El Jimado Canned Paloma

Why in God's name would you make a tequila cocktail in a  can and only make it 5 percent alcohol? Who in their right mind has ever said "oh, no thanks, I'm trying to just get a nice buzz going. Just tequila for me." And why would you throw together substandard agave juice and grapefruit soda into said can and sell it for 2 dollars when I could get the same buzz for a buck's worth of PBR and it wouldn't taste like a cactus hooker?

Yep. Typical Tuesday night here at the Department of Skullduggery.

LOOK
It really, really seems like a waste to pour this out of the can. In it's in a can for a reason. What am I gonna do, mix it with scotch? (NO. No I am not. That's like if in Pretty in Pink Molly Ringwald had slept with that awful 80's friend of hers).

And I am Harry Dean Stanton, shaking my fist at the heavens. But not in this movie. Repo Man Stanton.

Alright, fine. But first let me say that the can is awful looking. It looks like budget soda-- specifically, like the store-brand version of Sprite from some chain based out of the Dakotas that found a niche market in selling caffeine-free soda to Mormons.

The soda itself is mostly clear, but kind of gray and cloudy. Like really terrible municipal tapwater or Mute, reproachful, the faint color of wetted ashes. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you ...

Wha- sorry. Sorry bout that. But yes, there is something sinister about El Jimado.

"How wonderful to fuck a farting woman." Man, Joyce would have loved tequila.

NOSE
 Well, this pretty much smells like grapefruit soda, which is what 90% of this can is. There is a really faint mustiness down at the bottom of it though-- the vastly substandard tequila that is mixed in there waiting in a thing sheet under it-- "death beneath the skin" to quote from Egon Schiele's trial.

What do you think: more or less pretentious than the Joyce reference?

TASTE
I've never had a real Paloma-- apparently Mexicans drink them way more than they do Margaritas --and I'm not a big tequila fan in general (unless I can go all David Carradine and just sip it in the middle of the desert). So take my assessment with a grain of salt, but this really isn't very good. I'd say it tastes like eating cactus pulp out of a grapefruit rind, but that would imply something clean and natural, whereas this is more processed and industrialized than modern-day punk imagery

The tumor they pulled out of Blake Schwarzenbach's throat wouldn't even drink this.

No, this is to tequila and grapefruit juice what 7-up is to fresh lemonade, or what those jugs of TGI Friday's White Russians are to a real handmade one (how do those even work? It's like fifty percent heavy cream and they just keep them on shelves). It also combines the worst aspects of tequila and grapefruit's pungency to be really puckering and dehydrating, and that is just awful. I've said it before, but nothing that you drink should make you thirstier.

FINAL THOUGHTS
In the end, though, it's not terrible. If you want a buzz and you don't want cheap beer, I guess you could drink it. I just have a pretty huge thing against pre-bottled cocktails anyway-- there's two ingredients in a paloma, and it's pretty much designed for a few people to kill a dozen over the course of an afternoon. Get some friends, but a bottle of something and make your own.

NOT. THOSE. FRIENDS.