Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Some mashups make no sense. Limp Bizkit, for example, teamed up with Method Man because we, as a society, were aimless in the late 1990s.
But others are simple crossovers that require little effort or forethought to connect. Absolut’s new canned cocktail team-up with Ocean Spray? That’s the second kind of mash-up.
Cranberry juice has long been one of vodka’s most accommodating dance partners. Ocean Spray has long desired global domination, one bog-berry influenced juice cocktail at a time. Thus, Absolut and New England’s monolith of tart red liquids joined forces to elbow their way into a rapidly expanding market of canned beverages.
Behold, Absolut and Ocean Spray. Let’s see if they’re as good as you’d assume.
Let’s stand with the basics. Vodka cranberry is a training wheels drink. Something the lightest of lightweight college freshmen can pound all night (and then vomit back up, prompting fears they’re puking blood. Nope, just bog juice!). There’s a reason for that; the tart cranberry weaves into the gentle harshness of vodka and basically just makes it a cranberry juice.
So it’s good we’re dealing with the Cadillac of cranberry juices in Ocean Spray. It pours a lovely pink with a small amount of carbonation. It smells undoubtedly like the fruit juice of origin, but much sweeter. And on the can it says “colored with vegetable juice” which… doesn’t make me feel any better about the process, but sure.
This doesn’t matter. The vodka disappears under a current of full-bodied but light cranberries. The tartness endemic to the fruit has been wiped away by a gentle sweetness — a sweetness buoyed by the very un-seltzer calorie count of 156. This tastes like a sparkling water; not a La Croix but those big, bubbly one liter bottles you’d find at Aldi or Wal-Mart that just say “LIME” or “BLACK CHERRY” on the label. This is that, only it’s cranberry and six of them will get you drunk.
Well, probably. They only clock in at 4.5 percent alcohol by volume but are very easy to drink. This is an easy win before one of those 11 am college football tailgates or the waning days of sunshine drinking by a body of water. It’ll probably work when it’s colder, too because, you know, cranberry.
Oh, perfect. These are the two most vodka-erasing juices out there. But a little pineapple goes a long way, so there’s gonna need to be a deft touch here for this to have replay value.
It pours that regular cranberry, vegetable juice pink. It smells like straight up pineapple, which is a little weird to square with the color, but whatever. The first sip bears that out. This is tangy pineapple, snapped off by that light current of carbonation and just a little bit of sweetness.
This leads to a flavorful, fruity … well, it’s almost a soda with just the slightest hint there’s vodka involved. After reviewing malt beverages from Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s that had no actual whiskey in them, I’m a little thankful for that. The booze is minor and doesn’t affect the drink in any real way but as a subtle reminder not to indulge too hard.
In all, this is everything I’d hoped and a little more. The cranberry is much more “cranberry juice cocktail” than the real thing, but it works as a low-key slim can. In this case, however, the pineapple is front and center, sweet and tangy without overstaying its welcome. The balance here is really well done.
We’re looking at calm pink tones again, but this time it makes more sense than the pineapple. The smell off the top is tart raspberry, which suggests there’s a little more cranberry influence in this round than the last one.
That makes it a little harsher up front, as two sour-adjacent red berries kinda battle it out. It ends better than it started with a wave of bubbles and sweetness, but then the acidic fruit returns for a fine-to-slightly-annoying aftertaste. It’s less noticeable out of the can compared to over ice, where it’s a totally fine if somewhat boring cocktail.
Which is fine. It’s vodka and juice, and in that realm it’s still pretty good. It’s light and hits the flavors you’d expect on the can. This is a professional cocktail through and through, and while I’d like it to have fewer calories it still hits the spot.
This one breaks the streak and pours a little purple. I think. It’s possible I’m imagining this because I want so badly for my grape drinks to be unnaturally purple. This is the curse of growing up in a household without Sunny Delight.
Anyway, the smell off the top is powerful Dimetapp grape. It’s syrupy sweet, holding all the promise of a Blow Pop. The taste itself is more complex. The cranberry is minimal but it does make a difference, bringing enough sour flavor to balance what could have been a too-sugary cocktail.
The end result is like the Cran-Pineapple; stupidly drinkable. Again, whatever vodka taste remains barely registers,
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Absolut + Ocean Spray over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Yeah, count me in. I’d like a little more booze for a 156 calorie canned cocktail, but the taste more than makes up for it. These are an easy win for a cookout, party, etc.
