I haven't ventured out to very many liquor stores since the pandemic began - I certainly have a pretty good stash at home, and I haven't been doing much inessential travel, and only recently (and rarely) have I gone anywhere in Manhattan other than straight to the office and straight back home. (I did get to a VABC store on vacation, and managed to snag a couple extra bottles of Beefeater at the old 94 proof.)
I spent a recent weekend in Connecticut, and hit up both a friendly small liquor store with a nicely curated selection and a location of the behemoth chain Total Wine & More, where I kinda went nuts, picking up some things I hadn't seen at my closest stores in Queens: Plantation Stiggins' Fancy Pineapple Rum, Cruzan Black Strap Rum, Ford's Gin Officer's Reserve overproof, and more fun stuff. (And some Maraschino. More on that anon.)
But one thing that caught my eye was the whole section devoted to ready-to-drink cocktails; the RTD market has been burgeoning lately, goosed by the pandemic no doubt. I've picked up some in the past: I'm fond of the small cans of Hochstadter's Slow and Low Rock and Rye — co-author Tony disagrees, calling them too sweet, but I'll occasionally lengthen them with some seltzer for a highball-ish kind of drink. (Together with the cheese tray from the cafe car, that's gotten me through several different Amtrak rides.) The Cutwater Spirits line of canned cocktails is enormous; I've enjoyed the Gin & Tonic and Rum & Ginger. Durham Distillery makes an excellent canned Gin & Tonic with their Conniption Gin, and Greenhook Ginsmiths makes a really nice one too. Less successful in my book were the On The Rocks entries I've tried; their Aviation had a little too much of the sweet-floral note that makes me think of my grandmother's hand soap, and their Mai Tai not only had coconut flavor (a dealbreaker!), but had way too much of it.
A standout approach in the RTD section at Total Wine on my visit was the line of cocktails by The Perfect Cocktail, from Italy - they're packed in small pouches, which might make them easier to transport (and conceal?) than the bulkier, heavier metal cans and glass bottles that pre-mixed drinks producers typically use. All the pouches were exactly 100ml in volume, so one could theoretically get these past a TSA checkpoint (though I note that federal air regulations prohibit serving yourself alcohol on flights; my inflight mixology several years ago was done with spirits bought from the airline and I only brought vermouth and bitters.) I didn't see any sharpened straw attached, to drink them à la Capri-Sun or juice boxen, but they do also have 3L bag-in-box offerings if you really wanna go nuts.
The Perfect Cocktail makes a line of ten different drinks, from the Dry Martini to the Daiquiri (and how do they do an Americano without bubbles?!), but only three are available in the US: the Manhattan, the Negroni, and the Old-Fashioned. Total Wine & More sells both the individual pouches and multi-pouch variety packs. (I should note that a Perfect Cocktail Manhattan ≠ Perfect Manhattan cocktail, which is a completely different thing.)
So how were they? I got together with co-author Tony Hightower and Joanna Scutts, and we poured each over a big rock and started tasting. (we served them on ice, as The Perfect Cocktail recommends, though of course we'd normally serve a Manhattan up. I think these all would have been infinitely better had we chilled the pouches first in the freezer for a while.)
Our first impressions were not entirely positive. As noted above, they were fairly warm and the big icecubes were working hard to chill them down to a more appropriate serving temperature. All of the cocktails were fairly sweet right out of the gate...not so much that they were cloying, but sweeter than I'd have typically made them. I was wondering if the Negroni was indeed made with equal parts vermouth/red bitter/gin. And all of them had an unusual mouthfeel, so much so that I wonder if/suspect that they use glycerin in their recipes; there was kind of a sweet gumminess to all three that reminded me of the Fee Brothers bitters line.
All three had lower alcohol levels than I'd been expecting, too; per Total Wine's site, the Old-Fashioned is 28% abv, the Manhattan is 25.5% abv, and the Negroni is 22% abv. This matters because a higher alcohol content brings — besides heat, general oomph, and tipsiness — more flavor. If I were making these drinks, my Old-Fashioned would be roughly 37.5% abv (2 ounces of 50% abv whiskey, a teaspoon/sixth of an ounce of rich simple syrup, two dashes or 2/41 ounce Angostura bitters at 44.7% abv, half an ounce of water from ice melt), my Manhattan would be 30% abv (2 ounces of 45% abv whiskey, 1 ounce of 15% abv vermouth, two dashes Angostura bitters, half an ounce water), and my Negroni would be 24.5% abv (one ounce 47% gin, one ounce of 15% abv vermouth, one ounce of 24% abv Campari, half an ounce water).
So the flavors weren't terribly strong, but they weren't bad: just not fantastic. The Negroni was the best of the three but didn't have that aggressive bittersweet slap with tons of herbal notes dancing around that I'm looking for in a good exemplar of the drink. The Old-Fashioned was, as mentioned, too sweet and didn't really have a strong bourbon flavor; in a drink that's meant to showcase good whiskey, you want to really taste it. And the Manhattan was kind of a mess and there was an artificial-cherry note in the mix. (No brand names were specified, by the way, except for Angostura bitters in the Manhattan and Old-Fashioned. I do wonder what kind of gin, "Kentucky bourbon", or vermouth they use.) So I'd give these a pass. It felt like a real step up when we'd finished our glasses and could refill them from the bottle of Willett Pot Still Reserve I'd brought along. (I like it a lot better than TikTok does.)
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