How big of a deal is it that Karl Strauss Brewing Company, San Diego’s oldest craft brewery and the grandfather of the local craft beer movement, has launched its first non-beer product, a Hard Cherry Cola?

“The hope is that this follows where the trends are going in the alcoholic beverage industry, and this will become a huge thing for us,” said Chad Heath, Karl Strauss’s chief operating officer for the beer division.

It’s well on its way. “The response has been fantastic — like, amazing — on this,” Heath said.

Karl Strauss turns 37 this year and will celebrate with $3.70 pints at all its locations, all day Sunday. By one estimate, it has created more than 1,000 beers in that span, considering both its small-batch and core brands. The company joins other beermakers that are branching out. Truly’s hard seltzers are made by Boston Beer Co., maker of Samuel Adams. And Oceanside’s Green Cheek Beer Co. now also makes seltzers. With this hard cola, Karl Strauss hopes to reach new audiences while satisfying its base.

When, where, how much

The drink, priced at $12.99 for a six pack, was introduced at Disneyland’s California Adventure Park. Now it’s being rolled out in the states where Karl Strauss beers are sold: California, Arizona and Nevada. Albertsons, Vons, Pavilions and Total Wine sell it in San Diego, and BevMo! and Ralphs will have it soon.

Beer? Not beer?

Hard Cherry Cola is hard cola, but it’s also a beer. Legally speaking. “If you look really close, you will actually find the word ‘beer’ on the can,” Heath said. “It’s taxed as such and treated like a beer. It falls under all the same restrictions beer falls under.”

Buckle up for a quick primer on how this hard cola is almost like beer, but different.

“When we make beer, we take malt, we crack it. There’s sugars in there. We add yeast to it. The yeast eats the sugar and excretes alcohol and CO2,” Heath explained. “We didn’t do that for this product. We just put pure cane sugar in a tank, put yeast in it. When the yeast eats the sugar — again it excretes CO2 and alcohol and ferments out. … And that’s how we got the fermentable sugars in this product, as opposed to using malt. We just used pure cane sugar, fermented it up to 5%, added the natural flavorings into it that we use to make the cherry cola what it is, and filter it, bottle it, can it, keg it, and send it out to customers.”

This overlap with beer makes hard cola’s production simple for a brewery: same brewhouse, tanks and packaging equipment.

Disney x Karl Strauss

There are two ways Karl Strauss brings new products to market. One is at its brew pubs. “If we get exceptional feedback from them, then it goes into a larger development cycle, and then eventually it goes into a commercially produced beverage.”

The other path: Disney. “People go, Disney? Really?” Heath said. That theme park is a great place to bring new products to life, because of its many visitors who are also beer drinkers. The brewery developed the cola for a particular bar at the theme park, Pym Tasting Lab at the Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure.

“This bar is like a scientific lab and they’re like, ‘Hey, can you make something interesting for us there? We would like to maybe try a cola.’ That was the genesis of making this, and it took off. People made videos about it, and it went viral.” They sold it in brew pubs, and “it became a top five selling beverage in all our brew pubs.”

More people tried and liked it. “So the snowball started building. And that’s really how we got into that.”

Old and new

As he talked about the hard cola, Heath brought up the brewery’s bestselling Red Trolley Ale, “our holiday beer that we made the first year we were in business. And so to have a brand that’s been around for that long, that’s the lifecycle that we’re looking for. Not just to get that flash in the pan.”

Karl Strauss reached for two things at once with its hard cola: nostalgia and growth. Nostalgia comes across in the branding, the concept and the flavor, Heath said. “This product harkens back to the ’90s, and maybe a simpler time — you didn’t have a phone, and you were looking at MTV,” he said.

As for the future, the company hopes to draw in a new generation of fans with the hard cola.

“It’s appealing to people that are soda drinkers,” he said. As people increasingly shift away from alcoholic beverages, as part of increased focus on health and wellness, and lifestyle changes that make happy hours and other socializing over alcohol less prevalent, offering an alternative to beer made sense.

More than a trend

Heath said the company has been evolving for 37 years.

“We’re the first brewery in San Diego since Prohibition. So we’ve gone through peaks and valleys,” he said. “If we were a company that just rested on trends and hoping that this trend would take us to the next couple of years, we would have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago. We’re not interested in peaks and valleys. We’re interested in sustainable, long-lasting products that we can give our fans that they’re excited about. And this is one of those categories that we’re excited about.”

Stay tuned

Heath ended the interview on a cliffhanger. Asked if this is the first of other non-beer beverages the brewery is working on, he answered, “We don’t foresee this being the only product that we make. We do see other things coming that should be pretty fun and exciting.”