Sazerac Buys Au Vodka for a Reported £500m: The Real Price of a Format You Cannot Build

Brown-Forman turned Sazerac down in July. The board called a fully financed $15bn cash offer "not actionable". Three weeks later, on 17 August, Sazerac signed a binding deal to buy Au Vodka. The brand was founded in a Swansea business park in 2015. Sazerac would not confirm the price, and the BBC put it at about £500m.

Jack Daniel's was already more than a century old when Au Vodka's founders were born. The gap between those two deals is worth a few minutes of any drinks executive's time.

What the accounts show

Au Vodka Ltd filed accounts for the year to the end of April 2025. Turnover rose 27.3% to just under £83m. Pre-tax profit rose 31.3% to £6.7m. Admin costs rose by £12.1m to £25.6m. That is close to a third of sales.

At a reported £500m, the buyer is paying about six times sales and roughly 75 times pre-tax profit. Nobody pays that for vodka. They pay it for a can that already sells.

The growth sits in the can

Au Vodka is known for a gold bottle. Its growth comes from a 330ml can at 5% ABV. UK off-trade sales of its canned cocktails reached £61m in 2025, up 36.9% in a year. That made it the biggest ready-to-drink brand in Britain.

The wider numbers point the same way. IWSR says the ready-to-drink category passed vodka in global value in 2025. RTD volumes grew 3% that year while whiskey, tequila and vodka were flat or falling. Inside RTD, spirit-based cans grew 7% and malt-based cans fell 5%.

This is a buying run

Au Vodka is the latest name on a long list. Sazerac bought Svedka from Constellation Brands in 2024. It bought Western Son Vodka in October 2025 and the RTD brand Dirty Shirley in March 2026. It backed 818 Tequila in April and SipMargs in May. It already owns BuzzBallz, which pushed into the UK top 100 alcohol brands on £73m of growth.

Every one of those deals adds a can, a flavour or a young audience. The Brown-Forman approach would have added a 150-year-old bottle. Sazerac reported net sales of $6.6bn for the year to March 2026, so it could afford either. The board it approached said no, and the money went where the growth is.

The seller side matters as well. Two founders started the business in Wales in 2015 with no drinks group behind them. The company still employs about 80 people. Eleven years on, one of the world's largest spirits companies is reportedly paying half a billion pounds for it.

Soft drinks is running the same trade

On 10 August, Nichols, the maker of Vimto, paid €75m, about £64m, for the Irish functional drinks brand VITHIT. VITHIT turned over €26.5m in 2025 with €4.2m of adjusted operating profit. That works out at close to three times sales for a low-sugar vitamin drink.

So a soft drinks buyer paid roughly three times sales for function. A spirits buyer reportedly paid about six times sales for format. Both were buying the same thing: a shelf position they could not build fast enough on their own.

What the price actually buys

Sazerac owns more than 500 brands and has deep reach into retail. What it lacked was a British can with the top spot and 36.9% growth behind it. The premium here buys time, and time is the one input a large drinks group cannot make.

There is a catch in the accounts. Au Vodka spent close to a third of sales on overheads last year. Much of that went on marketing and famous faces. Floyd Mayweather, Jake Paul and Soulja Boy are all attached to the brand. Growth bought that way has to be bought again every year. Sazerac now owns that bill.

What to watch next

Completion is due within weeks. Three things will show whether the price was right. Whether Sazerac keeps the celebrity spend or moves it into shelf space. Whether Au sells well outside Britain, since its 2022 US entry has yet to produce a comparable number. And whether a reported £500m sets a floor under the next RTD deal.

For anyone selling drinks, the read is simple: the format is now worth more than the liquid. For anyone buying, the harder test comes later. It arrives on the day the attention moves on.