“I have quite literally gotten more calls this year asking about it than Blanton’s.”
What could be this whiskey unicorn that’s causing retailers’ iPhones to vibrate non-stop? The latest tater-ific Weller variant, perhaps? The new Russell’s Reserve 15 Year Old? Some single barrel picks from cult bottler Rare Character?
“The answer to your question isn’t going to be one you’re looking for,” a liquor store worker recently wrote on Reddit, responding to a user’s request for the “most trending” whiskey of 2024. “But the most trendy or hyped bottle this year has been Crown Royal Blackberry.”
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Intentional and Typical
Though Crown Royal Blackberry was announced and released on March 13 of this year, Scott Pascoe says he had customers coming into his South Carolina liquor store looking for it a good two months before then.
“Totally intentional and typical of Diageo, honestly,” he says, referring to the conglomerate that owns the brand and that he believes is able to astroturf hype for certain products by sending bottles to, and sometimes even paying, influencers to post about them on social media before they’re available in stores.
Indeed, if you search TikTok you can find countless, mostly positive reviews of Crown Royal Blackberry posted well before that official release date. Some of these videos are simple tastings, while others include more advanced cocktails created with the product. And then there is general zaniness, like user izzydrinks’ February review in which he mixes the flavored Canadian whisky with Sprite and then stirs it with the foot of a chair. The latter video garnered some 1.1 million views.
Another TikToker went so far as to post 15 different videos featuring Crown Royal Blackberry paired with such offbeat partners as Squirt, Hypnotiq, and Skrewball, leading up to the release day.
“Crown Royal Blackberry is the drink of the SUMMER 🥃☀,” wrote one enthusiastic creator in February, netting 2.4 million views.
In its initial March 13 press release, Diageo even mentioned all this TikTok love, noting, in classic corporate speak, that Crown Royal Blackberry “has already taken social media by storm with consumers +21 sharing their love for the new flavor and exploring their own cocktail innovations.”
(To be clear, it’s not uncommon or even unethical for brands to send new product samples out to both writers and influencers before an official release.)
“Neat, it tastes heavily artificial and even medicinal like cough syrup. Mixed it’s great — I mean it’s low proof and sweet; you can’t really go wrong.”
Whatever the case, and however you want to look at it, just as Diageo had done with Crown Royal Peach — the whiskey unicorn of the year in 2021, of which I was the first to cover — this online tactic has likewise worked extremely well with Crown Royal Blackberry.
“I certainly am getting more calls about Crown Blackberry than other allocations now,” says A.J. (last name withheld for professional reasons), who works at a liquor store in a large college town in Missouri. He notes that it was allocated from the get-go, with his particular store only getting five cases upon release. “I think Diageo is certainly part of the hype,” he adds.
Today, some five months after it was released, Pascoe says he still gets at least five calls a day for Crown Royal Blackberry and it still sells out the second it’s put on shelves. He mostly sees older zoomers and younger millennials buying it, though not of the typical whiskey tater type, he’s quick to note.
For Pascoe’s part, he doesn’t think the liquid lives up to the hype. “If you were ever given Dimetapp as a kid for allergies, you have tasted this foul stuff,” he says.
Low Proof and Sweet — Can’t Go Wrong
Indeed, Crown Royal Blackberry isn’t exciting snobby whiskey fans, nor appearing on online secondary markets where Pappy and bottles from the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection are wheeled and dealed (though it is sold illegally on Craigslist). Neither is it making appearances on the menus at elite cocktail bars across our fair nation.
Nevertheless, it has its diehard fans, as did Crown Royal Peach. “Are you drinking it straight?,” wrote one fan on Reddit, in response to a hater. “If so that’s your problem. It slaps as a mixer hence the popularity.”
“I think all the flavors trend, they’re just seasonal.”
Even whiskey connoisseurs like A.J. see its certain charms. “Neat, it tastes heavily artificial and even medicinal like cough syrup. Mixed it’s great — I mean it’s low proof and sweet; you can’t really go wrong,” he says. “Almost everyone I have sold it to raves about it mixed with lemonade, as per the recipe on the box, which recommends 6 ounces of lemonade to 1 and a half ounces of whiskey.”
Not coincidentally, that’s the same way most of the TikToker influencers chose to drink in their pre-release videos. (Mixed with Sprite is probably the second most common usage on the platform.)
Meanwhile, people clamor for it on forums, message boards, and Reddit. Stores boast about their supply. Residents living in control states like North Carolina and Ohio offer tips for what stores have bottles in stock. It even makes appearances on NSFW corners of the internet.
What else can be said? It’s yet another flavored whiskey hit from Crown Royal and Diageo. Should we be surprised any more?
All the Rage, All the Hype
As I wrote back in 2021, the fervor around Crown Royal Peach “made me explicitly aware that people who write about whiskey and read about whiskey and collect whiskey … are in a serious snob bubble and sometimes not aware what regular people are really drinking these days.”
“We found there was a huge, untapped market for people who aren’t what I like to call ‘flavor snobs,’” Nicky Heckles, former vice president of Crown Royal, told me at the time. (I was unable to speak to her or any one at Diageo for this story.)
A similar, but slightly less viral, example is Buchanan’s Pineapple, another flavored whiskey, this time of the Scotch variety, but also owned by Diageo. Though it goes through spurts of solid sales, it doesn’t touch Crown Royal Blackberry at the moment, according to retailers I spoke to. Still, the mere fact Diageo can turn something as unlikely as a Latin-inspired, pineapple-flavored blended Scotch into a hit speaks to how good the global conglomerate is at crafting flavors, or hype. Or perhaps both.
“I think all the flavors trend, they’re just seasonal,” says A.J., who notes that while Crown Royal Blackberry is ideal for summer, Crown Royal Vanilla and Crown Royal Salted Caramel always pick up in sales once winter comes.
But true unicorns don’t live on seasonal sales alone, and as Pascoe tells me, unlike, say, Pappy Van Winkle or Weller or Blanton’s, Crown Royal Blackberry will lose its hype fairly soon, whether summer ends or not.
“When I first came to work for [the liquor store] a couple of years ago, [Crown Royal] Peach was still all the rage,” he explains. “We would get a case and it was a ‘one bottle per customer’ type of thing. Then one Saturday I get to work, and we had 20 cases of Peach. Ever since then, it barely sells.”
