With the added benefit of a celebrity spokesman-actor Miles Teller became a fan and eventually bought in as a co-owner-The Long Drink has been well positioned to continue rapid U.S. And wouldn’t you know it-growth has been quite strong, mirroring the rise of hard seltzers, as The Finnish Long Drink is now sold in almost 4,000 retail locations in 9 states.

Many companies produce riffs on Long Drink in a variety of prepackaged flavors in Finland, but the concept was mostly unknown in the U.S., until a new company by the name of The Finnish Long Drink started selling its wares in the U.S. While the Brandy Long Drink faded away into relative obscurity, the gin-based version was a hit, and has become an enduring staple of Finnish culture. The first two varieties of Long Drink, created then in 1952, were the classic Gin Long Drink, made with gin and grapefruit soda, and a less well known Brandy Long Drink, made with brandy and Pommac, an oak-aged fruit drink. What was needed was a simple, prepackaged drink that could be distributed en masse, and Long Drink was the result. With a national alcoholic beverage monopoly that still existed as a relic of the country’s Prohibition period (1919-1932), it was recognized that the nation’s inflexible nature when it came to selling booze would likely hinder bars and restaurants when it came to serving a massive influx of tourists and international travelers. The lonkero has been around since 1952, as the nation of Finland prepared for the 1952 Summer Olympics it was hosting. We’re talking about “the long drink,” aka lonkero, often considered the national alcoholic drink of Finland. actually has decades of history in Europe. The natural expectation is more American companies looking to grab the next Mike’s Hard Lemonade malternative or flash-in-the-pan like Not Your Father’s Root Beer, but one of the more unexpected concepts making serious headway in the U.S. The unprecedented boom of hard seltzers in the last few years has proven just how much room there is for new innovations in the canned alcohol/malternative beverage/mixed drink field, and there’s been no shortage of new companies jumping into that field in pursuit of their slice of the pie.

Long drink