Best Canned Cocktails

I chose cans from a mix of popular, well-reviewed, and up-and-coming brands. Along with my husband, I tasted each can first straight, then added ice according to taste. For example, an old fashioned calls for only one ice cube, but I used a full cup of ice for my tequila paloma. I then evaluated each cocktail according to a few criteria: 

Is it balanced? Cocktails should have a balanced flavor profile and not be overly sweet, watery, or bland. 

Does it taste like a bar-quality cocktail? Although it’s difficult to entirely replicate a fresh cocktail in a can, I was looking for as close of an experience as possible.

Does it use quality ingredients? Ideally, a canned cocktail should use bar-quality spirits and avoid artificial flavors.

Would I buy it myself? I considered whether I would drink more of these or recommend and serve them to friends. If so, the drink was overall a winner, even if it might fall short in other ways.

I was surprised to learn that canned cocktails aren’t a new invention but have existed since the early 20th century. They’re descended from bottled cocktails, which saloons sold in the 1860s and perhaps earlier, according to David Wondrich, a cocktail historian and author of “Imbibe!”, which won a James Beard Award. By the 1890s, ready-to-drink cocktails emerged from saloons and became nationally distributed products.

“Heublein’s Club Cocktails were the pioneers here, followed by Golden Lion and Sazerac cocktails, all distributed nationwide by 1900 or 1901,” Wondrich says. Most of these drinks didn’t use fresh citrus or other juices. An early advertisement for a Heublein Club Cocktail, aimed at women, featured a proper Victorian lady instructing her butler, James, to “bring me a CLUB COCKTAIL. I’m so tired of shopping, make it a MARTINI. I need a little Tonic and it’s so much better than a drug of any kind.”

Cocktail mixing was primarily left to the professionals in the early days, hence the popularity of premixed varieties. The first canned cocktail was introduced in 1935, but Prohibition put a pin into the popularity and survival of ready-to-drink cocktails, which wouldn’t become popular again until after World War II, before once again waning in the 1990s. According to Smithsonian Magazine, it’s not clear why canned cocktails nearly disappeared from liquor store shelves and home bars. It’s certainly cheaper to buy your own base spirit and simple mixer than it is to purchase a canned cocktail, and if you have simple needs when drinking at home—or if you prefer wine or beer, particularly as craft beer exploded in popularity in the late ‘90s—there’s little need to buy canned cocktails. 

So what’s with their reemergence now? Canned cocktails follow closely in the footsteps of hard seltzers like White Claw. They’ve also gained steam as growth in the ready-to-drink cocktail category exponentially accelerates. 

Consumers were also, quite simply, curious about the cute little cans they saw springing up at their local liquor shops. “There was this real sort of novelty factor and an interest just by virtue of that novelty,” says Tom Geniesse, founder and owner of Bottlerocket Wine & Spirit in New York City. But “very rapidly, consumers got over any hesitation about alternative packaging.” Now, he says, they’re enthusiastic about ready-to-drink cocktails, where there’s been an “explosion” of new products. 

In the early years of the recent canned cocktail renaissance—i.e., 2019 and before—many of the options were of mixed quality. Experts say they’ve been more impressed by newer releases. “Now you’re seeing people putting money, time, energy, and talent into putting something delicious in the can, which is tricky,” says Joshua Bloom, co-owner of Duke’s Liquor Box in Brooklyn, New York. 

Geniesse agrees. “Now there’s this enormous flood of product on the market, which is terrific because it means that some percentage of those will be very high-quality and desirable.”

Though canned cocktails have come a long way in only a few short years, there are still challenges that brands and drink developers are trying to overcome. Perhaps most frustrating for cocktail brands and consumers alike is that in most cases, you can’t simply take a fresh margarita and put it in a can. 

“Canning is typically not considered a sterile process. The cans themselves aren’t sterile. So you usually will rely on some method of stabilization,” such as preservatives or pasteurization, says Roger Kissling, vice president of sales and customer management at Iron Heart Canning. “Oftentimes, fresh fruit juices, things that are used by a mixologist, don’t always translate well to a product that’s meant to be shelf stable for months at a time and not refrigerated.” 

Fresh citrus juice has a shelf life of only a few days, even in a can, so brands often turn to pasteurized forms instead. Shelf-stable pasteurized citrus, though, doesn’t taste the same—it doesn’t taste as good—as the fresh-squeezed stuff. Sometimes, citrusy canned cocktails will taste somewhat “tinny,” but this isn’t because of the can. That’s the oxidation that occurs when citrus is pasteurized.

Some brands turn to food-grade essential oils, powdered acids like citric acid, or “comminuted” fruit concentrates, a shelf-stable purée. These workarounds can be of varying quality, but again, it means consumers have to temper their expectations. A whiskey sour in a can will taste different from a whiskey sour at your favorite bar. 

Then there’s the issue of can compatibility. Most canned beverages in the U.S. are packaged in aluminum cans with interior liners that prevent the aluminum from degrading when it’s filled with acidic drinks like soda or cocktails, Kissling says. But drinks with an alcohol content of over 20 percent are incompatible with aluminum cans. These high-alcohol drinks, such as a Negroni, an old fashioned, or a Manhattan, are typically canned in stainless steel instead. But stainless steel cans, which are less common in the U.S., and aluminum cans are seamed (or closed) using different equipment, presenting further complications for canned cocktail companies that want to create different types of cocktails.

Consumer Reports is a very safety-oriented organization, which means I should probably remind you that alcohol isn’t very good for you. In fact, it’s quite bad. Folks with a blood alcohol content of .08 or more are 11 times more likely to die in a single-vehicle crash than those who aren’t drinking, according to Northwestern Medicine. Excessive drinking (four drinks a day or eight-plus drinks a week for women; five drinks a day or 15-plus drinks for men) also increases the likelihood of liver disease, certain cancers, high blood pressure and heart failure, and injury. Even moderate drinking—defined as one drink a day for most women and two drinks a day for most men—can increase the risk of breast cancer. 

That said, a 2018 PLOS Medicine study of almost 100,000 older adults found that lifetime light drinkers who consumed one to three drinks a week had a lower risk of overall mortality, as well as a lower combined risk of cancer or death, compared with people who never drank or did so infrequently (less than one drink a week) and people who drank heavily (less than three drinks a day) or very heavily (three or more drinks a day). 

It’s a limited study: It looked only at older adults, and the study’s authors said there could be confounding socioeconomic variables. But it’s some evidence that a little bit of drinking might be okay. Just keep it chill. Don’t drink every day, and certainly don’t drink and drive. Otherwise, have a fun—but safe—time. Cheers!