Beverage of the Week – Syndication Server

Beverage of the Week: Wilderton made a non-alcoholic spirit for mocktails and, alright, I’m into it

Can a non-alcoholic spirit make a proper hot toddy replacement? If you’re willing to put in the time … yes.

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.

It always bugged me that January and October were the two most popular months to give up drinking. I mean, I get why. January’s the start of a new year. October, uh, rhymes with sober? I guess it clears the runway to booze your way through the holidays, too.

But January and October are each 31-day months in the middle of football season. February, for the most part, has 28 days. It’s the backdrop to the Super Bowl, which is an obstacle, but otherwise only regular season hockey and basketball among America’s big five sports. If you need a get-right month, February is your guy.

I won’t be partaking personally — look for some on-location stuff from Phoenix breweries next week if all goes well — but I still opted to start the month off booze-free. Fortunately, I had a cocktail kit from Wilderton, and a five-step, 15-minute recipe, with which to kick off February.

Wilderton is a non-alcoholic botanical spirit made with grapefruit, orange blossom and herbs. It looks like magenta whiskey and smells, kinda, like pickles. And it came with the recipe for Rosy Cheeks, a booze-less hot toddy variation made with tea, vanilla syrup and lemon.

Let’s see how it tastes — and if it’s a proper substitute for a regular cocktail.

Beverage of the Week: Send out dry January with Athletic Brewing’s legit non-alcoholic beers

Need a non-alcoholic option to round out dry January? Turns out Athletic has the best NA beer I’ve had to date.

Dry January would be much more of a sensation if it weren’t right in the middle of the year’s most important stretch of football. Taking the first 31 days of the year off from drinking is a rough option when the alternative is having a beer and watching the Rose Bowl or remaining couch-bound through the entirety of Super Wild Card Weekend ™.

It’s a smart idea, however. The last two weeks of December are typically reserved for stress eating and drinking enough to get you through family functions or the assembly of whichever high-involvement toy kitchen you stupidly bought your kid that year. A hard reset makes sense, even if it’s at odds with the football schedule.

In that spirit, today’s beer come from one of the fastest growing non-alcoholic breweries in the country. I first heard of Athletic Brewing Company a few years back, but didn’t really pay attention until I heard AEW wrestler Jox Moxley gush about it in a post-match press conference. I wouldn’t normally consider the a Cincinnati-born wrestler with a penchant for biting dudes in the ring as a tastemaker, but if Athletic was good enough to replace his post-match beer as part of his journey through sobriety, it must be pretty good.

Right?

Beverage of the Week: SweetWater’s Festive Ale lacks the warmth of a good winter beer

SweetWater’s Festive Ale lacks the spice and flavor of a good winter warmer beer.

I like winter ales and warmers. I really, really like SweetWater. So when SweetWater offered up a sample of their Festive Ale, I was pretty excited.

After all, the landscape of Christmas ales and spiced cold weather beers is fairly barren. Great Lakes probably does it the best. Breckenridge has a popular offering, though I admit I’ve never pulled the trigger on those CostCo mini-kegs (as someone who grew up with incurable poor-brain, I perpetually wait to see if they’ll get marked down after the holiday, only to find beer is not sold like candy). St. Arnold and Shiner each have notable entries as well.

But SweetWater was a new development from a brewery I’d always associated with pale ales. SweetWater Blue remains a solid foray into fruit beers that showcases the brand’s versatility. It stands to reason a winter’s beer would be another win for the one-time microbrewer.

However…

Beverage of the Week: I don’t understand who Bluebird Hardwater is for

It’s the watered-down end of a rocks glass, 12 ounces at a time. Hooray?

I’ve been on a run of canned cocktails lately in this column. One of the things I’ve learned is that I prefer simplicity. Add too many ingredients, no matter how good they are, and you wind up with an overstuffed drink that doesn’t quite taste like anything.

Then came Bluebird Hardwater to put that to the test. Bluebird is … minimal. Their cocktails are just spirit and water. Ultra purified water, specifically, but yeah. No carbonation. No sugar or flavoring. Just whiskey and water. Or vodka and water. Or tequila and water.

The end result is an incredibly basic idea, targeted toward people who thought the 100 calories and fruit flavors of High Noon’s vodka sodas were excessive. Bluebird Hardwater clocks in at four percent ABV and 78 calories. And, for a whiskey drinker like myself, it’s an intriguing conceit.

It turns out, the label on the can gives way to zero surprises within. Here’s how Bluebird Hardwater tastes.

Beverage of the Week: Epic Western makes the best canned cocktail I’ve ever had

Epic Western’s Chispa Rita has all the hallmarks of a fresh margarita. And it’s completely crushable in a can or a glass.

Things have not gone so well for the Tennessee Titans.

Tennessee was once 7-3 with a 97 percent probability to win the AFC South for the third straight year. Now Mike Vrabel’s team is 7-9 and needs to beat the streaking Jacksonville Jaguars, in Jacksonville with its third-string quarterback, just to sneak into the playoffs.

And it turns out their official canned cocktail, well-made as it may be, is a bit of an unfortunate, over-complicated mess.

But there is another. It turns out the Titans have multiple official canned cocktails. So if you’re at Nissan Stadium you can also find Epic Western’s tequila-based offerings to help you through the interminable slogs that have made up Tennessee’s 2022 regular season. After rolling through Spirited Hive’s lineup, it was only fair I give the its Nashville alternative a proper chance to put a silver lining on the franchise’s unpleasant 2022.

Turns out, it’s pretty good. Like, really good.

Beverage of the Week: Sweetwater’s hazy IPAs swing hard — and one is a home run

Sweetwater went big with its hop profile for double hazy and mosaic IPAs. It paid off in a big way … for one of them.

Sweetwater has bought a lot of goodwill inside my brain. The Georgia-based brewery was a standby when I was a broke graduate student in Nashville, typically available for $2.50 a pint at my local Flying Saucer on trivia night.

While it’s 420 Pale Ale was a little too strong from my “still-used-to-Pabst” taste buds, Sweetwater Blue helped fill the gap in my years of hating bitter hops before abruptly loving them. There are at least a few 2007-era pint glasses with the brewery’s fish logo adorned upon it someone on a shelf in my basement.

But living in Wisconsin the past 12 years means I haven’t had a Sweetwater in a while. While other southern brewers like Abita and Cigar City have made minor inroads in the drinkin’-est state in the union, the Atlanta-based beer is a virtual non-entity up here.

So when I got the chance to try a couple of new-ish — at least to me — Sweetwater beers for the sake of “research” I jumped at the chance. I drank the H.A.Z.Y. double IPA and Mosaic single hop hazy IPA (along with a few 420s and Blues) in hopes of sending me back 15 years.

It mostly panned out!

Beverage of the Week: Urban Chestnut’s Zwickel is an easy-drinking German beer for whenever

The St. Louis brewery’s primary offering is a tasty anytime beer that does its Bavarian roots proud.

St. Louis is a good drinking town. Of course it’s home to Budweiser, but there’s so much more about the Gateway to the West than mass-produced beers. There are 86 breweries currently operating in the area, per STLbeer.com, ranging from older independent standbys like Schlafly to newer shops like Wellspent.

I’ve got my favorites among that group. There’s a bunch of stuff from Perennial Artisan Ales I enjoy and just about anything Four Hands makes is wonderful. But given my love of German style beers, my go-to for trips south is Urban Chestnut.

Urban Chestnut isn’t an underdog tale. They’re a well crafted and well funded venture with an older taproom in Mid Town and an impressive, massive base of operations/bierhall/kitchen in the Grove. It’s easy to see why investors would bet on UC; their stuff rules.

Today I’m gonna dig into the last straggler in my fridge after my most recent Missouri trip. Urban Chestnut’s Zwickel is a Bavarian lager and the most likely UC brew to pop up in your local gas stations across the midwest. Let’s talk about how it tastes.

Beverage of the Week: Spirited Hive, the Titans’ official canned cocktail, tries too hard

Spirited Hive is well made and its cocktail recipes make sense. Until the flavors start fighting each other in your mouth.

Canned cocktails are a great idea in theory. Being able to eliminate the effort of a five-step mixed drink and replace it with a one-shot trip to the fridge or cooler is an easy sell.

In practice, they’re a lot dicier. It turns out jamming a bunch of moving parts into a 12-ounce can and hoping the ingredients meant to blend together for 45 minutes tops can last a full year without turning against each other and turning your drink into a David Cronenberg-ian mash-up of mutated anger is a very delicate balance. But that’s worked recently for basic vodka-soda mixes like High Noon, which has capitalized from a still-vast hard seltzer market to become a major player on liquor store shelves.

Spirited Hive is the next step in that evolution. And, even better for my purposes as an NFL writer trying to monetize his drinking problem,* they’re an official “Ready-to-Drink Partner” of the Tennessee Titans. As great as beer is with a football game, there’s value to finding a seven percent ABV cocktail you can slip in a koozie and sip across a quarter and a half.

This made me excited to give Spirited Hive a try. But while these drinks certainly put in the effort, they’re a little too involved for my taste. Let’s dig through all four primary flavors.

Beverage of the Week: Fever-Tree’s Blood Orange Ginger Beer shouldn’t work, but it does

Fever-Tree’s got a new mixer. Does adding orange — sorry, BLOOD orange — actually improve ginger beer or make it worse?

When I did a tour of Fever-Tree’s fancy-pants mixers last month, I noted the ginger beer was far and away the star of the show (with a nod to the sparkling grapefruit). Fever-Tree must be acutely aware of this, because it expanded that beverage line out to a new flavor this fall: blood orange.

That’s … interesting. When it comes to ginger mixers I’ve well versed with lime and cranberry and other bitter citrus, but orange and ginger is a new one for me outside of chicken dishes. Fever-Tree already has a handful of lime-based mixers, so doing something that could easily translate to a one-step dark and stormy or Moscow mule seemed like the more logical progression.

But no, instead we’re gonna take those old classics and add a little more citrus and see what we get. I can understand it. Fever-Tree is fancy stuff, so you’d expect it to default to something a little more involved than rum and Coke. But I still used it in a couple two-step cocktails because I’m a lazy man and I’m not about to pretend to be fancy here. Y’all saw me drink out of a dog bowl last week, I won’t insult you by suggesting I’m zesting lemons or making shrubs over here.

Here are the basic drinks I made instead and how Fever-Tree’s Blood Orange Ginger Beer mixed with both.

Beverage of the Week: Firestone Walker’s IPAs remain an all-Crunchberries array of goodness

Firestone Walker’s Hopnosis IPA is the perfect blend of hops and citrus for a very drinkable pale ale.

I’ve made no effort to hide my fandom for Firestone Walker’s beers. In the past year I’ve had the chance to feature their tropical IPAs and oaked Oktoberfest and came away impressed with both. In fact, that Oaktoberfest may be my new favorite märzen out there, which is substantial because I freakin’ love märzens.

This week’s taste test presented the opportunity to try a new 2022 release — Hopnosis IPA. Per the company itself, the difference between this and the rest of its hop-forward portfolio is a double dry-hopping with a whole bunch of different stuff in there. Simcoe hops. Talus. Callista. Idaho 7, etc.

The centerpiece are the Mosaic Cryo Hops, which I am wholly unfamiliar with but were included, in all their glory, in a sealed, freeze-dried package along with this sample. No idea what I’m gonna do with a couple ounces of hops but … thanks?

Anyway, those are supposed to make things extra hoppy, which is a concern. I like IPAs, but I don’t need the tastebud-scorching IBUs that was the hallmark of craft breweries a decade ago. I’m good with a bitter beer, but I don’t want something I’m done with after one can.

Well, let’s see how it goes.