Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mainly chronicle and evaluation beers, however gladly broaden that scope to any drink (or food) that sets well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough scotch.
Some mashups make no sense. Limp Bizkit, for example, teamed up with Method Man duetothefactthat we, as a society, were aimless in the late 1990s.
But others are basic crossovers that need little effort or planning to link. Absolut’s brand-new canned mixeddrink team-up with Ocean Spray? That’s the 2nd kind of mash-up.
Cranberry juice has long been one of vodka’s most accommodating dance partners. Ocean Spray has long preferred worldwide supremacy, one bog-berry affected juice mixeddrink at a time. Thus, Absolut and New England’s monolith of tart red liquids signedupwith forces to elbow their method into a quickly broadening market of canned drinks.
Behold, Absolut and Ocean Spray. Let’s see if they’re as excellent as you’d presume.
Let’s stand with the essentials. Vodka cranberry is a training wheels beverage. Something the lightest of light-weight college freshmen can pound all night (and then vomit back up, triggering fears they’re barfing blood. Nope, simply bog juice!). There’s a factor for that; the tart cranberry weaves into the mild cruelty of vodka and essentially simply makes it a cranberry juice.
So it’s excellent we’re dealing with the Cadillac of cranberry juices in Ocean Spray. It puts a charming pink with a little quantity of carbonation. It smells certainly like the fruit juice of origin, however much sweeter. And on the can it states “colored with veggie juice” which… doesn’t make me feel any muchbetter about the procedure, however sure.
This doesn’t matter. The vodka vanishes under a existing of full-bodied however light cranberries. The tartness endemic to the fruit hasactually been cleaned away by a mild sweettaste — a sweettaste buoyed by the extremely un-seltzer calorie count of156 This tastes like a shimmering water; not a La Croix however those huge, bubbly one liter bottles you’d discover at Aldi or Wal-Mart that simply state “LIME” or “BLACK CHERRY” on the label. This is that, just it’s cranberry and 6 of them will get you intoxicated.
Well, mostlikely. They just clock in at 4.5 percent alcohol by volume however are really easy to beverage. This is an simple win before one of those 11 am college football tailgates or the subsiding days of sunlight drinking by a body of water. It’ll mostlikely work when it’s chillier, too because, you understand, cranberry.
Oh, ideal. These are the 2 most vodka-erasing juices out there. But a little pineapple goes a long method, so there’s gonna requirement to be a deft touch here for this to have replay worth.
It puts that routine cranberry, veggie juice pink. It smells like straight up pineapple, which is a little odd to square with the color, however whatever. The veryfirst sip bears that out. This is appetizing pineapple, snapped off by that light present of carbonation and simply a little bit of sweettaste.
This leads to a delicious, fruity … well, it’s nearly a soda with simply the smallest tip there’s vodka included. After evaluating malt drinks from Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s that had no real bourbon in them, I’m a little appreciative for that. The alcohol is small and doesn’t impact the beverage in any genuine method however as a subtle suggestion not to indulge too hard.
In all, this is whatever I’d hoped and a little more. The cranberry is much more “cra