As a category, ready-to-drink cocktails (RTDs) offer enticing sales potential to small distilleries that can plan and execute the right approach. However, there’s a lot more to it than packaging drinks from the bar and placing them on store shelves. It takes careful R&D to select ingredients and processes to arrive at a product that’s shelf stable, doesn’t lose flavor, and looks attractive once poured.
One of the most popular ingredients for RTDs also happens to be one of the trickiest: fruit.
Like RTDs, fruit also comes with a wide range of decisions to make for bottled or canned cocktails. Besides the variety of fruit, do you use puree, fruit syrup, dried fruit, or something else?
Here, three craft distilleries share their insights on using fruit successfully to release a product that remains attractive on the shelf and delicious in the glass.
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Shelf Stability in a Fruit Cocktail
The team at Chicago’s Maplewood Brewery and Distillery made it a high priority to ensure stability in their Rum Punch, a canned cocktail featuring hibiscus, pineapple, orange, and cinnamon.
The question, says Adam Smith, Maplewood’s distiller and special project manager, was, “Can we keep the flavors intact and not have them explode on the shelf?”
Rum Punch is the only RTD cocktail in which Maplewood includes actual fruit concentrate—cranberry, in this instance—besides orange and pineapple flavorings. They also add potassium sorbate to help with stabilization, mainly because of the cranberry concentrate.
“We've seen these out for over a year, and they’re still just fine,” says Ari Megalis, cofounder and head distiller. “I think it’s because of the low pH of the concentrate itself and the particular cocktail; pH definitely does matter.”
The Rum Punch has a pH around 3.0, which—in tandem with potassium sorbate—curbs any yeast or other microbial growth in the can. Maplewood adds the preservative at packaging and chooses not to pasteurize.
Courtesy Central Standard Craft Distillery
Flavorings and Fruits
Fruit extracts are another option for distilleries that produce RTDs. Such flavorings typically offer better stability than fresh fruit, which breaks down when sitting on a warm shelf.
“We found the extracted flavors—once they’re introduced into this environment, locked in with pH, and really enhanced by the assets that we add—they’re pretty stable,” Smith says. “We’ve had some of these years later that we’re still proud of—we’re not selling them on the shelf years later, but we’re keeping them for QC in our building. … I wouldn’t say they’re just as good as the day they were canned, but they’re very respectable.”
At the Family Jones Distillery in Loveland, Colorado, lead distiller Jamie Burns uses fresh citrus in their orange liqueur, with a portion of that liqueur going into an RTD Cosmopolitan—part of their Automatic Jones line of bottled cocktails. For the liqueur, dried orange peels and fresh oranges go into a distillation for improved stability and flavor.
Besides the orange distillate, Burns says he adds other botanicals to layer flavors and better evoke the experience of eating a fresh orange. “Think citrus-type adjacent spices,” Burns says, “stuff like coriander or cardamom that have citrus components to their flavor, using those in small quantities to layer the flavor, to kind of help round that spirit.”
Family Jones also includes dried cherries and raisins in other RTD offerings, such as the Rock & Rye, macerating to extract the fruit flavors directly into the spirits. With dried fruit, they don’t need to worry about the liquid content of fresh fruit or the way that flavors from fresh juice can change over time; dried-fruit flavors are more stable.
“Fresh fruits can have really nice flavors,” Burns says, “but they’ll oxidize and change over time, whereas with dried fruit, that process has already happened. So, you concentrate the flavor, and you’re extracting what's left over. You’re working with a process that is more replicable and more stable.”
At Central Standard Craft Distillery in Milwaukee, the most popular drink at their Crafthouse & Kitchen bar was a cherry vodka lemonade, prompting them to figure out how to make it work as an RTD. They set out to use as many natural and organic ingredients as possible, using real fruit, fruit juices, and dried fruits. It proved difficult early on—especially the organic lemon juice, which settled at the bottom of packaging.
“The juices are, for the most part, already going to have some stabilizers in [them],” says Central Standard cofounder Pat McQuillan. “So, that one makes it easier. From a shelf-stability perspective, we flash-pasteurize ours, so that helps to make sure nothing is growing in there.”
However, he says, fresh fruit is probably the biggest challenge because it hasn’t been treated and is naturally inconsistent. “The flavor can be different each time,” McQuillan says. “Some might be sweeter, some might not be as sweet.”
Dried fruits also are a challenge, if you want fruit—and not just flavor—in the packaged product. “It is harder to rehydrate them and get the flavor profile out of it,” McQuillan says. “They’re good for steeping, but not for actually keeping in a product.”
Fruit juices, on the other hand, “they’re much easier to work with because they’ve already been blended and [are] ready to use. … So, that’s what we found—utilizing these juices has been the best for us.”
Flash-pasteurization is part of the equation for Central Standard, but so is using a big emulsion blender to mix and only coarse filtration to keep from stripping away too much fruit flavor.
The Acid Test
At Maplewood, they start with bench trials for the flavoring they want to use to find the right mix—for example, dosing a two-gallon batch of seltzer with blackberry flavoring to find the proportion that tastes best.
Broadly, Smith says they aim for 6 to 10 percent ABV with their RTDs, using proofing calculators while knowing the water content of the flavorings. Maplewood’s Blackberry Gin Fizz, for example, combines their Spruce Gin and orange bitters with a house-mixed blackberry seltzer. “I’m adding that seltzer water to proof down my gin, and that’s how we got the flavoring of that one,” he says.
From there, Megalis says, they figure out the pH they want by adding malic and citric acids. “The whole point is not just to lower the pH, but also [to] just bring some other things to the party,” he says. “Malic, for example, gives a little bit of apple flavor.”
Megalis says their approach is to “break it down to nothing and build it back up and try to create the best representation of that cocktail possible that will be shelf stable.” Finding the right acid additions is part of that process, and malic acid tends to add “a lot of perceived body,” he says, so they typically combine it in some proportion with citric acid, and they also include that volume in their calculations. “So, our dosing is always exact. And then, of course, we always take a final proofing of the cocktail.”
For example: Megalis and Smith say that using blackberry flavoring, citric acid, and a smaller amount of malic acid helped to create a more vivid blackberry flavor.
“You’re getting the mouthwatering from the citric, you’re getting the complexity from the malic, and you’re getting the blackberry flavor from the natural flavor,” Smith says. “Everything has a purpose for flavoring as well as stability. … We have to think about that when we’re formulating that recipe.”
Sugar and Bubbles
As with other cocktails, sugar is usually an important piece of the RTD puzzle.
Maplewood uses invert sugar for sweetening, as well as gold trim molasses when they want a darker, richer flavor—as with their Rum Punch. The syrups are easy to weigh and add, and they use an Enoitalia flexible impeller pump to move the thicker liquid sugar and molasses. Before they switched to those liquid sugars, they’d open the canning line and find the sugars and acid just hadn’t mixed well.
With the syrups, “we have had leaps and bounds better products going into the cans, more consistent,” Smith says. “Using these liquid sugars has been a godsend, and then using the flexible impeller pump to recirculate that liquid, you get a more homogenized mix. Your sugar’s mixed, your acid’s mixed.”
Smith also strongly recommends an Anton Paar CboxQC to test carbonation. (It also tests for dissolved oxygen content.) Maplewood usually carbonates on the high side, between 2.8 and 3.0 volumes of CO2. At 3.0 volumes, Smith has learned to expect about 10 percent loss on the canning run.
“I would suggest everybody find a way to test their CO2 if they’re going to go down this road,” Smith says. “I think it’s one of the most important things.”
Courtesy Family Jones Distillery. Photo: Casey Wilson
The Craft of RTD Cocktails
All this talk of shelf stability, sugar, acid, and special gear can be daunting, but there’s a reason all of these distillers want to make RTDs: They like them—from the challenge of getting them right to drinking them, and on to what they can add to their businesses.
“It’s fun,” McQuillan says, including “the experimentation of trying these different things you want to push the envelope on, or you think [are] good for you or your company.”
