The Club Long Island IceD Tea
Bartenders always say that Long Island iced tea drinkers are trouble. Usually they're lightweights that want the most booze possible in the most palatable form possible, with the goal of getting ripshit and loud in as short amount of time for the lowest dollar value. As my friends in the gaming industry say, this is “min-maxing” in cocktail form.
Not having had a Long Island ice tea in ages, I begin with a first sniff that’s heavy on lemon. Not booze or cola! Perhaps we're off to a good start and maybe someone knows what they're doing. From there, the drink is definitely caramel and lemon-drop sweet, with the usual supporting cast of god-knows-what bringing up the rear.
A few sips in, and I'm reminded of the utter alchemy that is a Long Island Ice Tea: it combines lemon, cola, vodka, rum, whiskey, and gin. Where does all of that balance out, taste-wise? Tea.
It might be that my palate is so blown out by random flavors that it's grasping for any kind of sense memory it can access. Maybe it's the power of suggestion operating in the absence of anything else (TEA!) but damned if it doesn't taste like alcoholic sweet tea. The canned drink wears its 15% ABV well, and it's just the right combination of lemony, boozy, and sweet.
Incidentally, “The Club” canned cocktails have been around forever. I remember seeing them at the local 7-11 as far back as when I was nine years old, and that was three decades past. I'd assumed that the brand and the presentation would be a little trashy and bracing, but this is actually pretty good. To paraphrase the critic Pauline Kael, we're incapable of appreciating good art when we can't appreciate good trash. What better way to stealthily explore one's inner trashiness than to pour a mini-can of Long Island Ice Tea in the privacy of your own home? I won't tell your co-workers or the members of your wine club: I promise.
I'll add the usual caveat that this isn't for those without a sweet tooth. Supposing that you do like to drink your desserts, this one is another thumbs up.
Buzzballz Pineapple Colada Chiller
Let me start this one off with an incongruity to end all incongruities.
Exhibit A: “Buzzballz.” Yes. With a Z at the end. Everything a consumer needs to know is right there in the brand name. It'll get you buzzed, and also, we actually made the package spherical, because balls.
It's supposed to be funny and irreverent, right? Maybe a reference to that whole late-90s zeitgeist where Korn was a chart topping band, and when we all used AIM to communicate with our high school buddies. For those who aren't in the know, I'm talking about AOL Instant Messenger. Yes, that AOL. And all of our conversations sounded like this:
K00lMynkey818: What dyd u think of tha Limp Bizkit album?
BrytNyBayB: I thawt it waz kewl.
I guarantee that all of us who lived through that time look back on it with regret. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m especially thankful that the Google/Skynet hivemind that will eventually vaporize all life on earth was not then smart enough to create a permanent record of our most embarrassing teenage missives.
Now that I've beaten that into the ground, here's Exhibit B, courtesy of the package: “Women owned.”
I practically did a double-take. This thing named after balls — ballz, even — is the product of a female brain trust. LADIES are responsible for this. As the Australians like to say: fuck me dead.
What's also crazy is that I enjoyed the Buzzballz. The pineapple colada chiller is a concoction of “orange wine with coconut, pineapple, lime, and natural flavors.” And I can see that. This isn't a concoction of neutral grain spirits and whatever synthetic chemicals approximate a tropical drink. Instead, the company started off with a citrus-based wine that had the ABV they were looking for and supported it with actual juice. The drink's suggestion to “shake well” is a suggestion that's typically applied to fruit juice and other natural products, rather than hell-crafted laboratory fare.
God help me, that naturalistic approach seems like a decidedly graceful and feminine touch to making a ready-to-go pina colada. Like the other cocktails reviewed, it’s sweet but far from cloying, and has no biting aftertaste. There's a juicy hit of coconut, and clear citrus coming from the orange.
I would absolutely buy more of these. And after my ringing endorsement of Buzzballz, I will forgive you if you never take anything I write seriously ever again.
