Businessweek
The Bar World’s Biggest Names Are Getting Wise to Canned Cocktails
Credit Covid with a boom in stuck-at-home consumption and for taking the stigma out of making canned craft cocktails.
Photographer: Gabriela Herman for Bloomberg Businessweek
As beverage director at Clover Club in Brooklyn, N.Y., Tom Macy has been formative in the 21st century cocktail revival. But then: Covid, when everyone was forced to pivot.
When the bar was temporarily locked down at the onset of the pandemic, Macy and his boss, Julie Reiner, founded Social Hour Cocktails, which cans a line of ready-to-drink, high-quality quaffs. “The biggest selling point of an RTD is—and always has been—convenience,” he says. (If not “necessity” for lazy drinkers at the height of the lockdown.) But “convenience meant you had to sacrifice quality.”