Aldi Fans Are Freaking Out Over These Boozy Teas

Yesterday, @aldi.mademedoit, a major Instagram fan account for the chain grocery store, uploaded a picture depicting a box of Owl's Brew, a boozy tea company based in New York City. "BOOZY TEA!!!" the post exclaims. "So does this mean... I can be healthy and have a buzz." One comment gave the teas the rave review of "these are absolutely to die for!" The rest displayed signs of having succumbed to the influence of the post.

The box collection that Aldi sells contains two cans of Darjeeling and Hibiscus Flowers, two cans of English Breakfast Tea with dashes of lemon and lime, and two cans of White Tea flavored with watermelon and raspberry. All have an alcohol content of 4.8 percent. Other products not included in the post are Owl Brew's Matcha Tea and their various cocktail mixers, which largely consist of their canned teas repurposed with slightly different ingredients to serve as an additive to spirits.

Given the booming popularity of hard seltzers, one would be forgiven for not realizing that hard teas too have started to trend.

In 2020, Vine Pair noted that hard tea already commanded $436 million in sales in 2019 and surpassed $200 million by July 2020. "We thought that seltzer was just getting the party started, demonstrating there is such a thing as an alcoholic beverage that consumers can drink and not feel guilty about," Crook and Marker's Chief Marketing Officer Daniel Goodfellow explained, indicating that the obvious boom of hard seltzers has opened the opportunity for other beverages, like tea and coffee, to become alcoholic as well.

The premise of this market, like hard seltzers, seems to be summed up by a statement that Jackie Atlas, founder of another alcoholic tea brand Wandering Whistler, made to Forbes. "In the more casual environment, for me, there's this whole white space of opportunity of non-beer drinkers," she explained. Indeed, light, non-spirit drinks for causal affairs is the market that's attracted the most overt attention from alcohol brands. Offering tea-based options merely expands the palette of this niche. And, if the responses to @aldi.mademedoit are anything to go by, it's a niche that will attract many.