With LYTT Electric Coolers, Boston Beer Co. Is Running Out of Bright Ideas
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But then again, they hadn’t yet seen Lytt.
Lytt? That’s right: Lytt. Spelled like that and everything.
Lytt is the latest product launch from Boston Beer Company (BBC), which really isn’t much of one these days. The firm’s Lytt-erature touts this line as “the newest single-serve beverage to light up the growing ready-to-drink space.” In plain terms, it’s a 15 percent alcohol-by-volume, malt-based riot punch made in six stupid-simple flavors, including “Blue Raspberry” and “Strawberry Rita” and packaged in a plastic bottle shaped to look like an upside-down lightbulb.
A lightbulb? That’s right: a lightbulb. Because Lytt, you see, is lit.
Or at least, that’s the message the folks at BBC are hoping to get across. “The single-serve convenience factor packs a punch on flavor and ABV while clearly signaling that our drinker is ready to light up the occasion,” Tim Kerrigan, the firm’s associate director of innovation, said in a press release. “We think we’ve got lightning in a bottle with this one and are excited to bring Lytt to even more markets later this year.”
Alas, BBC declined to make Kerrigan et al. available for a phone interview, instead referring Hop Take to co-founder, chairman, and then-and-now chief executive Jim Koch’s appearance at the Goldman Sachs Global Staples Forum in New York City.
The company that helped mainstream craft beer with Samuel Adams and hard cider with Angry Orchard has found its “niche” in the sugary, slop-heavy realm of “fourth-category” drank, its co-founder told Goldman’s ace beverage analyst Bonnie Herzog, according to a report on the talk from Brewbound’s Justin Kendall. This is eminently clear for anyone with eyes to see, but, yes, fine. No argument there! Koch also said that “Beer’s not going to grow again in our lifetimes,” a popular soundbite of his that really turns on whose lifetimes the 76 year-old is talking about. But again, sure: it’s no secret the category has struggled for a long time, and continues to.
To his credit, Koch also got pretty candid about why a company that used to go by the slogan “For the love of beer” has reoriented its focus to the lowest-common-denominator world of gas-station hooch that glows in the dark. (Oh, did I mention Lytt’s spherical packaging glows in the dark? Well, it glows in the dark.) It’s the money, honey! At a suggested retail price of $3.99, he told Herzog, each plastic flask of fermented whatever will earn BBC two and a half times what Truly does on a case-equivalent basis.
In an interview with Beer Business Daily, Kerrigan said BBC’s lightbulb moment (hey-o!) on Lytt came from a brainstorming session. “We think packaging is really where innovation within the category is going, and we need to be a key piece of this,” he said. “And one of our coworkers was like, ‘What about a bulb, and its name is ‘LYTT?’”
First of all, contrary to corporate motivational posters, there is such a thing as a bad idea. Some lamps, no matter how Lytt, should be hidden under the biblical bushel indefinitely. I just want to mark that for posterity. But also. I mean. Come on. Just as industry observers know full well BBC is slinging swill, not Sam Adams, for its shekels these days, it is also extremely obvious why the company was inspired to roll out a fearsomely potent fruity slurry in a globular vessel.
It’s the BuzzBallz of it all! The original orb-shaped saccharine slurper, founded in 2010, had already become a billion-dollar brand by the time the Sazerac Company scooped it up in 2024 for an undisclosed sum. It has been hammering along ever since. According to sales data analyzed by Bump Williams Consulting (BWC) and first reported by Brewbound, BuzzBallz brought in $794 million in the 52 weeks through March 2026 in the NIQ-tracked off-premise alone, logging 50.1 percent growth year-over-year. It’s the fourth-largest “flavored alcohol” — a cross-category pseudosegment BWC uses to compare the market’s various fruity drink-alikes head-to-head — brand family in the country, trailing only White Claw, Twisted Tea, and High Noon Sun Sips by NIQ-universe dollars, in that order.
The leading supplier in this cloying cohort is Mark Anthony Brands — and all the more so now, given since BWC’s memo it acquired the Finnish Long Drink for $325 million. But second is BBC. The House That Sam Adams Built now looks like a tiny home on a confusing campus of metaphorical flavored-alcohol mansions: There’s Chateau Twea, there’s Sun Cruiser Castle, there’s the never-completed, now-crumbling Truly Tower. (At Goldman Sachs’s confab, Koch acknowledged White Claw was the “default” hard seltzer. Again, sure. But it didn’t have to be that way!)
Sure, Dogfish Head Brewery has a hot hand these days, mostly on the strength of its Gen X-baiting Grateful Dead collaboration. However, the brand’s recent return to growth — four straight quarters as of April 15 — is coming after a long, dark night of the soul that saw many quarters of red ink and ~$85 million in impairment charges. Angry Orchard’s story is different in details, but not broad strokes: It also just notched its fourth straight quarter of volume growth, after some very grim years. In the Brewers Association’s latest volume ranking (in which spirits-based ready-to-drinks and flavored malt beverages do not rate), rival Sierra Nevada Brewing Company finally ousted BBC from its long-held No. 2 spot behind D. G. Yuengling & Son. For Koch and company, the future is flavored, whether they like it or not.
The good news is that it is capable of serious success on this sticky, high-test terrain. The bad news is a lot of that success has come from brands that are now in flux, or worse. After two decades of yeomanly work and a blazing burst of growth in the first half of this one, Twisted Tea has cooled off. It’s down 7.1 percent in year-over-year dollars and 9.1 percent by volume in off-premise sales through April 19 at multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana. Truly has been hard to watch for a while, and continues to be: It’s down 14.6 percent dollars and 16.3 percent volume by the same measure. Will its Believe, USA promotion — a World Cup-themed rehash of Whatever, USA, Bud Light’s 2014 “we bought a town” bash — stop the bleeding? I Truly don’t Believe so. (Sorry.)
Sun Cruiser is a bona fide hit, albeit not really an “innovative” one: While BBC has claimed it had been “noodling for a long time” on the vodka-based tea, it kept it unlaunched until 2024, giving Philadelphia’s interloping Stateside a big head start with its segment-leading Surfside line. It’s impressive that Sun Cruiser has fought its way into the top five spirits-based RTDs after less than two full years on the market; on the company’s most recent earnings call, Koch called it “the fastest-growing brand in the category by volume.” But its growth hasn’t been able to offset the company’s losses elsewhere, and depletions were down 4 percent and shipments down 6.9 percent on the quarter.
“We have a great innovation track record,” Koch told analysts on the Q1 call. This is not untrue. But to take that at face value would be to memory-hole plenty of BBC’s misses. From recent memory alone: Bevy (the malt-based long drink dupe branded like a feminine-hygiene product); Loma Vista (a botched tequila-soda collaboration with a… Texas ranch family?); General Admission (a non-alcoholic “fruit brew” to not-answer Athletic Brewing Co.); Tura (hard kombucha); Wild Leaf (another hard tea); and probably a few flops I’m forgetting.
(Hard Mtn. Dew hasn’t been a total flop, but by Koch’s own admission, BBC hasn’t “found [its] niche” with the soft-to-hard PepsiCo partnership, either. It was a drag on depletions last quarter, and given the uproar it caused with BBC’s distributors when its Big Soda counterpart tried its ambitious, ill-fated end-around on the middle tier with Blue Cloud Distribution, it hardly seems worth the hassle.)
There’s also the fact that BBC’s latest bets just aren’t that innovative. Sun Cruiser followed Surfside. Sinless followed Carbliss, the hard-charging, low-bubble vodka-based RTD brand that’s probably best understood as a drinkable version of one of those “Live, Laugh, Love” signs that’s somehow been in every Airbnb you’ve ever stayed at. In addition to following BuzzBallz — which of course makes a malt version, because Sazerac is nothing if not hip to placement arbitrage — Lytt is also following Big Sipz into bulbous hooch-hustling. Which is fine, I guess, given we’re living through bev-alc’s depressingly derivative iterative era. But let’s be real here. No, no other brand is marketing a glow-in-the-dark ball-o’-booze; also no, this is not a meaningful point of differentiation.
To launch Lytt in Florida, Ohio, Texas, Washington, and Illinois, BBC is “spending more money on in-store, that point of sale, that’s really our focus,” Kerrigan told BBD, teasing suction racks, cash register-adjacent collateral, and so forth. “Point of sales actually has been as much of an innovative process on this as anything else,” he added. Again, this is fine, and in fairness to Kerrigan, he seemed to be claiming this approach represented innovation for BBC. But it’s just not innovation as such, because BuzzBallz et al. are already doing it.
What sort of drinker might look fondly on Lytt? Kerrigan told BBD “it could be before going out with your friends if you’re in the [young] LDA crowd, but also that “[w]e’re seeing a lot of middle-aged folks drinking this before going out.” I assume we’ll see a lot more of the latter — your Facebook-poisoned latchkey adults, your downwardly mobile elder Millennials — than the former.
Then again, you know what “they” say happens when you assume.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Last week, The Seattle Times reported that a bulk-wine plant in Washington State went up in flames with about 4.5 million gallons of grape juice inside. Luckily, nobody was harmed — except, possibly, the wine. Which would be bad for the owner, but good for the market, because as we all know, there’s too much of that sloshing around anyway. “Unorthodox solution to the global wine glut just dropped,” I posted on Instagram. A reader from the hops trade slid into my DMs with a note shortly thereafter. “That’s a joke in the hop industry any time supply gets high[:] ‘Be a really good time for a warehouse fire.’” As Hop Take has previously reported, supply of hops currently is high. “Arson” is such a strong word, isn’t it? Can’t we just agree to call it “inventory management?” (This is not legal advice.)
📈 Ups…
Anheuser-Busch InBev sold $21.1 million of Bapple in its first week back in the off-premise… The 6th Circuit ruled Ohio’s out-of-state wine-shipping ban unconstitutional, which the National Beer Wholesalers Association is annoyed about … Maine Beer Co. owner Dan Kleban’s brief Senate run didn’t pan out, but Lunch sure has, with the India pale ale’s sales pulling the firm into the BA’s Top 50 this year…
📉 …and downs
After roughly one (rough) decade, Stone Brewing closed its Richmond digs this past Thursday… Per BeerBoard, the brand with the highest draft share on Cinco de Mayo was somehow Michelob Ultra, what is wrong with you people?… The Bureau of Labor’s latest Consumer Price Index reading shows beer (+3.6 percent year-over-year) trailing all items (+3.8 percent) but ahead of wine and spirits.
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