We’ve almost made it to the start of Daylight Savings Time, which brings longer days and optimism for warmer weather ahead. That’s followed closely by fantasies of lying on the beach drinking a refreshing alcoholic beverage (or five). Well, thanks to a new product, Corona’s offering more ways to “find your beach” than ever. The only catch is that you might not like what you find once you get there.
That’s because Corona just launched a new line of “flavored malt beverage[s]” called Corona Refresca. It involves new tropical fruit flavors like guava and passionfruit, each paired with Corona’s classical lime-taste accompaniment. But the real showstopper here—for better or worse—is coconut and lime-flavored Corona.
I have so many questions. Who was clamoring for a coconut-flavored take on a Mexican pale lager? Is coconut beer even a thing, or is this completely out of left field? What does it even taste like? Does Corona have to put the lime in the coconut to make this beer?
Thankfully, answers to all but that last question exist. Corona Refresca is a bid to branch out from traditional beer and inch towards the sparkling mixed drinks/spiked seltzer category. Though it sounds like this is technically still a beer, it gives Corona an opportunity to capture some of the audience for a beverage category whose growth has significantly outpaced the more traditional beer category in recent years.
“We know consumers are seeking an alternative malt beverage experience,” Corona’s VP of Brand Marketing Ann Legan told USA Today. Legan sees Referesca’s audience as “multi-cultural females and males who are looking for a premium spiked refresher that delivers a taste of the tropics,” but that yield no clues as to why a coconut flavor was greenlit.
As it turns out, this is far from the first attempt to incorporate coconut into a beer. While a number of craft breweries have played around with the ingredient, Craftbeer.com notes that the trend is toward “coconuts getting added to porters or stouts exclusively” as a way to lighten up darker, chocolatey flavors. My gut instinct is that adding the flavor of coconut to a pale lager feels a bit redundant (given how light the beer already is), and potentially off-putting. Will it taste like sunscreen? A boozy coconut water with a hint of lime? Who knows.
What we do know is that drinkers in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina will be able to get their hands on the cursed coconut beverage by the end of March because those are all warm places that don’t still have snow on the ground. The rest of us can try out Corona Refresca by May, which is an appropriate time to start cracking open vaguely summer-themed cold ones.
I can’t wait for Bud Light to release a Dragonfruitarita, or something like that, in retaliation.
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