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.
Margaritas don’t do much for me. It’s a bummer. I love hole in the wall Mexican restaurants. Their wave pools of frozen alcohol in various Trapper Keeper colors is always inviting. I know the fajita effect is a real thing that changes customers’ minds and alters orders, but I doubt it’s as powerful as a brief glimpse of day-glo tequila slush undulating like early-2000s special effects in a Mark Wahlberg-George Clooney-you’ll-cry-at-the-end movie.
Unfortunately, the expectation and the experience don’t line up for me. I have no soft spot in my heart for margaritas thanks to entirely too many bad memories and reactions to tequila. I’m sure I’m not the only one, so if you’re reading this and nodding just know you’re not alone. That stuff is stupid juice.
I *do* have a soft spot for Dos Equis, however. As a broke graduate student, they were a $2.50 staple at my local Flying Saucer. While buying in bottles never quite lives up to the taste of the Mexican beer fresh on tap, it’s still a regular piece of my restaurant equation if I’m at an aforementioned perpetual-motion margarita place.
This left me in a pinch when Dos Equis sent me a four-pack of their new product … a 10 percent ABV canned margarita. It’s not a malt beverage; there’s real tequila and lime in there and, oh man, this could be a quick review. Well, let’s dig in.