‘How do we retool for a smaller market?’” Cumbow says. “Do we do it with our own brand, or do we come up with a different brand, like we’re starting fresh, and nobody’s ever heard of us before?”
Gallo is much less charitable in his analysis. He knows that IP defense is slow and costly, and the legal system isn’t built to process all the possible infringement claims. Cunning firms like AB InBev know they can move in on an innovator, cloud their IP, and get out before anyone even notices. The customer is none the wiser, and the courts are too backed up to spring to their defense.
“With possible volume declining and investor pressure mounting, some players are willing to blur ethical lines just to survive another quarter,” Gallo says. “The long-term risk isn’t just lost revenue, it’s erosion of trust and innovation.”
If there’s one silver lining, it’s that the internet is mostly ephemeral. The facsimiles pile up and ultimately disappear. What lasts is the hardest thing to develop, and BuzzBallz and BeatBox have it inside their signature packages: actual innovation. Novel contributions to the bev-alc business might be getting lost in a cloud, but clouds clear.
Eras can end.
“The brands that will endure are those that treat IP not just as a legal shield, but as a living expression of authenticity,” Gallo says, “constantly evolving, and unmistakably theirs.”
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