Bud Lite & Clamato Chelada

Now, you may have noticed a new subtitle for this blog: "These bars are filled with things that kill, by now you probably should have learned." It's from a Bright Eyes song, and I chose it because  a) there are a lot of things I am not, and faggy is not one of those things, and b) I do stubbornly refuse to learn.

He's like a scared little kitten. I'd totally drink some Riva with that guy.

Even then, though, some of you might thought a pre-canned blend of clam juice, tomato, bud lite, lime, and salt (it's supposed to be served in a salt-rimmed glass but they just said fuck it and put salt in the goddamn can like goddamn assholes) might daunt me. Those of you who did either seriously underestimate my courage or overestimate my will to live.

"So I give myself three months to feel better/ or I swear to god I'll drive right off a fucking cliff." Oh, this is pretty much what highschool with me was like, by the way.

Well, almost. You need more Smiths references but, as both Morrissey and beer-clamato are for inexplicable reasons enjoyed by swarthy Latinos, I guess this'll make an adequate substitute.

LOOK
Reddish-pink, with matching foam. It's a little faintly orange and more translucent than I like my beer, let alone how I like my beer mixed with what-should-be-opaque tomato juice. Which, in all fairness, I proabably wouldn't mind if it was absolutely translucent, by which I mean didn't exist. I mean, Jesus christ, I know Bud Lite is for drippy vaginas but does that mean this has to look like period blood.?

What are you, on y-- shit, already made that joke in the Cossack review. Welp, hopefully some Winstone will class this place up a little regardless.

NOSE
It's in the nose where the rich bouquet of clams comes  through. It still smells faintly like tomatoes and faintly like beer, but mostly it just smells fishy.

I want you to try and wrack your brain for anything that can be described as "smelling fishy" that is good. Nothing is supposed to smell like fish. Even fish. When fish get aromatic you throw 'em the fuck out, but NOPE, Amheuser just thinks yeah, yeah, this beer smells like low tide. And I'm okay with that.

I want you to keep in mind, given the metaphor I used in the section above, that I didn't make a single vagina joke. I stayed the hell away from vaginas in the fish-smell metaphor, and that makes me classy.

Pictured: Class, a Turkey.

TASTE
They put salt in this. Do you think they understood what a bad idea that was? When you salt the rim of the glass, it gives a nice sharpness to what you're drinking and, by making you thirstier, makes the drink more quenching. I've only started appreciating tequila in the past month since I bought a little bottle of 1800, and I understand that. The people who came up with this deal in booze for a living and they couldn't figure out that if you put salt in the beer it just makes it painful to drink. The lip of the can tastes like seawater and it burns my throat in the worst way possible.

(For the record, whenever I think of budweiser I just flash to the scene in Blue Velvet where Laura Dern says it's all she's had, and Kyle MacLachlan just sighs and disappointedly replies "yup.  King of beers.")

"Diane, I'm drinking Clamato, salt, and Budweiser. I've made a huge mistake."

Honestly, the only flavor advertised on the bi-lingual label that I would want in my cheap watery lite American beer is the lime, and I can't taste that. It mostly tastes like tomato juice. Bad tomato juice. At least when you drink it, the clam-- the "unique flavor of Clamato" they advertise on the back of the can-- doesn't really come through. It just tastes like beer and tomato juice and it makes you thirsty when you drink it, making it a failure at the one reason I ever have cheap watery beer. And I drink a lot of Rolling Rock, so it's not like I'm coming at this with unreasonably high standards.

Can I just say that my spellchecker doesn't recognize Clamato as a word? That's because it shouldn't be.

"Clamato, per se?"

I will say this though-- it makes a nice counterpoint to the Four Loko from earlier in the week. On a surface level, that's because it's horrible flavors and colors are at least natural; I know what makes this bad, unlike the awful undertow of Loko, which I can only guess at being the rough flavor of Nyarlothotep's dust-covered taint (not taint in the Lovecraftian sense, I mean the space between Nyarlothotep's testes and Nyarlothotep's anus). On a less awful level, though, it's because chugging this actually makes it better. Your mouth gets acclimated to the store-brand V8 taste and it just tastes like watery, vegetable-y beer after a few swigs.

Also, I think the salt did help clear up these congested sinuses I've had, so that's good. I'm not even joking, that happened.

FINAL THOUGHTS
On the other hand, I think my throat might be bleeding. It's really hot and sore I don't know if my spit's red because of the tomato or if the saltwater kinda fucked me up because, you know, you shouldn't drink saltwater.

It's like nobody even watched Waterworld.

Four Loko (standard flavor)

Did you watch that video? (I didn't-- I cut out at the point when he was sharing his pride in spending three dollars on his chosen poison at the corner store). But yes-- that's why I'm going for some Four Loko tonight. Well, that and the fact that, according to Wikipedia, it's currently under investigation by the FDA. And when you Youtube search for it, one of the first results is about teens being hospitalized by it. Also, there's wormwood in it, which strikes me as a terrible idea.

Essentially, Four Loko is malt liquor full of fruit flavor and energy drink and, I can't stress the cosmic foolishness of this idea, wormwood. Also, its company is based out of Latrobe PA, which makes me sad because I started drinking beer with Rolling Rock. So I got just the standard purple-colored can and thought I'd see if this is normal malt-liquor bad or a special thing unto itself.

LOOK
Oh my god this looks more like grape soda than grape soda does. It's a really really dark purple, like, darker than Fanta. (They made Fanta originally because Nazi Germany couldn't import Coca-Cola syrup.  I'm not making any claims here about quality or trying to say that Four Loko is a war crime. I'm just telling the exciting story that is 20th-century history)

Apparently exciting enough that someone made a Martin Bormann action figure.

But anyway, it's malt liquor and it's dark purple. It wouldn't matter if that purple was like made out of ground-up amethyst and unicorn jism, it would still be wrong.

NOSE
It also smells like grape soda. It's really reminiscent of Purple Passion, (man, those were halcyon days. Back when I had  a liver larger than a golfball and more solid than a whiffleball)-- it smells purple and fruity, but neither like actual grapes or totally healthy. There's a weird, old, dusty foot smell at the bottom of this, like I'll drain the can and just wind up choking on someone's knucklebone.

"Looks like a ... pinky."

There is a cheap beer aroma mixed in, though, and that's just terrible. It can smell like soda, it can smell like cheap beer, but smelling like both just feels like something-- either a rat or an oompa-loompa, respectively--fell into the mix and drowned.

TASTE
 Well when you sip it, it just tastes like soda. But it's malt liquor, so you should chug it, and when you chug it thenitdsjcdlsjl;ZALGO.

Whoo. Sorry there. I drank like a fifth of a can and for a second everything was black and yet somehow fire at the same time. I was somehow absolutely nothing and yet aware of nothing but my own flesh. It was a little weird.

NO WONDER YOU'RE ALWAYS SCREAMING.

It starts off with this faint, bitter wormwood flavor down at the very base of the first sip. It tastes like dust and hangover-mouth, with sort of a lemon-rind sourness. But with every  gulp I take over the course of a chug, the grape soda flavor diminishes and that grows, until after about four gulps and it tastes like wood pulp and mushrooms. It tastes like something that is legitimately poisonous and then you salivate like crazy as your mouth tries to flush it out. And it's not just in the course of one chug-- the deeper I get into this increasingly too-large can, the worse every consecutive sip tastes. It's the opposite of the Mad Dog effect (fun fact: my first exposure to Mad Dog was on My Name is Earl, where it was the preferred drink of Patty the Daytime Hooker).

Seriously, a sip of this is passable. That last gulp is some of the worst stuff I've tasted for this blog.

(I gotta take a break while I process the buzz. Here's something special to keep you company).

zALgO RiseS

BUZZ
I'm just adding this section because this is an energy drink as well as a beer as well as, in Europe, absinthe-pop (which all combine into a Japan-level bad idea). I figure that, since the reason to drink Four Loko over anything else is the buzz, I better talk about it.

It's not really an energy drink buzz, though, as the alcohol mostly negates that. I am typing better than I usually do in the reviews, so I guess it makes that a little easier, but I'm not jittery or tweaking. It actually reminds me of an absinthe buzz (only with Taurine and Shoggoth-bile instead of fennel and anise) in that I'm clearly kinda drunk but not tired or lethargic.  But whereas an absinthe buzz is fun and an excellent conduit to bad ideas and weird fuckin' dreams (seriously-- can't go into details but they were strange as shit and we all dreamed about different variations on the same idea) I imagine that this is just a conduit to sitting on the hood of a moving car.

"Someone slammed their butt on your car! It looks like a butt!"

(Wonder Boys is hella late-90s-early-2000s but it's still a damn fine movie). Essentially this buzz is just gonna make you a chattery asshole but not actually inspire you to any bad decisions.

FINAL THOUGHTS
More like you'd have to be loco to driiiiiiiiiiiiii
ZALGO
HE RISES. 

Newgate Corrections Citrus Blend

(Before any of you start worrying for my health, I want you to know I ran my process and the finished product by two different people I know who do a lot of homebrewing. They were disappointed, dismayed, and horrified, but they assured me that this should be safe. Fairly safe).

So, we all knew this was coming. I think we were all wondering, "how long is it going to take before Jasper decides that no ordinary awful stuff is enough to keep him running and instead decides to engineer something truly awful and gloriously perverse?" So I found a shittily-made website from the year 2000 that told you how to make prison wine out of Welch's and baker's yeast and decided "fuckit, why not?"

A paragon of  good decisions.

The roommate and I made it out of Grapefruit, Pink Lemonade, and Apple from Wal-Mart brand concentrates and fermented it in a plastic water jug. It's been sitting for about four days and last night the bubbles finally stopped going, meaning that all the yeast poisoned itself. And so, named after one of the most infamous prisons in history, I present to you: Newgate Corrections Citrus Blend.

Pictured: pride!

This is it: the moment when i get to call myself Gonzo. When I create the worst story possible and then report on how awful it is. Or I could call myself a Republican Congressman.

LOOK
Whooooo boy. There was a lot of pink juice that went into the blend of this and I don't know where it went, because it's pretty much beige now. It's about the color of slightly lighter apple juice, but totally opaque. Also, as you can kind of see in the image up there, there's a surprisingly thick layer of sediment at the bottom of the jug. This is the dead yeast and the processed pulp from the juice. The fact that there's so much of it means some pretty serious fermentation went down. Kind of like when, in a horror video game, you walk into an empty room that's strewn with chunks of something and you know a brutal boss fight's coming up.

This is Regeneratin' Robby. He's our mascot.

NOSE
Okay I think I might have fucked up the airlock seal that is supposed to let some of the waste product out (I was making it out of a balloon and a rubber band), because this smells straight up rancid. (Again, I want to stress I had people who know their shit make sure this wasn't poison-- I'll be fine in the morning, people. Although, fun fact, in the slim chance I did seriously fuck shit up my body would actually turn this into formaldehyde. Having friends who know chemistry makes you kind of scared of life).

There's a serious sulfur whiff here because I used bread yeast and that shit does not make anything good ever,  and there's a vague sharp, sweet citrus smell under it (and I mean under, as in lurking.) It's a little bit like the aroma that bread dough makes when it's rising, only a lot stronger, more bitter, and in a place it really shouldn't be.

TASTE
I've been listening to a lot of Sparklehorse lately, and the thought of even having to do this section made me cue up "Here Come the Painbirds." And that song's about the time Mark Linkous did so much heroin he filled his heart with potassium, briefly died, and couldn't walk for six months. SO YEAH.

"The only things I really need / is water, a gun, and rabbits / [also not prison wine]"

(He uh, he shot himself in the heart about four months back. So I feel bad for that. But not as bad as I'm going to. Look, I made prison wine here-- I WOULD RATHER BE DRINKING THUNDERBIRD.)

Ohgodohgod here we go. Okay, for starters, it doesn't actually taste as rancid as it smells. The grapefruit flavor really tears to the forefront, which makes me glad we only used one third grapefruit. It also makes me really glad that we couldn't find beet juice from concentrate, which was our first idea. Still though, it's amazing that, starting with simple fruit juice and the addition of two ingredients, we got this awful.

"I can ferment, mother. You fermented juice."
"Good for you Buster, now let's see you drink it."

It actually tastes like the time we mixed Thunderbird and grapefruit juice, but if you drank that through rising bread dough. Or like, if it was given to you by the world's absolute worse pastry chef. I don't mean worst as in "the worst at being a chef," I mean "out of all the chefs in the world, he is the one who is the most objectively bad as a human being." I don't know what the fuck that website was smoking, baker's yeast was a terrible idea. As was making it as concentrated as they suggested-- this should probably have like twenty percent more water. Although using grapefruit juice was also a terrible idea.

This tastes like bile and sulfur. It may well be the straight-up worst I've reviewed, and definitely the hardest to choke down, although I can't really count it in the running because it was engineered to be the worst. I mean, it's not like anyone actually makes grapefruit wine.

Blow me, world.

On the downside of the downside, it's hard enough to get down-- and I'm still vaguely afraid I might have made poison--that you pretty much can't get drunk off of this concoction. So yeah, it is an abject failure.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Now, I don't wanna condemn the proud tradition of hombrewing-- there's some people out there (I know a couple) who make delicious things. But if you're gonna do it, don't go by a website from ten years ago that still uses frames and encourages you to use a rinsed-out milk jug (because it's free!).

And that's why I can't go to prison. I just have certain standards about my wine.

Richard's Wild Irish Rose (Red)

Welp, back to the grindstone. No more weird Eastern-European stuff, no more light, vaguely alcoholic stuff. It is time for the last, unvanquished Bumwine, one of the legendaries. I've worked my way through six other classic hobowines (and the sub-standard Orange Driver, whatever the hell it counted as), now I've got a big (full-liter) bottle of Wild Irish Rose staring me down before I can say I've cleared all of 'em out.

Orange Driver is Mimmy. Also this metaphor works because Margaret is brutal to get through.

 Oh, oh. And I just finished watching Season 4 of Dexter (which is a barrel of laughs, let me tell you), so I am in an extra bottle-drainy mood. So come Wild Irish Rose--number one, here I come.

LOOK
Not that bad, actually. It's second to MD 20/20  as the most wine-y looking of the Rogue's gallery of bumwine. Mostly red-colored, vaguely purple, and a little too light to be actual wine, but if it was in a bottle it could pass for port or sherry maybe. It does look just a little sugary, though. That said, MD red was honestly the second-hardest to drink after Thunderbird, so that doesn't tell us much.

When I was talking to my dad once--a former Wyoming bartender, so you know he's seen some shit--about this kind of stuff, his response was "you've actually had Thunderbird? Tastes kind of like diesel, doesn't it?" It was kind of a sweet father-son moment.

Dammit Jasper! You drink by The Code!

NOSE
Ah, WIR, you betray yourself. Much like the Irish, your facade of acceptability fades upon closer examination-- or upon smelling.You might pass for civilized in dim light, but as soon as that bottle opens I know you for the filth you really are.

"Good wine...is very sweet, my brother."
"Aye. Good wine is very sweet. But you're not me brother."

There's actually not that much aroma to it, but what there is is pretty much pure vinegar and floor polish. There's a little bit of that red-candy sugary smell that marks the really low-grade stuff, but this follows just behind Thunderbird in terms of unpalatable smell. (Out of the bumwines, at least-- bad liquor has a bad smell all its own). (I really didn't like Thunderbird. Can you tell?)

I hate Thunderbird as much as I hate this image.

 

 

 

 

 TASTE
At its most basic, like fruit, grape, sugar, and poison. If I didn't know that this was going to taste awful and instead expected something actually natural-flavored I'd be fucking worried.

Making me more competent than Gotham PD.

Oh, do I need to be more specific? Do your journalistic standards demand it? I can't pull a W.R. Hearst and just insinuate and fabricate and smash our foreheads together to get the information into your skull faster?  I have to do actual journalism? (Wait? Do I? I'm too deep to know what's real and what's the joke anymore).

Citizen Who OR "FAB-RI-CATE! FAB-RI-CATE!"OR "I hate Wild Irish Rose. Wild Irish Rose isn't cool."

(I want you to know I was just going to do an Inception joke there but I took the time to MS Paint William Hearst as a Timelord, because I am dedicated to my craft.)

Okay, well look, have you seen the Season 4 Dexter finale? I just watched it, like two and a half hours ago. And logically I should be drinking more because when I watched it the first time I had to sit there for a while to catch my breath and rewatch parts of it and then go upstairs and have myself a bit of a cry. And I'm still barely into this bottle at all.

Okay. Okay. Give me a minute. Maybe take that minute to, I dunno, look at pictures of kittens or something nice.

Whatever the opposite of this is.

Okay, all that said this is probably the most chuggable of all the bumwine I've had, so at least it accomplishes its mission. But that's like how at the end of Metal Slug you still accomplish your mission, because you leave behind an army of corpses, get earth invaded by Martians, puke blood for a while and some guy gets eaten by a killer whale.

Not really a fair comparison because Metal Slug is fucking awesome though, and this isn't. So maybe it's like how, at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jack Nicholson actually does end up adjusting to the mental institution.

Pictured: rad.

Pictured: not rad at all.

 There's a really strong grape juice/cranberry candy flavor at the beginning (because W.I.R. is "100% grape with citrus spirits"), and then that bitterness and vaguely ill backwash. It tastes a lot--a lot--like bile, or maybe that's just, I don't know, my bile. It goes down easy enough, but after a big gulp you don't really want to drink more of it. (GAY JOKE HERE). There's also this very faint aftertaste, after everything else goes away, of blood and spit, although that might just be-- well, I guess what I'm saying is that the wine itself tastes like candy, but the aftertaste tastes like the aftertaste of swallowing glass.

And I don't know if they grade glass, but if they do...coarse.

Honestly though, it might still be the most drinkable hobo wine I've tasted yet. The only hard part of the drinking is the swallowing, which does hurt and gives you a grimace that's the exact opposite feeling of whisky shivers. This is not at all to say that it's good, but, like Night Train (which I've got soft feelings for, as I drank half a bottle with friends, made pineapple nachos, and watched Van Damme's magnificently tardo Cyborg), it'll do the job if you don't mind the slimy aftertaste and the bootleg flavor.

I had an elaborate masturbation joke there originally, but I'm gonna be classy and just leave it to your imagination.

It's a relatively nice buzz, too. The kind of buzz where I listen to cabaret music and google screenshots from Secretary, not the Thunderbird kind where I wander down to the grill on the corner at 1 am and my friends talk about their exes (see: T-bird).

So yeah, this isn't good, but it's a nice high standard for bumwine. Kind of like how John Merrick was hella deformed but still a classy guy. (Yes, that's the second Elephant Man joke I've made. As a side note, the Lynch film is a really underrrated classic-- it's not weird and hallucinatory, but it's still clearly his work and Hurt is absolutely incredible in it). So I'm not gonna recommend it-- if you have the five bucks a liter bottle costs you just get actual cheap wine for that price or a couple little sampler bottles of liquor--but if, like me, you consider yourself a travel guide to the tourism of the land of misery,  you could do worse. You could do Thunderbird.

Like I said, I'm in a cabaret kind of mood. So here's Jack Terricloth, both because Addicted to Bad Ideas is tied with Tallahassee as the official Gutrottin' album and because I think he'd really like the second-to-most-recent sentence.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Wow, this review sorta ballooned. Like a tumor. Or a balloon. It is sort of my farewell to bumwine-- I don't doubt that I'll return (I think I may even round up my roommate and my girlfriend to revisit Thunderbird), but I've now tried all the major brands. I haven't done the white Wild Irish Rose yet, so that may be in the future. The distant, awful, future. But I gotta say, this is better than Mad Dog. It's in the Night Train category of "shit I wouldn't ever be in the mood for but might drink again to save money." Although, seriously, a five-dollar bottle of Riesling is still pretty decent. There's really no excuse besides abject poverty.

SPECIAL: [Name Unknown] Pelinkovac

As of the vile, vile affair that was Cossack vodka, I now officially have done twenty-five different reviews over the past several months, making that review a pretty big milestone for this blog. That's twenty-five different bottles,  ranging from non-alcoholic Busch to 100-proof banana hitler choked down by yours truly. And today is the last day of my summer vacation.

So I thought I'd hunt out something special. There's no brand name or title on this bottle, just PELINKOVAC (which is the type of liqueur) and bottling information, with a drawing of a feudal-era Slavic girl offering you a bottle (which, inexplicably, is also named in English like a weird, Escherian recursive hooch label). There was only one bottle left at the local ABC store, and a sign under it reading "Discontinued." Plus, I don't even know what a Croatian apertif is doing here in Carolina, so for all I know I've got the only bottle in the state. I've never seen it anywhere before-- never even heard of Pelinkovac, period --and when I saw that strange, lonely bottle I knew there was nothing in the world I wanted to review more.

Pelinkovac is, according to the sources I looked up, a liqueur native to Serbia, Croatia, and the Bosnian region, traditionally distilled from wormwood (which, in Ukrainian, is chernobyl-- the first of many good signs) and flavored with herbs and various bitters. It seems like it's  sort of the Serbo-Croatia-Bosnian answer to Malort, which, given Malort's reputation, seems like a very, very, very, bad idea.

Serbia's answer to Mario, for comparison.

Don't worry, I'm going to try to refrain from just making a GTAIV clusterfuck of an entry. That said-- I was in a war; let's see if this liquor means anything to me.

LOOK
It's colored with caramel, so I really shouldn't even talk here. That said, from looking up some legitimate brands, it seems like Pelinkovac should be darker than this. The liquid inside the generic bottle is fairly translucent with an amber, slightly orange tint to it. It's the consistency of water, so it's not sluggish or strangely thick, which is simultaneously reassuring and disappointing. I should be happy it looks so threatening, but I'm a little worried that it's not even stranger-- its attempts at normalcy, besides being artificial, don't really hide anything, they just make me a little more afraid.

26 reviews in and I'm still not above using the most convoluted setup possible for a throw-away pop culture reference. I really will contort the flow of my comedy and stifle an actually creative observation just to make a gag about television. You know, like Family Guy.

 NOSE
 Man, considering the last 3 reviews have been vodka, cheap tequila-soda, and malt liquor, I'm honestly lucky to have  something that has a real aroma to talk about. Because, trust me, there is an aroma here. There's a really strong cinnamon note-- hot, spicy cinnamon, like in Big Red or Goldschlager. But there's a lot of really herbal and fruit flavors under it: fennel, anise, pear, and pepper all spring to mind. There's also some of that savory bitterness that I assume must be the wormwood (or vermut in German-- hence vermouth! I'm gonna get that funding yet!), since it's also really prevalent in the absinthe I've had. It's a shame the cinnamon is so strong, because the rest of these flavors are actually kinda nice, but the cinnamon is really intense--clearly more than it should be in bottles that don't cost ten dollars --and also smells really candy-like and artificial. Given that I really like the other scents there, this overpowering artificial aroma is the equivalent of taking a talented, subtle actor and wrapping him in pancake makeup and distractingly over-the-top costume work.

Goddammit Tim Burton stop doing that to your friend. Also get another friend.

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
First the good news: the artificial atomic-fireball-cinnamon flavor is not nearly as strong in sipping as it is in smelling.

Bad news: this stuff is not good to you.

It honestly doesn't taste that bad; it may be the most palatable thing I've reviewed (short of the beers) for this blog. There's a lot of the herbal flavors there that Jagermeister and absinthe have, but it's not as syrupy-sweet as the former or as licorice-y as the latter. It's a lot more bitter than either, though, and that's where the bad news comes in.

Wormwood, apparently, is a fairly lasting flavor, because after everything else fades there's this really strong woody bitterness that lurks around the back of your throat.

Silly Internet, that's not what I meant!

It's pretty much what I would imagine Croatia tastes like, and whether or not that's good  is up to you. I honestly kinda like it. It's weird and I don't know if it tastes particularly good, but hey-- I'd honestly recommend trying to find a bottle, if only so you can experience it. It's honestly the strangest and most unique thing I've reviewed, and if it's not terrible, at least it's weird. Just be warned that a large gulp is gonna make you queasy and a little ill. And then you realize that you are a poor wretch, and should have found a better way to live.

GR North: Cossack Vodka (w/ Tyler Lee-Moore)

Greetings from Gutrotter North Office, based out of sunny Someverville MA, just south of the Cambridge municipal border. And boy do we have a winner for you tonight: Cossack vodka, distilled right here in Somerville and costing only ten dollars for a full liter (and liquor is expensive here, since the state doesn't own the business).

WRONG AGAIN, ANDY.

This is something that you probably can't even find outside of the Boston area-- and I really doubt you'd want to try. So let's dive right into this Cossack.

LOOK
 I can't say much about the way vodka looks. I only put this section in because of my near-autistic devotion to pattern.

That said, my good buddy Tyler points out that it doesn't move the way vodka (or fucking anything) should-- it's not that cold but it still sloshes around a little too thickly, too syrupy. Like an alien imitation of real vodka. Come from way out beyond the stars.

To kill us kill us KILL US WHERE WE STAND / they'll store our livers in Mason Jars.

Also, there's a little Cossack on the bottleneck. (And can I say that honestly, given Western views of vodka, it's a little weird to name it after a society that was at times fairly anti-Russian and usually anti-Soviet? And that one time, pro-Nazi? [gutrotter.blogspot.com: the thinking man's poison reviewer])

Oh also, on a very much related note, since our women have left us to ourselves, I'm drinking mine with heart-shaped ice cubes.

NOSE
Not much of one honestly. If you jam your nose down in your tumbler (we are drinking out of Irish crystal tumblers because we are gentlemen) you can smell the usual burn and diesel fumes, but it's really not much worse than some good vodkas. Still worse though.

The little heart-shaped ice cubes are melting.

Trotskii is Sadskii.

Hey, you know what smells good? The Flying Dog Raging Bitch I'm using as a chaser. WHICH I JUST OPENED WITH A HUNTING KNIFE. WE DON'T NEED WOMEN ROUND HERE.

(Tomorrow on Gutrotter North: Tyler and Jasper exploit their Massachusetts location and get married).

To find my "wooden leg"

TASTE (STRAIGHT) (UNLIKE US. ANYMORE.)
Alcohol and water.

There's this weird sweaty syrupiness to it though. Tyler compares it to vodka sipped from a leather boot, whereas I compare it to horse. So I guess it's true enough to the name. Truer than the Cossacks were to any political power (LEARN, dammit! Otherwise I lose government funding. I'm technically listed under edutainment, I just can't afford a .org address). Tyler and I are preeeetty... sure that the issue here arises from distillation: the thickness, weird sugary taste and vaguely dehydrating burn all point to this only being once-distilled alcohol with a lot of grain and poison lurking around. There is just so much more awful hidden in this bottle than there chemically should be. THANKS BOSTON.

YAH WELCOME, JAHSPAH.

TASTE (MIXED)
First off, being that we are in the Northeast and also what, on your fucking period? we mixed it with cranberry juice.

Tune in next week, when we just transcribe all of The Departed.

Yeah, it pretty much just tastes like cranberry juice. We need to reinforce this: it's not the worst, but it is fucking boring. Like Tyler. A boring fuck. There's no flavor beyond the flavor of pure alcohol, which, despite what you might guess, is not a flavor I like. There's a bit of that leather and a bit of burn at the back of the throat, but I guess if you cut it with juice it goes down smooth enough. It's not Riva bad, but what is? Like King Cobra was to beer, this is to vodka: the way a child imagines it would taste.

(Update: Raging Bitch still delicious).

Vodka tonic is yeah, pretty much what you'd expect. It tastes like tonic water and lime juice. And some poison. (Alcohol is technically classified as a poison, making my therapist technically correct-- The best kind of correct!). I guess if you wanna buy cheap-ass vodka and celebrate your neighborhood, whatever, go for Cossack. It's probably the best cheap vodka I've reviewed, but it's still not good or really worth drinking. Just make weak cockatails, drink 'em like soda, and, I don't know, get gay-married or something. Worked for us.

"On the day that I forget you / I hope my heart explodes."

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.