Category: Food & Drink

Joey Chestnut not officially banned from 2024 Nathan’s hot dog contest, despite reports

Joey Chestnut has put MLE in a real pickle, is being a total weenie.

Is it possible to celebrate America without the greatest athlete of all time front and center? This may be the future of our nation thanks to a …(sigh) beef between hot dog eating GOAT Joey Chestnut and Major League Eating (MLE).

Early reports from the New York Post suggested the MLE had banned Chestnut from participating in this year’s Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest — i.e. the event that kicks off your Independence Day with gurgitory greatness. This would be a massive deal.

Chestnut has ascended beyond Michael Jordan status, a champion with no rival. He’s taken home the mustard yellow belt 16 of the last 17 years, emerging as the beef-stained face of competitive eating by hammering down 60 to 70 hot dogs in a 10 minute span and allowing the world to see the limits of peak human performance.

The reason for the alleged ban? Chestnut’s partnership with Impossible Foods, the plant-based meat replacement that made the legendary athlete spokesman for its new vegan hot dogs. Per reports, Chestnut refused to eat the classic Nathan’s offerings and instead wanted to swap in his Impossible franks instead — a trade that could create a clear imbalance between the defending champion and the rest of the field.

Per the New York Post, MLE representatives addressed the issue in a statement:

We are devastated to learn that Joey Chestnut has chosen to represent a rival brand that sells plant-based hot dogs rather than competing in the 2024 Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest

…

For nearly two decades we have worked under the same basic hot dog exclusivity provisions. However, it seems that Joey and his managers have prioritized a new partnership with a different brand over our long-time relationship.

Joey Chestnut is an American hero. We would love nothing more than to have him at the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. We hope he returns when he is not representing a rival brand.

Later, however, MLE executive Richard Shea — brother to the man behind the most electrifying introductions in pro sports — refuted those statements.

Also brought to light in the Post’s report? The fact Chestnut made $200,000 per Nathan’s appearance before even getting to his official winnings ($10,000 for each belt). MLE reportedly offered to bump that in a four-year, $1.2 million contract offer, but was rebuffed by Chestnut’s partnership with Impossible.

This wouldn’t be the first high profile conflict to mar the Fourth of July’s greatest spectacle. Takeru Kobayashi’s refusal to sign an exclusive contract with the league kept the six-time champion out of the competition starting in 2010. Losing Chestnut would open the door for Geoffrey Esper and Patrick Bertoletti to break his string of victories.

There’s still time for the two sides to reach a compromise. We’ll see if MLE caves to the demands of its biggest star or if, somehow, we’ll have an Independence Day without Joey Chestnut’s bun-splattered greatness for the first time in two decades.

Celebrate National Donut Day 2024 with 5 deals and free donuts on Friday, June 7

Go get some free and discounted donuts on Friday, June 7 2024!

We love donuts a lot more than National Donut Day, but because Friday, June 7, 2024 is the annual celebration of the baked good, we REALLY love them.

That’s right, friends, it’s time once again for the day when you can get some free fried baked goods from purveyors of doughnuts around the country.

Why is Friday, June 7 National Donut Day? Why do we spell it doughnut or donut? I have no idea, but free or discounted donuts are the important thing here, and we want you to get those as soon as humanly possible.

So let’s stop writing about donuts and get to the important stuff here: A partial list of donut joints that we’ve found who will give something away or sell you one for less than the usual price:

Dunkin’

Syndication: Palm Beach Post

You can get a free classic donut when you buy a beverage.

Krispy Kreme

Syndication: The Coloradoan

You can get a free donut without buying anything! And you can get a dozen glazed for $2 when you buy any dozen.

Shipley Do-Nuts

Syndication: The Clarion-Ledger

Make any purchase and get a free glazed donut.

Voodoo Donuts

https://www.instagram.com/p/C7zj2ZAy8MA/?hl=en

Get a dozen of their pink raised glazed donuts for $10.

Tim Hortons

Syndication: St Cloud Times

If you’re a rewards member, you can get a free donut with any drink purchase.

Gosling’s Reserve wants you to treat rum like fine bourbon. It’s got a sweet, sippable point

Gosling’s $80 Reserve has a high bar to clear. It gets there.

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.

Rum is a blind spot for me. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that I rarely drink it without a mixer that significantly obscures its taste. In college, that was Coke. After landing a junket trip to cover the America’s Cup in Bermuda — I was SB Nation’s designated “white guy sports” for a while there — it became dark n’ stormies.

This was always fine, because the extent of my rum purchases was more or less limited to:

a) Costco’s spiced rum (a tremendous bargain), and

b) whatever was marked down in the bargain cart at Woodman’s for $5.99. For a while this was Bayou rum, which is also pretty good.

But Gosling’s offered me something better and terrifying. An $80 bottle of rum aged in rye whiskey barrels (hell yeah).

Gosling’s already has a built in advantage as a go-to ginger beer (especially since it’s one of the few brands to make a light option). And they’d already kinda crushed their entry into the ready-to-drink cocktail market, albeit with entirely too many calories in each of their canned dark n’ stormies and some rough fruit flavors that mucked the whole thing up.

Maybe this left me a bit compromised on my way to this taste test. On the other hand, I’m a big rum dummy so maybe it didn’t. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum: A-

I’ve poured it into a rocks glass with ice. Clearly, my fanciest rocks glass for my fanciest rum. It’s dark and a little thick and smells sweet and vanilla. You pick up a little bit of that bourbon barrel influence as well. Since we’re dealing with an 80 proof spirit there’s no disguising the alcohol within, just making it smell a little better.

It is an undoubtedly sweet spirit, which, duh. While you’d never mistake it for a lighter drink, there’s no real burn involved here. Barrel aging has softened the edges of a booze I’d ever only used for mixing in the past. It starts off a bit neutral with some light candy bar flavors, then the rum hits your tongue running with a little cinnamon, a little allspice, and lots of that vanilla.

That makes it a deserving straight-up sipper. And as the ice melts it mellows down nicely into a lovely dram. I don’t typically drink rum straight up. This may change that.

Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum with Betty Buzz ginger beer: A-

Look, I probably shouldn’t. But it’s rum. I’m gonna mix it with *something.* And while I’d love to make a dark n’ stormy, I am tragically lime-less. But that gives the rum an extra chance to shine against the spicy and bready carbonation of the ginger beer.

Tonight we’re rolling with Blake Lively’s brand of mixers, Betty Buzz. You may remember her from the Betty Booze line of canned cocktails that punched well above their weight class. Well, I’m taking that base and using it for my own, very basic drink.

Good news: this rules. The carbonation and ginger heat thread together, creating a dense flavor that’s sweet but uses that mixer to create a balanced, simple and borderline lazy cocktail. A lime would add another layer here, sure, but the fact this can stand up in a two-step drink is a testament to its quality.

Do you want to use an $80, barrel aged rum as a mixer? Probably not! Can you? Oh, hell yeah. It’s great.

Would I drink it instead of a Hamm’s?

Welcome to a new feature on these reviews; a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Gosling’s Reserve rum over a cold can of Hamm’s?

Absolutely. But I could buy about 160 cans of Hamm’s for the cost of one bottle of Gosling’s Reserve, so I probably won’t.

Whiskey of the Week: Blue Run elbowed its way into the high-end bourbon world. Is it worth $100+?

Does bourbon need a SNKRS-type hype cycle of artificial scarcity and big prices?

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.

The high-end whiskey market is, frankly, a little bit stupid right now.

It has been for a while. Blanton’s, for example, used to be a pretty good bourbon you could find many places for around $48 a bottle a decade ago. Now it’s mostly relegated to resale markets at prices that in no way reflect the good, not incredible spirit within.

Needless to say, this demand for high quality whiskey that doesn’t necessarily have to be elite has spurred a rash of new contenders to a crowded field. On one hand, they’re pushing the average bottle price higher and higher and creating a swelling tide of prices that don’t always equate to the booze you’re getting. On the other, if they’re filling that void while, say Four Roses or Rare Breed, can stay affordable and folks are content dropping $100-plus on a bottle, well, godspeed.

This is where Blue Run comes in.

Its inaugural offering was a 13-year bourbon that clocks in at $175. What’s the history behind that price point? What’s the story that goes into each cask? What’s the tale bourbon nerds can tell when they break at the bottle at a party? Well, uh, there isn’t really anything truly unique other than the fact it looks expensive, and is.

An old, esteemed whiskey head (Jim Rutledge) joined forces with a new, rising whiskey head (Shaylyn Gammon) and together they blend bourbons distilled elsewhere. The founders behind the spirit are exactly the types you’d expect to bring SNKRS-type drops and limited releases to the world of high-end whiskey; bourbon-loving executives who saw an opportunity.

Blue Run wants to create an exclusive world unto itself despite lacking the history of other exclusive spirits. Or, barring that, they just want you to drop three figures on a fifth of booze.

That’s a frustrating place to start, but none of it matters if the bourbon itself is good. Today’s review is a bottle of the high rye whiskey, second batch. Let’s see if it’s worth the $100 price tag.

Blue Run high rye whiskey: B+

In fairness, Blue Run — a product name merely one letter away from being “the wine so bad it made the news” — looks like a premium drink. The bottle is lovely, with a pearlescent butterfly front and center. At 111 proof it promises cask strength goodness and a rich, mahogany color that suggests it had plenty of time to sit and think about what it did in oak barrels.

The smell off the top is unmistakably boozy but complex. There’s a lot of fruit hiding under the grain, along with a little spice. Maybe nutmeg? Cinnamon? Something comforting.

There’s some definite heat involved which, at 55.5 percent alcohol, duh. But it’s not overpowering and there are plenty of intricate flavors underneath. Some of those sweet stone fruits, a little spice and some dry sugar to close things out. There’s a little bit of cinnamon toast to the whole proceeding, which you have to search for but I swear it’s there.

It’s good bourbon. Maybe not $100 bourbon, but that’s the world we live in. I’m gonna add an ice cube because that’s a thing I enjoy. Feel free to mock me.

Blue Run high rye whiskey on ice: B+

The ice softens the profile without taking away those deeply ingrained flavors. That makes a heavy spirit easier to sip, though you don’t get quite the same profile and intensity of the unadjusted pour. I like it roughly as much as the straight pour; you lose some of the stuff that makes it interesting, but it’s an easier, smoother sip with solid replay value. As long as you have at least $85 (depending on your local package store) for the next bottle.

The question isn’t whether Blue Run is good. A bunch of rich executives got together and ensured it would be, at the very least, above average. The question is whether it’s worth premium sneaker prices and the hype of bourbon’s next big thing.

After drinking a similar new(ish), high-priced bottle in Kentucky Owl, I’m not sure it is. It’s a proper sip that fits alongside ryes at half the price. If you’re asking me whether I’d buy this at $100 or Limousin Rye for $35 to $45, I’m gonna roll with Limousin every time.

Would I drink it instead of a Hamm’s?

This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Blue Run High Rye over a cold can of Hamm’s?

Oh, absolutely. But I could get 200 cans of Hamm’s for the starting price of a Blue Run bottle, so this feels… unfair.

Ranking (and grading) Athletic’s non-alcoholic beers, the best booze-less brews you’ll find

Simpler is better when it comes to booze-less brews, but Athletic’s got a stout that’s worth coming back to (and one that’s not).

Sober October is upon us, so a merry booze-less month to all of you who celebrate.

I, personally, don’t, but I can appreciate the sentiment. September is a celebration month for me, filled with football and Oktoberfests and delicious, malty beers. But on Sunday nights, after I’ve filed my last NFL story, I wind up craving a beer but have zero desire to once again tax my overworked liver or make Monday’s 6:30 AM wakeup any more difficult than it already is.

This is where Athletic Brewing Company comes in. The Connecticut-based company stood out amidst a crowded landscape by offering non-alcoholic offerings covering a wide variety of styles. Where before there may have only been Clausthaler or O’Douls, you now had the opportunity to find pale ales and stouts that carried lower calorie counts and virtually none of the booze.

That’s where I’ve been turning lately on those Sunday nights. It’s worked out well enough for me to make these rankings.

Athetic’s beers are graded on a curve; while they stack up well against traditional brews, they don’t quite get all the way there. And that’s all right, because in the land of non-alcoholic beers they mostly stand alone. As such, these grades consider both how true to the regular, booze styles they’re replicating are as well as the overall quality and taste of the beverage itself.

Also, the only brews to make the rankings are the ones I’ve personally tried and reviewed thus far. Expect this list to be updated as I expand my palate — and allow me to apologize if I haven’t gotten to your favorite yet.

Updated 5/25/24 with four new styles: Blueberry Mosaic, Emerald Cliffs, Personal Record and Wit’s Peak

I am a big dumb animal who would drink the Malört cicada shot

Oh yeah like a little bug is actually gonna make Malört worse.

Illinois doesn’t win often. And, thus, Chicago has made celebrating its losses an art form.

There have been bright spots, of course. The Cubs won a World Series. The Sky earned a WNBA title. The Bear has shined a much-needed light on the culinary wizardry that takes place in the midwest.

But mostly? Searing defeat. The 100 years of Cubs losses that preceded their breakthrough. The ongoing existence of the post-1985 Bears. The ceased existence of the rat hole.

Dealing with this has sustained one of America’s finest, worst liquors. Jeppsen’s Malört is distilled pain. A drink that tastes like a middle school breakup. A concoction of fermented Band-aids and Swisher Sweets wrappers, its existence is a point of pride for Chicagoans and a hazing ritual for visitors. Malört tastes so bad it creator was able to avoid persecution during prohibition by simply offering it to police officers, who roundly agreed it must be medicine because no sane person would ever choose to drink it.

The fine denizens of Chicago understand it is bad and power through anyway. This is the spirit of a city that’s rebuilt after devastating fire and literally jacked itself up above the mud that threatened to consume it. It is a city that embraces pain and rallies around it.

It is also a city that understands multiplying one negative times another creates a positive. From, uh, Pyramid Chad on Twitter. Language is NSFW and accurate.

2024 marks the emergence of cicada brood XIX, a swarm of gordita-shelled sky disasters set to darken the skies with busy wings and droning song before peeing, mating and dying in some order (actualy, probably that one). And because Chicago understands how to weaponize its defeat, you can now rip a shot of bug-laced Malört at the city’s Noon Whistle Brewery.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it.

Would.

I’ve long been intrigued by the Sourtoe Cocktail Club, a Dawson City, Yukon tradition where Canadians and visitors sip whiskey from a glass with an mummified amputated toe inside it. That’s a better spirit and a worse garnish, but you don’t drink the toe — you actually get run out of town if you do. You don’t have to pound the bug in your infused Malört — it’s the worm to the gasoline alternative’s tequila — but after a few shots, is crunching down on a cicada really going to make things worse?

I mean probably, but bracing for the worst and persevering anyway is Chicago’s whole thing. Starting your night with a cicada crunch and a mysterious bottled fluid extracted from ancient sarcophagi once sealed by the weight of 1,000 curses ensures you’ve got nowhere to go but up.

Or to the police station. 50/50. Anyway, hand me the bug juice, I have bad decisions to make.

Anthony Edwards had the best response when Charles Barkley asked what to eat in Minnesota

Anthony Edwards and Charles Barkley are comedy gold.

After defeating the Nuggets in a wild Game 7, the Timberwolves will officially head to the Western Conference Finals.

Following the improbable comeback win over Denver, Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards appeared on TNT’s postgame coverage of the game. During this exchange with Barkley, the Inside the NBA host said that he had not been to Minnesota in approximately twenty years (which may not be true).

This seemed to excite Edwards, though, who told Barkley to “bring his [expletive]” out there. It was yet another hilarious moment from Edwards, who has now become arguably the funniest player in postgame interviews.

Barkley then asked Edwards one of the most important questions you could possibly ask a basketball player after a series-clinching victory: When I’m in your city, what should I eat?

Edwards said he would find a way to get Barkley’s contact information and would gladly provide a list of recommendations.

In the meanwhile, however, celebrity chef Bobby Flay provided a quick recommendation for once Barkley arrives in Minnesota: Spoon and Stable.

Other fans have jumped in to help Edwards provide Barkley with the best food options for when he is in Minnesota.

But either way, this was a hilarious conversation between two very funny people.

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Free Dunkin’ coffee for nurses: How to get a cup on Monday, May 6 for National Nurses Week 2024

Here’s how to get free Dunkin for nurses on Monday.

Hey, it’s National Nurses Week 2024, an entire set of days dedicated to those who work so hard to keep us healthy and take care of us. There are food and drink deals out there all week starting on Monday, May 6.

And Dunkin’ is celebrating nurses on Monday, May 6 2024 with a well-deserved free cup of coffee. Here’s the deal: if you’re a nurse, you can get a free medium hot or iced coffee without needing to make any purchase. It’s one per guest as you’d expect.

That’s it! Go enjoy your free coffee and thank you for all that you do.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C6n0PghutnQ/?hl=en