Liquid Death and Sazerac Chase Everyday Bubbly Drinkers With Mr. Fancy

Liquid Death is stepping into the wine aisle.

The canned water brand has partnered with spirits company Sazerac to launch Mr. Fancy.

It's a new canned American bubbly brand made in collaboration with Liquid Death founder and CEO Mike Cessario, its internal creative team Death Machine, and Crush Labs.

The partnership argues that bubbly deserves a place outside of weddings and championship toasts, in the ordinary moments beer and hard seltzer currently own.

"With Mr. Fancy, we saw an opportunity to challenge where bubbly fits in consumers' lives," said Sazerac CMO Sara Saunders.

"The category has traditionally been reserved for celebrations and special occasions, while beer and hard seltzer own the everyday."

Additionally, Saunders believes that there's meaningful space between the two categories, and Mr. Fancy delivers both taste and experience that "people expect from bubbly."

Cessario, who has built Liquid Death's identity on irreverent marketing, made a similar case for the new can.

"Bubbly is delicious and refreshing all the time, maybe even more so than a light beer," Cessario said.

He added that people have long treated it as reserved for weddings, yacht parties or championship celebrations.

"Mr. Fancy is American bubbly in a can that you can crack anywhere you'd normally grab a beer or seltzer," he explained. 

Mr. Fancy frames its origins as distinctly domestic, describing itself as coming from "the good ole U.S. of A."

It's a jab at the "romantic French cave where sommeliers whisper poetry to grapes" bubbly is often associated with.

A Straightforward Rollout

Mr. Fancy launches October 1 in Texas, Tennessee and Massachusetts, with additional states planned to follow.

The three markets give Sazerac a mix of major metros and mid-size cities to gauge demand before a wider push.

The bubbly comes in Brut and Rosé varieties, sold in six-packs for $14.99 plus tax, at 5.5% ABV and 140 calories per 12-ounce can.

Sazerac is pointing curious drinkers to the brand's account, @drinkmrfancy, ahead of the product launch.

It's using the same social-first strategy that built Liquid Death's following to introduce Mr. Fancy to a new audience.

The can's calorie count and ABV put Mr. Fancy in line with many hard seltzers on shelves, giving Sazerac a direct comparison point for drinkers weighing what to buy.

The move continues a pattern for Liquid Death's marketing team.

Death Machine has spent the past year building category crossovers for the brand, including a Peanut Butter Cup sparkling water collaboration with MrBeast's Feastables.

This ran alongside a chaotic biker-bar video and limited distribution through Amazon and Feastables.com.

Liquid Death's Wine Aisle Entry

Liquid Death closed 2024 with about $333 million in retail sales, up from $263 million the year before.

This gives Death Machine a growing budget and audience to test new categories with.

Mr. Fancy applies that same game plan to spirits, joining Liquid Death's marketing engine with Sazerac's production and distribution network to move a legacy category into new territory.

Sazerac made a sharp call bringing Liquid Death's marketing engine into the bubbly conversation.

Mr. Fancy shows how a legacy spirits company can use a challenger brand's audience to move into a category getting squeezed from both directions:

• Target a shelf that's already losing ground. FMB and hard malt seltzer sales together fell 6% to 7% in 2025, according to data reported by Beverage Industry, and that decline is the opening Mr. Fancy is aiming at.
• Borrow scale instead of building it from the ground up. Sazerac supplies the production and licensing, and Death Machine supplies the marketing voice, letting Mr. Fancy skip the years most independent RTD wine brands spend building out distribution.
• Sell the category's growth story alongside the can. A growing global sparkling wine industry gives Mr. Fancy real room to expand bubbly's everyday footprint.

The bigger question is whether Sazerac can hold that everyday positioning once bigger beverage companies target the same opening.

Bubbly's growth numbers suggest the category has room to grow well past its usual occasions.

Our Take: Can a Beer Occasion Get Answered With Wine?

We've cracked plenty of cans that promised to change how people drink, and most of them just changed the label.

Mr. Fancy is asking for something harder by hoping people reach for bubbly the way they'd reach for a beer without a toast, an occasion, or anyone clinking glasses first.

That's a bigger ask than a new flavor, since habits move slower than taste buds.

Sazerac priced Mr. Fancy like a six-pack of craft beer, a sign that the real fight sits at the register, next to everything else in the cooler.

We're curious whether Mr. Fancy earns a spot in that cooler on the ordinary days when nobody's celebrating anything.

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