Many collaborative alcoholic beverage releases involve pairing a beer or spirit with another food or beverage brand that offers a surprising but ultimately compatible flavor profile. Think Pinnacle’s Cinnabon vodka or Oskar Blues Brewery’s French’s Mustard beer.
A smattering of collaborations over the years, however, have been built on the fact that the two partners’ products have ingredients in common. These combinations tend to be unexpected at first but very logical upon further examination. And the underlying similarities provide a hook for authentic storytelling that can be useful in marketing the product.
The collaborations most often take the form of a flavored beverage, but they can result in alcohol-inspired foods as well. Some examples over the past several years include:
- Vodka and potatoes. Vodka can be made from any starchy base, often grains or sugar beets, but many brands rely on potatoes. Two notable limited editions celebrated this potato connection. Lay’s partnered with Eastside Distilling for a blended spirit that included Eastside’s Portland Potato Vodka and a second vodka made from the same potatoes Frito-Lay uses in its potato chips, which were developed in-house by the company’s food scientists. The result was a straight 80-proof vodka without any infused flavors. Arby’s, meanwhile, partnered with Tattersall Distilling for two varieties inspired by its French fry flavors, Arby’s Curly Fry Vodka and Arby’s Crinkle Fry Vodka. The former was distilled with cayenne, paprika, onion, and garlic, while the latter included kosher salt and sugar.
- Gin and coriander. A collaboration between Katz’s Deli and Hendrick’s Gin led to a new version of half-sour pickles, descriptively dubbed Hendrick’s Gin and Katz’s Delicatessen Gin-Inspired Pickled Cucumbers, which started as an April Fool’s joke before becoming a limited offering. The pairing, which does not contain alcohol, makes sense in that Hendrick’s uses both cucumbers and coriander in its gin recipe, as does Katz’s in its pickles. (Gin has a grain base that is enhanced with juniper and other botanicals, of which coriander is the most common.) In addition, pickle brine and gin are a popular combination in summer cocktails such as pickle juice martinis. Note that while this collaboration is about pickles, there conversely have been gins that have incorporated pickles in the distilling process, such as Citadelle Gin Vive le Cornichon, a French gin that was infused with French cornichon pickles.
- Whiskey and grains. Whiskey is made from a mixture of grains, including rye, corn, wheat, and/or barley, with different combinations creating different varieties (e.g., corn being the leading ingredient in bourbon and single-malt whiskey containing 100% barley). Two California companies, Alchemy Distillery and Los Bagels, paired to make Los Bagels Whiskey out of day-old plain and seeded bagels, at a rate of 1,500 pounds of ground bagels per batch. The waste from the distilling process, in turn, was given to farmers as pig feed. The sustainable product lasted for four years before being discontinued because Los Bagels had reduced its food waste to the degree that it could not supply enough day-old bagels for production to continue.
- Beer and wheat. An early example of an alcoholic beverage collaboration centered on a like ingredient was when General Mills and Fulton Beer partnered to create HefeWheaties, a German-style wheat (hefeweizen) beer. Not only are both products made from wheat, but both companies were founded and continue to be based in a city, Minneapolis, in which wheat played a critical role in its development as an early flour-milling hub, adding another layer to the collaboration’s reason for being.
While examples of spirits collaborations involving unlike but compatible ingredients abound, pairings built on common ingredients have been relatively few and far between. The conditions must be right to make any collaboration work, and those with shared ingredients are no exception. The collaboration between the two needs to make sense conceptually and the combined result has to taste good. From a practical standpoint, the collaborative item must be able to be manufactured cost-effectively. And, when you think about it, there are relatively few brands that would be a good fit with many of the ingredients used for brewing or distilling, which range from molasses (rum) to pears (brandy) and beyond.
Despite these challenges, there are always opportunities for creative partners to collaborate on unexpected-but-logical common-ingredient-focused combinations that tell a story, stand out from the competition, taste good, and resonate with consumers.
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