Beverage of the Week – Page 2 – Syndication Server

Beverage of the Week: Bourbon barreled (kinda) Dr Pepper? Go on …

Dr Pepper and bourbon was already a strong combination. But what happens when the Dr Pepper *already* tastes like whiskey?

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’s wild to think that Dr Pepper has its own cinematic universe. Every fall, their Fansville commercials re-introduce college football fans to a cast of recurring characters on par with Progressive’s salespeople or Geico’s cavemen or, uh, well probably a bunch of other non-insurance adsfolk I’m not remembering.

The Fansville ads are mostly innocuous, occasionally funny and, importantly, a necessary buffer between political ads in election years. They’re ingrained into Dr. Pepper’s identity, so much so that the denizens of this imaginary community have been gifted their own special Doc P variant; Dr Pepper Bourbon Flavored Fansville Reserve.

This new blend isn’t for sale and available only through the Dr Pepper Rewards exchange — an online portal that effectively tracks your purchasing habits but offers free soda and various discounts in return. You don’t have to buy anything to get your can, but you do have to win one of 2,300 specially minted kits through a lottery system that gives you one free shot at Fansville Reserve per day.

Because I am special (read: because I emailed Dr Pepper politely and asked if I could feature their new drink) I was able to get a can despite my constant failings in the sweepstakes. They, fortunately, said yes. So how did it taste?

Pretty dang good, actually.

Beverage of the Week: OK, I guess Dos Equis makes margaritas now (they’re fine)

Dos Equis’ canned margaritas have real tequila and clock in at 10 percent ABV. Does that make them any good?

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.

Beverage of the Week: Elysian teamed with Chucky to make a murder beer (and also pumpkin stuff)

Elysian got ready for spooky season with a Chucky cranberry wit to pair with their normal pumpkin stuff. Some of it’s good. Some is not.

I’ve chronicled no shortage of Elysian beers here, and for good reason. They’re typically awesome. The company behind Space Dust IPA has been aggressive with its expansion from the Pacific Northwest to the rest of the country, rolling the dice in new markets in an attempt to become a household name among craft brewers.

That boldness applies to Elysian’s brewing process as well. When they want to go wide, they come up with a mass-appeal wheat beer perfect for Seattle Seahawks games. When they want to whittle that focus group down to a specific few they’ll give you an IPA so danky it’ll make whatever room you’re in reek like weed the moment you crack a can.

This year, they’re taking their fall offerings — a pretty solid mix of pumpkin beers ranging from light ales to stouts — and experimenting again. My most recent mailer from the brewery contained three brews; their Night Owl Pumpkin Ale, the Mr. Yuk Sour Pumpkin Beer and Chucky: A Killer Wit Beer. The latter is a collaboration with the SYFY series based around the star of the Child’s Play film franchise and features his Jon Gruden-esque mug front and center on the can.

Elysian also offered journalists the opportunity to do a virtual tasting with its founders, which was a nice touch. Here’s how each beer went down and whether or not you should seek them out here in the tail end of the spooky season.

Beverage of the Week: Kona’s Big Wave Golden Ale makes for a solid tailgate beer

Kona doesn’t do many complicated beers. But they get simple beers right, and that’s good for the pre-game.

Kona wants Big Wave Golden Ale to be your tailgate go-to. The Hawai’ian inspired brewery has grown in prominence since its parent company was acquired by Anheuser-Busch, making it a stable presence in the mainland for a beer that originated thousands of miles and half an ocean away, but technically not an import.

It’s a brewery that’s always been interesting, even if it doesn’t take many risks. Kona’s brews have typically been domestic beer standards — light lagers, golden ales, blondes and American pale ales. There’s nothing wrong with that, obviously, but it’s not something that makes their beers stand out in any way besides “HAWAI’I,” even if the bulk of its product isn’t actually brewed there.

But in the spirit of going a little easier for Sober October — and because it’s prime tailgating season — I wanted to tuck back in with Kona’s Big Wave Golden Ale, which promises the easy lift of a macro light beer with more flavor and “tropical hops.” Let’s see how it tastes.

Beverage of the Week: Firestone Walker’s Oaktoberfest is one of the best märzens I’ve ever had

The oak is subtle but ultimately lifts this beer to new heights. Firestone Walker may make my favorite Oktoberfest.

Oktoberfest is my season. Not just because the weather cools off and football is firmly upon us, but also because märzens flood the market with the most drinkable beer style in the universe. There’s nothing quite like a bready, malty Oktoberfest brew, a beer that’s as easy to drink as a light beer but loaded with enough flavor that you can drink them a liter at a time and not get sick of them.

Germany’s märzens are the standard bearer because their breweries have been making them for hundreds of years. That leaves America’s beermakers playing catchup. This doesn’t mean U.S. Oktoberfests are bad or inherently inferior — they’re usually great! It does mean brewmasters have a little room to experiment with a recipe that’s already pretty much perfect, but not infallible.

That means these beers vary a little more from coast to coast than their European counterpart. In a few places, that means a heavier hop load — the solution to lots of problems in American microbreweries and honestly not a terrible one. At California’s Firestone Walker, it means maturing the brew inside oak barrels to impart a smooth, slightly earthier beer that doesn’t throw away the hop profile, either.

Is it any good? Well, yeah. It might be the best beer I’ve had this year.

Beverage of the Week: Sam Adams is a good airport beer but that’s about it

Sam Adams rose from the primordial ooze of the US beer scene to become a powerhouse. Do their beers still hold up?

Sam Adams was the epitome of class growing up. For my parents and my friends’ parents in Rhode Island, the dividing line between a cookout and a cookout where folks had money was whether there were Sam longnecks in the cooler.

“A brewer and a patriot,” they’d scoff before prying off the cap and lamenting whatever awful thing had happened to the Red Sox that year. But deep down, they were impressed. Heineken levels of impressed.

The folks at Sam Adams have been kind to Boston and welcoming to emerging brewers, but they’ve largely become a relic as the country’s beer scene exploded. Boston Lager is up there with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale when it comes to microbrews-turned-standard-bearers. Even so, the company’s portfolio is generally something I’ll pass up if more interesting local beers are available.

In fantasy baseball terms, they’re the steady veteran who hits .260 and gives you 20 home runs each year; completely reasonable but unable to stack up to an unproven young prospect with All-Star potential. In beer terms, well…

I typically think of Sam Adams as the kind of beer you turn to at a generic spot with no local buy-in whatsoever. More often than not, it’s a nondescript airport lounge. The beers are overpriced and there are only six on tap. And if you’re not interested in Miller Lite or Stella Artois or, if they’re fancy, Guinness then Sam Adams is the best you’re going to do.

That’s the brewery’s sweet spot; a realm where they remain the innovative young upstart despite evolving into a macrobrew over the past three decades. Sam Adams has been aggressive to count a new generation of drinkers who’ve been inundated with choices in hopes of fixing that image. That’s meant entirely too many television ads, sure, but also an evolving line of new and old beers aimed at casting the widest possible net of beer lovers.

Let’s see how their fall beers shake out.

Beverage of the Week: High Noon is coming for that tailgate market and the results are… fine

High Noon’s new flavors don’t add much to the lineup. But they’re still better than most seltzers.

I’m already on board with High Noon’s vodka-soda mixers. I came into the Pool Pack expecting a hard seltzer wannabe but instead got the Transformers to White Claw’s inferior GoBots.

This made me unreasonably excited for the company’s next mix pack, a fall(ish)-themed combination of flavors aimed at stocked coolers in parking lots across North America. High Noon’s Tailgate pack follows the brand standard; eight cans and four flavors for roughly $15, depending on where you live. Those flavors:

Black cherry
Pear
Cranberry
Grapefruit

Eclectic! I’m not sure I’d associate 75 percent of those flavors with grills and cornhole, but I appreciate the effort. And I’m gonna do some work to drink at least a couple of them in the proper environment.

This week, I ventured out from Madison to what used to be Miller Park to partake in the best tailgating scene in baseball. Even better, I had the chance to watch the nihilistic nightmare for which I’ve been rooting since I was six years old (the Pittsburgh Pirates) and the local team who somehow knew the exact expiration date of Josh Hader’s pitching abilities (19.06 ERA, 3.53 WHIP since being traded from Milwaukee to San Diego).

Complicating matters was my 4-year-old daughter, who was significantly more interested in the escalators at the stadium than the game itself and had entirely too many questions about port-a-potties. It was just the two of us that day, a bonding moment where we could discuss the consequence of bad decisions (my three decades watching the Buccos mostly vomit off the side of the boat, not writing these articles).

It also led to roughly 300 questions per minute. This ensured that:

a) I very much needed a drink.

b) I couldn’t drink too much.

That made the 4.5 percent ABV High Noons a worthy selection for a day game. Would they stand up to the 85 degree heat and a sun-baked parking lot? Would they ease the pain of hearing 35 straight jokes whose punchlines are “Mr. Poopyhead?” Well, let’s find out.

Beverage of the Week: Hard Mountain Dew is the balm to heal our burned nation

Particularly the watermelon flavor. My god, the watermelon flavor, folks.

Mountain Dew has long been a staple of low-budget boozing. It’s always been easy to pair with alcohol; an Army buddy clued me in to the versatility of “combat margaritas,” which is Dew mixed with whatever bottle you can dig up near the base. About a decade ago, when our nation was gripped by its Whipped Cream Vodka phase (just me? You sure?), Diet Mountain Dew and the perky booze in question combined to make a drink, I swear, tasted pretty much like Sour Skittles.

The folks at PepsiCo understood this. That’s why they made a hard seltzer version of Mountain Dew. They also understood it would take time for a nation to adjust to Dew its residents wouldn’t have to bother mixing extra liquor into. That’s why it’s only available in a few select states.

After rolling out in Florida, Tennessee and Iowa (the big three!), Hard Mountain Dew’s multicolored variety packs — three cans each of Baja Blast, watermelon, black cherry and traditional Dew flavor — doubled that scope to Arkansas, Oklahoma and Minnesota. Feeling regrets yet, coastal elites?

It hasn’t yet made it to Wisconsin’s rabid market, but I happened to have a friend passing through the Ozarks a couple weeks back. He first picked up a 12-er at Wal-Mart as a joke, then drank that and a couple more before buying a few more for the trip home.

This was the highest possible praise for a beverage for which I held no legitimate hopes. Now, I drink it to honor him.

And honor the soda that once marketed itself as the top choice of hillbillies everywhere, of course.

Beverage of the Week: Loyal 9 Lemonade is OK! Mostly!

These cocktails in a can kinda hit the spot. Except the original lemonade, which tastes like college in a bad way.

I pride myself in an encyclopedic knowledge of all Rhode Island’s garbage cuisines. I’m not talking about lobsters or fine seaside dining. I speak to the glory of pizza strips and hot weiners and stuffed quahogs and frozen by-god lemonade.

This makes Loyal 9 cocktails a mystery. Their labels say “Founded in R.I.” with the iconic anchor of our flag next to the statement. But nothing on the official website says a thing about the best damn state in the union.

Digging further into the matter brings up Sons of Liberty’s Loyal 9 vodka, distilled with “local Rhode Island corn” which I assure you has never been a sigil of Rhody pride. It also suggests there’s a limit to how much the whole process can be scaled up, since:

a) tiny state, and

b) while farms certainly exist and thrive, they are far outnumbered by strip mall sports bars where everyone refers to each other — friend, foe, family member — as either “guy” or “kiiidddd.”

My extremely localized concerns aside, I’m happy for a change in pace. It’s still summer, and a canned cocktail is a great poolside drink since you can’t bring bottles an– oh my goodness, it’s 9 percent alcohol. OK, so, only bring like two or three or else I’m gonna start RKOing kids off the diving board again, and they told me I used up my one warning. Hey man, it’s fine, we’re all having fun here.

Right, sorry, where were we?

Loyal 9. Canned cocktails. Uncarbonated and packing the punch of an actual mixed drink and not a hard seltzer. Let’s go.

(No adults were ejected from the pool during the sampling of these beverages.)

Beverage of the Week: Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat is back. Does it taste like you remember?

Sunset Wheat is back after a two-year hiatus. It tastes a little sweeter than before — but that’s not a problem.

Leinenkugel’s has a special place in my heart. The pride of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, was one of the first macrobreweries to trick me into thinking l was drinking a microbrew.

The Miller subsidiary — now a part of the MolsonCoors portfolio — felt exciting and new when I first saw it on tap handles and store shelves in Nashville in 2006. More importantly, the flavors were interesting — lemonade shandy! Berry wheat! — and the beer itself was inexpensive. Not cheap, mind you, but on par with Miller Lite and Coors Light and all the rest of the gas station beers within arm’s reach while seeming a little bit fancier.

Sunset Wheat was the jewel in that crown. So when I felt particularly proud of myself or crappy or just needed some kind of respite, I’d dig down deep for the fanciest looking beer I could afford. $6.99 for a six pack.

This does not sound like a big deal, but my research assistant stipend in grad school paid $425 monthly. A sixer of Leinie’s was nearly two percent of my net income that month. My default at this point had been beers like American — the only beer with a blinding spinal headache in every can — which could be purchased in western Pennsylvania for $6 per case or, when feeling especially fancy, Laser.

So, Sunset Wheat was important. It was exotic (enough) that it remained a special occasion beer at home. But it was also on tap at most basic bars and sold at the supermarket so it wasn’t hard to find. This was my college drinking sweet spot, and Leinie’s was grooving fastballs down the middle.

Then it went away. Taken off shelves. Retired in 2020 long after I’d moved on to fancier beers. And, like the Choco Taco two years later, I stood shameful in regret, knowing this was at least partially my fault. I hadn’t had a Sunset Wheat in years — maybe a decade.

So when Leinenkugel’s announced it was making a 2022 comeback, I cleared off a space for Sunset Wheat in the Beverage of the Week annals. Will it taste as good as it used to? Or is my brain simply broken by the dopamine of nostalgia?

Turns out, it’s a little of both.