Tag: beverage of the week

Beverage of the week: Surprisingly, Darren Rovell makes 3 pretty good canned cocktails (and one terrible one)

I regret to inform you Darren Rovell makes a pretty good cocktail. Except the raspberry. Don’t get the raspberry.

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.

Darren Rovell is — how do I put this diplomatically — a divisive figure in the sports landscape. He’s a comprehensive reporter whose hustle never ends and helped popularize the sports business beat. He also carries himself online as the living embodiment of #brands and once emailed the University of Michigan to complain about one of its graduate students mocking him online, only to later be mocked online by the University of Michigan.

But what’s undeniable is the former ESPN talking head and current Action Network reporter has an expansive reach and an battle-tested understanding of influence and monetization across athletics. You can find this out for yourself if you’re willing to drop $89 on a Cameo from him. Or you can be like me, write a booze column and wait for your interests to intersect.

This happened back in February, because Darren Rovell, a man who charges nearly four times more for a recorded video hello than Olympic gold medalist, American hero, Figure It Out host and woman who makes Sixpence None the Richer songs play in my head each time I see her, Summer Sanders, founded his own canned cocktail line. Then he sent me some to try for this review.

KickStand isn’t your regular vodka-soda slim can. The baseline flavors are mostly there — lime, pineapple, cucumber and peach — but the twist comes with an infusion of “artisanal spice” aimed at blending elements of hard seltzer and spicy margaritas together in one drink. At 5.5 percent ABV and 103 calories it packs more of a boozy punch than most seltzers or light beers, so we’re already winning in that regard.

Hell, I like a good habanero stout every now and then. Let’s see if the flavor can match the hype.

Beverage of the week: Freshie Organic Tequila Seltzer is gonna clean up come summer time

The organic canned cocktail is an easy drinker that’ll only taste better as the weather warms up.

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.

One of the benefits of this column is expanding my tastes in alcohol. Whereas the College Football Cocktails line mostly served to indulge in my own terrible booze takes (and, occasionally, openly antagonize my own stomach), Beverage of the Week casts a wider net.

Since I’m open to drink-related pitches, I’ve gotten to try a bunch of new things that wouldn’t typically land on my radar. I was never a hard seltzer guy before, but High Noon made me a convert. I wouldn’t have drank non-alcoholic beer in the past, but Athletic Brewing makes a pretty dang good boozeless brew.

I have not been, in general, a tequila guy. Much of the blame here can be placed on cheap tequilas and the ubiquitous presence of Solo cups in college, and for the most part I’ve avoided it in favor of beer or whiskey. But as canned cocktails grow in popularity its place in the landscape is unignorable. There are gonna be a lot of good to-go tequila drinks out there, so I should probably get on board.

Turns out, Freshie’s Organic Tequila Seltzer is a decent to start.

Beverage(s) of the week: An Arizona Super Bowl smorgasbord, starring hazy IPAs and Emmitt Smith tequila

A trip to Phoenix paved the way to try a whole bunch of regional drinks. The IPAs were great. The cocktail based on a candle? Less so.

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.

Super Bowl 57 wasn’t just a wonderful opportunity to talk with players on Radio Row and watch the game that decided football’s newest world champion. It was also the backdrop for Arizona’s local culture, some great food and a full week of chances to drink the Grand Canyon State’s finest beverages.

This manifested in a few different ways, ranging from bottle shop four-packs to fresh pours at media events so over the top they could only be connected to the Super Bowl. In that spirit, I’m gonna run down all the spirits we got to try in our whirlwind week in Phoenix. They range from juicy pale ales to Emmitt Smith’s preferred tequila.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.