We are very aware that the RTD (Ready to Drink) market has steered very heavily in the direction of cans over bottles. Although the vast majority of that market is hard seltzer type drinks with less than 5% ABV, there are still hundreds of cocktails from brands like Marks & Spencer and so on that people have got used to buying in a can and then throwing the can in a recycling bin.
We have thought long and hard about this, and we are going to stick with glass for our drinks. We thought it was worth sharing our reasons here on our website. If you have views on anything we say below, we would genuinely love to hear them. If we get enough, we will make a comments page here, but for now please just email us at the address below.
Anyway, here is our thinking:
- It is an illusion that aluminium is more sustainable than glass. The best science we can find is that producing glass requires a tenth of the energy of virgin aluminium, but double that of recycled aluminium. However, recycled aluminium is very hard to come by. What is available is purchased by giant consumer goods companies like Nestlé and Unilever. If you read all of the websites of the cocktail and Hard Seltzer brands like M&S, White Claw, Served, Whitebox, Sipsmith, Fever Tree, and so on, not one of them will claim to use recycled aluminium in their cans, but they will talk about sustainability. To us, it feels scammy, but at best, none of these brands* are using recycled aluminium in thier packaging, so we don't think they are producing a more sustainable product than the glass we are using.
- *the one company we do know using 100% recycled aluminium are our friends at Sustainaholics, and all power to them.
- The other main issue, and actually the dealbreaker in this decision, is flavour. We have never tried our drinks out of a can as there is no way of running tests that we have heard of. However, we do try lots of other drinks all of the time. Probably the best one we have tried is the Pocket Negroni from Whitebox. Even then, we can still taste the can. We don't profess to completely understand why this is. We're sure that Whitebox use amazing ingredients and have a wonderful process for making drinks, so it must be the can itself. We dearly love Sipsmith gin and Fever Tree tonic, and have made that exact drink with those two ingredients countless times at home. If you then taste the canned Sipsmith Gin & Fever Tree Tonic, it just does not taste the same. To be clear, it doesn't taste as good. Why? It must be something about the canning process, and it has reinforced the feeling that pursuing canning would mean making big compromises in our product, which would be the opposite of why we started the business.
Finally, we still like this Medium article from the Center for Environmental Health, and I suggest you read it.
