Avery’s Beverages honors city anniversary

Hard Hittin’ Lemonade made to commemorate 150th year

Avery’s Beverages, the New Britain-based soda maker famous for making special flavors to commemorate historic news events, has a new specialty flavor: Hard Hittin’ Lemonade, to mark the sesquicentennial of the incorporation of New Britain as a city.

The flavor is a lemonade laced with honey.

“New Britain has that whole bee thing going on, so when we started out we knew we had to have a little honey in it,” Avery’s General Manager Rob Metz said. “We said what goes good with honey? That’s easy, lemon.”

Metz said Avery’s needed to assure customers that the drink was for all ages. “It’s called Hard Hittin’ Lemonade, but it’s not a hard lemonade. We put a disclaimer on the bottle. It says, ‘This is not a hard lemonade but if you want it to be, just add your favorite spirit’,” he said.

New Britain was incorporated as a city on Jan. 13, 1871. The city’s motto is “Industry fills the hive and enjoys the honey” and the city’s seal and flag feature a beehive surrounded by bees. A futures collegiate baseball club, the New Britain Bees, is based in the city.

The title of the beverage references the city’s often-cited nickname, “Hard Hittin’ New Britain.”

The soda is sold at the Avery’s plant at 520 Corbin Ave. in New Britain and at dozens of New Britain shops and restaurants, including Capital Lunch, Frisbie’s Dairy Barn, Alvarium Beer Co. and Max Pizza.

Metz said that Avery’s sodas sell in all 48 continental United States and all around Connecticut, but this flavor, because of its local appeal, is primarily selling in places in New Britain.

Avery’s has made sodas to commemorate news events that are both happy — the first presidential election of Barack Obama — and sad, such as the long government shutdown in 2018-2019.

“Since 2008, we’ve done every presidential election and anything that dominates the news cycle for a long time. We did ‘Swine Flu Tonic,’ ‘Sick of Snow’ in 2011, ‘Deflated Ball Brew’ when the Patriots were in the Super Bowl,” he said.

Specialty sodas are on sale for a limited period of time, but some previous specialties are still on sale because their news events are recent and there are some left. Hard Hittin’ Lemonade is available as well as I Survived 2020, a bitter lemonade; Coronavirus Cocktail, which has orange and lime flavors; and Bidenberry, a mixedberry concoction commemorating Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

Except for presidential elections, the flavors are impossible to predict, Metz said. “We have to wait for things to happen,” he said. “It’s kind of organic. We can’t always plan it.”

Bottles of specialty sodas are $1.50.