Craft sodas are coming for your cola

If Bryan Wilder ever needs a shot of inspiration, all he has to do is gaze across the street.

The office and warehouse for his Oak Cliff Beverage Works, located on the industrial side of Dallas’ Design District, sit directly opposite the Peticolas Brewing Co., an award-winning leader in North Texas’ exploding craft-beer scene.

But Wilder, a 30-year veteran of the beverage industry, is interested in a different kind of brewing revolution: craft soda.

He launched his Real Sugar Soda brand for fountains in 2009, and Wilder says the same philosophy is bubbling up now in the parallel drinking universe of craft sodas.

“They are local, small batch and it’s really good stuff,” he says. “[Big soda] has taken carbonated beverages from being a treat and almost marketed it as something you hydrate on. I want to take it back to being a treat.”

Wilder is hardly alone in his quest to offer an alternative to the big three — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr Pepper/Snapple — aka Big Soda.

Other Texas companies see an opening in the market, too.

Austin’s Maine Root products are now sold nationwide and have become fixtures at local restaurants such as Torchy’s Tacos and Hopdoddy Burger Bar, as well as being sold at Whole Foods and Central Market.

Saint Arnold Brewery in Houston produces a popular root beer that can be found throughout the state, and Flower Mound’s five-month-old Aqua Pop, a fruit-infused carbonated water, is sold in more than 40 locations throughout North Texas.

Howard Telford, a senior beverage analyst with the market research firm Euromonitor International, says interest and sales of craft soda have certainly been “accelerating over the last year or so,” and part of that appeal is easy to understand. The sodas use natural ingredients and pure cane sugar or agave instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and they often come in exotic flavors.

But Saint Arnold founder Brock Wagner says craft sodas tap into something more ephemeral, too. Something that doesn’t necessarily show up on a balance sheet or taste test: a story.

He has seen it firsthand when consumers come in for tastings at his brewery and try the root beer.

“They tell me about something from 30 years ago with their parents or grandparents in a different state,” he says. “People will say how it reminds them of this or that brand but they will give a lot of other modifiers and it will be about who they were with, where they were and how long ago it was.

“Never does anybody ever actually tell me a descriptor about that actual root beer. It’s about the experience more than just the flavor.”

That shared American memory, real or imagined, conjures a world of tire swings on summer days, movie double features and full-service gas stations with their red Coke refrigerators with the lift-top lids.

Wilder remembers those days fondly, too.

“When I was a kid, you lifted the lid [on the refrigerator], dropped a dime down the box, yanked up this bottle, and it was either 6.5 ounce or 8 ounce, and it was delicious,” he recalls. “It was all you wanted, and then you were satisfied.”

Big Soda’s big drop

The craft-soda boom, while still a niche market, seems even more dramatic when set against the background of declining mainstream soda sales. The New York Times reported Sunday that “over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent,” representing “the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade.”

The report goes on to say that “daily soda consumption among teenagers, a group closely tracked by federal researchers, dropped sharply — by 24 percent — from 2007 to 2013, compared with about 20 percent for the country.”

Bottled water is expected to surpass soda as America’s favorite beverage by 2017. Meanwhile, craft-style sodas, with their more healthful image, have been taking up a small slice of that market share that Big Soda has been losing.

Some brands, like Virgil’s and Dry, have a national profile and Big Soda — much like Big Beer did with craft beers and ciders — has taken notice.

Pepsi recently launched three cane-sugar sodas: Dewshine, a riff on Mountain Dew, Caleb’s Kola (test marketed on the East Coast), and the fountain-only Stubborn line that includes such flavors as black cherry with tarragon, classic root beer, lemon berry acai, agave vanilla cream, orange hibiscus and pineapple cream. This month, Pepsi is even releasing a commemorative, limited-edition, real-sugar Back to the Future-themed Pepsi Perfect that retails for $20.15 for a 16.9-ounce bottle.

Coke hasn’t yet launched a separate brand but did take over the Blue Sky and Hansen’s natural-soda brands as part of its deal with Monster Beverage Corp. in June.

While the idea of “craft soda” might seem, at first, oxymoronic, the trend is a logical outcome of the artisanal movement that has affected everything else we put in our mouths, from pizza to ice cream, coffee to whiskey.

“It reflects the greater interest in craft everything,” says Saint Arnold’s Wagner. “You go get your bladder buster from 7-Eleven of whatever soda [and] you’re looking for something cold to quench your thirst or deliver caffeine. With [craft] soda, it’s about an epicurean experience. I think that’s fun.”

New York’s elegantly marketed Q Drinks — which says on its website that it is inspired by the belief that “soda can be spectacular” — even come in large, 750 ml bottles that are designed to look like wine bottles. No one’s going to get this confused with Cactus Cooler.

Though everyone seems to know a craft soda when they see one, there is no precise definition.

“I know in beer, there are certain levels of production that allows companies to be qualified as micro breweries, nano breweries or mega brewers. Craft soda I don’t think has a definition for qualification yet,” writes Maine Root president Mark Seiler in an e-mail.

“The term ‘craft soda’ has just come into vogue, but craft soda makers have been around for over 100 years. How should companies be evaluated if they are craft or not? Size of batches? Number of cases sold? Ownership status? Ingredients?”

Sweet dreams

Craft-soda enthusiasts also maintain that, however they’re defined, their drinks are slightly healthier than traditional soda and that aspect appeals to current consumers who are shying away from products made from high-fructose corn syrup. They also claim their products are less heavily carbonated, are more filling due to the sugar content so consumers want to drink less at a single sitting, and simply taste better.

“Corn syrup has a bitter aftertaste to it,” says Kenny Horton, the self-described “head soda jerk” at Dublin Bottling Co., the Texas firm legally restrained by Dr Pepper in 2012 from distributing its cane-sweetened Dublin Dr Pepper but that now has a full line of other flavors.

“What the bottlers did to combat that was increase the carbonation levels of the soda. That way, you would get that burn down your throat and out your nose, but you wouldn’t taste that bitter aftertaste. With our products, you don’t have to worry about that because the cane sugar sets off the flavor and we can crank the carbonation level down.”

For Denton’s Rob Peters, whose Aqua Pop line is more fruit-infused water than soda, health was a prime motivator.

“You go to [a convenience store] and get one of those big drinks, you need a dolly and a syphon. You can drink 240 calories and not even know you did that,” he says.

“What I want to do is give someone the choice of here’s something that tastes good, it feels good going down, feels substantial and it goes with any food.”

Still, there’s no denying that craft sodas in general have a lot of sugar.

“There’s still going to be 50 grams of sugar in a bottle, but I think that speaks to that it’s an ingredient people can read and understand,” says Telford, the beverage analyst. “It doesn’t typically have that long list of preservatives … That speaks to people. But it’s not necessarily healthier.”

In their defense, the craft manufacturers say that the sodas — like their equivalents in the culinary and beer worlds — are meant to be savored and approached as an occasional indulgence, not a regular accompaniment to every meal.

Says Oak Cliff Beverage Works’ Wilder: “I want to take it back to being … [something] satisfying, even like a dessert to some people, instead of something you throw down like water.”

Too hipster?

Of course, as has happened with many old memories reborn — from the new-generation, gourmet version of the humble doughnut to grandma’s Mason jars — there’s been a backlash against the “hipsterization” of the common soda pop, even if much of that has been aimed at Big Soda leaping on the craft bandwagon.

It ranges from a mocking YouTube video (“Pepsi’s trying to cash in on this whole people-making-things-with-care trend going on right now”) to more serious pieces in Mother Jones (“Coke and Pepsi Are Trying to Sell You Pretend Craft Soda”) and Salon (“Pepsi’s lame ‘hipster’ makeover”).

Wagner says the big guys are co-opting the sense of story that craft sodas convey. “When it comes to beer, people like the experience of visiting the brewery and knowing the brewery,” he says

“With sodas, people go in and buy something off the shelf, it has an interesting name and maybe a story but who knows if the story is real or something the marketing department crafted?”

The craft guys don’t seem too concerned about the giants stomping on their turf, though.

“High tides raise all ships,” says Maine Root’s Seiler. “I just wonder if they will ever tell their customers who owns these brands they make look like little craft start-ups.”

(To check out what Seiler is referring to, look at the Caleb’s Kola website, with its rustic backdrop and lots of chatter about citrus notes, fair trade sugar, mixology, batches, vinyl records and truffle fries but not one word about Pepsi even though its name is borrowed from Pepsi inventor Caleb Bradham.)

But it does bring up the question of whether consumers will make the distinctions with real and faux craft sodas and if the entire movement could be just a brief infatuation, a love affair with a memory.

After all, craft drinks are more expensive than their mainstream counterparts — partly because sugar is more expensive than corn syrup — and, when combined with the general trend against sodas, it can be wondered if they can sustain themselves.

Euromonitor’s Telford says craft soda remains “very niche” and “if you aggregate all these brands together, it would probably be a single digit of the market.”

“I see so many correlations with the craft-beer world. Overall, beer consumption is down across the nation but craft beer sales are up,” says Bobby Mullins, co-founder of Armadillo Ale Works in Denton, a brewery that will brew at least two craft sodas, and perhaps other seasonal sodas, when it opens in the spring.

“People may be drinking less but they’re drinking higher quality,” Mullins said.

However the numbers shake out, Dublin’s Horton isn’t too worried.

“There’s an old saying in the beverage industry: Alcohol is depression proof, soda is recession proof,” he says. “Those things will always sell.”

This story was originally published October 7, 2015 at 3:24 PM with the headline "Craft sodas are coming for your cola."