Ready-to-drink cocktails may not appeal much to purists, but it’s clear that customer demand is there—and plenty of distilleries and ambitious brands are putting in the time and effort to develop products meant to be worthy of an upscale bar.
It should be clear by now that this isn’t only a game for the biggest companies, and craft distilleries are in a good position to offer flavorful, high-margin products. While canned cocktails come with their own challenges, including package integrity, higher-proof bottled cocktails should be in the comfort zone of most craft distilleries.
Smaller independents such as Tattersall in River Falls, Wisconsin, and Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh are leaning into their strengths, embracing high-end ingredients—and some careful math—to formulate and dial in their RTD products.
Here is some of what they’ve learned.
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Test Recipes at the Bar
Both Tattersall and Wigle have the advantage of testing cocktails in their tasting rooms—the bar is where their R&D begins.
Tattersall founder Jon Kreidler says the old fashioned was the most popular drink at their cocktail bars in River Falls and in Minneapolis. So, that was the first one they bottled—but it wasn't as simple as just porting the recipe over to packaging.
“You can’t just take it starting from the bar and put it into a bottle,” Kreidler says. That’s for reasons of cost and shelf stability, among others. “You have to figure out how the consumer’s going to drink the cocktail or spirit.”
For example: Are they drinking it straight or diluting it? Tattersall’s Old Fashioned—bottled at 35 percent ABV—features rye whiskey, orange zest, sour cherries, and aromatic bitters. The distillery couldn’t simply bottle a bigger batch of the bar’s cocktail. For starters, they significantly reduced the sugar in the bottled version, which meant testing different syrups, actual sugars, and house-made sweeteners.
Tattersall also created its own bitters for the product, thus lowering the production cost. The distillery had been using Angostura bitters at the bar, but using those in bulk wasn’t a cost-effective option. An additional wrinkle: Tattersall had to get approval from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for their house-made bitters, and that meant additional time and effort.
“You could just add the ingredients into the old fashioned and get it approved that way, but we went a step further,” Kreidler says. “We basically make every little piece to make it work.”
For products like this, a distillery’s own cocktail bar can be a place of built-in research and development. Starting small and proving the concept is important, Kreidler says. Also, during this R&D phase, stability isn’t a problem—that’s a technical challenge that can be tackled once you’ve landed on a winning recipe that can be packaged.
“Prove it out before you step into it too big,” Kreidler says. “There’s a ton of competition in this space now that simply didn’t exist five years ago. Be mindful of how the consumer is going to drink it. … I would say to start small, prove it out, and make adjustments.”
Dial In a Consistent Strength
Wigle in Pittsburgh currently sells five types of bottled cocktails: a Sazerac-inspired Bird in Hand, a Manhattan, and three types of Old Fashioned: Bourbon, Rye, and Rum. Wigle distiller Brian Waryck, who manages product development, says that crafting an RTD cocktail begins with a lot of math and a good workbook. For him, formulation starts with figuring out the proof gallons of the spirit and then adding sugar according to those proof gallons.
“So, we go by gram per proof gallon,” Waryck says. “For our Old Fashioned, we’re adding 721 grams of sugar for every proof gallon that we have of whiskey—so, it just keeps everything standardized nicely—and then scaling it up from there.”
Each distillery will want to find its own preferred sweetness level for the packaged drink; Waryck says their bottled Old Fashioneds are slightly sweeter than those served at their bar—and that was driven by testing with customers.
Waryck says Wigle has done a lot of testing with proof obscuration: “We get our proof down to a point where we know adding sugar will only bring down our proof.” With the Old Fashioned, he says they want the whiskey to be 70 proof before adding sugar and getting down to 64 proof. At this point, he also knows that 13.5 pounds of sugar adds a gallon of volume for their product. (Thus, 1.6 kilos of sugar would add about one liter of volume.)
That simplicity has made it an efficient process for the Wigle team. “That’s been the nicest thing for us to do,” Waryck says. “We can limit how many proof obscurations and experiments we need to do on this whiskey; [we] just make sure that we have it a little simplified for us. And we can just add water at the end. Much easier than if, say, we’re still at 70 proof after we added the sugar. ... It adds up, timewise.”
A simple timeline of RTD cocktail-making may look like this: First, you harvest some bourbon for regular blending, portioning off some of that whiskey for use in the old fashioned or other cocktail. Wigle gauges that spirit, gets it down to 70 proof, and then adds brown sugar via a pump that cycles it through the spirit. (If you use that kind of sugar, he says, be careful that it doesn’t clog your pipes.) After that, he adds bitters and filters the mixture.
For clarification and a cleaner look, Wigle uses a plate-and-frame filter like those found in wineries and many breweries. Afterward, Waryck does another proof-obscuration test to verify the proof. If it’s high, he adds water and tests it again. Once the proof is on target, they bottle the batch.
Mixing in multiple spirits adds complexity, but it remains a matter of figuring out the proof gallons used in the cocktail. Make those percentages of your total ingredient list, Waryck says, and then combine them in a way that is functional for use.
“At least you know if you’re adding a sugary spirit to your whiskey already, you’re going to have an obscure proof,” he says. “But if you have that at the proof that you bottle at originally, you’re pretty certain on what that proof will be. You can take that and combine them, and just kind of have a generalized idea of what the proof is, and then you can work from there. So, it helps you save a bit of time, instead of doing multiple proof obscurations.”
Know Your Ingredients to Maximize Shelf Stability
Most bottled spirits are inherently shelf-stable, but RTDs are another matter. There are many considerations here, and they begin with ingredient selection.
At Tattersall, for example, they don’t like to see ingredients settle out to the bottom of the bottle while sitting on the shelf, so they avoid certain additions.
“Pectin coming from citrus rinds can really cause problems,” Kreidler says. “Fresh juices are extremely difficult. We prefer to distill flavors to get the essence [or] flavor instead of simply using fresh ingredients—mainly because they won’t stay fresh forever.”
Pasteurizing fresh ingredients is helpful, he says, and good filtering is key. Using oils or essences can also help you achieve your flavor target, he says.
At Wigle, Waryck says, they opt to focus on shelf-stable ingredients. They know that their house-made bitters are stable, for example. They also don’t use true vermouth in their bottled Manhattan; instead, they use a vermouth-like spirit that they make in-house and know it’s stable, too. Some ingredients age better than others. Cherries can work well, Waryck says; as the product oxidizes, cherry can develop some pleasant raisin-like flavors.
Another way to ensure stability is to package at a relatively high proof. Wigle bottles most of its RTD cocktails at 64 proof; Tattersall’s bottled cocktails are 60 or 70 proof (though it also sells some canned cocktails at 4.5–7 percent ABV). Dosing with nitrogen also can flush out oxygen, leading to a longer-lasting product.
Heat-testing—or simply leaving bottles out in the sun for a while—is an accelerated way to see how well your RTD cocktail holds up to age. It’s also good practice to set aside bottles from various batches and test them periodically.
Making any ingredients you can in-house not only saves on cost, but it also gives your distillery considerable control over their stability. At Wigle, they’re not only making their own bitters and “vermouth,” but they’re also making their own coffee for an espresso martini.
“We’re making all this stuff ourselves,” Waryck says. “We have all these finished products that we like. If we can use them for other things as well—to make good cocktails that we can put in a bottle—yeah, it's great.”
At Tattersall, Kreidler also recommends keeping it simple and familiar—as with an old fashioned. “Anything too weird, people get afraid of it,” he says.
Expanding Your Reach
There are plenty of reasons why RTD cocktails make good business sense—they can be made efficiently and at relatively low cost—but the biggest is customer appeal.
The reason for that appeal is right there in the acronym—they are “ready to drink.” It’s not hard to make an old fashioned at home, but ease of use after a busy day or at a social gathering is something that many customers value.
There is bonus marketing value, too. An RTD cocktail is often the thing that gets drinkers interested in the base spirit, leading them to the distillery doors.
“That’s been our biggest push—ease of use,” Waryck says. “And it gets people more interested in your spirit, if they like sweeter things.”
