It was a sultry evening in early June, and I was heading to a party on the other side of London. The journey by tube takes an hour, so my boyfriend and I brought along some warm cans of margarita to pass the time. As the sweet reek of lime had begun to drift across the carriage, I spotted two women sipping cosmopolitans – Carrie Bradshaw’s drink of choice and for years the only cocktail I could have named – out of similar tins. Before long, we were all feeling lightly smashed.

Drinking on Transport for London services was banned in 2008 (the year of the great recession, just when we needed it most), but these days it seems the rule survives more as a suggestion. And conveniently, our cans were small enough to disappear into our pockets if necessary. As the writer and founder of @londondeadpubs Jimmy McIntosh puts it: “It might seem a bit uncouth to crack out a four pack of lager when travelling somewhere on public transport. But a canned cocktail feels more discreet and civilised somehow.”

It’s been 40 years since Marks & Spencer first put cocktails in cans. In the early days, the company kept it simple, selling rum and coke or gin and tonic for around £1 (about £3 today). Today, it stocks well over 40 floridly named concoctions that start at £2.50 a go, and claims to shift an alarming 150 cans a minute during summer weekends.

It’s not just M&S. You can barely pass a corner-shop fridge without being confronted by a Pocket Negroni or a Funkin Nitro daiquiri. Ocado and Sainsbury’s stock approximately 50 varieties each. Some you’ll know, others – a raspberry rose vodka seltzer, say – sound like algorithmic slop. And that’s before we get to the indie ones, which mix small-batch gin in micro-distilleries and cost the same as they would in a bar. The canned cocktail’s standing in British drinking culture is now every bit as assured, it seems, as a pint of lager.

Even if you do not partake, the evidence is hard to ignore. According to the International Wine and Spirits Record (IWSR), a drinks data and insights provider, British drinkers bought more than three times the total volume of premixed cocktails last year than they did in 2020, and thanks partly to the World Cup and the heatwave, 2026 is heading for a similar boom.

Staff at a corner shop in east London near where I live told me they now sell more Moth margaritas (a high-end bar-strength cocktail brand) than any other alcoholic drink except beer. They even outsell BuzzBallz, those phosphorescent orb-shaped drinks that have been widely associated with alcohol-fuelled recklessness among gen Z. These customers want more than portability and convenience. They want a cocktail.

Marketing gurus have described this era as the great tinification of drinks, the idea being that you can put any combination of booze into a can, slap some minimalist typography on to a label, and turn it into A Thing. They’re not wrong. I recently tried a low-intervention pétillant naturel (or pét nat) wine, which at almost £8 costs the same as a supermarket bottle and, frankly, I’d buy it again.

My canned cocktail of choice is a bougie margarita from Moth, Pimentae, or lately, the Psychopomp Microdistillery in Bristol (mail order at £6 a pop!). But the other week, I tried a Belletti Hugo Spritz for £1.29 from Aldi and it tasted perfectly fine. On my list to try is the canned spritz at Federal, a bar in Manchester that has its own canning station on site so you can drink the first and take away the second. Obviously, a margarita hand-mixed in a bar is superior, but for something lightweight and recyclable, these aren’t bad. So what if the M&S Limoncello spritz is cloyingly sweet (many canned cocktails use excessive sugar to stabilise perishable ingredients)? It does the job. It also resembles a can of soft drink, so you can sit on the train, chugging away, largely unjudged.

Tell that to Diane Abbott, of course, who was caught drinking an M&S mojito in transit in 2019 and was praised (relatable stressed woman) and pilloried (“There’s nothing funny about a middle-aged woman cracking open a canned cocktail at lunchtime on a train,” wrote Janet Street-Porter in the Mail) in equal measure. Sales of canned mojitos shot up shortly after.

“Diane caught flak simply for existing,” says David Inglis, professor of social sciences at the University of Helsinki, who is writing a book about the history of cocktails. “If you’re on a train and see one person drinking beer and another sipping a cocktail, the latter is often seen as drinking respectably, while the former is viewed as carrying the threat of losing control – it’s plain old semiotics,” he says.

Whether it’s a G&T or a mojito or a spicy marg, the selling point of canned cocktails is largely aspiration and fantasy, says Inglis. “When we’re holding the can, we’re drinking what it tells us about ourselves, which is often an idealised, aspirational version of who we are.” With their strangely textured labels, Moth margaritas even feel classy. It’s the same method – including a relentless marketing campaign – that enticed us to all drink Aperol Spritz a decade ago, despite many feeling it tastes like marmalade.

M&S did not invent the canned cocktail, nor indeed the canned alcoholic drink. Canning was invented after the French government in 1795 offered a prize for a method of preserving food for transport. However, it wasn’t until 1935 that a canned alcoholic beverage was first put on sale – by New Jersey producer the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company.

“Cocktails in themselves are an American thing,” says Inglis, “but they can also reflect the time we live in, culturally but also politically.” Take the emergence of Tiki culture following the second world war, which led to a trend for exotic rum cocktails and pineapple-on-everything. “In the 50s and 60s, one way to make your boring suburban lifestyle feel more exotic was to put on a colourful shirt and drink a piña colada in your back yard,” says Inglis.

Sometimes it goes a little deeper than that. Inglis tells me about the Campari sodas that were sold premixed in prechilled bottles from street vending machines during the 1930s in Mussolini’s Italy because the regime wanted Italians to drink patriotically. “At that point, Italians were drinking afternoon tea and American cocktails, which Mussolini hated.”

It’s this sort of cosplay that has allowed gin and tonics, “a drink rooted in a sort of postimperial fantasy that recalls white men in white suits and panama hats in former empire enclaves,” to flourish. They remain the most popular canned “cocktail” on the market, though, as Inglis adds: “A lot of these are not really cocktails.” A gin and tonic is simply gin and tonic. “That’s because you can’t put anything sophisticated in a can. First, you have a restricted market, and the average buyer might be put off by something elaborate, but the chemical composition wouldn’t work either – as soon as a cocktail is made it begins to deteriorate,” he says.

And yet this boom seems wildly countercultural. Over the past 20 years there’s been a steady and significant decline in youth drinking. This is specifically in relation to gen Z, says the British Medical Journal, which claims, based on NHS data, that “those born between the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2010s seem to be drinking less alcohol than older generations”. Just this month, Vogue Business claimed kombucha was the new tequila. So who exactly is drinking this stuff?

According to IWSR, of those drinking canned cocktails in the UK, 10% were boomers, 24% were gen X, 26% were gen Z (over 21) and 40% were millennials. More than half were women, and more than half were considered middle-income. In short: middle-class women. “It doesn’t matter how alcoholic these things are,” says Inglis. “They are widely considered to be a harmless drink drunk by a harmless person bought from a harmless shop.” Yet they are indeed quite alcoholic. The M&S margarita has an ABV of 8%, and the Moth version, which is half the size, is stronger at 14.9%. Remove the ice and the refined oak-pannelled bar, and you’re left with something designed to get you drunk.

But there’s also a financial appeal. I’m not embarrassed to admit part of the reason I preload is to save money. A standard cosmopolitan in a bar is anywhere between 100 to 135ml and would cost at least £12, whereas most cans are almost three times that size and a fraction of the price. Canned cocktails have shifted from convenience to carpe diem, a post-work treat and the only form of self care you can find in a train station. As Iris Murdoch’s protagonist Charles says in 1978’s The Sea, the Sea: “Why wantonly destroy one’s palate for cheap wine? One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured, so much the better.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, few things are more likely to whip up a moral panic than getting drunk in public. I’m old enough to have lived through the late-90s innovation of alcopops, which reached their apex in the 2000s, and were blamed for most societal wrongs among the young and febrile by church leaders, politicians, pressure groups and the media, which jumped on the bandwagon, prompting calls for Hooch and Smirnoff Ice to be heavily regulated or even banned. For me, many a Saturday night was spent practising strawpedos in Exeter pubs, a technique that involved popping a straw in a bottle of Hooch and then downing it by drinking around the straw instead of through it, allowing you to sink more than was sensible.

“So much of the alcopop panic was tied up with ladettes,” adds Inglis. “I’m sure everyone is a lot happier to see women drinking canned gin and tonics. It’s quaffable by the upper middle classes, so far more acceptable.”

Jem Roberts, head of external affairs at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, compares BuzzBallz to alcopops. “We’ve seen this playbook before – alcopops of the early 2000s were all designed with the same logic, and all drew the same public health concerns.” The name doesn’t help, either. “You could put rum and coke in a bottle and call it an alcopop and it sounds rowdy and troublesome. But put the same thing in a can, call it a cocktail, and sell it in a food hall to socially responsible people, and it sounds far more sophisticated – what’s more, the town centre won’t be trashed.”

Beyond Diane Abbott, my most recent reference point for canned cocktails is season two of Fleabag, where the titular heroine and the “Hot Priest”, played by Andrew Scott, share canned gin and tonics and reckon with the existence of God. The segment not only signalled that this priest was “cool” as Fleabag puts it, but led to a 24% increase in sales of the drink at M&S. Had he produced a bottle of Gordon’s gin, you would have thought he had a problem.

Perhaps, then, the stigma around getting drunk from a can has simply shifted – “it’s about what the container connotes,” Inglis says. Canned cocktails telegraph a consumer with a certain taste and budget that automatically render them unthreatening.

“Still, I find the idea of a canned cocktail being harmless so strange, especially when you think of rum, which is a sailor drink, and gin as mother’s ruin,” he adds. “In being put into a can, it’s like being domesticated.” But then, he says, “moral panics never came out of an M&S food hall, did they?”