First there was light, then there was clear. Then dry and ice and even oat bran. Now, in yet another attempt to add a little froth to a flat market, breweries are looking to a variation of an old European tradition: fruit-flavored beers. At about $6 a six-pack, the ambrosia-like blends have moved from home breweries to brew pubs and, now, to supermarket shelves in flavors ranging from a fragrant apricot to a subtle cherry. Most of the producers are small specialty firms Like New Belgium Brewing Co. in Ft. Collins, Colo. and Saxer Brewing in Lake Oswego, Ore. One Boulder, Colo., company, Beartooth Brewing, is building an entire business around fruit-flavored beers; it’s scheduled to introduce raspberry, cranberry and blueberry suds in liquor stores and beer outlets throughout Minnesota and Colorado this October. Even the titans are taking an interest. Miller Brewing Co., the nation’s second largest brewer, tested a lime-flavored beer in Gainesville, Fla., and San Diego, Calif., this summer.
American brewers aren’t the first to pop their tops over fruit-flavored products. The brews have long been seasonal products in Belgium, Germany, Austria and parts of Britain, and Americans have for years bottled them in their own kitchens. Brewers are betting that the new products will appeal to highbrow drinkers in the same way gourmet coffee and wine do. The target market: women, young beer drinkers and those “Bud men” who have traded up to specialty brews like Samuel Adams and Pete’s Wicked Ale. “There are a lot of adventurous palates out there,” says George Hancock, chief executive of Hart Brewing in Seattle.
For now, fruit-flavored beer is only an infinitesimal part of the $1 billion gourmet-beer business. But brewers say its popularity is on the rise. Hart Brewing’s Hancock expects fruit-flavored beers to account for nearly 25 percent of sales next year, up from about 14 percent today. “We could easily have sold five times as much this year,” he says. Traditionalists predict that bottles of fruit beer will clog warehouse shelves just as the dear, dry and oat-bran varieties do. “It’s something you try just once,” predicts Kirby Shyer, owner of Zip City, a brew pub in lower Manhattan. Then again, a few years ago skeptics might have said the same about cappuccino.
