PITTSBURGH -- Christian Kahle hoped the London dry-style gin he and business partner Matt Brudnok produced with juniper berries and other botanicals at the height of the coronavirus pandemic would prove popular with drinkers tiring of mass-market brands.

Not only did Lucky Sign Spirits end up in the black its first year, but thanks to a crowdsourcing campaign that followed, the craft distillery was able to expand its product line in a 11,700-square-foot production facility in West Deer, Pennsylvania. Today, Lucky Sign makes more than a dozen spirits, including whiskeys and bourbons, limoncello and other specialty liqueurs and nontraditional drinks like raki, a Turkish spirit that tastes of anise.

What Kahle couldn’t have anticipated was that it would also become known for its canned cocktails.

While they’d wanted to test the waters in the ready-to-drink (RTD) beverage category after setting up shop in 2020, “it took us a long time to understand the food safety and science of this,” Kahle says. That, and as a distillery that prides itself on authentic ingredients and unexpected flavor pairings, the owners wanted to make sure “we were doing something different than everybody else.”

It took two years of research and development to launch last spring’s inaugural RTD product — a vodka drink with the punchy zip of key lime and the herbaceous flavor of dill. The distillery released three more flavors in the summer of 2025 “and it’s been going wild ever since,” says Kahle.

In fact, in the last year and a half, canned cocktails have accounted for about 50% of all sales at Lucky Sign.

Kahle is pretty sure he knows why: Most makers of canned cocktails offer only one pedestrian flavor.

“All the cheap stuff is out there and most of it is not good,” he says.

Lucky Sign takes a cocktail-minded approach and uses premium craft liquor instead of low-cost malt bases or high-volume neutral grain spirits.

“People want something complex or interesting to drink besides pop, and that niche hasn’t been filled,” Kahle says. “That’s where we come in — something interesting to drink other than just a flavor.... People just fell in love with them.”

Lucky Sign’s current lineup includes four alcoholic and two nonalcoholic options, with two more alcohol-free cocktails in development.

Jim Hough, who co-founded Liberty Pole Spirits in 2016 with his wife and two sons, agrees there’s a huge market for interesting, ready-to-drink cocktails. Their canned old fashioned, which the distillery introduced three years ago after six months of trial and error — they had to figure out how to put the drink into a steel container without changing the flavor or proof — also has proved a runaway hit.

“We sell a lot of them,” Hough says.

Portable and convenient

Canned cocktails aren’t new to American drinkers; Connecticut-based Heublein popularized the idea of pre-mixed, bottled alcoholic drinks way back in 1892 with its Club Cocktails, a line that included a Manhattan, martini, Holland gin and York cocktail, a type of whiskey sour. After being acquired by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in 1982 and then sold to Grand Metropolitan in 1987, the corporate name was retired.

Then there were wine coolers in the 1980s, carbonated malt beverages like Zima in the ’90s and hard seltzers like White Claw a decade later. All helped change the way people drink as convenience, portability and consistent taste became increasingly more important.

Some people developed a taste for RTD cocktails during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Pennsylvania restaurants and those with hotel licensees were permitted to temporarily sell mixed drinks and cocktails for takeaway.

Custom mixed-to-go cocktails from bars were once again banned in June 2021, but a law signed in July 2024 (Act 86) allowed licensed grocery and convenience stores and beer distributors to sell pre-packaged, ready-to-drink canned cocktails with up to 12.5% alcohol by volume with a special permit.

Today, those drinks are ubiquitous at tailgate parties, sporting events, bars and just about everywhere else people gather over a cold adult beverage.

Overall, sales of distilled spirits are down in the U.S. because younger consumers are drinking less and budgets are tighter, making a 750 ml bottle of alcohol more of a luxury. Spirits suppliers’ revenue fell 2.2% to $36.4 billion in 2025, according to the national trade group Distilled Spirits Council. But the growing thirst for ready-to-drink cocktails has been unquenchable.

The trade group reports that sales of premixed cocktails, including RTDs made with spirits, have grown 16.4% year over year to $3.8 billion — making it the only major spirits category to experience growth. Once a novelty, they now account for around 12.5% of total alcohol beverage sales.

RTD cocktails include everything from hard lemonade and vodka iced teas to tequila seltzers and canned margaritas and espresso martinis. Where you can buy them depends on how much alcohol they contain.

To be sold in a grocery or convenience store or beer distributor, the drink has to contain less than 12.5% ABV. That makes them light and approachable, or as Hough calls them, “a weak cocktail.”

Anything with an alcohol content over 12.5% can only be sold on site at the distillery or by a state-run liquor store such as Fine Wine & Good Spirits.

That RTD category is drawing lots of interest from distilleries.

Wigle Whiskey, which introduced a line of five ready-to-drink canned craft cocktails in April, offers premixed cocktails in 750 ml bottles.

Its latest is a 34% ABV ready to pour Manhattan ($47) made with its Pennsylvania Straight Rye Whiskey, Little City Sweet Vermouth and Wigle Pomander Orange Whiskey Bitters. It requires no measuring or mixing, just some ice and a cherry garnish. Other Wigle RTD products include bourbon, rye and apple old fashioned cocktails and a lemon drop cocktail.

While the distillery made its name on its small-batch, historic Pennsylvania whiskeys, RTD cocktails “are a big part of industry right now for lots of reasons,” says chief operating office Alex Moser. “Bottles are easy, they’re tasty and they’re always perfect. You don’t need to be a seasoned bartender to serve it.”

It also allows the distillery to expand its customer reach. Introducing newbies to whiskey “is a very big curve,” Moser says, “so we have always preached the best way to get them into whiskey is cocktails first.”

Moser says it took Wigle about a year to develop the bottled cocktails and twice that to perfect its lower-alcohol, “more crushable” canned cocktails. Because innovation is core to the company’s psyche, “we don’t want to rush anything to market.”

In light of declining spirits sales overall, “we’ve tried to connect dots and bridge the gap with these products. The sky is the limit here.”

Americans have always loved cocktails, says Kahle, but making them at home fell out of fashion, and many people were disappointed when they didn’t turn out well.

“They would rather be able to just buy something and have it over and over again, without having to worry about buying a bottle of a specialty spirit and then having it sit on a shelf for year,” he says.

There are two problems when it comes to canned cocktails, says Kahle.

First, many are made with cheap ingredients.

“I have to tell people ours are good,” he says. “I’m paying for the sins of others.”

Secondly, when some people hear the word “spirit,” they immediately think they are going to get drunk if they indulge. But Lucky Sign Spirits cocktails are only 5% alcohol, about the same as a light beer.

“This isn’t about getting drunk,” Kahle says. “It’s about enjoying yourself.”

© 2026 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. ©2026 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.