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Beverage of the Week: Spindrift’s teas are fine. Except one, which is a waking nightmare

Spindrift made a tea that tastes like carbonated toothpaste. Not a fan.

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.

I’m not a seltzer guy. But I am a tea guy, so when Spindrift expanded its lineup of bubbly, fruit-flavored drinks, I perked up. Sure, the idea of a carbonated iced tea was weird, but Spindrift is the brand that saw La Croix’s complete lack of flavor and decided to do something about it. This gave me some hope — and led me to give it a try.

It turns out, yep, it’s still mostly a seltzer experience. The bubbles are dense and there’s never a doubt you’re drinking a sparkling water. But the tea is there as well and the flavor is powerful enough to stand out.

That works … unless it all falls apart. So read on to figure out which flavors are solid and which feels like one of those trick Jelly Belly flavors your friends hand out in an effort to convince you to stop spending time with them.

Beverage of the Week: SweetWater Gummies are fruity, hoppy, boozy goodness

A fruit punch double IPA sounds weird, but tastes pretty dang good.

I’ve made my appreciation for SweetWater’s beers clear here in the past. As a reliable, but inexpensive, regional option from my graduate school days in Nashville, it was a tidy $2.50 pour at a few different happy hours across Music City. And though drinking SweetWater Blue earned mockery from my father to this very day (it’s beer and blueberries, what’s not to like???) the brand has retained a place inside the happier recesses of my brain.

SweetWater 420 helped kick off a love of hoppy beers, even if it took some time to get over the bitterness. Now the brewery has a new round of heavy pale ales that promise an easier sip. SweetWater Gummies are double IPAs that promise big fruit flavors and a potent kick at 9.5 percent ABV. These year-round offerings suggest low bitterness despite the style from which they’re birthed, a nearly crushable flavorful beer that’s more than capable of knocking you on your ass.

Did SweetWater walk that tightrope successfully? Or is Gummies just a clever marketing ploy? Let’s find out.

Beverage of the Week: Benriach’s $4,500 The Forty scotch tastes smooth, expensive

A 40-year malt lives up to the hype, if not the price tag.

There are perks to my job beyond just being able to say I’m living a 15-year-old’s dream by writing about football and beer each week. A rash of PR emails hits my inbox each day, and while most aren’t anything worth covering here there’s occasionally a gem in that minefield. An offer to sample some great beers. A month’s supply of caffeine in a single UPS box of energy drinks.

And, as happened this summer, a bottle of scotch older than I am.

Benriach reached out with the opportunity to try a whisky I could otherwise never afford. The Scottish distiller’s mailer consisted of a 100 milliliter package of 40-year-old scotch, roughly the size of a shampoo bottle you’d find waiting at a nicer hotel. With a suggested retail price of $4,500 for a fifth, that put the estimated price of this mini-bottle at $600.

And they sent it to me, the guy who compares every drink he reviews to Hamm’s.

I’m not a scotch expert, but it is one of my favorite spirits. I tend to steer toward the peaty, salty Islay malts — one of my rare trips overseas involved a trip to that lovely island and what felt like 400 drams in a three-day period — but for the most part there’s no such thing as a bad scotch. Like pizza or sex, even when it’s awful it’s still better than most things.

This stands as my introduction to Benriach’s offerings and, damn, what a way to start. Well, it’s time for me to go drink a car payment’s worth of whisky. Let’s see how it is.

Beverage of the Week: Terry Bradshaw’s bourbon isn’t quite a Failure to Launch

… but it’s a two-year old bourbon that needs a little extra barrel time.

First off, allow me to apologize for a headline referencing a terrible movie from nearly two decades ago. I am referring to, of course, the classic 2006 vehicle Failure to Launch starring Matthew McConaughey (playing, boldly, Matthew McConaughey) and Terry Bradshaw (playing, boldly, Terry Bradshaw). It’s just that a review of Sammy Hagar’s rum got a nice traffic rub by dropping a “can’t drive 55” line in there and, well, your boy needs those clicks.

But yes, Bradshaw is the latest celebrity to wade into the crowded pool of famous folks hawking alcohol. His Bradshaw Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. The Hall of Fame quarterback, significantly less than that country singer, surprisingly prolific 2000s film actor and pre/post-game show staple is a man of many talents, and now he’s stepping into the malt game — or at least lending his reputation to it.

That that reputation … phew. Bradshaw’s Super Bowl accolades are all over this dang thing. The bottle only has three printed labels and his NFL titles are mentioned four times. This bottle drops “IX, X, XII, XIV” like a typical episode of Lost threw out “four, eight, 15, 16, 23 and 42.”

This also provides hope. Bradshaw’s a southern man with a history of success. Of course he’s gonna know bourbon. His malt should lie on the upper spectrum of celebrity alcohols.

On that scale, some are pretty great, like Blake Lively’s Betty Booze. Others fall flat, like Hagar’s Beach Bar canned cocktails. Let’s see where Terry fits.

Beverage of the Week: Blake Lively’s Betty Booze rises above celebrity cocktails

Betty Booze goes harder than it had any right to.

Betty Booze is the confluence of two rising tides: canned cocktails and celebrity-helmed alcohol branding.

The slim-fit cans are an extension of Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz premium mixers, a logical jump from craft bottles of ginger beer to the mixed drinks in which they’re destined to wind up. The actress joins a crowded lineage of famous folks who’d like to get you drunk — a banner brought to the spotlight by Dan Aykroyd and Sammy Hagar a couple decades back and since carried by George Clooney, The Rock, Peyton Manning and, notably, Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds.

Instead of branding a specific spirit, Lively’s opted to build her own cocktail line aimed at going above and beyond the 12-ounce hype machine of hard seltzers. Betty Booze is filled with the ingredients you’d find at an expensive speakeasy-inspired venue, ready to be made by a bartender with entirely too complex facial hair and arm garters. Thus, being able to drink them at home is already a point in their favor. Will they live up to their craft-inspired billing?

Beverage of the Week: Dos Equis has fruit and salt and a pretty decent non-alcoholic offering

A mango margarita, a michelada and a salt-and-lime non-alcoholic brew. Are any of them worth your drinking time?

Dos Equis was a soothing balm back when my wallet had been scorched as a result of being a broke student. It was reliably the non-pale ale special at Nashville’s since-defunct Flying Saucer, selling for $2.50 per pint and allowing me to drink, lose at trivia and be able to tip my server without feeling like (more of a) scumbag. The amber, while not technically a dark beer, was rich enough to make me feel like I was drinking something fancier than a macro-produced brew.

That instilled a minor sense of loyalty, even as my scope expanded to hoppy brews and my wallet expanded beyond the $550 I’d made each month as a research assistant. Dos Equis has a special place nestled inside the poorest parts of my brain, alongside the instinct to save Ziploc bags and buy Abercrombie & Fitch clothing, but only at thrift stores.

Thus, I was happy to give the company’s newest brand extensions a try. This time around we’ve got a michelada, new margarita flavor — I reviewed the traditional lime versions here — and a non-alcoholic offering. Will they live up to the romanticized version of the beer I keep close to my heart?

Beverage of the Week: XXI Martinis are low effort, high quality boozing

Premade martinis that leave heavily into the sweet side of the cocktail? As a lazy man, I’m interested.

It’s been a while since I had an actual, proper martini. Actually, it’s possible I’ve only had one or two in my lifetime.

Sure, there was an undergrad dalliance with something approaching an apple-tini (I regret nothing). There was a stretch of some wild, extremely potent cocktails poured by a wonderful septuagenarian named “Martini Bob” at Madison’s sadly shuttered Smoky’s Supper Club. But for the most part, the intersection of vodka or gin and vermouth has been a blind spot in my boozing career.

It still mostly is, but the rise of espresso martinis has been unignorable. I opted for a canned version when I was rolling through Two Roads’ lineup this summer. Now, thanks to XXI, I’ve got more access to this corner of the cocktail spectrum I rarely visit.

XXI Martinis are ready-to-drink bottles that take the effort of shaking, straining or stirring out of the equation. They’re also nestled tightly in the marketplace of “fun martinis” — no heavy gin or olive juice here, just sweeter flavors like chocolate, peach and, of course, espresso. That’s a win for me; hell, I already admitted my soft spot for sour apple schnapps. This left me eager to see if XXI deserves a place in my liquor cabinet.

Beverage of the Week: Santo vs. Camarena in a cheap-vs.-(slightly)-expensive tequila throwdown

Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar’s tequila vs. a brand half its price: who’ve you got?

This series wasn’t especially kind to Sammy Hagar two weeks ago. Sure, his Beach Bar rum was a fine mixing spirit, but his branded canned cocktails were a throwback to 2015’s drinking scene — and not in a good way. Fortunately, the high-pitched pitchman gets a chance at redemption with the liquor he does best: tequila.

The man who birthed Cabo Wabo into the world is back in the agave game, teamed with Guy Fieri to bring us Santo — a line of spirits that covers both tequila and a curious blend called “mezquila” (Adam Levine is somehow involved as well, but we don’t talk about America’s Chad Kroeger here, not after that Super Bowl halftime show). I already talked about how much I liked their reposado, but today we’re gonna dig into Santo’s other offerings — and compare them to another fairly new (at least to me) tequila.

Camarena pitches itself as an old school, highly awarded liquor at a bargain price. Where a fifth of Santo reposado clocks in at $46 at my local Total Wine, Camarena only costs $23 for a full liter. I happened to have both on hand and, as a relative tequila neophyte, I decided to stack them up and see who came out ahead.

Let’s do some reviews.

Pumpkin beer season is upon us; that means it’s Elysian’s time to shine

Elysian’s pumpkin pack covers everything from ale to coffee to stout. Is it worth rolling the dice on a finicky flavor?

Elysian Brewing was born in Seattle. But as fall kicks into full swing, you won’t find anything approaching the Pumpkin Spice Latte flavor fellow Washington juggernaut Starbucks has developed into a national frenzy in their beers.

Pumpkin, sure. Hell, they’ve got four nationally distributed pumpkin beers ranging from ales to stouts and crushable to heavy. But there’s no pie-adjacent, sugary-sweet brew amongst their flagship beers despite the neverending rising tide of pumpkin spice … everything. That’s on purpose.

“Starbucks has a reputation as a soccer mom, SUV type drink,” founder Joe Bisacca told me midway through a pumpkin beer tasting session. “I think Elysian’s vein is more ’72 [Dodge] Challenger. There’s a little more edge to it. Latte inspired? Maybe, but we’ll put a twist on it that’s a little more edgy.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t spiced beers in the company’s portfolio. Crack open a bottle of Night Owl Pumpkin Ale and you’ll get plenty of cinnamon and nutmeg right from the first whiff — it just won’t be Starbucks sugary, and it will be unmistakably Elysian. It also doesn’t mean those sweeter beers don’t exist at all — just that their distribution is limited to the brewery’s annual Great Pumpkin Beer Festival.

“We do 10-12 pumpkin beers each year to fill out Pumpkin Fest,” Cellermaster Dan Beyer said. “We go as eclectic as one can — a straight up PSL clone is not unheard of. You’ll hear multiple instances of “latte” in our Pumpkin Fest lineup this year.”

That’s great if you’re in Washington to help bartenders drain a hollowed-out, 1,800-pound gourd on the festival grounds. You’ll also get to try guest brews in styles like pumpkin pickle beer, cinnamon roll stout and apple cobbler ale — two-thirds of which sound pretty good.

But if you’re, say, stuck in Wisconsin your options are limited to Elysian’s core four pumpkin beers. And while I’m wishy-washy on the topic — there are so many ways to do pumpkin ales and every brewery’s take is different, leading to a wild variation even before you get to overall quality — I’d be remiss if I didn’t tuck into this year’s pack from a trusted brewer.

Let’s see how it tastes.

Beverage of the Week: Essentia and House Wine’s rose+water box is weird, possibly brilliant tailgating

Alkaline water and wine, in one convenient 30-pound box. Perfect to get you tipsy AND hydrated.

Sometime this summer, a 30-pound box arrived on my doorstep. It was bulky and cumbersome and, honestly, a little strange. Inside were three more boxes. Inside those, three plastic bladders; one containing water, the other two containing wine.

This Jesus cube, a collaboration between Essentia alkaline water and House Wine, is meant to walk a fine line. A little booze to get you tipsy and then some purified, ionized water to … well, maybe not bring you back, but at least make your following morning more pleasant.

It came to me with the intent of a summer sensation; a limited-edition offering for pool gatherings and beach days. But since I’ve got a backlog of beverages to drink here (brag), it lingered a bit longer. And since Patrick Mahomes is an official Essentia spokesperson — no word on how he feels about boxed wine, though I’d wager he’s in favor, partically after looking at his wideouts — I turned my attention to a similar social space in need of hydration. The tailgate.

OK, that’s a weird tailgate combo, but I don’t judge. Drink what makes you happy, and if a little rosé is gonna make pre-game better for some folks, hell, have at it. Personally my review of the wine itself is going to be muted because, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s pretty much the one thing I don’t drink. But I’ll do it for the sake of the review — and to figure out if Essentia and House Wine created a viable product or merely a 30 pound curiousity.