“This Is Disgusting”: How Night Shift Sold the Team on Hard Seltzer

“Actually, this is kind of a funny story,” says Michael Oxton, cofounder of Night Shift Brewing in Boston.

This story starts with how ideas come to the surface at Night Shift, where the cofounders have a try-and-see-if-it-works, tinkerer’s approach to new brands. It’s how they’ve come to add coffee, cider, and wine to their repertoire, besides launching a thriving distribution business on the side.
[PAYWALL] “We really encourage people to push whatever ideas forward,” Oxton says. “But I do think more often than not, the three founders are usually the ones coming up with a lot of the craziest—like, ‘Hey, look, why don’t we try this out?’ And a lot of the time our staff can just be like, ‘Nah, that’s crazy. Don’t do that.’ And usually, they’re right.

“But every so often, I think we get one right.”

Hard seltzer was one of those ideas, Oxton says. But it took a while. The founders were talking about it back in 2018, when hard seltzer’s popularity was just beginning to blip upward. They asked themselves, “Can we make something that we’re proud of?”

“So, we took it kind of seriously, in terms of getting staff input on this,” Oxton says. He and a few people from the marketing team went to Total Wines and stocked up on different brands. Fellow cofounder Rob Burns bought a bunch, too, as did others. “A ton of people ended up getting us all this hard seltzer,” Oxton says, “and we did this giant tasting panel with a bunch of staff. We had them come in and do blind tastings with the little sample cups. There was a Google form to fill out—it was like a three-day feedback session.

“And the overall consensus, if you like—just looking at what our staff thought—was pretty much, ‘Hard seltzer is disgusting.’”

One of the questions for the staff was, “Should we get into hard seltzer?”

Their response: “No. Don’t bother. It’s stupid. It’s not craft.”

But there was another question: “Could we make a good hard seltzer?” Oxton says that about 70 percent of the team said something like, “Yeah, we could if we wanted to, but it’s not worth our time.”

To the seltzer-curious founders, the team’s confidence was encouraging—even though nobody at that time especially wanted to make or drink it. “So, I think we listened to our staff,” Oxton says, “because we didn’t put out a hard seltzer and sell it the next day or anything like that. But we did spend the next year making tiny batches of hard seltzer and just dumping them—because they all tasted like crap—and just pushing ourselves to come up with something we were proud of.”

By late 2019, their R&D and test batches had gotten better. Even the team started to like them. “We ended up with this liquid that we actually thought tasted really good,” Oxton says. “Super fruity, crisp, fermented with a wine yeast. So, our R&D got us to this place where we were like, ‘Holy crap, we actually made a hard seltzer that people are into on our staff.’ And then we launched it in a small batch in our taproom.”

They named it Hoot. “And people loved that first batch. And then we made another one, and it just kind of took off from there.”

Hoot took off quickly. Night Shift started selling 16-ounce four-packs of it last year. In April, after the pandemic hit, they launched the variety 12-packs of 12-ounce cans—and they caught fire. “In July and August, they were the best-selling product we had, which was awesome,” Burns says. As the weather cooled, so did those seltzer sales—just a bit, though. “They’re still doing really well,” Burns says.

“But the cap of this story, at least for me, is that all-staff New Year’s Eve Party,” Oxton says. “Half the room is filled with people holding Hoot hard seltzer and drinking it. And those are all people who were like, ‘This is disgusting.’”

“That was awesome because we got our staff to buy into it, eventually, by making something we were all proud to drink.”

The Making of Hoot To make Hoot, the brewers ferment their sugar base with wine yeast, and they ferment it intentionally to a lower strength. They don’t dilute it, Burns says. “We don’t water it down later in the process, and we don’t have to do aggressive filtering to get it to be palatable.” The wine yeast provides some fruity character, and the result is softer and more delicate. They also ferment it for longer than most producers.

“I think that’s where you can say hard seltzer isn’t craft, but I think you can put craft into hard seltzer,” Burns says. “And I think that’s what we’ve tried to do as we’ve formulated the recipe and process to get it to the flavor that we enjoy.”

With their process, Oxton says, there is no need to strip flavors or back-sweeten the seltzer at any point. “And we got it down to 90 calories,” Oxton says. Not only that, he says, but it tastes good. “And I think that’s cool—because if it didn’t taste good, we wouldn’t sell it.”

The seltzers get their fruit flavors from organic natural flavorings that add no sugar. Since they’re not back-sweetened either, the result is very dry, “which we really like,” Burns says. “It does taste, I feel, more like a hard water—more like a La Croix–type of thing than Trulys and stuff that have this little sweetness kick.”

Lately, they’ve been trying out a stronger version called Hoot Louder, at 8 percent ABV compared to the standard at 4 percent. “I had some Hoot Louders the other night,” Oxton says. “They were ridiculous. I had two Hoot Louders, and I was hammered.... It drinks like Polar Seltzer. It just tastes like regular seltzer. It doesn’t even taste like hard seltzer.”

One of the things the Night Shift founders like best about seltzer is the potential for further experimentation. “It’s like a beautiful kind of blank canvas,” Burns says. “There’s so much to play around with and have fun with.”

For more about Night Shift’s iterative approach to the business, including a bustling distributorship and an expanding beverage program, check out the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® Brewing Industry Guide Winter 2020 issue.