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Tax Policy Gave Us White Claw
- padseeker 7y agoThere are some interesting tidbits (tax laws between beer vs distilled spirits), the reason everyone I know drinks it is it's a low carb alcoholic beverage. You can bring it ready made to a party, which is easier than mixing a drink of seltzer and vodka at your friends house.
- reaperducer 7y agowhich is easier than mixing a drink of seltzer and vodka at your friends house When I was a very young child (six or seven), it was my job at my parent's parties to mix the gin and tonics. If mixing seltzer and vodka at a party is too hard, it's time to stop drinking.
- NegativeLatency 7y agoIn addition to the taxes mentioned in the article, It's also important to note that in many states in the US distilled beverages are only permitted to be sold in certain licensed stores. (Oregon for example has liquor stores, and you can't buy distilled things at a regular grocery store)
- nimbius 7y ago>As a gay man in New York with a well-stocked bar, I am used to my friends coming to my apartment and asking for vodka sodas. meh. As a gay man in a midwestern rust belt town with a used fridge that makes exorcist noises, I am used to my friends assuming I drink vodka soda. I got a six pack of "white claws" from a female friend and couldnt choke down more than a few sips. If youre going to drink a vodka soda, for god sake avoid this landfill fodder and pour one yourself. vodka comes everything from cotton candy to bacon, so theres really no excuse. TL;DR: White Claw is the Keurig of mixed drinks.
- brianbreslin 7y ago@nimbius actually keurig is now the keurig of mixed drinks: https://www.drinkworks.com https://www.drinkworks.com
- reaperducer 7y agoVery interesting. Though, currently only available in Florida and Missouri.
- equalunique 7y agoI don't understand why this comment should have been downvoted. I disagree because I like White Claw, but downvoting someone due to drink preferences seems rather hostile.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 7y agoBecause the comment itself is hostile! There's no reason to be so snooty to anyone that likes it. The horror of a Keurig!!!
- kjs3 7y agoApparently where you're from humor and hostile are commonly conflated?
- vertex-four 7y agoMeh, I'm from the UK, this was more on the hostile side of things. Perhaps a misjudgement of how tone maps to text, but yeah.
- logfromblammo 7y agoMidwestern humor isn't for everyone. It has a bit of a sour aftertaste. Non-Midwesterners may mistake it for hostility, in the same way that non-New Yorkers might mistake an offhanded cultural observation--or anything the New Yorker says, really--for being a rude, arrogant prick. (Edit: Not you. The author of the article is the New Yorker.) (Edit 2: If you are a Midwesterner, then you're not a non-Midwesterner, by definition.) (Edit 3: Let's not even go into how someone with a used Exorcist fridge is snooty for dumping on Keurigs. That's some Midwestern humor right there.)
- kingbirdy 7y ago> Because White Claw is brewed like beer, it’s taxed like beer, which is important because beer is taxed in the U.S. at a much lower rate than spirits. If you made a product similar to White Claw by mixing vodka with seltzer and putting it in a can, a six-pack would be subject to almost $2 in additional taxes when sold in New York City. Important takeaway from the article. This also answers my own question as to why drinks like Mike's Hard, Smirnoff Ice, etc are malt beverages. Hopefully the sugar base instead of a grain base catches on for new drinks.
- flanbiscuit 7y agoDoes it being a sugar base make the alcohol closer to a rum?
- stochastic_monk 7y agoBeing made from sugar, it more completely ferments. Beer has residual short-chain carbohydrates that leave calories and provide body. It wouldn’t be much like rum unless it were brewed with dark sugar.
- Mikeb85 7y ago> leave calories Ethanol itself is most of the calories in any alcoholic drink.
- monocasa 7y agoFor people curious on the breakdown: A 12 oz can of 5% abv is .6 fluid ounces of ethanol. That's 14 grams, or 98 calories. A Budweiser has 145 calories, White Claw has 100, Old Chub Scottish ale has 264. Basically I see the benefit over most craft beer, but over macros it's not that big of a difference.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoIf you add up the average consumption of alcohol for an American in a year, the difference between 100 calories per unit and 145 calories per unit amounts to something like an additional 45-60 minutes of exercise per week to offset. There’s a lot of variables there, so it could potentially be more or less, but it’s non-trivial.
- bsharitt 7y agoNot just taxes, but being "beer" allows it to be sold in grocery stores and corner stores where a drink made from distilled spirits(even if watered down to the 5% alcohol) would have to be sold in a liquor stores in many states.
- SilasX 7y agoIs there a reason no one says, "hm, that don't make a lick of sense, let's change that?"
- joshstrange 7y agoEntrenched industries benefit from regulation and will lobby to keep the odds in their favor.
- SilasX 7y agoSure, but which industry specifically? Spirits makers would benefit. Who loses? Those who are hellbent on only every using malt to produce these kinds of beverage?
- lotsofpulp 7y agoLiquor store owners. In NJ, politicians bribed by restaurants are blocking breweries from serving food.
- hollerith 7y agoIn states where it is currently hard to get a license to sell spirits, the stores that currently have those licenses would lose.
- asdff 7y agoThere can't be too many states where the liquor lobby has a strong hold. Pretty much every liquor store I've encountered is a hole in the wall. How could they possibly stand in the way of the producer lobby?
- alexhutcheson 7y agoThis is also why the European version of Four Loko contained vodka, while the American version used malt liquor.
- grawprog 7y agoI was confused by another commenter's post saying Smirnoff's ice and Mike's hard were made with malt liquor, both are made with vodka here. But, booze can only be sold in licensed stores here so there's not much incentive to make them different and I imagine mixing vodka with carbonated sugar water is cheaper than using malt liquor.
- vinceguidry 7y agoI've been mixing a shot of whiskey, bitters, and club soda with a splash to a few glugs of ginger ale/beer, still playing with the mix. Would be nice to start seeing better ready-to-drink options.
- kart23 7y agoFor real. I was in UK for a week, the mixed drinks over there are amazing. Had something called wkd, which is apparently regarded as a pretty trashy drink, but it tasted like fizzy gatorade, couldn't even tell it had alcohol in it.
- traek 7y agoWKD tastes good because there's a ton of sugar in it. There's plenty of sugary alcopops in America already (Smirnoff Ice, Mike's Hard Lemonade, Four Loko, etc.). White Claw is interesting because it's low-carb.
- reaperducer 7y agocouldn't even tell it had alcohol in it So.... what's the point? Why not just drink Gatorade with seltzer, and save yourself some money?
- CydeWeys 7y agoGatorade doesn't get you drunk.
- EpicEng 7y agoIs this an honest question? I can't believe that it is...
- kart23 7y agohonestly, the taste of alcohol is repulsive to me, but I enjoy drinking with friends. I find myself physically unable to drink hard liquor, and beer becomes tough after a couple drinks.
- 7y ago
- rjeli 7y agoJapan is reversed - beer is taxed much more than spirits, so gas stations carry $2 highball tall boys. Plus, public drinking is legal..
- RyJones 7y agoAnd those canned highballs are available at many street side vending machines, as well. Same planet, different world
- topmonk 7y agoJapan was the only place I've been where one could buy a 4 liter jug of whiskey. At a convenience store.
- nocsi 7y agoYou can buy hard liquor at convenience stores in WA state
- hirundo 7y ago* waves magic wand * * poof! - Constitutional amendments are passed in every state requiring sales tax to apply to all items at an equal rate. Politicians suddenly have less power to punish or privilege individual sectors and industries, and so there is less reason to lobby and corrupt them. Sin taxes go away, so constituents are nudged and nannied and pandered to less. Much labor to track and charge differential taxes is disappeared. * * wakes up * Damn.
- CydeWeys 7y agoWhy should sales tax be the same for all items? Why should we, e.g., pay the same tax on groceries as on cigarettes?
- duxup 7y agoI'm not answering for hirundo as I suspect our views are different. But generally speaking it has been recognized that broad based sales taxes across all products is more stable when it comes to various economic downturns and etc. Same goes for just say property taxes that cover X, but not Y property. Some sin taxes that get tagged to be used for "good things" often have bad results if usage drops and the "good things" that we previously wanted to fun suddenly have no (or a dramatic drop) in funding. I'm not saying anyone shouldn't / can't do such things but there are reasons to avoid tax policies where things are taxes dramatically differently. How much "dramatically" is obviously up for endless debate. That doesn't mean "tax should be the same for all items" but keeping close to that concept is not a bad idea.
- pmiller2 7y agoThat’s more of an argument for not using sin taxes to fund anything other than public health measures to combat the effects of consuming the thing that’s being taxed.
- duxup 7y agoIt is but it demonstrates why you want a more even tax base just to help ride out any changes in economics or usage. Also even direct sin taxes tied to things might be hard. If we all stop smoking, there still be cancer related to smoking... Gas tax to fund roads, and increased fuel efficiency is another example.
- Agathos 7y ago"It doesn’t contain vodka or any other distilled spirits. Instead it is made through fermentation, like beer, but starting from a base of sugar instead of cereal grains like barley." This is a roundabout way of saying it's undistilled vodka. All spirits are fermented before distillation (or else what is there to distill?), and some vodkas already start with pure sugar instead of grains, potatoes, or fruit.
- draw_down 7y agoWell, OK. They use the word "distilled" to distinguish between the two, so I'm not sure I agree it's as obfuscatory as you imply.
- jdminhbg 7y ago> This is a roundabout way of saying it's undistilled vodka. Not really. Since you can make vodka from the same cereal grains that beer is made from, you could also describe beer as undistilled vodka, but that wouldn't make a ton of sense. Its major similarity to vodka is its neutral taste, not its base ingredients.
- tempsy 7y agoPersonally I've just started drinking (very occasionally) low calorie beer. My favorite is Corona Premier. 90 calories + 2.6g carbs (4% ABV) vs 100 calories + 2g for a White Claw (5% ABV). Less alcohol, more refreshing, tastes pretty much like regular Corona, and something about drinking Mexican beer always reminds me of sitting on a beach.
- oftenwrong 7y ago>something about drinking Mexican beer always reminds me of sitting on a beach That "something" is affective conditioning from years of exposure to advertising, and exposure to the world that the advertising created.
- rootw0rm 7y agounless you've actually drank lots of Mexican beer on a beach. San Diego native here.
- simonsarris 7y agoAmusingly tax policy also allegedly gave us brandy. When you're taxed by volume (such as by the cask or barrel of wine) you may wish to dodge some taxes by distilling your wine product into brandy ("burned wine") to concentrate the volume, with the aim of re-constituting it with water for consumption, later. Then of course you find out the reconstitution tastes nothing like the original wine, and you also may discover that leaving it in the wooden casks makes a pleasant drink on its own...
- tptacek 7y agoThis is also a reason not to drink cask-strength whiskey straight: to wit, you're not meant to; you buy cask-strength so you're paying for less water, since you can provide that yourself.
- klyrs 7y agoUnless you enjoy the strong flavor. I don't drink alcohol but I do drink espresso: ristretto, no adulterants (except the occasional mandarin peel -- I'm not above a little variety). I dislike americanos almost as much as I hate long pulls. The intensity is a significant component of my enjoyment (same with blue cheese, hot sauce, etc.) and if I drank, I'm positive that I'd find cask strength to be the best strength.
- tptacek 7y agoAn expert argument against drinking cask straight, one I'm not qualified to evaluate but can repeat here, is that high-proof alcohol actually impedes your ability to perceive the characteristics of the spirit itself. If you just like the taste of very strong alcohol, dilute some Everclear down; don't waste money on cask whiskey (for the most part, the only whiskeys sold at cask strength are expensive, premium expressions). I sometimes drink Four Roses cask-strength straight, because I'm lazy, but also cask-strength Four Roses is not all that high-proof. But I wouldn't drink Thomas Handy straight; it would be a waste.
- stock_toaster 7y ago
- tptacek 7y agoBarro means that it gave us White Claw in the sense that we don't instead have canned vodka tonics (in effect: alcoholic seltzer), because vodka is distilled, and White Claw's cane-sugar-brewed alcohol is a tax workaround. We have the product category itself --- alcoholic seltzer --- on its own merits, according to Barro. There's no escaping it.
- munk-a 7y ago> A problem with malternatives has been the need to find ways to mask the beer-like flavor that results from brewing. To that end, these drinks have added sugar and strong citrus flavors, which a lot of consumers like. Nice! Our tax laws encourage companies to make less palatable goods that then require more added sugar to compensate thus upping everyone's carbohydrate intake without it actually tasting as good as those carbs would be in a cake or some such. How wonderful! /s
- nategri 7y agoEndlessly frustrates me how much of the food economy is focused on producing cheap carbohydrates. This is perverse regulatory pressure.
- core-questions 7y agoCheap carbohydrates keep us fed and happy. What if I told you that not everyone needs to look like a fitness model to live a reasonably content existence?
- admax88q 7y agoProteins and fats can keep us fed and happy as well. Also being healthier can keep lead to being happier.
- simonsarris 7y agoDo they keep us happy? Or would depression rates be better if we had fewer cheap carbs and more quality calories?
- lotsofpulp 7y ago70%+ of Americans are overweight, 30%+ are obese. We’re not at any risk of having too many people look like fitness models.
- diminoten 7y agoYeah, filling bellies to keep people alive really pisses me off too...
- throwaway13337 7y agoFinland has a huge culture for drinking Lonkero or Long Drink - very similar to this and for the same reason. Fermented beverages there are taxed like beer so these long drinks are made as such. These are on tap in all the bars. It seems to have less of a stigma there than drinking malt beverages in the states. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonkero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonkero
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoIn Finland, the difference between fermented and distilled products was not taxes, but that until very recently it was illegal for anyone but Alko (the local alcohol monopoly) to sell anything that was distilled. The law was changed like a year ago and now only the alcohol content matters, anything with less than 5.5% vol can be sold in stores. Fermented beverages used to enjoy strong sales, but it seems like tastes are rapidly shifting towards distilled ones. IMO they generally taste better.
- GordonS 7y agoSounds similar to Norway, where only there is a max alcohol % (5%, IIRC) can be sold in supermarkets, and anything stronger is only available through the state monopoly, Vinmonopolet. In Western countries outwith the Nordics, this may sound awful, but I've come to appreciate it. Vinmonopolet stores sell a curated stock of high quality alcohol drinks, and their staff are invariably both passionate and highly knowledgeable. In short, the ethos is "quality over quantity" - and I like it. For some context, I live in the UK, but work for the Norwegian division of a megacorp, and have travelled to Norway frequently for decades.
- cat199 7y agoin the us, we also have 'good liquor stores' and 'regular ones', the market is lucrative enough to support such things without a mandated government monopoly. same should go for UK as well I presume..
- 7y ago
- monocasa 7y agoI mean, there's more to it than that. A friend of mine is a prominent head brewer in the Denver area, and a couple weekends ago we cranked the numbers and figured out that the cans for hard seltzer are more expensive than the contents (aka the actual drink) from a BoM perspective. A labeled can is something like 14 cents, and the contents were something 10 cents. For a can of beer, the contents are closer to 50 cents. The margins are just stupid good. Apparently Upslope brewing here already makes more profit on their seltzer than all of their beer.
- Godel_unicode 7y agoThe same type of margins apply to vodka and gin vs aged spirits like whiskey, whisky, and to a lesser extent tequila and rum. No warehousing, no barrels, no forecasting demand a decade out, etc. If you love booze, you make beer/whiskey/tequila. If you love money you make vodka. Edit: see also, wine.
- zeroego 7y agoI would guess that the keto craze taking off has helped as well. White Claw is very low carb.
- bkjelden 7y agoWhat's crazy to me (also in the Denver area) is that the national brands (White Claw, Truly) are the same price as the local craft brewer's offerings (Upslope's Spiked Snowmelt, Oskar Blue's Wild Basin). The national brands have to be making an absolutely massive profit on these.
- gojomo 7y agoAny chance you're calculating BoM costs on the assumption a distilled/pure alcohol is used as an ingredient? As this articles highlights, these recent "hard seltzers" actually use a brewing process, apparently for tax purposes.
- ratacat 7y agoThere are commercial scale providers of bulk alcohol that is taxably considered beer. It's not quite as cheap as neutral grain spirits, but ours definitely a lot cheaper then brewing it.
- shiftoutbox 7y agoOne why do I care if the writer is gay ? Also “used to” , what do you mean by that ?
- exabrial 7y agoMy opinion is taxes are theft in the vast majority of cases.
- BasicObject 7y agoSlightly related: I tried to buy an expensive used camera from one of my favorite online retailers from New York and discovered that used electronics were now being taxed. They lost a big sale yesterday.
- falcongod082 7y agoNah, you're already a part of their spreadsheet, they don't need everyone as a customer, the profits still roll in.
- walrus01 7y agosee also, bumwine: http://www.bumwine.com/ http://www.bumwine.com/
- ezoe 7y agoIn Japan, the tax for beer is insanely high. "Free beer" doesn't happen in Japan because beer is expensive. It makes most major beer companies R&D beer-taste products which is by definition of the tax law, not a beer. On the other hand, the canned vodka soda so cheap.
- ykevinator 7y agoWhat is bom? Also where is the bargain basement competitor? That's gotta be coming right? Seems like this is super easy and cheap to make.