• by Steve Ellwanger , May 1, 2023

It’s going to be a truly interesting summer for Boston Beer Co.

While the first quarter ended April 1 is a typically slow period for the nation’s largest publicly traded craft brewer, Boston Beer lost $9 million due in part to the rebranding of Truly Vodka Seltzer.

By Memorial Day, Boston Beer expects to have achieved full distribution of a reformulated and repackaged Truly hard seltzer lineup—which is #2 in the densely populated category behind White Claw.

In June, Truly Vodka Seltzer—launched last fall—will reappear on shelves as Truly Vodka Soda.

“We continue to believe that the beyond beer category, where we have an advantaged portfolio, will grow faster than the traditional beer market over the next several years,” Boston Beer founder and chairman Jim Koch said on an earnings call with financial analysts last week.

“And there is certainly a tidal wave of new products coming from literally everywhere. It’s not even just traditional alcoholic beverage producers, [but] soft drink producers—all the way to energy drink producers.”

As in the prior quarter, Twisted Tea remained a bright spot.

Twisted Tea posted a 34% dollar sales increase in Q1—growth that CEO Dave Burwick attributed to several factors including increased media spending and attracting new Latino and African American consumers.

“Additionally, we’re in the early stages of launching 110-calorie Twisted Tea Light nationally,” Burwick noted.

The company's Q1 depletion rate—the number of cases resold by distributors—fell 6% from the prior-year period amid declines in hard seltzer, hard-cider brand Angry Orchard and Samuel Adams and Dogfish Head beers.

On the beer side, Koch was asked by Jefferies analyst Kevin Grundy to comment on the controversy that has engulfed Anheuser-Busch because of its partnership with transgender advocate Dylan Mulvaney.

Sales of Bud Light have declined by double digits in recent weeks.

“Honestly, this is something we haven’t seen before in beer. I’ve been making beer for 38 years. This is a first. It had a duration and a depth that it’s nothing that’s happened before,” said Koch.

“We’ve all had missteps. And we’ve all recovered from them without any permanent damage. I was talking to some wholesalers today that told me that it’s real and it’s large. Even they don’t know how to predict this.”