I gotta say, this product is perversely brilliant. How many times have you been sitting there in the car, stuck in a stop-and-go traffic jam on the interstate, that’s going to take you at least an extra hour to get home? And there you are, you’ve promised yourself that if you managed to make it to the end of the day without punching Dave in the face repeatedly, you’d have a nice cocktail when you got home. And that was because Dave drank the last of the coffee, and put the empty carafe back on the burner, where it eventually cracked, meaning not only did you not have any half burnt caffeine to get you through the last three hours of the workday, but you’re going to have to go over to Operations to get a cup of joe tomorrow, because it’ll take at least a couple of days to get a replacement carafe, and you hate the guys in Operations. But now that cocktail is another hour away, and you’re feeling like some one has to get punched but you’re in the car alone, so who are you going to pummel? Slamming your car into the guy ahead of you is looking more and more attractive all the time, but what if he stops, and gets out, and he’s not only six foot seven and two hundred and fifty pounds of lean, dojo trained muscle, but he has a concealed weapon permit, too?
So that would be the time that one of these canned gin and tonics would really hit the spot. Not that I’m recommending or condoning drinking while driving. That would be wrong. Man, I should get into the advertising business. Make a commercial just like the above scenario, and just show the principal at the end of the commercial, his car pulled over to the side of the road (cause, let’s repeat, drinking and driving is bad, okay?), drinking a frosty cold canned cocktail. I am very probably so going to burn in hell, someday.
Back in Ye Olde College days, I used to hang around a bunch of guys, reprobates all, who travelled with the Infamous Portable Bar. This was a gym bag that someone had lined with the cardboard dividers that come in a case of booze. They then filled up the bag, now safely divided into twelve little squares, with whatever cheep hooch they could find. It wasn’t a sophisticated selection. It also suffered from an overconcentration on hard liquor and a lack of mixers, the theory being that any party that you’d take the IPB to would have some sort of mixers, which wasn’t always the case, like with keggers. Of course this is the crew that led an acquaintance, who had recently seen Animal House in its initial release to comment – “they made a movie about you and your friends.” Anyway, canned cocktails might possibly have prevented ill-fated experiments like mixing beer with rum, because we ran out of Coke.
Canned cocktails don’t seem to have ever really taken off in the US. Sure, there was a brief flirtation with wine coolers but those aren’t the same. Pretty much as awful, but not the same. I have seen commercials for stuff like Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which sounds really appalling, but again, this isn’t the same as a classic cocktail in a can. Great Britain seems to have taken the lead in developing the whole premixed cocktail industry. So much for American exceptionalism! I look forward, while we’re living in England this fall to sample a few of these cocktails, just in the spirit of scientific inquiry. I find that you can partake in a lot of really awful activities if you say your doing science. Yay, Science!