I had no idea... I see them everywhere and just assumed it was one of those "I wanna drink, but also hydrate" type things coming off the heels of White Claw

pantera needs to alcoholize their heart attack lemonade

The alcohol soda trend started in 2016, with drinks like Alcohol Root Beer and Alcohol Orange Soda.

Some of the more egregious variations that I have tasted were Alcohol Bojangles Tea and Alcohol Green Monster.

Soda is largely viewed as a beverage for children or immature people. Alcohol is a beverage for adults. In my opinion, combining the 2 ideas represents a rejection of growing up or traditional adult values.

The Hard Seltzer trend is different and started around 2019-2020 with White Claw. Hard Seltzers were part of a health trend. There's almost no sugar in hard seltzers, it's just water and alcohol and carbonation. A can of White Claw hard seltzer has ~100 calories.

On the popsicle website, it says that each Hard Popsicle can has 234 calories with 25 grams of sugar, that's 100 calories of sugar. You are probably right that made Hard Popsicle is made with malt liquor.

I would say that this drink is a Hard Soda rather than a Hard Seltzer because of the amount of sugar.

Hard seltzers are a response to the focus on “Craft” and “sense of place” from the Early 2000s Pollan/ locovore era. It’s like fuck yea drink sludge it’ll taste like candy and get u wrecked.

I'm once again telling you that the alcohol industry is making all this branded swill explicitly to market it at children.

Yes, and, I've noticed many of my zoomer/elder alpha coworkers have "childish" tastes, for lack of a better word: they'll just not drink anything that's not soda-sweet and perfectly designed to hit all dopamine receptors at once.

Many of them don't even drink alcohol or coffee because they say they hate the taste, and when I ask them what they mean by it it always comes to them not being immediately agreeable, or not sweet at all.

I think the alcohol industry is realizing that many people who are coming of age now and joining the alcohol market will simply not drink snything that's remotely bitter or complex or bracing, so no beer, no wine, no spirits. It's getting drunk without the experience of drinking.

We always were way to cheap for that stuff as kids.

I don't know why we have the damn thing, but somewhere along the line we ended up with a Ninja Creami whiz-bang plastic ice cream gadget (made with real plastic!) that we have used maybe a dozen times in five years. At one point, I had a craving for a "dirty banana" cocktail, but in ice cream form. Even after two or three days in the freezer, the tub of banana mush, cream, and booze (I swear I showed restraint on the amounts) was still basically an alcohol slushie. It did not blend very well.

I bet Guinness chocolate ice cream would work pretty well, though...