Britain’s Unexpected Fruit Lager Craze

I like to think I keep a pretty close eye on foreign beer markets, but I somehow missed the latest craze to sweep across Britain: fruit lagers. My education began on Bluesky, where Jason, an American tending bar in Amsterdam, noted this:

“I've had a number of Brits come into the bar asking for just a ‘normal fruit lager’ and though I try to not show any disappointment or judgement with anyone's order I really struggle controlling myself with that one.”

Wait, what?

I was aware of one variety of fruit creep in the UK: the success of fruit sours. This phenomenon is exemplified by Edinburgh’s Vault City, which has created a minor sensation for these FMB-adjacent frolics. They follow the kettle-sour playbook that started in the US and emphasize the sweet rather than the sour. Vault City seems to specialize in smoothie-sours, but I confess I am not fully up to speed on the nuances of their product line.

John “The Beer Nut” Duffy described one, which will be familiar to Americans who remember drinking a decade ago. “[They claim] to be sour but are no such thing. To its credit, the murky orange-pink offering has a very real strawberry character, not an ersatz flavouring…. So full marks for being like a cheesecake; none for being like a beer.” But Vault City, for all the press it has generated (a lot!) only made 14,000 hectoliters of beer in 2025. Oregon alone has perhaps a dozen bigger breweries than that. I noted the phenomenon and decided to keep an eye on it, slipping it in the “niche only” file in my memory.

Fruit lagers are a more recent phenomenon, and again it looks like we have a specific brewery to blame: Jubel*.

“The demand for fruity beer is being driven by the popularity of Jubel, a 4 per cent ABV lager with flavours including peach, grapefruit, lemon and blood orange. The British brewing company’s sales have grown by 80%, from £5.1m to £11.6m, over the past year, according to NIQ data.”

This appears to be yet another FMB-adjacent play. The Telegraph goes on to add, “45% of Gen Z beer-drinkers enjoy fruit-flavoured beer, while the same percentage of younger millennial beer-drinkers find citrus beers appealing.” This is a time-honored slot in the alcohol aisle, the sweetly-flavored booze that appeals to young drinkers who still consider candy a major food group.

I don’t have too much wisdom to add to this development, which is a decades-old story retold with different names. It’s going right in that same file in the memory bank—although we may have to move it out of the “niche” folder if things continue. The one small area of interest is that these two trends, fruit sours and fruit lagers, began in the craft channel. Fruit-flavored beers are a long-standing seller here in the States, but they have largely been the province of the big breweries. Little breweries make plenty of fruit beers, but they are not aimed at a mass market or built to scale. Will Jubel and Vault City become brands as ubiquitous as Bud Light Lime-a-Rita? Something to keep an eye on.

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* Not to turn everything into a comment on Oregon, but Jubel? We have a little brewery here that has made a “Jubelale” longer than the drinkers of Jubel’s raspberry lagers have been alive, and it’s a bit startling to see that name. I don’t know if attorneys have gotten involved.