One of the beverage world’s biggest trends is ready-to-drink cocktails, or RTDs. This is one of the fastest-growing alcohol segments in the world. Various researchers report that 2024 sales were in the $800 million to $900 million range.
Here in our biggest little corner of the world, there is one distillery crushing the canned RTD cocktail, and that’s 10 Torr Distilling and Brewing. Located at 490 Mill St. in Downtown Reno, 10 Torr makes award-winning spirits and beer, but what keeps them busy these days are cans of cocktails. You may have seen them behind local bars and at retail outlets like Raley’s, so what does it take to make such an in-demand can? I sat down with Annalisa Suarez, 10 Torr’s director of craft beverages and spirit innovation, to discuss the success of these RTDs.
“It’s what pays the bills,” Suarez said when I asked her how many cans of cocktails 10 Torr is selling. “We make about eight to 10 pallets of cans a month.” That’s roughly 72,000 cans leaving the facility monthly. According to Suarez, the secret to their success is in the still.
“We do not use malt liquor to make our (drinks in) cans like some other RTDs,” she said.
Most ready-to-drink cocktails, such as flavored seltzers, are made with malt liquor, which can result in a less-than-great feeling in the morning. 10 Torr is home to a unique still that uses vacuum pressure instead of heat to distill alcohol. (In fact, it’s where the name comes from: The still operates at 10 torr of atmospheric pressure.) The vacuum still makes alcohol faster than most traditional stills, allowing the distillery to keep up with demand.
“We start with fresh juices, fresh purees and our spirits—that’s it,” Suarez said.
10 Torr makes seven flavors of canned cocktails—three available year-round, and four seasonal. The flagship three are Lavender Lemonade, Blueberry Sage Spritz, and the new Spill the Tea, flavored with Earl Grey tea and marionberry vodka (and featuring can art by a 10 Torr brewer who loved the drink so much, he wanted his art on it). Each flavor uses real ingredients, so when it says “sage” on the can, someone has to pick the sage off the stem.
“We are picking 30 to 60 pounds of sage per run,” Suarez said. “It can take almost two days to pick all that.”
The distillery first sold canned cocktails in 2018, but they achieved a new level of hype during the COVID-19 shutdowns, when the distillers wanted to offer a taste of their bar experience, and the community was lining up for cases of Lavender Lemonade. “The canned cocktails skyrocketed during 2020, because we could sell them to-go,” Suarez recalled.
Today, some of 10 Torr’s best-selling canned cocktails are seasonal variations. Flavors like the Spiced Apple sell out incredibly fast, which can make people a little impatient.
“We get our apple from Apple Hill (in Placerville, Calif.), so we can only make it one time a year, and we can only hold so much apple juice,” Suarez said.
Which cocktails make the cut to become an RTD? “We like to put cocktails on draft here and then see if people like it,” Suarez said. “If they do, we try it in a can. … If you want to know what we are making next, you can come down to the bar.”
10 Torr has no plans to slow down its production and development. You can now buy 10 Torr canned drinks from the website anywhere in the U.S., excluding Iowa and Utah. New bottled espresso martinis and other cocktails are coming to the tasting room, and through a new partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno, cans of Pack Punch—a mojito-style sipper with rum, marionberry, blackberry, mint and lime—will be available at UNR games and online in the fall and winter.
As much as Suarez wants you to drink the 10 Torr cans at home, she is still a bartender at heart. When I asked her why her team handmakes each batch, even with all the volume they have, she said: “It’s a labor of love; you have to do it that way.”