Tag: booze

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.

Beverage of the Week: Jiant hard tea tastes a lot like white wine, somehow

Jiant’s hard teas are boozy and low on calories, but they all taste kinda the same.

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.

There are three trends I’ve noticed as brewers and distillers ramp up their efforts to ply our great nation with booze this summer. The first is that tequila, while never truly out of style, is getting a big push in the seltzer and canned cocktail game. The second is that we’re throwing peach into everything and making a bunch of good drinks taste like gummy candy (not a judgment, peach rings rule).

The third is that we’re giving hard tea another shot. That’s great, because having a market dominated by Twisted Tea provides a massive opportunity.

Hard coffee was, despite its potential, a bust. Per Kate Bernot — who is a wonderful beer writer you should absolutely follow — canned, boozed-up coffees sold only 1 percent of the volume that Twisted Tea comprised in 2022.  And Twisted Tea, as we’re all aware, suuuuuuucks.

So instead there’s been a push toward expanding hard tea beyond its current horizon. Earlier this year I kicked the tires on Spiked Arnold Palmer and found it to be a worthy replacement for the bile-tasting industry leader. Now comes Jiant, a craft-brewed sparkling hard tea that clocks in at seven percent ABV and between 130 and 150 calories per 12 ounce can, depending on your source. My variety pack came with four flavors; peach, kiwi strawberry, mixed berry and half & half.

One of those is pretty good. Let’s find out which.

Beverage of the Week: Arnold Palmer Spiked is here to make golf tolerable

A booze-infused Arnold Palmer? I’d always heard it called a John Daly. Whatever it is, it’s 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.

I was raised in a golf household. My dad was a high school golf coach. Not a good one, mind you, but he cared. There were plenty of weekends lost to the Travelers Championship or Greater Milwaukee Open as a kid.

As a result, I spent some time at the driving range, walked some municipal courses with some flea market knock-off clubs and was generally indifferent toward golf. Until I became an adult and realized you could spend most of your round with a drink in your hand. Golf, much like watching baseball or playing slow-pitch softball, is much better with a beverage.

This week’s sipper combines those worlds. Arnold Palmer’s pour of choice, a half lemonade, half iced tea glass of simple pleasure, has always been a fertile spot to plant booze. Add some vodka or bourbon or Southern Comfort to it and you’ve got what I’d always heard as a John Daly. But Arnie’s estate is branching out, so what we’ve got is the officially branded Arnold Palmer spiked bevvy. He’s right there on the can — signature and trademark multi-colored umbrella and all.

Does it live up to the Palmer standard? Is it at least as good as the Arizona Iced Teas that bear his name? Let’s crack this can.

In honor of the Brown-Rhode Island game, let’s drink two beautiful Ocean State messes

Brown plays Rhode Island this weekend. Let’s celebrate the greatest local cuisine in America with coffee milk-based booze.

For decades, Brown versus Rhode Island was the only game in town. The smallest state in the nation only had two Division I schools with football programs. Both competed at the I-AA/FCS level. Neither was especially competitive.

Still, these games, forgive the parlance, slapped. Right around the start of the millennium the Ivy League Bears, under the guidance of Phil Estes (who succeeded a Mark Whipple-Don Brown combination, somehow) developed into one of the most exciting teams in the country. Not AA football; anywhere.

In 1998, Brown out-slugged Penn 58-51 in a game that featured 58 (fifty-eight!) fourth-quarter points. The 1999 team won the Ivy League title behind current head coach James Perry, Mike Malan and Steven Campbell. The 2000 team scored at least 28 points in every game.

But the best game in that stretch may have been a 2001 showdown with then-No. 9 Rhode Island where Bears wideout Chas Gessner had 269 receiving yards and three touchdowns and still lost. Rhody ran for 309 yards. Brown passed for 492. It was like watching Ron Dayne’s Wisconsin play Michael Crabtree’s Texas Tech, only everyone kinda sucked at football. It was glorious.

In honor of the quaintest in-state rivalry in college football — Brown season tickets cost $40 for five games in 2001 and came with $20 in concessions vouchers and a long-sleeved tee! — we’re going to drink one of Rhode Island’s proudest traditions.

If you know someone from Rhode Island — or, most likely, are from Rhode Island, since we tend not to leave our motherland; maybe we’ll get to Connecticut or even New Hampshire, but roughly 95 percent of us remain tethered to New England in order to preserve our superiority complex over the rest of the nation — you’re familiar with our extremely localized cuisine.

It’s mostly, for lack of a better word, garbage. Hot weiners. Pizza strips. Clam cakes. Frozen lemonade. Subsisting on any of it for more than a few days at a time should make you ineligible for health insurance.

It is also incredible. Calvitto’s strips, a couple of weiners from Olneyville’s New York System and a Del’s is capable of powering you through any test the world can drop at your feet. So in honor of that cuisine, we’re gonna booze up the official state drink of Rhode Island: coffee milk.

The key ingredient in coffee milk is a syrup endemic to the Ocean State, typically made by either Autocrat (great) or Eclipse (… fine). If you can’t buy it, you can make it — here’s a good-enough looking recipe. Fortunately, I have a backlog of Autocrat that made the trip to the Midwest alongside me, just waiting for a moment like this.

Today we’re making two drinks. Let’s keep it simple for the first. Coffee milk in a white Russian is a no-brainer — it’s basically got all the ingredients anyway. Let’s see if a little taste of Rhody kicks it up a notch.

Beverage of the Week: Welp, they made me try peach lemonade vodka

Honestly it’s way better than I expected.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Previously, we’ve folded these in to our betting guides, whether that’s been for the NFL slate or a bizarrely successful run through the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. 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. 

Flavored liquors have taken off in recent years. The booming popularity of spirits like Fireball and Skrewball (540 percent growth in 2020!) is a reflection of a market that’s typically rewarded tinkerers trying to make middling drinks taste a little less like themselves.

That’s especially true when it comes to vodka, which offers the blankest canvas for experimentation of all the major liquors. There’s a wide gulf between connoisseurs buying top-shelf brands to drink on ice and the multitudes happy with neutral spirits swirled with fruit juice in a garbage can or whatever.

Pinnacle and Burnett’s have made “bad vodka mixed with a bunch of random crap” their business model; a trip down their line extension reads like a Baskin-Robbins menu. While I had a whipped-cream-vodka phase for a minute back there — especially with Mountain Dew, which somehow tasted like Sour Skittles (try it, in moderation) — I’ve mostly steered away from flavored vodkas and toward whatever would mix best with Zing Zang, hot sauce, and a beef stick garnish.

Smirnoff is hoping to bring me back on board with its new 2022 offering: Peach Lemonade Vodka. I wouldn’t have bought this unless it ended up in a bargain bin at my local grocery store, but my general rule remains: If you send me booze (or non-alcoholic beverages!) I will drink it and write about it.

Right away, this bottle flies in with some lofty promises. It’s wrapped in pink and yellow like it was a leftover prop from a Duran Duran video. The description printed therein promises “a refreshing taste like crisp waves hitting the sand” and “tangy flavors as bright as the sunshine.” I don’t know what the hell a crisp wave is, but fine. Shoot your shot, copywriter.

The bottle also includes three recipes, though they’re more suggestions than actual guides. Let’s try them out, along with a classic vodka tonic since that’s effectively a perfect summer drink and, despite the fact it’s currently 55 and raining in Wisconsin, summer is pretty much here.

Touring Carlos Dunlap’s Miami restaurant Honey Uninhibited

Cincinnati Bengals defensive end Carlos Dunlap is the proud owner of Brickell restaurant Honey Uninhibited, where the slogan is “Brunch. Breakfast. Booze.” Dunlap took us inside his restaurant and shared his inspiration for opening the spot, which features many varieties of eggs Benedict, french toast and all the brunch foods you could wish for.

Cincinnati Bengals defensive end Carlos Dunlap is the proud owner of Brickell restaurant Honey Uninhibited, where the slogan is “Brunch. Breakfast. Booze.” Dunlap took us inside his restaurant and shared his inspiration for opening the spot, which features many varieties of eggs Benedict, french toast and all the brunch foods you could wish for.