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.
Betty Booze is the confluence of two rising tides: canned cocktails and celebrity-helmed alcohol branding.
The slim-fit cans are an extension of Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz premium mixers, a logical jump from craft bottles of ginger beer to the mixed drinks in which they’re destined to wind up. The actress joins a crowded lineage of famous folks who’d like to get you drunk — a banner brought to the spotlight by Dan Aykroyd and Sammy Hagar a couple decades back and since carried by George Clooney, The Rock, Peyton Manning and, notably, Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds.
Instead of branding a specific spirit, Lively’s opted to build her own cocktail line aimed at going above and beyond the 12-ounce hype machine of hard seltzers. Betty Booze is filled with the ingredients you’d find at an expensive speakeasy-inspired venue, ready to be made by a bartender with entirely too complex facial hair and arm garters. Thus, being able to drink them at home is already a point in their favor. Will they live up to their craft-inspired billing?