DEWEY BEACH, Del. - A new cocktail is letting people take a piece of Dewey Beach home with them. Dewey Crush says they have canned the taste of summer with crushes inspired by the Starboard.
The restaurant created a takeout crush station in its parking lot when the State of Delaware allowed for alcohol to be sold to-go during the pandemic. Customers can now take a different kind of crush home. It's not in a plastic cup. It's in a can.
Starboard owner Steve Montgomery says it all started when a group of three investors from the west coast fell in love with the Starboard's crushes and wanted to put them in a can.Â
"I poured them a real orange crush at the Starboard and said here it is figure out how to clone this," Montgomery says.
The crushes aren't canned at the Starboard. Montgomery says he's just the expert taste tester and that a slower year during the pandemic gave Dewey Crush more time to crush their orange, watermelon and grapefruit recipes.
"We wanted to make sure it was exactly the taste, the flavor, the alcohol content and everything as close to do as what we do everyday at the Starboard," Montgomery says.
"We Canned Summer!" is now printed on 4 and 12 packs of crushes in liquor stores statewide.
"For the people who aren't in Dewey, this is the next best thing to being here," says Dewey Beach Commissioner Paul Bauer. "You can take a little bit of Dewey wherever you go now."
Bauer says this will give the town more exposure and help more businesses recover from the pandemic.Â
"It's innovative," Bauer says. "It's the times that we live in now. The takeout business has gotten so large in the last year and we learned a lot."Â
The drink isn't only boosting business in Dewey. Atlantic Liquors owner Dale Lomas says canned cocktails are some of the best selling products in retail alcohol right now, but that the Dewey Crushes completely sold out over Memorial Day Weekend because they were so popular. He says it's their fruity flavors that make them so unique.
"It has a lot more flavor than a lot of them do," Lomas says. "A lot of them are really light. This really does have a good orange taste to it and it's about the closest thing I've ever experienced to the real thing. I mean you can buy a pre-made vodka and tonic, a pre-made vodka and seltzer and they're never quite the same as the ones you would make at home."
For those who aren't a fan of sweet and fruity drinks, Lomas says Dewey Crushes taste great over ice. Montgomery says skinny crushes will be released in the next couple of weeks.
A film crew will be in town over the weekend to make videos of the canned crushes to promote them even further as they start selling in different states in the country.
