What happened to Battles & James?
The Mexicans call that drink “Dos Okies”
“What happened to Battles & James?”
Bartles & Jaymes is now canned, of course, because every alcoholic beverage must be canned these days (in pleasant white cans if possible). The cans have a scant 4% ABV and, again like hard seltzer, they’re low-sugar and low-cal; just 120 calories, far less than they were in the 1980s.
But, as usual, what happened was that on January 1, 1991, Congress gave drinkers the most brutal hangover ever to start a new year: The nation’s excise tax on wine was raised from $0.17 per gallon to a whopping $1.07. It suddenly became a quite expensive proposition to blend cheap wine with nuclear-red strawberry flavoring.
The clever way around that tax? Eliminate the wine. That, in turn, spawned the rise of malt-based beverages—“alcopops,” if you will—like Zima, Smirnoff Ice, and Mike’s Hard Lemonade that tasted like the wine coolers people had spent the ’80s falling in love with, but were taxed like beer. They were big hits on the fake ID circuit and spelled the end of wine coolers.
You would have thought Bartles & Jaymes then ceased to exist. Instead, quietly, it too quickly transitioned to being a wine-free “malternative” beverage in late 1991. It’s not near what it was in the 80’s. but it’s still on the shelf in a lot of places.
wy69