E&J "Temptation" Cream Liqueur

You know what E&J stands for? Ernest and Julio. "But Jasper," you ask? "Who are Ernest and Julio? Are they brothers? They sound like brothers. Do they go and have adventures together? They're like Mario and Luigi, right? Adventurous Italian brothers who love each other?"

Ernest and Julio Gallo.

So, you know, their adventures are really more on par with these brothers.
Oh, uh, spoiler warning for those of you reading this from 2005.

I have a history with Gallo, in the way that Eastern Europe has a history with Kalashnikovs. Thunderbird. Night Train. Their execrable vermouth. Gallo are people who don't fuck around in the game of putting disgusting things in my body. Ernest and Julio Gallo started making wine because there wasn't a market for the tears of infants. The proper cheese to accompany Gallo wine is something a step below Kraft singles individually shrink-wrapped American. They make the perfect thing for sitting at home, opening a bottle by yourself and having a quiet night in, when that home is a refrigerator box and it's quiet because Cat-eye Dave put a screwdriver in your ears because you thought his pressed tinfoil collection was trash.

So let's see how they do with their thing-that-should-be-a-bottle-of-Bailey's.

LOOK
It looks like non-dairy creamer, which, let's be honest, is probably what it's made with. Come to think of it, I wonder how veganism looks on cream liqueur like this. Well, I mean, hopefully they frown on this specific brand, but I don't know-- vegans keep buying shit from American Apparel too, and if massive sponsorship of anti-gay groups won't turn 'em off of something I doubt knowing that the forces behind Thunderbird profit from it would.

The other 90% of your brain is curds and whey.

It's a lot lighter than Bailey's is. Instead of looking like a blend of whiskey and cream, it's more of a sort of gray milk. It's just kinda gross-looking: rather than like a thing-within-itself (hey there Kant!), it looks like a spoiled version of something else.

NOSE
What the fuck this smells like grape soda. Like, almost exactly. Now, this might be expected because I think it has brandy in it and brandy is made of grapes, but it doesn't smell like grapes, it smells like grape soda. With a lot of the weird hiccups and deformities of the things I review, it's a matter of deficiencies or deliberate cost-cutting measures. But the only explanation for this is that Gallo was producing some kind of industrial grape-related runoff from the Thunderbird factory and, knowing that releasing it into the environment would be disastrous and reporting it to the government would have them erased by a wetworks team, they decided to mask it under the other flavors in a liqueur they thought no one would buy.

Pictured: Ernest Gallo, still alive due to his ability to feed off of pain.

Or it might just be the corn syrup and caramel that I'm sure this is loaded with. Both equally likely.

TASTE (Straight)
Well, at least the nose doesn't mislead. This pretty much tastes exactly like non-dairy creamer mixed with packets of artificial sugar. With a splash of alcohol in it. In other words, this is just a cocktail of what your basic office worker could put together between the communal supply in the fridge and the secret supply in the back of his desk.

It's a lot less charming when you wear a polo shirt and your charismatic speeches are passive-aggressive hints to Donna that you know she ate the cookies in your lunch.

There should be a special mention of how alcoholic it tastes, though-- it's only 15%, but taking a full shot of this is hard. In part it's because the flavors don't marry well, so the alcohol's sharpness really comes through unmitigated. And that sourness shouldn't really be in a cream liqueur at all. When I'm drinking a tall glass of milk, the last thing I wanna think is "mmmm...tangy."

TASTE (Mixed)
Well, I decided to make a Jack Torrance with it. Technically you're supposed to use advocaat, which has eggs in it, but technically you're not supposed to drink anything Gallo makes. So drop a dollop of rye whiskey into that glass of shitcreme and let's see how it goes down.

This is a fucking great idea, lemme tell you.

Eurgh. Worse than expected. It actually tastes legitimately spoiled, somehow. I thought it would just be like whiskey and cream, but no, this metastasized into a special kind of awful. I don't think it actually curdled anything, but the Temptation was already too sour and didn't have enough of a cream flavor to it, so when you combine it with a really sharp whiskey it tastes simultaneously milky and sour.

I'm just gonna throw the rest in the sink, because drinking it makes me taste kinda legitimately queasy. So this has failed conclusively at mixing, which cream liqueur should be able to do, since nobody wants a straight glass of that. Congrats, Gallo. You failed the easiest test on this blog harder than anything else I've reviewed. I honestly feel kinda sick now. I'm gonna get a cold glass of water. Fuck you Gallo, and why don't you hold on to that Fuck you for a while because you're gonna need anytime anyone drinks what you make.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Gallo, did it ever occur to you that people use the word temptation to refer to things they know they shouldn't touch?