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.
If you’re like me, you recognize Tampico’s neon jugs of various fruit punches from end caps at your local, dirt cheap grocery store. Their beverages don’t have names so much as they have colors. Want a glass of thick pink? Hypercolor yellow? Concerning levels of blue?
Effectively, Tampico is the purple stuff Sunny Delight warned us about, and it’s wonderful. I still buy it occasionally as an adult, though in its sugar-substitute versions and generally cut with a fair amount of water. It’s still pretty damned sweet at that point, so you can imagine what we’re dealing with here if you’re new to the brand.
OK, so now lets take those big, sweet jugs of sugar water and add booze and a little carbonation to them. How’s it gonna turn out?
Like Sunny D before it, Tampico is the next brand to make the jump from the back of your childhood refrigerator and into canned cocktail form. Its slim cans ditch the neon lure of plastic jugs for a more sophisticated place on liquor store shelves. So can a budget fruit punch brand break into a snobbier world of hard seltzers and canned cocktails?