Tag: canned cocktails

Canned Cocktail of the Week: Melograno tastes as good as it looks

Melograno’s got the prettiest can designs on the shelf. The cocktails themselves live up to that standard.

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.

Seltzers aren’t the only things cutting into beer’s market share. Over time, the quality of premade cocktails has risen dramatically to bring another slim-fit can to shelves and chip away at light beer’s popularity.

Melograno isn’t a traditional cocktail thanks to its agave wine base, but it’s elbowing its way into that demographic with upscale offerings like Pomegranate Cosmopolitan and Orange Blossom Martini. The pitch is simple; these aren’t your typical High Noon vodka seltzers or your VMC tequila drinks. They’re low-calorie cocktails with a moderate ABV (five percent) aimed toward a crowd with a more discerning eye.

I mean, that’s pretty obvious from the labels themselves. These cans are gorgeous. They come in a sea of rich, glossy patterns like the wallpaper in the great room of a house you can’t afford. But I’m wary of a “blue agave wine specialty.” These typically come up short despite the promise of big flavor on limited calories.

Can they possibly be as good as they look?

Canned cocktail of the week: Tampico’s Hard Punches are boozy, sweet madness

A canned punch that tastes like the real thing — and will knock you on your butt.

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.

If you’re like me, you recognize Tampico’s neon jugs of various fruit punches from end caps at your local, dirt cheap grocery store. Their beverages don’t have names so much as they have colors. Want a glass of thick pink? Hypercolor yellow? Concerning levels of blue?

Effectively, Tampico is the purple stuff Sunny Delight warned us about, and it’s wonderful. I still buy it occasionally as an adult, though in its sugar-substitute versions and generally cut with a fair amount of water. It’s still pretty damned sweet at that point, so you can imagine what we’re dealing with here if you’re new to the brand.

OK, so now lets take those big, sweet jugs of sugar water and add booze and a little carbonation to them. How’s it gonna turn out?

Like Sunny D before it, Tampico is the next brand to make the jump from the back of your childhood refrigerator and into canned cocktail form. Its slim cans ditch the neon lure of plastic jugs for a more sophisticated place on liquor store shelves. So can a budget fruit punch brand break into a snobbier world of hard seltzers and canned cocktails?

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

Betty Booze goes harder than it had any right to.

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.

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: Sammy Hagar’s canned cocktails don’t even go the speed limit

Hagar was a celebrity booze pioneer. His canned cocktails taste like they’re trapped in 2015.

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.

Before there was Casamigos or Crystal Head or 818, there was Cabo Wabo.

The legend of Sammy Hagar isn’t limited to his vocal range or inability to drive without moving violations. He’s not just a rock mainstay but also a sigil of branding success.

Hagar arguably started the celebrity liquor trend, founding his Cabo Wabo restaurant in 1990 and then, a few years later, bottling and selling its signature house-blend tequila. He sold that off for a significant profit, and now he’s back in the game. Hagar once again is making booze. Sadly, there is no “Hagarmeister” brand extension to be found.

I’ve already covered how delightfully impressed I was by Santo, the tequila he co-branded alongside Guy Fieri. Today we’re talking up his line of canned cocktails and white rum. Will they reach the dizzying highs of his Diners, Drive-ins and Dives collaboration? Or will they be more Chickenfoot than Van Halen?

Beverage of the Week: Loverboy’s hard teas are easy summer drinks… except one

A new hard tea contender brings plenty of flavor at 90 calories per can. It’s not always a good thing.

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 summer of 2023 has been the backdrop to a hard tea revival. Several new contenders have come after the shoddy throne upon which Twisted Tea proudly sits and watches monster truck rallies.

Sometime it’s worked well in a common sense mashup — see Arnold Palmer Spiked Half & Half’s debut back in April. Other times it’s been a bit of a mess, like how Jiant made a bunch of tea that tastes like white wine, somehow. Today we’re on to our third entry of the summer — Loverboy’s low calorie, slim can offerings.

Loverboy isn’t quite coming after Twisted Tea. At 90 calories per can it’s clear they’re pushing up against the hard seltzer marketplace. Advertising an all organic recipe list, sweetened with monk fruit, means its taking a more upscale approach to the concept. So did it pan out? Or are we going to regret trying to make hard tea a thing again?

Beverage of the Week: Two Roads’ canned cocktails might be even better than their beers

Two Roads’ beers might not be as good as I remember. Their tropical punch canned cockail, however, is thoroughly legit.

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.

As someone with Rhode Island roots, I’m moderately invested in New England’s vibrant and occasionally ridiculous brewing scene. A region with its own IPA style that’s become a worldwide hit — seriously, every microbrewery in Denmark and Sweden seems to have its own NEIPA lurking and they’re all very close to getting it right — is a microcosm of the brewing landscape unto itself.

One of the landmarks on that horizon for the past decade has been Two Roads, a Connecticut-based brewer who has existed inside the fridges of my back-home beer snob friends for roughly the past decade (at least when they didn’t feel like dropping $27 for a four pack at Trillium). The Stratford brewery made an immediate impact in the region and grew into a reliable mid-tier company with good beers at a reasonable price. This is all I want in the world, so they became a staple of my trips back to the Ocean State.

But it’s been a while since I’ve been home to my land of hot weiners, baffling indignation and the interchangeable use of the words “kiiiiiiid” and “guy” like an old telegram would use “stop.” Was Two Roads still a heavy hitter? Would its foray into canned cocktails sap its efficacy in the beer world? I ordered a sampler; let’s find out.

Beverage of the week: Gosling’s canned Dark ‘n Stormys are wonderful… until you add fruit

Canned dark and stormies make sense, especially if Gosling’s is making them … until you add extra fruit.

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 love a good dark and stormy. I’d never had the classic cocktail before a work trip to Bermuda, where it’s the national standby. Then, since rum, ginger beer and limes are easy to come by here in the states, it became a staple at home — a simple to make cocktail that doesn’t have more steps than a whiskey-and-Coke but feels significantly classier.

Gosling’s, maker of both rum and ginger beer, decided to streamline that process even further and jump into a crowded market of canned cocktails with its signature drink. Their Dark ‘n Stormys come in four different flavors: original, cherry, pineapple and mango. And because dark and stormies rule, I took it upon myself to try all four.

The good news? Gosling’s knows what it’s doing when it comes to the original. The bad news? Well, there isn’t much sense innovating when you’ve got a base model that’s just about perfect.

Beverage of the Week: Topo Chico Spirited is perfect bubbly, boozy summer flavor

Topo Chico Spirited offers boozy cocktails with lots of flavors, low calories and, this is important, thick-thick bubbles.

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’d heard a lot about Topo Chico, but I kinda dismissed it as dumb seltzer hype. La Croix kinda ruined an entire genre by tasting like angry fizz and the vague recollection of a fruit you once liked.

But people kept talking it up, and when they added booze to the mix — not just a hard seltzer, but a straight-up cocktail — I was intrigued. Now that I’ve had it … well, I’m not obsessed, but I understand why people would be.

There’s something different about Topo Chico’s carbonation. The bubbles are different. Bigger. Softer. While most seltzers and sodas have tiny circles of CO2, Topo Chico’s beverages taste like they’re filled with ovals. It’s like the difference between a regular tap beer and a nitro one. It’s softer, maybe even a little creamier.

We’ll get into all that though. Let’s talk about each flavor.

Beverage of the Week: Simply made spiked peach juice and it’s candy in a glass

Turns out, mixing peaches and sugar with booze makes one heck of a summer drink.

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.

Last year, Simply made the move from bowling pin-shaped plastic bottles of juice and lemonades to cigarette-jean aluminum cans of hard seltzer and made waves in an ever-expanding ocean. That set the stage for an encore.

Market trends in 2023 dictated it would be one of three things: tequila-based, hard tea or peach flavored. That middle option would have been a natural fit — look out, 2024 — but instead we got a sea of peach mixed with some Simply standbys.

That doesn’t mean the new lineup is just peach lemonade. In fact, this extension leaves its roots behind and there’s nary a drop of lemon in the entire lineup. Instead, we’re getting fizzy Georgia fruit with strawberry, mango and kiwi to fill out the sampler.

The company that forced its way into a crowded marketplace is at it again. Can the sequel live up to a well received debut?

Beverage of the Week: High Noon’s tequila seltzers (mostly) live up to the brand’s lofty reputation

High Noon branched out to tequila, so they made three pretty good cocktails. Out of four.

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.

High Noon changed my opinion on slim-can hard seltzers and canned cocktails. Granted, the bar had been set pretty low by White Claw, but High Noon’s balancing act between flavor, fizz and a light calorie count has earned it a spot among my regular drink rotation. Particularly in summer, when those vodka sodas go down smoooooooth.

Unsurprisingly, High Noon has opted to capitalize on this strength. 2023 marks the brand’s venture into the the next big market in the canned cocktail/hard seltzer landscape: tequila. The formula is simple; a little fruit juice, tequila blanco and seltzer. As usual, you’ve got the 100 calorie benchmark and 4.5 percent alcohol by volume.

This summer has seen a proliferation of tequila-based canned cocktails. High Noon has a head start thanks to its name recognition and track record. Will its tequila seltzers take advantage of that, or merely sink to just-OK levels?