Somewhere around the May bank holiday, something shifted behind British bars. The orange glow that has dominated every beer garden Instagram grid since roughly 2016 started sharing space with a paler, greener, floral-scented rival. By midsummer, it wasn’t sharing space anymore: it had taken over. Britain’s love affair with the Aperol Spritz has a new protagonist, and its name is Hugo.
If you run a bar, pub or restaurant, you’ve probably already felt this in your order tickets, even if nobody’s shown you the numbers yet. So here they are, plus a look at who’s queuing up to make Hugo’s reign just as short-lived as Aperol’s.
The numbers behind the coup
For the first time on record, UK Google searches for “Hugo Spritz” overtook “Aperol Spritz” this summer - a genuine changing of the guard after years of Aperol having the internet entirely to itself. Over the 13 weeks to 12 July, Hugo posted an average search-interest score of 55.8 against Aperol’s 53.9. It sounds narrow, but the trajectory is the real story: back in 2022, Hugo generated barely 2% of Aperol’s search interest. It has spent three years closing a gap that once looked unbridgeable.
Till data backs up the search trend. Point-of-sale figures from Square found Hugo Spritz sales up 196% year-on-year between April and June 2026; comfortably the fastest-growing cocktail in the country, ahead of the spicy margarita (+56%) and even the Aperol-adjacent Campari Spritz (+52%).
One Manchester-based canned cocktail maker told The Drinks Business their tinned Hugo Spritz sales had simply doubled compared with the previous summer. Elderflower liqueur sales (the backbone of any Hugo) have more than doubled in the UK too, which tells you this wasn’t a one-off TikTok flicker - people bought the ingredients and kept making it at home.
Why Hugo, and why now?
The honest answer is that Hugo suits how people are actually drinking these days better than Aperol does. It’s lower-key: elderflower liqueur, fresh mint, lime, prosecco and soda, built around a floral sweetness rather than Aperol’s bittersweet, more assertive orange bite. It reads as lighter, both in flavour and in ABV, which matters when over a third of 18-29 year-olds say they’re socialising earlier in the evening than they were a year ago. The so-called “daycap” habit of treating a spritz as a 5pm ritual rather than a big night out. Roughly a third of Britons aged 18-29 now name spritz, in some form, as their go-to summer cocktail, and within that group, nearly half are specifically choosing Hugo over Aperol.
Don’t clear the Aperol off your optics just yet
Here’s the twist that makes this more interesting than a straightforward changing of the guard: Hugo has won the internet, but Aperol still wins the till roll. Aperol Spritz remains, by a wide margin, the single most-ordered cocktail in British venues, commanding 13.6% of all cocktail serves nationally - a share that actually grew by 3.7 percentage points over the past year. Zoom out further and Campari Group, Aperol’s owner, is behind close to 90% of every spritz poured in the UK over the last three years, once you count Campari Spritz and its other aperitivo brands alongside Aperol itself.
In other words: everyone’s Googling Hugo, but Aperol is still paying most of your spritz-shaped rent. Search interest is a leading indicator of buzz, not yet a replacement for a decade of habitual, “I’ll have my usual” ordering. Whether Hugo converts its search lead into that same loyalty is the real question for 2027.
So what’s next?
If there’s one lesson from the last five years, it’s that spritz season never really ends; it just rotates the lead. A few names worth watching before next summer’s menus get printed:
- Campari Spritz: The more bitter, adult sibling of Aperol, already the third-fastest-growing cocktail in the country and tipped by bartenders for its “complexity and sophistication” relative to its two stablemates.
- Sarti Rosa: A vivid pink, passion fruit and blood orange aperitivo, also from Campari Group, already stocked in chains including Slug & Lettuce and Franco Manca and pitched explicitly as “the next big trend.”
- Limoncello Spritz: Riding the same citrus-forward, Italian-summer wave as Hugo, and an easy sell to anyone already keeping limoncello behind the bar.
- Low- and no-ABV spritz variants: With canned sparkling wine sales up 70% year-on-year and the “daycap” habit showing no sign of slowing, expect more menus offering a spritz built for four in the afternoon, not midnight.
The practical bit
Whichever way next summer breaks, the same prep applies now: keep a case of elderflower liqueur and decent prosecco on hand alongside your Aperol, since Hugo isn’t going anywhere even if it’s no longer the newest name in the room.
It’s worth trialling one Campari Group challenger (Sarti Rosa or Campari Spritz) on a small-batch or specials board before committing shelf space, given both are backed by the same distributor relationships that made Aperol easy to source in the first place. And don’t discount Aperol itself: the data says it’s still your best-selling spritz by volume, whatever your search history suggests. The smartest move for most venues isn’t picking a winner - it’s making sure your spritz section has room for all of them.