Blog / June 20, 2026
From Apple Pie Moonshine to Canned Margaritas: A Decade of How America Names Its Booze
Every flavor fad leaves an artifact on the federal label. Ten years of TTB filings, read for what we actually put on the bottle.
By Zillah Bahar, Founder, COLAClear · June 20, 2026
Every flavor fad leaves a fingerprint on the federal label. A distiller has to register a product’s name with the TTB before the bottle can ship — so a decade of those filings is a near-perfect record of what we thought we wanted to drink. I pulled every domestic spirit label from 2015 and 2025. The shift is unmistakable.
In 2015, the bottle wanted to come from a mason jar. The top flavor words were Spiced, Apple Pie, Cherry, Peach — peak Appalachian-craft cosplay. (“Apple Pie Moonshine” is a real brand, named exactly that.)
By 2025, apple pie is gone. In its place: canned cocktails. “Cocktail,” “mule,” and “margarita” more than tripled; “lemonade” and “iced tea” took off. The mason jar got recycled into an aluminum can.
Moonshine didn’t die — it changed jobs, from personality to base, now carrying flavors like Cotton Candy and Pink Lemonade. And the permanent undercurrent never quits: Dill Pickle Vodka, a product called Majestic Unicorn, a Minnesota liqueur called, simply, Monk.
The flavors are fashion, and they’ll rotate again. What stays constant is us — still reaching for an easy, sweet, ready-made drink, and still dressing it up as something grander than it is.
Zillah Bahar is the founder of COLAClear, a TTB label pre-screening platform for wine, spirits, and beer.
Source: Brand and product names on domestic distilled-spirits labels, 2015 and 2025, from the TTB Public COLA Registry. Percentages are the share of uniquely-named products carrying each word. Every product named is a real, TTB-approved label.
Related reading: Wine labels have a season — another pattern hiding in the COLA registry. See also what 13,744 spirits COLAs reveal about how brands grow.