This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
I’ve had the same encounter multiple times, but I remember one instance vividly. I had finally spotted a canned version of the Penicillin cocktail, by the brand Tip Top, on the counter at my local wine shop. “I’ve been looking for this one,” I told the store clerk. It had been sold out on Tip Top’s website ever since it was released. “Have you tried it?”
“No, I don’t really do canned cocktails,” the clerk said. “If I want a cocktail, I just make one.”
I’ve heard this refrain again and again from wine-shop folks and bartenders whose bars stock canned or “RTD” (ready to drink) cocktails, in industry parlance. I also love to mix my own cocktails, but honestly, the Penicillin—a modern classic created by New York bartender Sam Ross in 2005—is a pain in the ass to make at home. You need to make honey-ginger syrup, you need candied ginger, you need two different kinds of scotch. I don’t tend to stock those things. I appealed to the clerk’s sense of reason: Why wouldn’t you want to have this perfect drink at home without $100 in overhead? Besides, I said, “Sam Ross himself partnered with them to make this one. That doesn’t sell you on it?”
My friend at the counter shrugged. I bought two.
When I got home and poured the cocktail over ice, I was astonished. It tasted incredibly close to the real thing.
The spirits press has long been on the case: RTDs, once a throwaway category, are now often disarmingly delicious. “Canned Cocktails Are Actually, Finally Good,” Eater declared years ago. Business is also good: Even as the American spirits industry continues to get pummeled, the canned cocktail sector grew last year, and it has doubled its market share since 2021. Yet the snobs persist, as if you’d only buy one of these things if you aren’t able to mix anything more complex than a gin and tonic. (I also buy those in cans sometimes—why not? The Social Hour brand’s is nice.)
“There’s absolutely still the person that we speak to who says, ‘Canned cocktails not for me,’ ” said Neal Cohen, the co-founder of Tip Top, when I called and asked if he also encountered the canned-cocktail jerks. “It’s actually not a problem with canned cocktails. That’s not the problem. It’s canned cocktails that are poorly made. Unfortunately, as we’ve been around—we’ve been around since 2018—many, many, many more entrants have come into the category, and seldom are they a great representation of the potential the category holds.”
Tip Top, with its delightfully tiny cans, launched with standards the Negroni and the Old-Fashioned, and has since branched out into modern classics like the Jungle Bird and my beloved Penicillin. It’s one thing to mix a few spirits together and can it, as with the simplest cocktails, but the newer additions to the company’s lineup are complex drinks with citrus and other flavors that are hard to replicate when not fresh. Yet Tip Top largely pulls it off.
“This is one of those misconceptions with canned cocktails in general,” Cohen said. “It’s not a shortcut to a cocktail. It’s the true cocktail. And that’s achieved by working with Miles Macquarrie at Kimball House on every single one of our cocktails. It starts with him making his gold standard of that cocktail off of his bar, and then what we’re doing is coming up with a scaled recipe using real ingredients to get as close to that as we can.” (Asked how he also got a world-famous bartender like Sam Ross on board to make drinks for the brand, Cohen said it took a whole lot of emails and accolades.)
J. Bryan Lowder
It’s One of the Worst Things You Can Put in Your Cocktails. Everyone Insists On Doing It Anyway.
Read More
Cohen told me another misconception is that canned cocktails are purchased only by drinkers looking for something easy on the go, whether at events or park dates or the like. In fact, most people, the company has found, buy them and drink them at home. They buy them for parties so they don’t have to spend their entertaining time making drinks, or they get them with a “specific occasion in mind,” he said.
Then there are people like me. I have an entire cabinet in my tiny kitchen devoted to cocktail ware. I love making drinks at home, as everyone in my life knows, such that I cannot escape a holiday season without acquiring more cocktail stuff. (If my in-laws are reading this, I love the standing brass mixing set!) But there are lots of times it makes more sense for me to crack open a can and pour it over ice than to mix a drink myself. In the case of the Penicillin, it’s simply a matter of resources—unless I was making the drink for a crowd, I wouldn’t bother to collect and produce all the ingredients. If I’m in the kitchen cooking, which I often am, I don’t necessarily want to stop what I’m doing to bartend when I could pull one out of the fridge, ready to go. And there’s the simple fact that canned cocktails are charming to explore, as the category explodes and so many new options enter the market. It’s a shame to box yourself out of them because you are a “not that kind of person.” It’s fun over here.
Even so, in writing this article, I discovered I am also a canned-cocktail snob, just not in the traditional sense. Louis Catizone, the co-owner of another of my favorite brands, New York-based St. Agrestis, told me the company’s famed bottled Negroni was originally intended to promote its Inferno bitter product, a heady alternative to Campari that is worth seeking out if you enjoy such things. If it held up in the most famous red-bitter drink, the company reasoned, people would know it’s worth buying. But the bottled Negroni exploded in popularity and, along with St. Agrestis’ well-known nonalcoholic Phony Negroni, came to dominate the business. (Now the brand even makes a Negroni in a box, which yields 20 cocktails and makes a good party trick.) Catizone made it clear that what I love about canned cocktails—their craftsmanship, their variety, their novelty—is not necessarily what other people love about them.
“There’s this concept of ready-to-drink, and then we’ve actually started to refer to our products as ready-to-serve, meaning they’re not really intended to be consumed out of the vessel,” he told me. “The interesting thing about ready-to-drink versus ready-to-serve is our products are intended to go into a glass and to be served over ice, where most RTDs are intended to be just consumed right out of the can.”
-
It’s One of the Worst Things You Can Put in Your Cocktails. Everyone Insists On Doing It Anyway.
-
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
A Guide to the Epstein Files if You, Like Me, Just Need to Know What Timothée Chalamet Is Doing in There
I have to admit I am a fraud in this sense—I don’t usually drink canned (or bottled) cocktails out of the can. I get out a nice glass and nice ice, and maybe even an orange peel if I have it, when I open a St. Agrestis Negroni. Do I now have candied ginger in the house for garnish when I buy the Tip Top Penicillin? Maybe. It lasts a long time. But I’m choosing to think of this as respect for the form. If people want to imbibe directly from the container, well, there is no judgment here, where we like canned cocktails.
“We dealt with a lot of doubt in the beginning,” Catizone told me. “The big question that we always got asked—I actually remember there was a buyer at Eataly’s wine shop on 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan who said the consumers would always come in and be like, ‘These are really nice bottles, but is it good?’ That was always the question: ‘But is it good? But is it good? But is it good?’ ”
If you think of yourself as someone who has no use for the single-serve cocktail revolution, please think twice the next time you see one on your wine-shop counter. I’m here to tell you: Some of them are very, very good.
