Once upon a time, beer was beer and came in cans or bottles; wine was wine and came in larger bottles; and cocktails were cocktails and weren’t on the grocery-store shelf at all. In the past few decades, wine coolers, hard lemonades, wine beverages, hard seltzers, and now ready-to-drink cocktails have muddied the waters. To add to the confusion, advertising, regulation, and the trademark system all draw the lines between these beverages differently. Depending on the source of the alcohol in the beverage, a beverage marketed as a ready-to-drink cocktail could be taxed like distilled liquors or like beer and, similarly, could be classified with one or the other in its trademark registration.
The first question is whether a beverage contains distilled liquor or is a fermented alcohol. You might expect that a “Ready to Drink Screwdriver” would contain orange juice and vodka but most brands of ready to drink cocktails are not just canned cocktails, but rather fermented malt beverages flavored like those cocktails. As such, these are “flavored malt beverages,” generally regulated like beer in most states. Some canned cocktails, often those branded by major spirits, are mixtures of distilled spirits with other ingredients, but this is not always the case: Smirnoff Ice is a flavored malt beverage, not diluted and flavored vodka, including its flavors named for vodka cocktails you might make with Smirnoff vodka. Canned cocktails (and other products) containing distilled spirits are usually regulated and taxed like distilled spirits.
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