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Mar 11, 2025

Playboy makes hard seltzer, for some reason. It's... fine.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

The promotional material for Playboy's seltzers is a little weird. It's a woman in handcuffs, holding the can in bound hands behind her back. This implies:

a) unlike with White Claw, standard laws apply whilst drinking Play Hard, and

b) this woman has Cirque du Soleil type dexterity to believe she can drink anything with both hands literally tied behind her back.

The promotional material also name drops Andy Warhol. While I do not have an art history degree, I believe he had no dog in the fight when it comes to hard seltzer.

That, of course, is burying the lede. The real story is that Playboy's omnipresent marketing wing, having stood witness at the death of print media, has branched out beyond air fresheners and deodorant (so, also air fresheners) and into the crowded landscape of hard seltzers. Alright, then. Let's see what we've got.

Oh dang, this flavor combination sounds great. Prickly pear is an underutilized ingredient that brings a creamy, mango-ish presence to a seltzer. The smell off the top of the pour brings that slightly, but mostly this is apple hard candies floating to the heavens.

The first sip is surprisingly tart, letting you know this is a Granny Smith situation instead of a honey crisp. But the sweet and sour combination is appealing, not overly sugary and a touch dry. I'm not getting much of the prickly pear, but it does seem to show up toward the end of the sip to clean things up a bit.

It doesn't taste like any other seltzer I've had, which is great. It's unique and fairly easy to drink, even if it's not especially full bodied. But it's maybe not something I'd want more than a couple of at a time.

Here we are at the other side of the seltzer cheat sheet. Faux-mango is an easy win to add creamy flavor without any calories, which makes it perpetually drinkable even if I don't like the urushiol-covered, impossible to prep fruit all that much. Let's see what the dragon fruit brings to the table.

It smells sweet like an undefined hard candy, but very light. The flavor itself comes across with more power, but it's tough to figure out exactly what it is. The mango and dragon fruit combine to create a gummy candy feel to the whole procedure. Like you're smacking on a fresh Laffy Taffy. I assume. Every single Laffy Taffy I've ever had has been at least old enough to attend kindergarten and hard enough to pop a semi tire if sharpened to a point.

This is all to say I'm not quite sure what I'm drinking, but I do like it. The sweetness here could be a little annoying after a while, but for two or three you should be fine. Keeping it in the can helps focus the flavor a little bit. Pouring it over ice makes it feel … a little like bubble gum? Weird, right?

Anyway, it's good.

Aw, man. Passion fruit is the bane of my existence in mixed drinks. Well, that and plain lime. Every plain lime kinda sucks in the same exact way. But passion fruit always tastes a little like stale plastic.

Fortunately, the pineapple should be able to help. That's the dominating force once you pour this into a glass. And it holds true on the first sip, which is sweet and acidic. The passion fruit clocks in light and late, ceding the spotlight to the better fruit.

It's unique and a little basic at the same time. Good, not great. The artificial flavor clocks in hard here, and it's unavoidable. Still, it's good enough.

I saved the flavor I'm least excited about for last. Probably because Recess's non-alcoholic grapefruit had a distinct body odor essence I'm still trying to come to terms with. But this smells like boring old, chewable vitamin grapefruit. Which, not great, but fine, I can drink it.

The taste itself is generic. The yuzu doesn't leave much of an impression, leaving this to stand as a basic, white claw style seltzer. It's grapefruit up front, then more grapefruit, then you're done.

That's tolerable, but it's clear which cans will linger from your mix pack. Playboy got a little lazy rounding out the pack, and it shows.

This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Play Hard vodka seltzers over a cold can of Hamm’s?

Maybe once in a while, but there's nothing here that needs to be tasted to be believed. If you've had a mid-range hard seltzer before, you've had Play Hard. If you're going for one, make it the Apple Prickly Pear