Sazerac, Liquid Death Founder Launch Mr. Fancy to Rival Light Beer

Liquid Death is renting out its creative team to the wine aisle.

Sazerac has launched Mr. Fancy, a canned American bubbly, with wine company Crush Labs handling the product side.

Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario and his in-house agency Death Machine built the brand and wrote its voice.

Cessario and Sazerac want bubbly in the everyday occasions that beer and hard seltzer already own.

Weeknights and backyards count, and so does a Tuesday with nothing to celebrate.

Sazerac CMO Sara Saunders believes that there's meaningful space between the two categories.

"With Mr. Fancy, we saw an opportunity to challenge where bubbly fits in consumers' lives," she said in a press release. 

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

Cessario made the taste argument himself, and he aimed it straight at the beer shelf.

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

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

The line mocks the French cellar imagery that sparkling wine usually sells itself with, all sommeliers and whispered poetry over the grapes.

Naming the country of origin as a punchline tells us the brand voice was written before the liquid was.

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 calorie count and ABV put the new brand in line with most hard seltzers on shelves.

Sazerac gets a direct comparison point for drinkers standing in front of the cooler.

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

Death Machine has spent the past year building category crossovers for the brand.

And the collabs include a Peanut Butter Cup sparkling water collaboration with MrBeast's Feastables.

The Feastables launch ran alongside a chaotic biker-bar video and limited distribution through Amazon.

A Creative Team for Hire

Liquid Death closed 2024 with about $333 million in retail sales, up from $263 million in 2023.

This number gave Death Machine the budget and the reputation to sell its work elsewhere as a legit creative agency.

Mr. Fancy is the first time that Death Machine has worked on a product that Liquid Death does not own.

Sazerac supplies production and distribution, and Cessario's team supplies the voice.

Sazerac has been buying its way into ready-to-drink since 2024, picking up BuzzBallz that March and the Dirty Shirley canned cocktail line this year.

Mr. Fancy shows how a legacy spirits company can hire a challenger's creative team without an acquisition or a licensing deal:

• Target a shelf that's already losing ground. FMB and hard malt seltzer sales together fell 6% to 7% in 2025, and that decline is the opening Mr. Fancy is aiming at.
• Borrow scale from a partner that already has it. Sazerac's production and distribution let Mr. Fancy skip the years most independent wine brands spend getting onto shelves.
• 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 three launch markets will tell Sazerac whether the brand positioning holds before a nationwide rollout.

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 wants people to reach for bubbly the way they reach for a beer. No toast, no occasion, nobody 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.

We're also interested in what Death Machine does next, now that Cessario has proven his creative shop can bill a 176-year-old spirits company.

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