It’s probably difficult for most breweries to pursue hard seltzers with real fruit. It may require some different techniques than they’re used to, or it’s going to require different equipment. But essentially, we are taking that neutral sugar base, we are adding real fruit, then getting all the particulate out, and then pasteurizing, so that that product doesn’t referment in the can.
Adding fruit, without a pasteurizer—it might be that you’re leaning on using some preservatives. Or you might just be fermenting it out. For a long time, brewers have been adding fruit and fermenting it out in beer, and you’re still left with a lot of fruit flavor in it.
I think pasteurization has become more and more useful in beer, as we’ve seen with stouts and fruited sours—really pumping that fruit flavor and residual sugar into those. To create a stable product, there are quite a few breweries who are buying, as a starting point, just a small-batch pasteurizer or looking at a flash pasteurizer—or going all the way to a tunnel pasteurizer.