When San Francisco-based Ficks Beverage Company began the transition from non-alcoholic cocktail mixers to hard seltzer, Ron Alvarado and his co-founder, Mike Williamson, had an important decision to make: Just how were they going to craft their product? 

In an exclusive interview with Hard Seltzer News, Alvarado discussed how the company settled on oranges as the fermentation base for the Ficks hard seltzer line. 

“When we decided that we wanted to go out and do these seltzers, really we had to [sic] do it on our own because we were doing such small batches,” Alvarado said. “We learned to make the alcohol ourselves in San Francisco; I would make it in my studio apartment in Downtown San Francisco, which is a mess.”

Devoted to the idea of using real fruit and blessed with access to a strong fruit supply chain — one which they cultivated with their non-alcoholic mixer products — Ficks Beverage Company looked to winemakers for some guidance.

“Being so close to Sonoma and Napa from San Francisco, we had a lot of people in the industry that were able to lend some expertise on fermentation and some tips as we were trying to [sic] find the right balance for our alcohol base that could be both smooth and rather tasteless for a hard seltzer,” Alvarado said.

After sampling products from large hard seltzer brands, Ficks Beverage Company knew they needed to take a new, vastly different approach.

“We didn’t like the taste of the ones that were just fermented malt or sugar,” Alvarado said. “Again, this was in 2017, so most of the big brands that you’ve heard of today — like the two or three biggest — they were around, [and it] had like a bite to it, or like a chemically taste, and we thought that was really coming from both the natural flavors as well as the alcohol base.” 

Wanting to maintain their mission for a “better for you bar” that they set into action with their cocktail mixers, Alvarado and Williamson began to experiment.

“We wanted to kind of take this winemaker approach, so we went out and tried a variety of different fruits,” Alvarado said. “The original idea was to [sic] ferment the fruit for each Ficks flavor for alcohol, but once we tried grapefruit alcohol, we were like this is awful…It was really, really gross.”

Finally, through trial and error, Ficks finally settled on a base fruit: oranges. The choice is a unique one, but to Alvarado, it also made a lot of sense. 

“We were fermenting oranges and we would get to these really high alcohol levels, which is helpful because it lets you kind of maximize your tank time,” Alvarado said. “You can get a lot of alcohol, more alcohol into the same tank if you can get the alcohol percentage really high.” 

Oranges also provided that smooth, tasteless base that Ficks was looking to achieve for their hard seltzer line. 

“We looked at [sic] competitive brands and said the alcohol is really standing out,” Alvarado said. “We want…the alcohol to take a backseat to our flavors of the fruit.” 

Even with this unique approach, Alvarado noted that consumers, in his experience, seem to worry less about the base and respond more to the taste of the product. 

“What people identified with was after the fermentation, us adding fruit juice in for flavoring,” Alvarado said. “People loved hearing [sic] what we call “farm to fizz” here internally…hearing where the grapefruit were grown, how we bring them into California why we use red grapefruits as apposed to pink…” 

Over the last year, we’ve seen quite a few hard seltzer brands working hard to differentiate themselves from big brands by telling their stories, using fresh, high-quality ingredients, marketing as “premium” and fighting against “natural flavors.”

“That storytelling really resonated with people in a world where the leading hard seltzers were just using natural flavors or extracts,” Alvarado said. “The alcohol base, while it makes a big difference in the taste, it’s [sic] almost splitting hairs a little bit when you get too detailed. [We’ve seen] some brands have some pretty unique things that they use in their fermentation process, but in the end, it seems like taste is kind of king.”

Stephanie Meade
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