Category: Food & Drink

Dr Pepper made a Bourbon Flavored Fansville Reserve. OK, so how does it mix with bourbon?

Dr Pepper made a special bourbon flavored Fansville Reserve. Turns out, it mixes well with … bourbon.

Dr Pepper — its official name has no period, which I assume frees it from having to produce a medical degree upon request — knows it’s not merely a soft drink. It’s a stately mixer.

The fruit-ish, cola-adjacent, difficult-to-describe soda is underappreciated for its ability to make a palatable cocktail with even the harshest of booze (Kamchatka, Fleischmann’s, any of the rubbing alcohol vodkas, really). Dr Pepper and whiskey is an easy, reliable mixed drink. And since bourbon country overlaps nicely with the college football fans Dr Pepper has eagerly courted every fall with a barrage of extended-universe advertisements, the soft drink goliath reached out to meet those fans halfway.

Behold, Dr Pepper Bourbon Flavored Fansville Reserve:

The limited edition brew can only be won via random drawings through Dr Pepper’s Perks website. You sign up and, through next week, get one online scratch-off card per day to try your luck at one of 2,300 cans. I used my media credentials and politeness to ask nicely for a sample to review, but in the spirit of full disclosure I also won one this morning after weeks of trying. Hooray!

I sampled the full sugar beverage — I generally lean toward diet sodas so as to make my caloric intake from beer less devastating — and wrote that up as our Beverage of the Week. But since I’m fighting off a cold and didn’t have the resources to put together a proper College Football Cocktail — Will Levis’ Irish mayonnaise coffee will have to wait until Week 13 — I went real basic with it.

I added bourbon to the bourbon Dr Pepper.

The Fansville Deliverance

  • 6 oz. Dr Pepper Fansville Reserve
  • 1.5 oz bourbon (Central Standard)

This was the logical progression after lucking into a can of bourbon-flavored soda. I was happy to sauce up Utah’s internet-famous dirty sodas a few months back, so of course I was going to see how bourbon pairs with, uh, bourbon-flavored soda.

For my booze I opted for Wisconsin’s Central Standard Craft Distillery’s cabernet-barreled bourbon. Bit of a weird choice, I know, but I didn’t want to mix Old Forester and I’ve been leaning pretty hard on Brother’s Bond lately. Plus, wine and Dr Pepper seem like a fit, right? My wine expertise ends at hastily-finished bottles of banana red MD 20/20 so it’s possible I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Turns out I might! The bourbon — poured probably too stiffly — blends nicely with the Dr Pepper to create a pleasant overall experience that ups the malt and fruit and hell maybe a little bit of chocolate? into a solid two-step cocktail.

It’s easy and, importantly, tasty. Dr Pepper knew what it was doing when it made a bourbon-flavored reserve. Adding booze to it doesn’t really change much, but it will help you accept the outcome of Texas A&M’s season more easily.

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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?

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.

Celebrate National Taco Day with 8 deals and free tacos on Tuesday

Go get some free or discounted tacos on National Taco Day!

Happy National Taco Day to all who celebrate — and really, shouldn’t we all celebrate tacos every day, especially on Tuesday, October 4?

Why is October National Taco Day? That’s not what we’re here to answer. You’re here to find out about free or discounted tacos, and we want to get to that as fast as possible so you can go grab some of them for lunch or dinner.

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