Texas Taste Test: Sweet tea vodkas
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Every week or so, our colleagues at The A.V. Club hold a Taste Test, in which they sample various cuisines with a focus on the new, the novel, and the downright bizarre. But why should Chicago have all the fun? Texas, after all, has no shortage of its own fascinating food and drink, just as enticing and/or disgusting as anything you’ll find on the shores of Lake Michigan. Every so often Decider presents the Texas Taste Test, wherein we shovel various Lone Star finds down our gullets. If you have suggestions for stuff you'd like to see us eat or drink for your amusement, e-mail us.
This week: Sweet tea vodkas
If you move to the South—and yes, we include Texas in that category [preparing for the inevitable onslaught of shotgun fire]—one of the first things you’ll notice is the tea. The first time you order it in a restaurant or a café, you may be expecting a hot cuppa, or maybe a tall, cool glass of iced tea, slightly bitter and with a lemon on the side. What you’ll get instead is a glass full of what tastes like a melted Slurpee: thick, impossibly sugary, and—to quote the late Douglas Adams—almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. This is what is known as “sweet tea,” and you’d better get used to it, because it’s the default setting for tea from El Paso to Key West.
It’s not that sweet tea is bad, exactly; in fact, it can be quite refreshing, especially when cut with lemonade on the kind of face-melting, 100-degree heat that hits Austin about this time every year. It’s just that it takes a bit of getting used to if you’re used to what they drink in rest of the civilized world. The first thing a Northeastern or Midwestern transplant is likely to think upon encountering Southern-style sweet tea is, “So this is what Coke syrup tastes like without the carbonated water.” The second is what inspired this week’s Texas Taste Test: “I bet this would taste pretty great with a pony of vodka in it.”
Within the last year, three enterprising liquor manufacturers have hit upon the brilliant idea of taking something you could make for free at home and selling it back to us at a gigantic markup, because we’re suckers for novelty. Sweet Carolina, Firefly, and Jeremiah Weed have all introduced sweet tea-flavored vodkas since 2008, and—after weeks of forcing down pickle juice and cow brains for your entertainment—our crack San Antonio tasting team was ready to relax. In order to give the most scientifically precise taste test possible—and not at all just to get sloppy drunk—we arranged to try each variety in four different ways: blended with actual tea; mixed with lemonade (the “John Daly”); cut with water, which is the manufacturer’s preferred method; and straight up.
Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka
Apparently there is a Hires/Vernor’s-style rivalry between Firefly and Sweet Carolina over whose product came first. We don’t want to be party to any such Hatfield-McCoy shenanigans, but we will say that Firefly is the first one we’d heard of, so it was the first one we tried. Firefly’s main claim to uniqueness, even if they didn’t come first, is that it uses all-natural ingredients; that’s likely why it has the strongest tea taste. It’s the middle of the pack in terms of sweetness, and the easiest to drink neat. Mixed with water, it’s alarmingly identical to regular, non-alcoholic sweet tea, which caused a combination of giddiness and alarm in our panel of drunks.
Jeremiah Weed Sweet Tea Vodka
Prior to rolling out its sweet tea vodka, Jeremiah Weed was mostly known as the preferred bourbon of American fighter pilots. (While the origin of this preference is obscure, no doubt we will all sleep better at night knowing that U.S. Air Force pilots are cruising around in F-22 Raptors bombed out of their minds on whiskey.) Jeremiah Weed is also the one that most resembles an actual alcoholic beverage—to a fault: It’s wince-inducing served straight up, harsh when blended with lemonade, and tolerable but unspectacular with water. It’s also the only one that, when blended with regular iced tea, actually tastes like it has booze in it. Bottom line: It’s not as good as Firefly, but it’s also slightly less terrifying, because it doesn’t let you forget you’re drinking.
Sweet Carolina Sweet Tea Vodka
To be fair to this melted sugar beverage, it does say the word “sweet” twice in the name, but that’s still not enough to fully prepare you for how paralyzingly, tooth-rottingly sweet this stuff is. It’s incredibly sweet even for a sweet-tea product, which is sort of like saying, “It’s quite a tall mountain for a Himalaya.” It really does resemble syrup, it’s more like Schnapps than any kind of grain alcohol, and not even cutting it with tea makes it taste anything like tea. (Lemonade only makes it sweeter, which is the last thing you want; if anything, it could use some salt.) Only a liberal dose of water makes this seem like anything but alcoholic pancake syrup. Nice bottle, though.
Reactions:
- Firefly: “I like the idea of this, but the execution of it is… Well, actually I like the execution of it too.”
- Firefly: “I want to run out and buy a bottle of this right now, which is funny, because all I need to do is pour some vodka in a glass of tea.”
- Jeremiah Weed: “This stuff doesn’t get itself. It doesn’t understand its own concept. How much have I had to drink already?”
- Sweet Carolina: “Too sweet! Way, way too sweet! This is like Rumple Minze or Jägermeister or something else you drink when you want to make a big mistake.”
- All three: “Can I take these home?” (This was a universal query from our San Antonio taste testers.)
Where to Get It: Spec’s, Twin Liquors, and many other local purveyors of intoxicants.
