Burnett's Sweet Tea Vodka

Well, before we tear into the meat of this review (the meat is awful-- I think it might be people), a bit of housekeeping.

1. Gutrotter's gonna be on a more sporadic schedule from now on. I'm not living with a roommate anymore, so there's a lot less potential for fun times when I'm drinking terrible things and these reviews are a lot sadder when I'm just in my room drinking and listening to the Mountain Goats version of "The Boys Are Back in Town."

Mostly I just spend my time making these.

2. I've got another review coming tomorrow night as well. This is in part to make up for a lack of activity and in part because I found...well I found something. I don't wanna tell you what it is. It was one of those magical moments when I discover something I didn't even know existed but can tell you with 100% certainty is going to be absolutely god-awful. Like when you first learn there's a country named Uzbekistan and you don't even need to see pictures to know it's sad.

3. I've mentioned this to a couple people in person, but the Gutrotter's shutting down in a few months' time, after I graduate. There a few reasons for this. Once I'm out of college I can't keep doing this to my body guiltlessly, I wanna finish up on a high note instead of dragging the blog on after I've run out of things to say, and, finally, I'm actually starting to straight run out of things I can easily get my hands on that would be fun to review. I'm gonna try and have a big blowout for the last post and round up the worst offenders for people to sample, and when all this is over I'm definitely gonna put all the reviews into an e-book or something with introductions and commentary. But we got a few months before then, so let's buckle down.

Man, writing all that made me feel like a real journalist. (That's a very young Hunter Thompson, by the way).

Some friends recently were partying, and there was a bottle of this vodka there. This sweet tea vodka. And, despite the fact that it was mostly empty by the time it passed into my hands, there was apparently a unanimous agreement that I had to try it (I was not there. I was watching Robocop). This is never, ever, a good sign-- my friends aren't exactly snobs about alcohol, so when there is unanimous agreement among people that I need to do an article it ends badly. This also happened with Johnny Bootlegger. And, these are the same people that I have, repeatedly, coerced into drinking banana liqueur, Thunderbird, and Kentucky Gentleman. I wouldn't blame them for having it out for me.

LOOK
I don't  even know why I'm bothering with this section. For starters, it's vodka-- I know it's flavored, but if your vodka has color fuck you I'm not drinking your vodka. But it does have color-- except that the back label says "caramel color added." So fuck it, just... just fuck it. There is literally nothing this section could contribute to the review, so have a couple illustrations I've wanted to use but never found a place for:

You're welcome. Seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it's been not being able to use those, they're both so wonderful. I guess the top one would have been good in my Old Mill Stream / Sonic Underground review but hey, as Samuel Beckett would say, Worstward Ho!

No no no, Samuel Beckett.

NOSE
Well, it does smell kinda like sweet tea. I can go back-and-forth on sweet tea: sometimes it's really what I'm in the mood for (especially when half of it is lemonade. Or rum), but other times when it's not made well it tastes like pancake syrup.

I do not go back-and-forth on the way this smells. It smells like sugar mostly. And a little tea. But not, y'know, Russian tea. Just like, hotel-brand breakfast tea. Also what the fucking fuck according to the label it was made in Bardstown KY?! Fuck you Bardstown, and fuck Riva, Kentucky Gentleman, Mill Stream, and everything else that oozes out of you. I'm tempted to just do a review of Bardstown (in terza rima, 33 cantos), but, as Samuel Beckett once said, it's never the same pus from moment to moment.

God damn it, I'm talking about the Irish one.

Anyway this smells like bad sweet tea and bad vodka, which I imagine makes it pretty much the best representative of the glorious culture of Bardstown. Also, can I just not that the label for this bottle has like, five tea leaves and giant fucking pile of sugar on it? Yeah, they know how their flavors are balanced.

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
Fuck, it's so much worse than I thought it would be. Now I know how the president felt in 2007. Jesus.

It doesn't taste like bad sweet tea. It tastes like bad vodka and sugar. Not even good sugar. It tastes like a couple packets of sweet 'n' low in a bottle of Riva. There's a little bit of what might be tea there, but, here, lemme take another taste-- no, no it mostly tastes like coffee grounds and sugar.

Fuck, I gotta stop making David Lynch jokes. I promise, more Alejandro Jodorowsky jokes in the future.

There's a real bitterness in it too, despite how sugary it is. Like, after drinking some I really want a big glass of water. It's the same effect as if you leave tea steeping too long, which just drives home the fact that this doesn't just taste like bad tea, it tastes like bad tea made badly. Mixed with bad vodka and bad sugar. There's layers upon layers of incompetence here, all influencing each other. It's like if instead of being a surrealist, Max Ernst was just all-around shitty.

It's called culture.

Like, no one thing about this is god-awful. But they blend together perfectly, interlocking into sort of a buckyball, but instead of carbon, it's... actually, it does legitimately taste kinda burnt. Somehow.

TASTE (MIXED)
I poured some Triple Sec in the bottle. It dilutes the bad flavors and replaces them with orange. All in all, this is a more bearable, slightly less alcoholic way to get this shit into your body.

  FINAL THOUGHTS
Don't drink this shit. Get some mediocre vodka and get a jug of sweet tea. It will be cheaper and better.

Don't do that either.

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?

Triumphant Return / Malort

Well will you look at that, I'm alive. Where ya been Jasper? Screw you I been busy. I got problems, and also I had a lot of final exams and then I was in Europe for three weeks. But I'm back, and I brought something special.

I had Gammel Dansk (Danish), Becherovka (Czech), Pineau des Charentes (Charentes region, France), Violette liqueur (Paris), scotch and cognac in their respective nations. It was all pretty good stuff, and I celebrated Hogmanny with a Scottish Nationalist.

And then I come back to America. To a Swedish drink only popular in Chicago, a sad town that may or may not exist. A drink that no normal human would ever enjoy drinking.

Yeah, I don't see how this disproves anything I said.

But I figured I'd make p for my absence with something special. Something that even the maker knows is infamous. The makers of it themselves say that:

"Most first-time drinkers of Jeppson Malort reject our liquor. Its strong, sharp taste is not for everyone. Our liquor is rugged and unrelenting (even brutal) to the palate. During almost 60 years of American distribution, we found only 1 out of 49 men will drink Jeppson Malort. During the lifetime of our founder, Carl Jeppson was apt to say, 'My Malort is produced for that unique group of drinkers who disdain light flavor or neutral spirits.'

It is not possible to forget our two-fisted liquor. The taste just lingers and lasts - seemingly forever. The first shot is hard to swallow! PERSERVERE [sic]. Make it past two 'shock-glasses' and with the third you could be ours...forever"

Jesus christ, fucking Sweden, what the fuck.

 And yes, as the copy-pasted note from Wikipedia points out, they did misspell that shit. And they're proud of the fact that only 2% of men would enjoy their vile brew. Meaning 1% of the general population-- slightly less than the percentage of the population who actively suffer from schizophrenia. You know. The lucky ones.

The people who drink Malort...they think they're sane. Only you and I know the truth, and we are mad as well.

Anyway. Malort is made from wormwood, which I'm no stranger to, but usually as an element of absinthe or pelinkovac or... four loko. But not by itself. This is the liquor equivalent of "I love a good curry...let's eat some curry powder out of a spoon." Only, you know, it tastes like "baby tears and gasoline". Which, let's be honest-- this was made for me. It is perfect for this blog. To be honest, I'm not sure there's anything I've wanted to drink more. But being perfect for me doesn't mean it's good.

Spoiler: this comic doesn't end well.

LOOK
 Kinda...beige. It looks a lot like original flavor listerine, or kinda like wood polish. But not the healthy brown that good wood-aged liquors have. Kind of sickly and phlegmy. It's not a color that food should naturally be, it's a color that appears vaguely spoiled. Like boiled millipedes. That's what Malort really should be-- some weird alchemical ingredient. Like "take an alcohol and wormwood solution and mix in equal parts with quicksilver and cod semen. Drink. You will see a man of silver who shall move the colors for you."

That last bit's not even made up. Isaac Newton believed that shit. AND NOW YOU BEEN EDUCATED LEMME GET THAT SWEET NPR MONEY.

NOSE
This smells the most legitimately poisonous out of anything I've had. A strong overlay of rubbing alcohol, with notes of paint thinner, acetone, and--for a bit of the more fruity flavor--model glue. It mostly just smells incredibly chemical. There's very little natural to this, which is weird as it's made from plants. In the same way that I suppose a sack of ants is natural. Hooooo boy. Not looking forward to this. Not one bit.

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
IT DOESN'T GO AWAY FUCK I HAD THAT SHOT LIKE TWO MINUTES AGO AND IT STILL LINGERS STRONGER THAN BEFORE.

 It is so much worse than I thought, my best unbeaten brothers. It tastes like awful vodka when it goes into your mouth and then as it goes away it gets worse. Incredibly bad vodka. Like, Riva bad. And then holy shit the aftertaste. It's incredibly bitter. And it hangs in the back of your throat exactly like bile. I know I've compared stuff to vomit before on this blog but I'm not even using metaphors here. It legitimately tastes like seasick bile on the back of my tongue, and like rubber on the front. Like bad meat and an angry robot who just grabs you by the hair and will not get its robochode off your gag reflex, cause it don't give a fuck about you, robot's horny tonight.

Like if you could liquify this and just suck the slurry out of a turkey baster.

 

Look, just look how miserable we were. Just look. You know whatever's in our mouth don't taste good.

That's your Gutrotter christmas card, right there. Malorty holidort.

I am told (TOLD, by someone else, not me, who only had a couple drops, and I cannot validate) that it tastes like chewing a used condom. I can see that. I can see it really--

Anyway, the organic, non-chemical burn flavor here tastes a lot like actual wood, like just chowing down on something you found in the woods. I'm reminded of a line from a poem, from the wonderfully bitter and clever Tony Hoagland:
"...with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world."

That's right. Malort tastes like the pulp that comes out when you a crush a soul in the machinery of the modern life, like misery itself. I don't even need metaphors anymore, I and every other poet with an inheritance of depression and a drinking problem and a habit for hurting women can pack up because the swedes can make you feel it in your gut.

"Even--" Fuck off Billy you too.

 

 

TASTE (MIXED)
Yep, we're making a cocktail out of this. I figure, with the perseverance of the killer cracking open a Glade plugin to cover up the stink of his mother's body in the crawlspace, that it might help hide it. Inspired by a Malort-based cocktail called The Bukowski, I decided to create a similar concoction. It's not named after a Chicagoan, but after a writer who, like Bukowski, dealt with the everyday life and its impact on the soul, who was a working schlub with a deep dark heart of bitterness. And who screamed so much it damaged his throat, which seems only fitting (by the way, it's been like half an hour and the taste lingers like guilt). Ladies and gentlemen, say hi to the Pekar.

I collect bad experiences, Harv. I don't suggest you try it.

The Pekar
1.5 oz. Malort
1 oz. Drambuie
.5 oz Basil/Rosemary vodka

The vodka's homemade-- just soak a wad of basil leaves and a couple sprigs of rosemary in a mason jar with vodka for about a day, more if you want it stronger. I figure the herbs should complement each other and the honey in the drambuie should overpower the bitterness. And might I suggest going real heavy on the ice, and then getting someone else to drink it?

Welp, the Pekar is made and ready, let's see how it goes down.

Yum!

Fuck, it's like the bit at the end of a horror movie where you think they might get out and then the killer comes back and the harpoon they put in him just made him mad. Only Jamie Lee Curtis ain't getting out. Nothing stops Malort. You can't keep a bad taste down any more than you can your dinner after Malort.

See, the problem lies in underestimating my enemy here. The Drambuie, rosemary/basil, and the bad vodka flavor all marry fairly well-- in fact, I may have discovered a pretty winning combination in the Drambuie and herbal vodka, and I'd imagine they'd go well with some gin or especially genever. But they're both fairly light on aftertaste. You know, the worst part of the whole experience. It's like invading a country in a fairly turbulent, incredibly diverse region: you might defeat the army there pretty well, but good luck making a country out of it afterwards.

The aftertaste remains no matter how much delicious honey, rich scotch, and carefully made homemade liqueur I mix it with. Nothing dilutes it, nothing overwhelms it. It endures like time and the relentless march of entropy into a world that is cold, so cold, and so devoid of anything except the flavor of cold rubber and the struggle in the dark to keep my meal down.

Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too lort. Ta lort. Malort.

FINAL THOUGHTS
If you ever have a chance to drink Malort, don't turn it down.  Yes, it's awful-- probably the worst thing I've ever tasted for this blog. It's miserable, it malicious, it's malorty. But it's incredibly unique, and it induces a disgust and horror I've never had from alcohol before. It's kind of like the raw cobra heart of liquor: is it tasty NO, is it actually good in any way NO, but should I have one WHY THE FUCK NOT. Yes, your mouth will taste like a tire fire for an hour afterwards, but hey, on the plus side...well, you get the experience of your mouth tasting like a tire fire.

And here at The Gutrotter, we hold that experience is worth it. Still holy fuck that was terrible fuck everyone who said I should do it.

Old Mill Stream Whiskey

"Where ya been, Jasper?" is what you're thinking. You've missed me. I understand how it goes. I've been really busy with exams and papers lately is what's up with that. Also, it's been a solid month and a half since I reviewed any hard liquor, which is also a bit of a problem-- I founded this proud/awful blog to wreck my body and find the worst sources of drunkenness, not to tackle malt liquor and vermouth.

But here I am. I have emerged, like a monster from the wilderness, and I have brought Hell with me.

So I'm walking through my friendly local liquor store, trying to figure out what can wreck me tonight that's not some dirt-cheap flavored liqueur, because those aren't nearly as fun. And then I see this, and, under it, the label reading  $3.70. Whiskey is NEVER that cheap. Never. Kentucky Gentleman  was  only half whiskey, and it was five and a half bucks for a bottle the same size. And I find myself wondering, "what the fucking cock is so bad about this that they have to sell it for 2/3 the price of the Gentleman.?"

20 percent Kentucky whiskey. 80 percent neutral spirits. This is less than half what Kentucky Gentleman was. And it's made in Bardstown, KY-- the home of Gentleman and my old nemesis, Riva-- so there's a good chance this bottle is just half gentleman, half everclear.

This is less percent whiskey than a Manhattan. Than a whiskey sour. Than a Jack and Coke. This isn't whiskey, this is a goddamn hillbilly cocktail . This is what a prospector would break out for fancy occasions.

Not even a classy prospector, too.

LOOK
The color's kinda weird. It's not too light-- whiskey can get to be pretty light in color without being bad (Glenlivet looks like honey), but there is something off with this. It's not as red as bourbon or as light as speyside, but somewhere uncomfortably in the middle. Sort of an orange-y color. It looks like butterscotch more than anything else.

NOSE
This smells almost exactly like the faux-moonshine I reviewed back in September. Same shivery strength, same really pungent burn. Only it's sweeter, but not that gentle corn sweetness of good bourbon. Nonono, this is a more clearly artificial, fruity sweetness. It smells like moonshine and ketchup.

Which means it's healthy!

TASTE
Okay, so the roommate and I are supplementing this with another review. We're watching Sonic Underground, which is to my childhood what Mill Stream is to booze. Which is to say, sodomy. By which I mean we're getting swervy and watching terrible television that makes us angry. It's sort of how we spend our Fridays.

For starters, this whisky has kind of a syrupy warmth to it, which makes the sweet part of the flavor seem really artificial-- like it's just moonshine with butterscotch dribbled into it. Also, Maurice Lamarche is all over this show-- it was in the lull between Pinky and the Brain and Futurama, so one of the greatest voice actors in animation is reduced to playing every third character on the worst crime out of many that the Sonic franchise ever committed.

A show in which this character wasn't just smashed to the ground at birth.

The three main characters (including a woman) are all voiced by Urkel and they fight with the power of rock (like, keytar-that-shoots-lasers style), which means that we have a tri-urkel musical number once an episode. An imitation of late-90s pop rock by corporate hacks. Also, this whiskey is seriously terrible. I wish I'd mustered up the extra two bucks for KY Gentleman, that's how bad it is. It's really sour, like the unaged corn whiskey was, but it's worse-- both because it's clearly starting with inferior pure neutral spirits and because they try and cover that up with really sweet, syrupy awful-whiskey.

One of the nicest things about whiskey--especially Kentucky whiskey--is the smokiness you get from wood aging and, in some cases, smoking or charcoal filtration. It's why Maker's 46 can charge ten bucks more a bottle and Laphroaig tastes like angel paste.There's none of that here. Mill Stream just tastes like grain alcohol mixed with corn syrup. It's missing the point as completely as if you made a Sonic the Hedgehog show that tried to be more cool and edgy and have more ATTITUDE than the original Sonic HEY THEY DID THAT. Man, between this and the Neverending Story sequels there really is nothing left of my childhood.

I had socks with this on them when I was seven, no lie. God, I was uncool. Not like now, where I'm spending my friday night with my roommate drinking and watching cartoons.

When I was a kid and I first had a chili dog, I was disappointed. That's the same feeling this brings up in me. I trusted Sonic then, and I trust whiskey now. And where did they lead me? To Mill Stream and to a Werehog.

TASTE (MIXED)
Mixed it with some Dr. Lynn-- the western-NC knockoff of Dr. Pepper that is okay-- and, well, not really very good. Since there's not much flavor to Mill Stream but corn-syrup sweetness and the alcohol burn is fairly strong, it doens't really taste that different. The bad bad bad sweetness of the whiskey merges with the sugar in the soda and the alcohol overpowers the rest of the flavor, and the end result just tastes like you watered down the whiskey. This stuff is so bad that you can't even mix it. It's like how Sonic 2006 had Havok physics but was so fundamentally broken you couldn't even tell. Jesus christ it's amazing I didn't grow up to be sadder.

Just picture them holding a copy of Absalom, Absalom!, a glass of brandy, and that been-up-reading tousled Professor hair and you'll have a notion of what I narrowly skirted.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Don't let my ranting about what a SHITASSCLUSTERFUCK Sonic has become distract you-- this is terrible whiskey. If you want cheap whiskey, get the Gentleman-- or shit, get Canadian Club, it's actually about as expensive as the gentleman but is legitimately good whiskey that I would voluntarily drink. If you only have four dollars in your pocket and you wanna get smashed, get Night Train. If you wanna get smashed on hard liquor-- and I say this with a great deal of sorrow--get yourself some Five O' Clock. You have so many better choices than this. It's like if you owned Sonic Adventure and wanted to play Sonic Unleashed.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go drink some good whisky. And play Sonic 2.

Holy fuck I lead a sad life.

SIGH.

Schlitz High Gravity V.S.L.

Baby's begged me not to go
So many times before
She said love and happiness
Can't live behind those swinging doors
Now she's gone and I'm to blame
Too late, I finally see
What's Made Milwaukee Famous
Has made a fool out of me.

-Jerry Lee Lewis

See, not even sad-sack country musicians like Schlitz. And those are the kinds of people that do songs about PBR. Well, them and the worst people on earth.

I hope you both catch the fucking T-Virus.

I had to deliberate a little while over which brand of big can of terrible Schlitz to review for you people. By which I mean that I had to look until i saw this one was 8.5% alcohol. Then it's not really a contest.

LOOK

Has anyone ever seen Schlitz? Has there ever been one person who's had it not out of an aluminum can? If I went to some bar in Wisconsin where they were dueling by riding cows across the field and swinging lawnmower blades and said "hey barkeep, can I have a nice frosty mug of Schlitz?" do you think I'd actually get one? No. Because I would probably be latched to the back of one of the cows when I walked into the bar. So I'm not going to find out. They don't take kindly to my kind there.

I don't mean gays. I mean the fact that I literally live in an ivory tower and I read for fun.

Pictured: your author. With Harry Potter. That was a fun time.

So I'm going to assume it doesn't look like black jelly or a can of slug paste or cabbage blood or unicorn jism or anything like that. Let's just assume it looks yellow and watery.

NOSE

Wait...it smells like unicorn jism. If that unicorn was made out of watery beer. Like, some sort of aquatic unicorn that lived in beer. Bad beer. Also, that would be a hippocamp. A Milwaukee hippocamp.

Yeah, yeah, like that, but with a cheesehead hat.

 Actually, I gotta hand it to Schlitz. Out of all the insanely cheap beers that are terrible, it has the most actually beery smell. It's not great, but at least it didn't smell like potato water like Olde English did. There is a bit of a celery tinge to it though. Ohh, that's not gonna be good.

TASTE

Okay, confession time. Friday night me and some of the Gutrottin' club wanted to get drunk and watch Army of Darkness, so I drank an entire bottle of Cobra. Then we wanted to get drunker and watch Slither, so I drank about a third of a bottle of Thunderbird. Then we wanted to get drunkest and get pamcakes, so I moved on to the Gallo vermouth from last time.

Mmmm...pamcakes. And cheap booze.

I think at some point over the pancake dinner I recited Yeats. But anyway, the confession boils down to-- none of that was for journalism. That was for fun. I think I'm actually starting to acclimate to cheeeeeeap beer and bumwine.

Because this is actually kind of almost tolerable and not poison-tasting. It still is though. It's really bitter and not in a "pint of bitters luv" way or a guiness-y way. And the aftertaste really is something fairly not-good. There's a really vegetative flavor to it and a sort of wormwood bitterness, plus it just makes your mouth feel gross. Like your tongue needs a bath or something.

Problem(s) solved!

Plus, after a while, the aftertaste becomes strong and pervasive enough that you don't taste the beer anymore when you drink it. It's like a less pure-horror version of the Four Loko taste. In the end, though, it's tolerable, int he same way Cobra was. I guess if you wanna get your swerve on and spend a buck fifty doing do you could do worse. As long as you don't mind feeling sad and drunk and midwestern.

Man, even I as a 17-year-old could rock the Neil Young haircut better than Conor Oberst. Dude looks like a West Virginia van killer.

Gallo Dry Vermouth

You don't know how special this is to me. You see, I had Gallo Dry Vermouth long before I even considered starting this blog-- almost exactly a year ago, my roommate and girlfriend and I decided we need to try some martinis for the first time (despite drinking them out of rocks glasses) but also didn't want to spend much money on a bottle of vermouth we figured we'd only be using for accent.

So we got Gallo. This was before I knew about the horrors that they made (Thunderbird, Night Train), and before I had any idea what vermouth was actually supposed to taste like.

We had made a huge mistake.

Even bigger than accidentally meeting your son.

Suffice it to say, our cocktails for that night were just us drink martini out of highball glasses and watching six hours of Dexter. And that a while later, when my roommate was so smashed that we had to hide the Wild Turkey (he actually thought drinking more Turkey was a good idea) he still took one gulp of the leftover vermouth and put it right the fuck back in the fridge. The only good thing that ever came of that bottle was that it was okay for cooking sweet onions.

So, let's see if my first encounter (aside from the obligatory college student meeting with Aristocrat) with low-grade gutrot still holds up.

LOOK
John Hodgman says that you can remember which vermouth is which by the fact that Italians have red blood and the French bleed a sort of clear-green lymph color. In which case I guess Californians that I hate must be very French-like with a hormonal imbalance, because this is actually a very faint yellow.

Ernest Gallo.

It's incredibly light in color, though, and the glass is actually tinted very faintly to make it look green. It's more the color of old plaster or faintly faded paper than an actual wine flavor.

NOSE
The aroma here is incredibly faint. Now, I drink a lot more sweet vermouth (I'm a sucker for Manhattans, the girl even more so), but what dry I've had is supposed to have a much stronger aroma than this. Unless you're some French bastard who orders a little glass after dinner, vermouth is supposed to be used as a (small) supplement to a couple hard dollops of booze. The aroma of this one is as fey and inoffensive as--shit, I don't know. I don't notice things that are fey and inoffensive. I really just set myself up for failure with that metaphor.

"Okay Haley, we're to the part where we just piss all over Kubrick's headstone. You ready?"

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
Welp, since I did just insult them let's see if the French know what the hell they're talking about (spoiler alert: the French never know what they're talking about).

"Iiiiii'm Charles Baudelaire, Iiiii hate lesbians for not sleeping with me, wah wah waaaaaah."

Joe (the roommate) fairly accurately summed up the flavor as "everything I hate about white wine." And let me tell you, the dude hates a lot about white wine. He bleeds Chianti and I'm pretty sure his bones are made of pasta. He only likes white wine when you're cooking clams in it. When he walks into a room, Dean Martin starts playing. He once stomped a guy to death to a Donovan song.

Pictured: my roommate.

And while I honestly prefer white (as if the hate speech didn't tip you off) the guy is right. This doesn't even taste like vermouth, it tastes like spoiled white wine with herbs soaked in it. It's really sweet (sweeter than the actual sweet vermouth I have), and actually has kind of that good old Thunderbird flavor to its pungency and fruitiness. The herbs only exist in the aftertaste, and even then it tastes more like you just mixed in a ramen flavoring packet with your hobo wine.

TASTE (MIXED)
I recently made some herb-infused vodka (take about eight basil leaves, some mixed peppercorns and a sprig of rosemary and soak 'em in a bottle's worth of Smirnoff for a couple days). It tastes pretty good, I think-- kind of has the botanical flavors of gin but is smoother and has a really mellow burn. Since that should pack the herbal dryness that this vermouth so badly lacks, I've decided to make a cocktail out of them. Since it's very similar to gin in some of the flavors, it should make a good modified martini. Since it's made of plants, I call it...THE SWAMP THING.

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing only thought that it was human. This only thinks that it's a real cocktail. Also, it's gross.

So how does the Swamp Thing fare? Does it kick as much ass as it did in the 80's? Does it invent John Constantine? Does it lead to a giant bearded warlock on acid somehow becoming the most respected artist in his field?

Of course not. How could you think that? Jesus christ, you people are fucking idiots. No, it pretty much tastes like that yummy herb vodka I made but with an added sweetness that completely goes against everything a martini should be. It actually starts pretty strong--the actual herbal component of the vermouth brings out the pepper in the vodka--but the wine flavor, that goddamn too-sweet wine flavor that clings to Gallo like they were goddamn asymptomatic carriers for the fucking superflu, it just lurches in pissing and squealing into an otherwise nice drink.

Gallo dry does to cocktails what Karen O does to motel rooms.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Don't ever buy this. This falls into the very rare category (alongside Banana Nirvana) of not even for the alcohol. There's very little reason to own dry vermouth apart from making distinguished cocktails, and if you're in the "let's spend five bucks on this instead of 6.50 on something better" mindset you're as stupid as I was last year. Just no. No. No. No.

Richard's Wild Irish Rose (White)

Hey guys! Guys! You know what's great? Sonic the fuckin' Hedgehog 4, that's what.  I grew up with that lovable blue fuckup, and it's so nice to see him again after 16 years. Because they haven't made a Sonic game since Sonic and Knuckles. They haven't. Not that I can remember.

Or at least, not that I will remember after trying out the white and worse version of Wild Irish Rose.

I was going to find a picture of Sonic drunk and sad here. But there is only porn. So much porn. AND THAT'S NOOOOO GOOOOOOD.

So, that seems as good a reason as any to start drinking.

Well. Not any.

LOOK

Well, it looks more like white wine than most of the bumwines I've looked at. If you put it in a glass, you might fool someone into thinking it's civilized (like putting an Irishman in a suit). It's a little more of a deep-yellow color, though, and a little more artificial looking. So I guess that, like an Irishman in a suit, it only looks dignified until close examination or until you start interacting with it.

I'm sorry sir please don't hurt me.

NOSE

Heeeeey whaddaya know it smells bad,  WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT (as a side note, after finishing this bottle I will have had literally every type of bum wine the Sav Mor and Ingles carry. Look at my life, look at my choices.) Unlike the vinegar-and-sugar aroma of a lot of other bumwines, though, there's something...off here. On taking a really deep whiff of it, there's something that can only be described as rotten.

YOU! WOULD! MAKE! A! GOOD! DANE!

Allegedly even people who seek out normal Rose don't drink the white variety. I can see why-- there really does smell like something just went off in the making, or like it somehow spoiled. But no, that's just the natural aroma. I mean, I guess a corpse stinks naturally too. Better just fucking CHOW DOWN on the next one you see.

"That corpse you planted into your wine / has it begun to sprout? / Oh keep far the Jasper, that's enemy to man / or with his gut he'll chug it down again."

(Jesus I'm sorry, I'm working on my Lit Thesis right now and I am awash in pretention).

TASTE

A strong beginning of poverty and pigeonshit, followed by an aftertaste of regurgitated stomach. It starts boorishly and finishes moreso, as though the wine itself is getting drunk, as though it starts the night pissing into your umbrella stand and ends it by punching your wife in the clitoris. Like, directly in it, like that one scene in Robocop where he cyber-targets a dude's nuts.

That was my attempt at fancy-pants wine journalism. I'm...not sure it quite went where I thought it was going.

"Not even in the babyhole, just POW. Clitoris."

Yeah, I'm not doing that again. Anyway this is a lot worse than the red. And that honestly says something-- I don't really like red wines all that much. If you'll forgive the unbearableness of how white this is going to sound, I can really enjoy a Beaujolais and sometimes when I'm painting I'll drink a lot of Merlot really fast but a lot of the time I actually prefer white, and this is a massive fuckup on Irish Rose's part. It just tastes like their red without the stuff that covers up the awful. It's just as sweet, just as fruity, but there's that...deadness. That evil at its core.

Don't just dump it down the sink. It's your lucky wine.

(Just took like a half-hour break to talk about Catholicism and the way it works its way into your skin. I gotta say, like W.I.R. Red, this is a pretty fun drunk).

The White goes down easy (that's what Spike Lee told me!), but it hurts afterward. It definitely tastes spoiled and turned, like its well on its way to being vinegar, and if you take big gulps it does its job-- unlike bad vodka it doesn't hurt while you drink it, but immediately afterwards it feels like your tongue was transplanted from a three-day old body. Not like three-days-old period, like a baby's tongue. I mean it's been a "body" as in "after the stuff it's been through we don't want to admit it used to be a person."

Really you can insert a lot of my description of the red and take out anything complimentary. All I can say for this is what Brendan "the Irish caricature" Behan said of Guiness: It gets ya drunk.

Fuck you and your independent republic.