It’s annoying when a meme arrives in your life before the product it is meming about is available in the country you live in. It is as though there is an inferior broadband connection on your material reality. I know, just from an ambient awareness of the US comedian Trevor Wallace – who gave birth to the meme “drinks White Claw once” – that the drink White Claw is very popular in the US. I also know – from the same source – that “there ain’t no laws when you’re drinking claws”. Yet I could only source a White Claw from the US. If you went into a pub asking for a “spiked seltzer”, they would most probably just get a soda water and put some vodka in it, at least if they had any initiative.
Across a spectrum of zingy flavours – lime, grapefruit, cherry – White Claw is, as you may have guessed, a fizzy drink with booze in it. You can’t really taste the booze because your brain just shovels it into the category of fruity carbonation. I like it because it reminds me of my dad, who would put alcohol in just about anything: whisky in tea; vodka in chocolate milk; one time, with limited options in a car (not driving, I hope, although that would be a very my dad thing to do), he mixed grappa with Benylin to create a cocktail known as the “coughtail”.
The US market for drinks that look like soft drinks but will get you drunk is huge – you can buy alcoholic fizzy water and “hard” kombucha. Sales of White Claw grew 283% in the year to July, according to data-measurement firm Nielsen. That’s why there’s no export market; they can’t make enough for themselves. By September, US supermarkets were out of White Claw, a situation that the nation has partly resolved by adding alcohol to coffee, but we will come to that later.
White Claw, incidentally, shot to prominence so quickly that it found itself inserted into the culture wars: what was later discovered to be a hoax account on Twitter published an image that appeared to show the White Claw account supporting Blue Lives Matter, a pro-police countermovement to Black Lives Matter. White Claw had nothing to do with it, and so the attempt to cancel the brand was diffused.
So, why are these drinks so popular? They are said to have a “wellness angle” – but that appears to be that they are billed as having a low alcohol content. And it is between 3% and 7%, which is quite a tolerance band (there’s a huge difference between 4.5% and 5%, as anyone who has accidentally tried to drink six pints of San Miguel will know). They are also lower in calories than, say, a wine spritzer, although that is also pretty marginal.
You will be wondering how this differs from the alcopops of the 90s, violently coloured neon drinks that attracted peculiar amounts of moral opprobrium, back in the day when we didn’t have more important things to get puffed up about. The Co-op banned sales of alcopops in June 1997: five weeks after the Labour landslide, when things could only get better, when Britannia was finally cool, people were so worried about children getting hooked on alcohol because it was turquoise that there were supermarket wars over who was the most socially responsible, mediated through Hooch and Two Dogs lemonade. The arrival of alcohol-spiked milks Moo and Super Milch that year was also taken as a tilt towards the youth market, although presumably they weren’t intended for the classic milk consumer, the baby. One slightly half-hearted corporate defence at the time was that alcopops were intended for women, who wanted to drink without smelling of alcohol. I feel sure I heard someone on the radio use the word “housewife”.
In the US during the same period, Zima was the alcopop, and even though it was marketed obsessively to men, only women drank it, hence “bitch beer”. There’s a lot of raw misogyny in the spiked-soft-drink culture.
Anyway, with autumn upon us, enter canned “hard coffee”: a generic alcohol base mixed with cold brew or coffee extract, milk and sugar. Is it dangerous, concerned citizens ask, remembering their Red Bull-and-vodka disasters of last century? Not really, reply other citizens, who have been drinking irish coffee and espresso martinis since before Starbucks existed (yes, really). In case of category confusion, bear in mind: this is not a morning drink. There is no such thing as a morning drink.
