Country Luau
Filed under “small things that made pandemic times somewhat bearable,” I was delighted to see the Twitterverse put its collective heads together to drag LaCroix on social media. Some of my absolute favorite lines: that LaCroix tastes like “A single skittle dissolved in water,” or “What flavor tastes like to a ghost.” My girlfriend drinks them constantly. LaCroix is never more than nine paces away from me at any given moment.
So when White Claw took the world by storm, I was skeptical that my life would be transformed by a boozy version of LaCroix. I also wondered if it had never crossed these buyers' minds to simply add a shot of vodka to one of the LaCroixs (or supermarket knock-offs) that are now invariably lying around our houses. I don't imagine the Venn Diagram overlap between White Claw devotees and LaCroix buyers is particularly thin.
Country Luau greatly outperformed my expectations, simply because there are a lot of small touches. First, there's flavor, and flavor that's a little more built around replication of cocktails rather than just doing “blueberry!” and calling it a day. Secondly, there's matching of the base spirit with the canned drink, so depending on the Country Luau you try, it might include Rum, Vodka, or Tequila. On the strength of these two merits, the strawberry daiquiri drink tasted like an actual daiquiri. It'd be likely easier and cost effective to use Vodka across the entire range, regardless of its suitability, but they don't.
And lastly, while Country Luau is carbonated, it's dialed in to the point where I could drink a can without feeling like I'd just eaten a full meal. This is a complaint I have with a lot of the canned cocktails, in that everything seems to be highly carbonated. Here, it works. It's fizzy without sitting like a brick in your stomach.
Besides that, Country Luau makes a point of giving a percentage of their sales to support smaller musicians, which I think is neat. In any case, buying the canned drinks does more to advance the arts than you'd be doing if you got a six pack of Bud (or White Claw). I absolutely did not imagine myself in the target market for these cocktails and likely wouldn't have purchased them on my own, but I certainly would get them again.
(Note: Country Luau was very kind to send me this to try on their dime.)
La Catrina Mojito
I am beginning to worry that my efforts to find a truly great canned Mojito are utterly doomed.
Readers will note that I have a well established sweet tooth. I have no problem politely waving away a piece of chocolate cake or scoop of ice cream, but if the siren song of a drinkable dessert reaches my ears, I'm telling you I'll crash into the rocks every time. So take heart that if I'm telling you something is too sweet, it most definitely is. And the La Catrina mojito is way, way too sweet.
At first, I thought I was at fault. The can says “pour over ice,” and in the infinite depths of my willful disobedience, I thought I knew better. Consumed without ice, the drink was cloyingly, wincingly sweet. The kind of sweet you feel in your very bones.
Once I realized the ice was a non-negotiable ingredient rather than a mere suggestion, I threw a big handful of the pebbled variety in there to very rapidly and aggressively dilute the drink. It was still way, way too fucking sweet. As Randy Jackson would say, “It's a ‘no’ from me, dawg.”
Before I dismiss it entirely, I do want to award a few thumbs-ups: the drink uses real lime juice, real cane sugar, and it's proofed at an impressive 13.9% ABV. This is not a weak-ass canned cocktail: a few of them will very likely knock you on your ass if you're not being careful. As I've said before, I'm especially not drinking sugary sweet stuff to get blitzed, but I think that when you have a “cocktail” that weighs in at 5% ABV, some of the gravitas of what a cocktail represents becomes MIA.
In any case, I think I know what's going on here. La Catrina isn't using rum as a base spirit (hint: they really should have). Instead, they're using agave wine to provide the ABV, and agave tends to be high in natural sugars. For example, witness the glut of agave sweeteners and syrups that have hit the market over the last ten years. And then it hit me: I think they're adding cane sugar on top of this.
Drinking the La Catrina mojito very much reminded me of the phenomenon behind the “Pepsi challenge.” I had a very positive first sip, as the sugar levels hit my tastebuds in just the right way. I even started to write out a few lines of tentative praise on a word doc. That's the danger of coming to a firm conclusion on the basis of one sip. By the fourth sip, I was exhausted with the stuff and found myself riding the backspace key, undoing whatever goodwill I had temporarily committed to print.
