Spirits
Spirits are beverages made by the process of distillation. The “Spirits” category is not commonly used at Drinkhacker because the vast majority of reviews we publish fall into this category. It is used only occasionally to help organize our category list (and mainly gets clicked by accident).
Everyone needs a gimmick, but the vodka industry, where product is legion, needs it more than anyone. Ursus Vodka, which hails from the Netherlands and is distilled “from grain,” is a budget brand with a trick: Like Coors Light’s newer bottles, the bears on the label turn from white to blue when it’s chilled. (It…
This new brand hails from New York, where a former Seagram exec decided to strike out on his own in the brave new world of tequila. As the story goes, founder Ken Austin scoured Jalisco for the best spirit that hadn’t made it to the U.S., and found it on the highest agave plantation in…
“New Mix” is not a slogan stuck on the can of El Jimador’s ready-to-drink tequila cocktails. It’s the actual name of the product: New Mix. Hugely popular in Mexico, New Mix now comes in five flavors. We’ve had the first three flavors sitting in the fridge literally for months, and finally we are getting around…
The uninitiated may think of Texas as the frontier, a place where whiskey is probably as common as water. Not so: In fact, for years, Tito’s has been the state’s only legal distillery. Now a few upstarts are coming out of the skunkworks, and the state has its first whiskey since Prohibition. Operating out of…
Hailing from Sheffield, Massachusetts, Berkshire Mountain Distillers is a new (est. 2007) boutique distillery that makes a ragtag assembly of vodka, gin, and rum. Primarily available in the Northeast, we tasted through the company’s current lineup, with one exception (we’ll get to that later). Berkshire Mountain Distillers Ice Glen Vodka is distilled from unknown materials,…
A new liqueur called Harlem is making a splash in the cocktail scene, its goal nothing less than knocking Jagermeister off its precious perch at the top of the “grimace and swallow” shot category. That’s an awfully tall order: Jager has 70 years of history and sick college students behind it, all unabashedly downing ice…
Smirnoff keeps cranking out the flavored vodkas, its two latest being the exotic mango and the humble peach. Both are 70 proof bottlings and are naturally flavored. Smirnoff Peach Vodka – Peach is a common fruit, but it’s not often used in spirits (perhaps due to its legacy with SoCo?). As a vodka flavoring, it…
Knappogue Castle has long shunned traditional age statements, instead vintage dating its whiskey with a year instead of telling you how long it’s been sitting around. That is changing, as Knappogue is finally moving from vintages to age, in order, as the company says, to better communicate to the customer how old these whiskeys are.…
This boutique vodka comes from a curious pedigree: It’s the brainchild of awards designers, the team that created the Golden Globe statuette and the MTV Video Music Award. What do they know about vodka? Nothing, really, but it turns out the spirit they’ve come up with — produced in small batches at the rate of…
You have certainly never heard of Camus cognac. But what if I were to tell you it was a major worldwide brand, the fifth largest cognac house on the globe — with its major markets Asia and Eastern Europe. Now Camus is coming to America at last, with retail in 15 states and more to…