Tampa Bay Food Monster

Vodka & Lemonade | Piña Colada | Strawberry Daiquiri | Mudslide

i was recently asked to review the new freeze & shake cocktails, from the makers of smirnoff, captain morgan, baileys, and guinness (just to name a few brands). i will review all of the freeze and shake frozen cocktails over the course of this four part series, and, in doing so, i will get trashed.

WHO DOESN’T LIKE GETTING DRUNK? i know i do. all the time. cripplingly so. if i can remember my name the next day, i didn’t drink enough. let’s put it this way: i am an alcoholic. i present a danger to myself and everyone around me. and i think it’s damn cool.

…okay some of, if not all of that is a lie. i enjoy drinking, but not to a fault. there’s just not enough time in the day for that. or at least there wasn’t… until now. why waste your time mixing one of your famous frozen alcoholic beverages, all that pouring and measuring and blending, hoping to get the equation just right, when you could be spending that time getting shit faced?? freeze & shake cocktails do all that tedious work for you, allowing you to sit back, relax, and destroy your many extraneous brain cells with ease.

“but how??” i hear you asking, desperate and ravenous. observe the following:

outside of a little shaking, the job is done for you. excellent. they use a balance of alcohol, water, and sugar such that the drinks freeze in a freezer, but not completely. they also assure us that “each product only uses food grade ingredients”, which is nice, except the thought hadn’t crossed my mind that they might be using chemicals until they brought it up. eh. anyway, after freezing, you’re left with an icy slush, and after a bit of manipulation, you have a perfectly drinkable frozen beverage. it’s clearly witchcraft.

i begin my quest for frozen slushes with the smirnoff® frozen vodka & lemonade. ®. it had been sitting in my freezer for a while, well over the 8 hour minimum the product specifies. i excitedly squeezed away at it, mimicking the promotional video i had seen on their website, hoping to have as much fun as the actors in it appeared to. when that didn’t do much for me, i went ahead with the shake phase, making sure to dance more than mix. though i quickly broke into a sweat and looked like a fool, i found that my efforts had not done the trick; the slush was near impossible to get out of the mixer. i tried to squeeze the drink out, delighting in the near-fart sounds it would make, but only getting small chunks out at a time. the majority remained frozen in the mixer. i pouted.

it wasn’t until later that i actually read the back, where it stated you may want to leave the mixer out for 10 minutes to thaw after freezing. whoops.

after struggling, violently squeezing, hands frostbitten and blackening, i was able to pour out enough of the cocktail to consider it a serving.

the packaging says it contains about five 5 oz servings. 5 oz doesn’t seem like much to me, but at least they sort of make up for it by giving you a fairly generous 13% alcohol. works for me! you can taste it. if you don’t like the taste of vodka, this is not going to be the drink for you. i do not like vodka. but at least you know it’s in there. the vodka is complimented by lemon juice and other natural flavors, and “certified color” (??), making up the lemonade portion of the drink. but this is not like a frozen hard lemonade – this is a cocktail. if you’re a pussy, you’re not going to be happy with this drink. if not, you’re probably going to enjoy this! it’s totally drinkable, and it’s not super sweet or anything like a lemon drop. you could probably down the whole mixer and feel pretty good about yourself.

the consistency was pretty damn good. it froze properly, and even after a really long time in the freezer, and not having let it thaw, it was completely drinkable. i was pretty happy about this. now, it’s not as smooth as, say, an icee, but i don’t think that’s possible without sacrificing many virgins to many different deities (something as perfect as an icee has to be evil). it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. and not having to do any real preparation to make this happen has me sold on the concept. it’s easy and convenient. you could have a picnic with these, and you’d be getting the same thing you’d expect from a restaurant.

these bad boys are priced at around 14 dollars per mixer. that’s a little less than three dollars per serving, which isn’t too bad. again, the convenience is what sells me on it. personally, i wouldn’t buy the smirnoff® vodka brand® lemonade® freezy, but that is solely due to my deep hatred of vodka. i am still really excited about the other drinks i have left to try out.

oh, and on a final note, i did not get drunk from this frozen cocktail. or, if i did, i couldn’t feel it past my meth high. laaaaaame.

ALSO… if you happened to be wondering where you can purchase these wild wacky frozen cocktails, their website now has a store locator through which you can find the answers you seek.