Au Vodka is in advanced talks to sell to the American drinks group Sazerac in a deal worth as much as £500m, Sky News reported on Saturday, in what would be the largest exit yet by a British ready-to-drink brand. The report says founders Charlie Morgan and Jackson Quinn are each expected to clear more than £100m once future payments are included.
Nothing has been signed. Sky News said negotiations had run for several months and an agreement appeared imminent, but a source close to Sazerac said only that it admired Au Vodka and its founders, and that discussions were ongoing and had yet to be finalised. Sazerac declined to comment. PJT Partners is understood to be advising Au Vodka and PricewaterhouseCoopers the founders. Until terms are announced this is a story about talks, not a completed transaction.
Sazerac is a family-owned Kentucky business whose portfolio runs from Buffalo Trace and Eagle Rare to Fireball and Southern Comfort. It has separately been linked with a bid for the far larger Brown-Forman, and people in the industry say it wants a bigger presence in Britain. Buying the country's biggest ready-to-drink vodka producer would do that at a stroke.
This would not be Sazerac's first purchase in the category. In May 2024 it announced it had completed its acquisition of BuzzBallz, the Texas maker of spherical premixed cocktails, confirming that founder Merrilee Kick would stay on and that other terms would not be disclosed. Two ready-to-drink acquisitions inside roughly two years is a measure of how seriously the big spirits groups now take a category they once dismissed as a novelty.
Morgan and Quinn founded Au Vodka in Swansea in 2015. Morgan was already known locally as the ballboy kicked by Chelsea's Eden Hazard in a 2013 League Cup tie. By March 2017, as The Spirits Business reported, it was agreeing terms to sell through the Viking Line ferry fleet and had listings in Harvey Nichols and Selfridges. It sold a minority stake to private equity firm Metric Capital in 2023, and is now the UK's leading producer of ready-to-drink vodka, built on heavy social media and endorsements from Floyd Mayweather, Ronaldinho and Jake Paul.
It would be wrong to read that as a template. Gold bottles and boxing champions are an expensive way to buy shelf space and few have made it work. The same years have been punishing elsewhere, with tariffs and falling spirits volumes pushing Diageo into a turnaround plan. A £500m valuation reflects the category, not the marketing. IWSR, which tracks the global drinks trade, has forecast ready to drink will be worth around 40bn US dollars by 2027, and puts the share of UK drinkers buying premixed RTDs at 41 per cent.
For smaller British producers the read-across is straightforward, and Boozy is acting on it. The Greater Manchester maker is in the early stages of seeking outside investment to expand production of a range built to be seen, eight cocktails in clear cans that show the colour of the drink and the shimmer running through it, a format the company says it brought to the UK first.
David Baddeley, who founded Boozy, said: "Nobody in this industry is pretending they are not watching that number. This is the strongest sector in drinks right now and it is not close. Spirits volumes are falling, beer is flat, and ready to drink is the one part of the shelf still growing every year. Our own momentum has come from trade and from events. We supply bars, clubs, hotels and restaurants, and festivals have been the making of us, because a bar that can serve a proper cocktail in seconds rather than minutes sells far more of them, and a clear can with the colour and the shimmer showing through does the selling on its own. We manufacture in house, so we can take a new flavour from idea to pallet in weeks. We are raising to grow, and I would rather say that out loud than pretend we got here on our own."
Whether the deal completes or not, the direction of travel is set. A category that barely registered in Britain ten years ago has produced a brand worth a reported half a billion pounds and a buyer twice convinced it is worth owning. The next few years will decide how many British brands stay independent.
Guidance on units and the UK Chief Medical Officers' low risk drinking guidelines is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
