Everyone's favorite seltzer brand dropped a crisp, light spiked seltzer option.
Can Spiked Spindrift Salvage Your Summer?
The great secret of lifestyle writing: 95% of the emails we get are from spiked seltzer companies and CBD brands. Usually I skip these, because if I tried every new hard seltzer, I would be hospitalized, and if I tried every new CBD product, I would never stop spiraling about whether CBD actually works.
But now Spindrift has made a hard seltzer. My obsession with seltzer runs so deep I once wrote, “I don’t care if my home becomes unrecognizable under the litter of crushed aluminum. I just want a moment when I come home after work and remove my mind and put it to the side for safe keeping, and fill the empty place with seltzer.” Spindrift is a fruit-juice-centric seltzer that tastes like a crisp slap across the face by a talented dominatrix. Other seltzers, in my very opinionated opinion, are just carbonated water and memory—the ghost of black cherry, a hint of acid that is supposed to indicate lime.
So naturally, anything Spindrift makes, I will not only try but consider using as a replacement for my entire personality. The last time I had this much brand loyalty, I was using babysitting money to buy my American Girl doll a tennis outfit.
The hard seltzer market is flooded. White Claw practically birthed an identity movement. Truly is synonymous with music festivals and concerts. Bon V!v helped hard seltzers break into dinner parties and minimalist bars. Bud Lite has a hard seltzer (I’ve tried it—the bartender misunderstood my order, okay?—and it was surprisingly unobjectionable.) So do Coors and Jose Cuervo and Corona and Smirnoff and Michelob and Mike’s Hard and PBR. Spindrift isn’t the only hard seltzer company that uses fruit juice (there’s Briggs) or the only seltzer-first company that decided to go hard (Arctic Chill did the same). But Spindrift is the the only hard seltzer that made me swoon with lightly buzzed anticipation when I first heard about it.
Spiked Spindrift comes in four flavors: lime, mango, pineapple, and “half-and-half” (a take on an Arnold Palmer). Each contains 4% to 8% juice and 4% alcohol, and all are under 100 calories (being a hard seltzer consumer means doing a lot of math). Though the target audience may differ, Spiked Spindrift drinks have almost identical percentage alcohol by volume to a Miller Lite. The design of the can is similar to White Claw, if White Claw grew up and decided that shopping at Whole Foods counts as being cultured.
I drank the half-and-half, the lime, and the mango. If the United States ever enters into a war in which all grocery stores are compromised, I suppose I will drink the pineapple. Spiked Spindrifts have more flavor than most hard seltzers, and an even more muted alcohol taste. They remind me, in a nice way, of running through a sprinkler in the summer and getting a little bit of water in your mouth.
For those of us who enjoy alcohol for the way it makes us feel rather than the way it tastes, the advent of spiked seltzer has been a blessing. Unlike almost every other kind of alcohol, it is designed for people who would really rather be drinking a milkshake.
Spiked Spindrift is an excellent new addition to the canon—it’s not a milkshake, but what is? It’s sharp, tasty, and Instagram-friendly.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Condé Nast
