A craft brewery in Melbourne, Australia, has come up with a creative way to serve its hard seltzer in on-premise locations. Moon Dog’s new drink dispensing system allows venues to offer the brewery’s line of alcoholic bubbly water, Fizzer, without taking up precious tap space allocated to draft beers and ciders.

The patent-pending dispensing system operates like a soda fountain or postmix machine, taking a container of Fizzer in a super concentrated form and automatically mixing it with soda water upon serving. The concentrated Fizzer is brewed as a 17 percent seltzer and stored in a 15-liter box until dispensed via the system that Moon Dog’s brand manager, Brook Hornung, calls “a world-first postmix dispensing unit for alcohol.”

Moon Dog received a $350,000 grant from Australia’s Manufacturing Modernisation Fund to support the development of its dispensing system technology. The brewery is testing the technology at its location in Preston, Moon Dog World. “It will be unique, as it doesn’t require them to take off beer taps, which is important for us as a brewery as well,” Hornung explained. “We have a shitload of taps at Moon Dog World so 8 out of 72 taps [for Fizzer] isn’t a huge issue, but no venues are looking to take off a cider or a beer tap.”

Moon Dog’s Fizzer Alcoholic Seltzer comes in eight flavors including Lemon Squeezy, Peach Iced Tea, Pink Flamingo, Raspberry Sorbet, Tropical Crush, Strawbs & Cream, Coco Mango, and Piney Lime. Consumers don’t have to visit on-premise locations to enjoy the fizzy drink. Fizzer is also available in cans. Each 330ml can contains between 85-105 calories, less than half a gram of sugar, and an ABV of 4%. The hard seltzers are packaged in 6-packs of individual flavors as well as a 10-can mixed pack. Fizzers are low in both carbs and gluten, and they’re vegan-friendly. They can be purchased at alcohol retail locations throughout Australia and are also available on Moon Dog’s website for Australia-wide delivery.

Several venues have already committed to carrying Fizzer’s dispensing system. Moon Dog aspires to install 1,000 systems in on-premise locations over the next year. “We will be rolling these out to a heap of venues in the next few months. We started the conversations with venues and the response has been positive.” Hornung said. “We’re pretty much good to go, we’re just making sure we nail the liquid before we started telling anyone about it, but we’re so close.”

Each dispenser will contain four to eight taps for flavor options and will require venue-provided CO2, water, power and drainage. The machine can be utilized with any liquid, and is not limited solely to dispensing Fizzer.

“For example we are going to be doing a ginger beer and are exploring getting a cider through that system, as well as looking at some pre-batch cocktails, but they won’t be an Aperol Spritz type thing per se but it would be a similar base to Fizzer, have a higher abv, or alcoholic beer base but with different flavours,” Hornung explained.

Being able to offer dispensable ready-to-drink beverages and hard seltzers to on-premise locations without forcing them to use their taps for offerings other than draft beers and ciders is particularly important in the global market. Unlike in the US where the seltzer market is exploding, hard seltzers are only just beginning to gain traction in other countries around the world.

Last year the US accounted for nearly half of the ready-to-drink (RTD) category’s global volume. The RTD trend was led by the US hard seltzer segment, which alone grew an astonishing 130% in that same time period.

It certainly would be easy to convince venues in the US to share their on-tap spaces with hard seltzers but the idea might be a harder sell in countries where the beverages are still a fairly new concept. Moon Dog’s dispensing system means venues won’t have to make that difficult choice just yet.

As bars and restaurants open back up in a post-pandemic world and hard seltzers are more in demand than ever before, we look forward to seeing more creative ways to get the bubbly beverages into the hands of consumers. Moon Dog’s Fizzer dispensing system is an exciting new way to market and sell hard seltzer in on-premise locations near and far.

Shirani Jayasuriya
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