Anheuser-Busch Is Selling Cutwater Like Crazy — and Keeping Quiet About the Viral #Challenge
The song is called “Cut Wader,” by Lex OnGoo and LadyBouncee, and it opens like this:
She want some Cutwater
[repeat 8x]
All these b*tches see us bounce,
me and my homegirl on the roof.
We drinkin’ Cuts but that’s not all,
we got some other liquor too.
Things kind of spiral from there. Frankly, I lack the critical faculty to unpack the rest of the single, which hit TikTok in November 2025, and major music streaming services shortly thereafter. Which is fine: I am not the audience for “Cut Wader,” with its anxiety-inducing uptempo beat and scream-sung lyrics about popping pills and eating ass. But make no mistake, there is an audience. The song is just one of half a dozen recent odes to the canned cocktail brand, which was spun off from Ballast Point in 2015 and acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) in 2019. This spirits-based subgenre is the unofficial soundtrack of the #CutwaterChallenge, a video trend that swept vertical video platforms over the second half of 2025 — and swept the titular ready-to-drink (RTD) brand up the sales charts in the process.
The exception to the malaise dampening the beverage-alcohol market in 2025 was spirits-based RTDs, and the exception to spirits-based RTDs was Cutwater. The brand went absolutely berserk last year, and on a not-so-small base, either. In the 52 weeks through Dec. 27, 2025, Cutwater’s off-premise dollar sales in national retail outlets tracked by NIQ were up 78.2 percent, and accelerating. Volume figures from Shanken’s Impact DataBank put the brand up 41.5 percent on the year, bringing it to 5.6 million cases and making it the 10th-largest overall spirits brand in the country.
“Up until a certain point at the tail end of summer, Cutwater was having a strong year, but not by any means a blowout year,” Dave Williams, president of Bump Williams Consulting, tells Hop Take. “Then, through the balance of the year, [the brand] just sort of took off like a rocket ship.”
What sparked the ignition is difficult to say with precision. There are broader trends pointing away from beer and malt-/cane-based hard seltzer and toward spirits-based RTDs shaping Cutwater’s fortune. There’s ABI’s fearsome “red network,” capable of placing its flagship canned cocktail brand more quickly, widely, and consistently than any other players in the middle tier. “When A-B puts the power of their distribution network behind a brand, that thing can appear everywhere overnight,” says Williams. (Of course, whether a brand can defend those placements is another matter entirely. Looking at you, Cacti…) The firm made Cutwater’s popular Espresso Martini a year-round offering in 2025, and saw terrific success with its Lemon-Drop Martini, too; the latter was one of the biggest line-extension winners in NIQ-tracked off-premise dollars last year, posting an eye-popping 646 percent gain through the end of December. All of these factors and more contributed to Cutwater’s colossal year.
But given the timing, it’s likely the #CutwaterChallenge, which first started gaining mainstream traction on TikTok in mid-July, had at least something to do with it, too. ABI “certainly benefited from the whole social media ‘viral push,’” Williams says. (The macrobrewer did not respond to a request for comment.) For the uninitiated, the “challenge,” such as it is, is trying to drink an entire Cutwater 4-pack, and filming the results. The results are: You get drunk! Pretty quickly and severely, too, given the 12-ounce canned cocktails clock in as high as 13 percent alcohol by volume. “THESE NEED A WARNING,” posted one TikTok user after her first encounter with the brand’s Margaritas, which are 10 to 12.5 percent ABV. “10/10 delicious though.”
There’s tension here, an acute version of the same conundrum that runs straight through the trade writ large. To wit: Bev-alc firms implore customers to “please drink responsibly,” but make more money when they drink irresponsibly — especially when they post about it. I first encountered this peculiar paradox myself many years ago, when, as an aspiring journalist with an English degree and no job, I found myself at a networking dinner with some sort of account manager for Smirnoff Ice, Diageo’s much-maligned, Zima-esque flavored malt beverage. This would have been 2010 — the year I graduated college, and near the height of the initial “icing” craze. I asked how the brand was planning to take advantage of all this viral excitement from frat bros on Facebook about its objectively not-exciting 4.5-percent ABV alcopop. She looked at me like I had just rapped an entire verse from “Tea Partay,” the delightful 2006 ad for Smirnoff Ice’s doomed Raw Tea line extension. (Which I could and still can do, by the way.) The answer was nothing, of course. People guzzling a beverage-alcohol brand and posting about said guzzling and its aftermath online, for lawmakers, regulators, and anti-alcohol advocates to see? Reputationally radioactive! Do not engage! Dive, dive, dive!
Mores around consumption have liberalized a bit since then, so much so that by late last decade Smirnoff Ice even began winking at the (shockingly durable) icing trend with holiday “gift boxes” to abet practitioners’ subterfuge. But there’s not a whole lot of room in the #CutwaterChallenge lane for a risk-averse conglomerate with ABI’s legal and political exposure. To my knowledge, the firm’s executives have never acknowledged it publicly, though you can be certain they’ve discussed it privately.
“You don’t want to promote binge drinking, you want to promote responsible drinking,” says Williams, speculating on the company’s official line regarding the #CutwaterChallenge. “But at the same time, it’s like, ‘We’re not going to stick a stick in [the wheel of] our bike as we’re going at full speed.’”
Where is Cutwater headed with all that momentum? The on-premise is an obvious opportunity. In ABI’s spirits-based RTD portfolio, the bar scene has been more the purview of NÜTRL, the High Noon drink-a-like brand ABI acquired in 2021. But Cutwater’s dominance in the off-premise, coupled with the convenience and margin it offers to on-premise operators looking for a way to meet cocktail demand without paying somebody to, y’know, make cocktails, offer a runway. “Brands like High Noon, Surfside, Sun Cruiser — those are the ones that you’ll see maybe have a slightly higher share in the on-premise,” Williams says. While Cutwater and other higher-end canned cocktails “haven’t quite broken through in ‘the on’ yet, I honestly think there’s more opportunity for this [segment] in general, to penetrate” in bars and restaurants, he adds.
Everybody wants a piece of a hot commodity, and in Cutwater’s case (ahem), the question of who gets what is imbued with some intrigue. Recall, in May 2025, ABI pulled the brand off of Republic National Distributing Company’s trucks in California, Hawaii, and most control states, and handed it — along with NÜTRL volume that formerly flowed to Golden State markets on independent Bud houses’ trucks — to Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS), the country’s largest non-beer wholesaler. Then, that August, ABI sold its wholly owned distributorship (WOD) in New York to SGWS, in a move signaling the corporate mothership’s long-desired aim to consolidate its middle-tier business among fewer, bigger wholesalers.
It would be wrong to say that the company’s future depends on Cutwater: As a macrobrewer, its portfolio still skews heavily to beer, including category-leader Michelob Ultra and bottom-shelf workhorse Busch Light. But even those brands’ strong incremental sales growth last year wasn’t enough to offset the decline of ABI’s erstwhile flagship Bud Light. Cutwater’s growth provides part of the solution (to the parent company, if not its wholesalers in states where beer distributors can’t handle spirits). BeatBox, the wine-based riot punch brand that ABI acquired at a $576 million valuation in early December, provides another. As ABI’s portfolio drifts by necessity away from “core beer,” its distribution strategy will do likewise —
As ABI’s portfolio drifts by necessity away from “core beer,” its distribution strategy will do likewise — just in time for the expiration of the Department of Justice’s consent decree about what it can and can’t do with its WODs. Keep an eye on it.
In the meantime, though, Cutwater’s rocketship will continue to soar, whether or not ABI ever acknowledges that some percentage of its sales are coming from people housing — and getting housed by — canned Margaritas for views. Maybe the real #CutwaterChallenge is figuring out how to advertise the stuff without coming off corny, or giving the game away.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
With closures outpacing openings in the craft brewing segment for the second straight year, industry observers have become quite familiar with a counterintuitive liquidation trend: beer brands that “live on.” For example, when Bosque Brewing Co. abruptly shuttered all of its taprooms in late December 2025, a sorry outcome of its Chapter 11-turned-Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings, the firm — which had been New Mexico’s largest — announced its roster would be produced by Marble Brewery out of Albuquerque. As one of my Bluesky followers noted, this arrangement seems to have become more common, though it’s hard to say how many brands actually get second lives in their new owners’ portfolios. Sure, it sounds nice in a press release, but how viable are these zombie/orphan brands from a business standpoint? We’d best find out: All signs point to more of ‘em, and soon.
📈 Ups…
Congratulations to James “Otto” Ottolini on his new gig as chief executive of Schlafly Beer… In a huge win for the Beer Institute, National Beer Wholesalers of America, Brewers Association, and other trade lobbying orgs, the feds’ new dietary guidelines loosen drinking recommendations… Modelo’s first non-alcoholic product is a Chelada, sure why not… Uncowed by the looming federal ban on hemp-derived THC, grocer Sprouts is launching the segment in 120 stores…
📉 …and downs
The fallout from Sycamore Brewing’s co-founder’s arrest on statutory rape charges is so severe the company looks to be prepping a potential rebrand… Constellation Brands’ beer division did better in Q3 than it did in Q2, but it was still in the red…
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