Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Previously, we’ve folded these in to our betting guides, whether that’s been for the NFL slate or a bizarrely successful run through the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. 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.
OK. Full disclosure. I started this feature because I wanted to drink a bunch of fine German beers and then talk about fine German beers. While that very much remains in play, my beautiful, pure vision has since been perverted into hard seltzers, cookie liqueurs and a truly unhealthy amount of Coffee-Mate creamers.
But never did I see it getting this far.
Somewhere, somehow, from the dark recesses of TikTok came an ungodly creation. An abomination of ice, seltzer and balsamic vinegar known, for reasons I can only assume are ironic and/or idiotic, as a “healthy Coke.”
JUST HEAR ME OUT pic.twitter.com/nEifb4BaGh
— Alex McDaniel (@AlexMcDaniel) June 9, 2022
This disturbs me. Greatly.
My stance on La Croix is that it tastes like someone whispering the description of a soda they had weeks ago. My vinegar usage is limited to steak fries and descaling my coffee maker (different vinegars, but still). Like you, I, at no point, considered pairing the two, just as I’d never considered drinking either on its own.
But, because I drank Utah’s dirty sodas, added booze to Utah’s dirty sodas and have sipped cookie dough whiskey in the name of science, this duty fell on my shoulders. “Vocation” comes from the Latin “vox,” or voice, meant to imply a calling from God. In my case, that voice is filtered through my coworkers, lovingly reaching out to say, “hey dummy, drink this.”
So I did. With my head tilted toward the heavens, quietly asking, “why?” I did.
Like last month, when I had to purchase two gallons of coffee creamer in a single trip, I felt weird running this through the checkout line. I fondly remembered the words Ryan Dunn’s urgent care doctor gave him after an x-ray showcased a toy car inside his rectum at the end of the first Jackass movie.
“You don’t talk to anybody. To your girlfriend, to your boyfriend, to whomever. You don’t tell nobody. [My editor] already knows. That’s too many people.”
But while I can hid that shame from the cashier, I can’t expense these drinks I don’t want or salad dressing I won’t use unless I write about it. Such is the plight of my offseason.