Until recently, cocktails were a rarity at baseball stadiums. Beer was far easier to grab on the go, and getting rowdy fans liquored up was in no one's best interest. Liquor was limited, sometimes exclusively to air-conditioned suites where cosmopolitans could be sipped far from the masses. And yet, on Memorial Day weekend, I found myself squeezed into the stands at Wrigley Field drinking a mai tai, next to a stranger drinking a margarita. My seatmate and I were having Cutwaters, a line of canned cocktails from Anheuser-Busch. The stadium's beer stand offered canned Long Island iced teas, canned palomas, even canned espresso martinis. Alcohol companies have been trying to make the idea of portable cocktails stick for more than a century, and they have finally succeeded. In 2025, Americans consumed nearly 11 billion servings of ready-to-drink cocktails, according to IWSR, a data firm that tracks trends in the alcohol industry. Depending on your state, you can now buy Cutwaters at...
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