Blog / May 23, 2026
What 13,744 domestic spirits COLAs reveal about how brands actually grow
By Zillah Bahar, Founder, COLAClear
Three of the most-filed domestic spirits brands in 2025 sat near the top of the TTB Public COLA Registry leaderboard via three completely disparate production strategies:
- Surfside — few SKUs, many states. Scale through geography.
- Crooked Creek — many SKUs, one state. Iteration across categories.
- Ole Smoky — many SKUs, one state, one category. Depth through flavor.
Same leaderboard. Different businesses. Nielsen and Circana show what consumers bought last quarter. The COLA registry shows what brands are organizing to produce next quarter — and the structure of that production. A brand operating across 11 distilleries is preparing for a different kind of year than one running 87 experiments out of its home distillery.
For competitors, distributors, and analysts, this is a supply-side leading indicator sitting in plain sight. It’s free. It’s public. It just doesn’t get read in aggregate.
Here’s what reading it in aggregate looks like, using the top three filers as case studies.
Surfside: 272 COLAs, eleven distilleries, seven states
Surfside — the Philadelphia vodka-iced-tea RTD launched in 2022 — filed 272 COLAs in 2025. That’s 2 percent of all 13,744 domestic spirits filings from a single brand.
The 272 approvals decompose into just 32 unique products, replicated across 11 distillery permits in 7 states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. Each state requires its own COLA, so a coordinated multi-state co-packing rollout multiplies labels accordingly.
The cadence is calendared, not continuous: 60 COLAs in May, 87 in June, 51 in December. February, April, October, and November total seven approvals between them. Pre-summer launch, gift-season launch, near-silence in between.
The retail outcome matches the supply-side commitment. Surfside reached 11.1 million cases sold in 2025 — a 360% jump in dollar sales versus 2024 at scanned retail (Spirits Business / PRNewswire, January 2025) — and was named 2025 Spirits Brand of the Year by Market Watch Magazine.
Crooked Creek Distillery: 88 COLAs, 87 unique products, one state
Crooked Creek’s pattern is the opposite of Surfside’s. All 88 of its 2025 COLAs came from a single Pennsylvania distillery permit, and almost every COLA is a different product — 87 unique product names across 88 filings.
The category mix sprawls. Twenty-two distinct class codes appear: bourbon, rum, vodka, gin, rye, liqueurs, moonshine, RTD cocktails. Product names include Limited Edition Moonshine Pickles, Cucumber Lemon Dill Vodka, Forbidden Black Rice Flavored Vodka, and Espresso Martini.
Monthly pattern: a 35-COLA January burst (40 percent of the year), a 15-COLA August surge, modest activity in between. A single distillery running structured experiments across many categories.
Ole Smoky: 78 COLAs, one category played deep
Ole Smoky filed 78 COLAs in 2025, almost entirely from one Tennessee distillery permit. Sixty-one are unique products. Unlike Crooked Creek, they cluster in a single category: flavored moonshine. Product names confirm it — Apple Pie, Banana Pudding, Black Cherry, Butter Pecan, Cantaloupe, Hot & Spicy Moonshine Pickles. Three coordinated drops: April (20), July (15), September (10).
Caveat: COLA filings measure label activity, not depletions or revenue. Surfside happens to lead both. Most of the leaderboard doesn’t.
Related reading: 22 of the Top 25 U.S. Wine COLA Filers Are Importers — the wine equivalent of this analysis.