Actual important research, carried out scientifically - The Standard Supermarket Blended Scotch Test

Concept

Having started my whisky love affair around 10 years ago with Aldi’s 8 year old Highland Black, a blend I consider to be a ‘standard supermarket blend’ (though it probably actually isn’t, given its declared 8 years), I have, as my knowledge of whisky and taste for it develops, for some time now held a curiosity about how good standard supermarket blends actually are. I hadn’t bought one since the last time I bought the Highland Black, as you generally only have to pay a couple of pounds more to get a basic entry level brand – Cutty Sark, Ballantine’s Finest, Dewar’s, Whyte and Mackay, Bell’s, Teachers, Grant’s, Johnnie Walker Red, and The Famous Grouse are all what I would call affordable – but that curiosity kept on niggling away at me. I was going to have to do something about it, something like getting a bottle of each standard supermarket blend in all at once and holding a tasting – even if it was just with myself.

Now, I didn’t want to be stuck with 3.6-4.2 litres of crap scotch when I was done, but the supermarkets have already thought of that – you can buy most of them in 35cl bottles, so while I wouldn’t normally buy a half size bottle without good reason, I decided to make that one of the experiment’s conditions of entry. Unfortunately, that prevents Highland Black from entering, but I can always get it to play the winner later on – assuming this experiment doesn’t put me off cheap blends for good.

I was actually thinking of doing this with all the genres of spirits, but while drinking a glass of standard Sainsburys white rum one day, I realised white rum, gin and vodka were all likely to be dull – and then I would be stuck with litre upon litre of crap spirits. On top of that, budget spirits brands tend to be around only 36-37.5% alcohol and that renders them fairly uninteresting for a start, but with whisky, you can’t even call it whisky unless it reaches the standard 40%. To paraphrase Jim Murray; don’t add water to your whisky, as in most cases that will bring it to below 40% ABV… and then it ain’t whisky no mo’. Something like that.

So anyway, finally we will know which supermarket has the best standard blended scotch. I’ll be contacting the winner to congratulate them on their prestigious achievement, and I’ll let you know if they respond.

Competition Rules

1. It must be a standard blended scotch. Some supermarkets offer a super cheap expression – budget, no frills, value, everyday essentials (perhaps not every day… I’m not sure a supermarket would be allowed to suggest you drink scotch every day…) and the like – these are ineligible, as is any supermarket expression that is slightly above standard.
2. It must state “bottled for [insert supermarket]” on the label.
3. It must be available in a 35cl bottle (or smaller).
4. Those are all the rules.

There was going to be a rule about not having to ask for the whisky at a counter, thus weeding out mini-markets and things that can’t be considered a supermarket. In the end though, I had to drop this rule because the Cooperative is a supermarket, it does have its own brand of blended scotch, and I had to ask for it from behind the counter in the Piccadilly Gardens branch.

Collection

Yes, I am a geek, but I am not geeky enough to visit all the supermarkets in one day in order to buy their standard blend. Nor did I want to spend around £50 on cheap scotch in one day. Instead, I figured I could just collect one whenever I was passing a supermarket, or happened to be popping in…

Time to start engineering “impromptu” trips to Tesco, Morrison’s, Asda, Sainsburys, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer. Aldi don’t do a half bottle, nor do Lidl, though they would have been able to enter if they did.

Tesco (Burnage) and Morrison’s were accomplished with no difficulty, since I go in Tesco fairly frequently anyway and we were passing the Morrison’s by Sheffield’s Parkway on the way to Phil’s one weekend.

A week or two later a leisurely Saturday afternoon turned into a trip to the big Asda (Hulme), and then a need to pick up lunch one Wednesday led to a stop at Sainsburys (Birchfields Road).  It wasn’t all plain sailing though.

I knew Waitrose would be tricky, since we don’t have many of those in the north. I heard Mrs Cake was heading to Wilmslow one weekend and enlisted her to pop in, even finding the product online in order to provide her with a picture and make sure she got the right one... only for her to change her plans and therefore scupper mine. That turned out to be the last I collected, having to call into the small one on Bridge Street after a Christmas party.

The same week Mrs Cake changed her plans with regard to Waitrose, a trip to the M&S in Trafford Centre proved fruitless. They didn’t have their standard blend in a 35cl bottle, and while they did have a 20cl of the 5 year old Kenmore variety I quickly decided that would be ineligible since it was one class above standard. I actually stood there for about 5 minutes, hoping I’d spot a 35cl standard blend if I looked hard enough, but in the end I had to admit defeat and wait until I could pop into the M&S in town – even managing to resist the temptation to buy the Kenmore just for the sake of it. Rules: sometimes they are good.

I finally had to exclude M&S altogether when I did make it to the big store in town, and they didn’t have a 35cl bottle. They do have it in 70cl, and I would really like to be able to compare it to all the others, but I’m sorry M&S, rules are rules so don’t go breakin em.

Pricing

More or less across the board, the blends were priced at a tempting and affordable £6.50 to £7. Asda, Tesco and Morrison’s inhabited the lower end of the scale, while Sainsburys consider themselves that 50p classier. Waitrose’s website states that theirs is £7, but that must be online and in the big stores, since I had to pay something like £7.35 (sorry, I forget exactly how much it was).

The real surprise though, was that I had to pay a ma-hoossive £8.35 for the Cooperative’s entry. At this stage I don’t know whether this is because I bought it from a small city centre store and whether it would have been cheaper say, in West Didsbury or whether it’s just that expensive. What I do know is that I don’t want to be collecting supermarket whiskies forever, so I just bought it anyway to hurry things along a little. What started out as a long term project to be completed whenever had quickly turned into an obsession as I clamoured to complete my collection and get the tasting underway. Time would tell whether it would be worth all the effort.

In total then, I spent £42.19 on 210cl of  standard supermarket blends.

Method

McKendrick's (Asda) vs Waitrose

So how would the test be carried out? I considered pouring all six into glasses at once and then just drinking them side by side, but I actually wanted a companion for this experiment. Enter David, fellow member of the Manchester Whisky Club, who was delighted to come over one Friday night and help out.

I would ideally have liked to have two rounds, three whiskies in each round with a winner being picked from each and facing each other in the final, but it turns out I only have 5 glencairn glasses. So instead, David came up with a winner stays on system, whereby we would each start with the same two samples, decide on a winner, and then compare it with the next sample until one was left standing at the end.

Before we could start the tasting though, let us consider another important factor, presentation.

Presentation

spirit wheel

I like that they all come in bottles of an identical size and shape. It means you can arrange them like this for interesting photographs. I actually like this bottle shape anyway, since it is clearly designed to fit snuggly into your jacket pocket, like a hip flask (though it isn’t shaped to fit your hip). If you see someone buying one of these, you just assume they’re going to drink it straight away, don’t you? Perhaps that’s why M&S don’t do one – they’re too classy for that kind of thing.

It is interesting to me to see the various similarities and differences. Both Tesco and Asda have gone for a traditional and professional look. Asda have actually gone so far as to name theirs McKendricks Whisky - lah-di-dah -  rather than just something generic like Blended Scotch or Select Reserve.

Sainsburys and Morrisons on the other hand, have gone for minimal fuss with a modern, uncluttered label, one depicting a distillery in a circular box and the other a thistle. Co-op have depicted a piper and included a silver medal from the IWSC (the only entry to do so), while Waitrose haven’t even bothered to include a generic Scottish image, but there you go.

I find it interesting that Asda and Tesco have specified that their product was aged for at least 3 years in oak barrels, since that’s a minimum requirement for calling it scotch whisky. So for whatever reason, the other supermarkets have chosen to eschew that information, presumably secure in the knowledge that their customers either know that already, or aren’t likely to be swayed by any lack of age statement and maturing information. I suppose if you’re buying an own brand blend, you’re not snooty about these things – since the only other option is to leave the supermarket and go to another one… not really worth it for the sake of an age statement.

Particularly amusing was that, when I searched for Asda’s standard blend on their website, it informed me that the 35cl bottle is frequently bought with Asda brown onions. Make of that what you will.

Colour

before...

This is weird. They are all exactly the same colour. There has to be caramel added, so presumably this represents an exact whisky colour profile that is considered to be most attractive to the consumer – though I can’t think why; I certainly don’t find it inspiring. This is whisky that is brown rather than an attractive pale gold or amber. One thing’s for sure, none of the supermarkets have decided to take a risk by being any different to any of the others. It makes you wonder whether the whisky is in fact the same. It will be a massive disappointment if that turns out to be the case.

Surprisingly, this uniformity doesn’t carry over into the glass. Yes, they are similar, but when we poured our first two samples (Asda and Waitrose), we noticed that the Waitrose was darker. Then, later we noticed that Tesco’s entry was closer to the Waitrose colour, but not as… shimmery.

Tasting

I had planned to break this next section down into categories of nose, palate and finish, but let’s be realistic; with all that booze floating about and only a very light tea consumed, we were starting to get hammered pretty quick and my notes became illegible and fragmented. I’ll just try and relate what I’ve got.

We started, as I said with Asda’s McKendrick’s and Waitrose. The nosing immediately revealed a startling difference. We liked Asda, but Waitrose gave a hit of nail varnish, caramel and molasses.

When we moved on to the tasting, we were immediately impressed with Asda. It is light and sweet, reminding me of the Ballantine’s Finest that I’d recently been enjoying. David said it had a ‘grittiness’ that he liked. I didn’t really understand and we had a brief discussion about how people seem to describe spirits they are trying for the first time as “smooth”, and how in a lot of cases I a) don’t know what they mean, and b) think they’re just making it up for something to say because smooth is considered good. David and I agreed we both like a degree of roughness to our spirits, a bit of burn.

Anyway, when it came to the Waitrose, we were both horrified. What the fuck is this? It’s minging. How dare they bottle this and pass it off as blended scotch? It reminded me very much of the Wall Street that I picked up in Vietnam. We concluded it had definitely been coloured with caramel spirit, and was devoid of any character or redeeming features. Waitrose, this is just awful.

So Asda was the clear (and unexpected) winner. We selected Tesco as the next contender, refilling our Asda glass, and swilling out the Waitrose one. I tried drinking the whole Waitrose sample, but it wasn’t nice, so I threw some of it down the sink. For the second round I poured smaller measures.

We noted that Tesco gave an impression of being artificially coloured on the nose, but it didn’t appear as shiny as Waitrose. When it came to tasting though, we concluded it was bad, though not quite as bad as the Waitrose had been.

Asda was victorious again, and would next face the Morrison’s offering. By this stage I was struggling to taste anything so we had to start sipping sparkling water in between samples to keep our tired palates awake.

Morrison’s proved to be fairly inoffensive on the nose, and on the palate a little harsh – but I liked that. It had a slightly dark flavour at the end, but while it was no match for Asda, it was actually quite pleasant.

Co-op was next up. As [easily] the most expensive of the competitors, you’d be hoping it would have a flavour profile to match. I’m going to give you direct quotes from my note book here:

“I like the Co-op, & [sic] I’m not sure if it’s Asda beating… It was agreed that Vince Vaughn is a twat… Yesh [sic] Co-Op not as good”.

Not as good, but fairly good nonetheless.

Finally then, we have Sainsburys. David proclaimed that this sample was identical to Asda, but I maintained that Asda just has a little something extra, that I’m going to call the edge. There was just a note about the Sainsburys that didn’t sit quite right. Nevertheless, a decent effort.

Before we move on to the verdict, I’d just like to share one more note from my book in direct quotation:

...more or less after.

“David is now unsure what he is drinking, while Neil is unsure of what went before.”

Yeah, we were pretty hammered and ready to start drinking the special stuff we’d been saving. David had brought an Amrut Fusion while the most special thing I had at the time was the Glen Scotia 16. It was about time we ordered some pizza also.

Verdict

When considering the verdict, you’ve got to ask yourself what was the purpose of all this anyway? Obviously I want to see which of the supermarkets has the best blended scotch, but to what purpose? I suppose I’m trying to use this as a benchmark. You see, it isn’t just blends that supermarkets produce their own versions of. There are also ultra-cheap blends, slightly more upmarket, even aged blends, single malts based on various of the distilling regions of Scotland then there are the different varieties of rum, brandy… so I’m wondering whether the quality of the standard blend might tell us something about all the other varieties of own brand alcohol. Sadly you know it won’t. I’ll ultimately have to try all the other varieties too. Since I’m destined to fail on that score, why don’t I break it down to the following questions, and see if that tells us anything:

Are these comparable in terms of quality to the cheap standard brands that they are emulating?

In some cases, yes. Asda, Morrison’s, Sainsburys and Co-op all supplied decent, even pleasant products. As I said, Asda seemed very similar to Ballantine’s, while a later tasting of Sainsburys brought to mind the standard Grant’s. They certainly aren’t to be sniffed at.

Would I buy any of these again?

I would definitely buy Asda’s again, without a doubt. The others listed as comparable above? Sure, if I only had £7, needed a bottle of scotch and only had access to one of those supermarkets. I would buy with confidence.

Is any one supermarket brand the daddy of them all?

Finally, yes. Asda confounded expectation, and is duly crowned the daddy of them all. Seriously, well done Asda and keep up the good work. All that remains is to give you the full list, in order of preference. Here you go:

1. McKendrick’s by Asda
2. Morrison’s Blended Scotch Whisky
3. Sainsburys Blended Scotch
4. Cooperative Blended Scotch
5. Tesco Special Reserve
6. Waitrose Blended Scotch

Thanks for joining me for this scientific experiment. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, found it useful, and that it has answered the question of whether supermarket blends are any good once and for all. Don’t worry, this isn’t the end by any stretch of the imagination. There are always more spirits to try, and David tells me he’d like to do the same thing with the super cheap supermarket blends, so I’ll be sure to let you know how that turns out.

See you again, then.

Postcript

While David and I agreed on the night, and while the results will stand as testament to that, in personal tastings since the Cooperative Blended Scotch has actually excelled, while Morrison’s, which placed 2^nd, has failed to impress, so I would actually like to elevate the Co-operative Blended Scotch to 2^nd, but that’s just for me. For the rest of you, take the ranking above.

Thanks, and see you next time.

The Great Supermarket White Rum Hype

A forthcoming trip to the Bearded Theory festival (some of which I told you about previously) a few months ago (messing with conceptions of time here), led me to considering the purchase of a new white spirit.

As you may have learned before – if you’ve read any of my previous posts – I can be quite methodical, so my thought process went like this. The Bearded Theory Festival allows you to take your own booze (both into the campsite, and into the arena area, which is something of a novelty), in moderate amounts. Moderate is defined as 16 cans of beer each. They don’t allow glass.

As well as the beer, I wanted to take some hard liquor – you know what I’m like. So I thought, I don’t want to take anything special, but I do want to take something I can enjoy (and that Mrs Cake could drink with a mixer). Just to narrow down my choices more, I decided to get something that would look like water when poured into a plastic bottle. I’m sure it wouldn’t have mattered if it didn’t look like water, but as I say, I just needed something to narrow down my criteria. So that left a choice between vodka, gin, tequila and white rum – so it didn’t narrow my choices down all that much…

Since it couldn’t be special, that meant it could be cheap. What I settled on then, was white rum. Of course, it is primarily for mixing, but it does have its uses in hipflasks and for quick pre-sesh swigs – you know; quick warm-up tugs before you leave the house.

Fate actually decreed that on this rare occasion, I found myself in the M&S food section in the Trafford Centre the night before the festival, and they had something that fit the bill; M & S White Rum – yes, a supermarket own brand from Guyana – ooooh!  At £12.19 it was the right price, and assuming there would be any left after the festival, this would present an opportunity to ask how budget upstart supermarket Aldi's Old Hopking could stand up to the might and reputation of Marks and Spencer. I like Marks and Spencer, but I don't do much grocery shopping  there.

Now, white rum isn’t up to all that much on its own, but it’s ok. It’s sweet at least, so you can enjoy it without loving it.  For the record, I did enjoy it at the festival. It proved very useful for topping up the old buzz from time to time, and I’m glad to say that in spite of that, I was able to bring a little home – in the Nalgene bottle you can see in the picture there.

So one Friday night, after posting my blog and knocking back a quick Wall Street, to see if it had improved at all (it hadn’t), I dove into another booze face-off. I don’t know if there are such things as rum glasses, but if there are, I don’t have any, so I decided to go with the Glencairn. Let the tasting commence.

Now, these are cheap brands – around £10 for the Old Hopking and £12.19 for M & S (both are an indifferent 37.5% ABV), so you can’t expect too much – and as you might expect, they don’t stand up to too much close scrutiny under discerning, home-tasting conditions. I embraced my inner geek, and made some tasting notes for you, in which I noted that on the nose, the M & S brand was a bit caramelly. Then, for the Old Hopking, I’ve er… confused myself a little, by stating that it smells sour in comparison – but not in a bad way, and then later I’ve written, like dirty socks. I’m only telling it how it’s written. It must have made sense at the time.

On the palate though, for M & S I’ve got that it tastes like it might have gone a bit stale, though it shouldn’t have since it was only a week since the festival. Perhaps storing it in a plastic bottle doesn’t do it any favours. I’ve also got that it tasted a bit fishy, and that it gave me the impression of being in a seafood restaurant on the coast – not something I want in my rum, I’m afraid.

For the Old Hopking, I’ve just got that it isn’t as sweet, but it is fuller bodied. It’s not a bad thing that it lacks the sweetness, and I do tend to prefer a fuller bodied spirit.

It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable tasting if I’m going to be brutally honest with you, and I kind of wished I’d broken out the special stuff earlier. No big loss, Mrs Cake and I went on to finish off the Bruichladdich Islay Barley later that evening anyway. It just backs up my theory that white rum isn’t for sipping, but it will serve you well if you want to mix it or stick it in a hip flask for taking nips when you’re out and about.

Was there a winner? Not really, I’d say you could just get the one from whatever supermarket you happen to be passing at the time, as a general rule.

As a postscript though, I’d just like to tell you that there was a little left in that bottle, and Mrs Cake was encouraging me to finish it off (she wanted use of the Nalgene bottle back), so I did one evening while I was cooking dinner. I didn’t bother pouring it into a glass and oddly, I enjoyed it again. I didn’t bother comparing with the Old Hopking this time; the simple fact of enjoying the M&S Rum was enough.

In spite of finishing it, I do still have about a quarter of a bottle of white rum left, so I won’t be needing to get a new one any time soon. I have been quite slack in my pursuit of varied spirits lately mind, and have just been buying more bottles of whisky instead of replacing the Putinoff vodka, Richmond gin and el Jimador tequila that Mrs Cake and I have polished off. I think that’s a situation to address next month…

There are of course, lots of supermarket own brands still to try, so maybe one day we’ll have an undisputed supermarket rum champion. Watch this space.

Wall Street

Hello everyone. Let me just start by apologising for my absence over the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy, and have had to take a break from the blogging game. Bless you if you’ve missed me. If not, well I expected as much. Either way, this week I’m back to enrich your life with a new post, and it’s all about a mysterious spirit called Wall Street that I picked up this summer. Enjoy…

To facilitate giving you my impressions of Wall Street, I’d best start with a brief rundown of what for me are the essential facets of booze tourism; the two aims, if you will.

First, in alignment with the basic point of all kinds of tourism, is the pursuit of new experiences. For the booze tourist that could mean drinking in local bars, trying the local brew, doing a tasting tour, visiting a distillery – even going on a booze cruise or ending up in hospital after drunkenly diving into a fountain in Ibiza and hitting your head… basically it’s anything alcohol related that pertains to the place you’re visiting.

The second is concerned with the issue of procurement of things that you drink and try to get your friends to drink, in order to convince them that you are exotic and interesting. You know what though? Your friends don’t care. They’re too busy worrying about how exotic and interesting they appear.

This second aim can be broken into 3 parts:

1. Procuring something unusual, that you can’t get at home.

 Ideally this is some local oddity, such as the longan wine I picked up in Vietnam or the aguardiente de orujo and hierbas ibicencas that I collected in Ibiza. It could just be some malt liquor that simply doesn’t have a distributor in the UK market.  The basic thing is that you’re trying to get something that you couldn’t’ve picked up at your local supermarket, and ideally that you couldn’t get without going to the country you went to.

2.  Pick up something at a bargain price.

Let’s face it, some liquors are particularly expensive but when you go on holiday they can turn out to be incredibly cheap. The basic idea here is, if you’re going to Italy, get some grappa. If you’re going to any of the Caribbean countries, you might want to think about getting some rum. You get the idea. We’ve covered this before.

3.  Hit the Duty Free.

 It’s not just an issue of getting a litre of something for the price you’d normally pay for 70cl. No, some things are only available in Duty Free. As a booze tourist, you need to find out what these things are and look for them. This brings its own problems; how good is the duty free at the particular airport you’re returning home from? You aren’t going to know until it’s already time to come home and too late to buy elsewhere. So don’t rely on Duty Free for all your alcohol purchases, and definitely make sure you pick up your local stuff beforehand. You never know what they’re going to have in, and the local stuff is probably going to be cheap enough in general anyway. Thinking about this just now has made me realise I should start a Duty Free airport guide, so look out for that sometime in the future…

Diageo... curious

So! Back to my bottle of Wall Street. You might remember from an earlier post that I picked this up in Vietnam. It appears to be distributed by Diageo, going off the label on the cap, and it’s a blend of scotch and ‘Vietnamese spirit’, clocking in at 39% ABV - so below the minimum level required by the Scotch Whisky Association to be classed as ‘genuine whisky’. It doesn’t claim to be whisky anywhere on the packaging, and it has listed as its ingredients, ‘scotch’ and ‘caramel’. What that does make it, I’m not sure. I do know that caramel is often used as a colourant in whisky production, so it could just be that. For a bit more science on caramel spirit, you can visit dramming.com, where it actually says that the Talisker 10 and Lagavulin 16 are examples of scotch that use caramel for adding colour. Both of those have managed to maintain ABV levels of over 40% though, so they are allowed to be called whisky.

As is the case with most brands of alcoholic beverage, there are more questions concerning this one than answers like:

            What is Diageo’s involvement, and why are they too ashamed to list it on their website?

What has Wall Street got to do with either scotch or Vietnamese spirit?

I haven’t found any answers to those, so let’s just crack on with some comments. 

I haven’t seen this anywhere else, and a search of the internet yielded a solitary picture of a bottle among someone’s holiday snaps from Vietnam, so in terms of procurement of items you can’t find anywhere else: mission accomplished.

The only problem of course, with buying random stuff that you can’t get at home is that it might not be any good. It might not even be made for your western palate. I had no idea what it was actually going to be like. Mrs Cake asked the lady in the shop if she had any idea, and she said she didn’t drink but her husband was very fond of it. Sadly, that information didn’t prove all that useful to me – not just because I don’t know him, but also because… he’s probably Vietnamese, which means he has different terms of reference to me as far as taste goes. You know; presumably Chinese people like Baiju, but I’d be surprised if you found many people in the UK who’d go back for a second glass.

My impressions then, of this Wall Street stuff is that in spite of its intriguing appearance and mystique, it’s fairly characterless. It sure is colourful – that’s probably the brightest amber I’ve ever seen in a spirit.

BRIGHT!

I’m getting nothing on the nose and very little on the palate. I’m not very good at this whole tasting lark anyway, but usually I can at least find a spirit tasty or interesting or enjoyable. After an initial hit of sweetness, this one is a bit like drinking fluff off the carpet. I just didn’t know now how I was going to get rid of it. I tried it with ice, and while that was an improvement, it still wasn’t a drink to enjoy. If you’re trying to write a booze blog and limit your alcohol intake to some degree, you simply can’t go wasting a drink on something you don’t enjoy.

It ended up being an easy go-to when I wanted a quick swig of something before going out, and for carrying around in my hipflask .It is surprisingly effective in a hipflask actually. I don’t know what it is, but that combination of cold, hard metal and pseudo-whisky gives the impression you’re drinking something a little more interesting than you actually are. A few people tried it out of the flask and were impressed.

Worries about getting rid of it were shortlived in the end because it was summer and there were plenty of occasions when warm-up swigs were required before heading out to various barbeques and all day drinking events. As such, it has actually left a void in my life… I don’t really have anything I don’t like enough to consume as flippantly. I suppose that dubious honour will have to fall on a cheap brand of rum… Mount Gay Eclipse, or the alarmingly cheap Liberty Ship - but more on those later…

So that's it. Thanks for joining me once again. I'll be back next week with something else.

Booze Tourism: Vietnam... Part 2

Bottles and cans, just clap your hands, just clap your ha-ands…

So now I’ve covered the journey to and from Vietnam with an emphasis on booze that you can get nearly anywhere in the world, let’s get down to the subject of actual Vietnamese booze, starting with beer.

They do make nice lager in Vietnam. I tried a number of varieties, including Saigon (which comes in green (4.3% ABV) and red (4.9% ABV) varieties), Bia 333 (5.3%), Hanoi (4.2% I think) and Phong Dinh (check). It can be quite hard to find a cold beer, and what starts as cold doesn’t stay that way for long, but nevertheless, it’s readily available (in all kinds of shops, restaurants, bars, hotels and on the street) and when you’re used to Manchester prices, it’s also cheap. Prices vary between 9000 Vietnamese Dong (that was for a bottle of Phong Dinh in Can Tho) at one end of the spectrum and 30000 VND for a 330ml can of Tiger or Heineken at the other. Really, there’s no need to be paying ‘premium’ prices for brands you’ve heard of when you can get a bottle of Saigon for 12000. Bear in mind, £1 was about 32000 dong.

 

just enough for a brew

beer is cheaper than juice

beer in Can Tho

All those zeros get confusing after a while, and you’ll find yourself rejecting the chance to eat in a particular restaurant because Saigon is 30000 dong, and you’re used to paying only 12000. It’s still less than a pound.

From here on in I’m going to move to a system that my friend Paul invented for coping with all those zeroes – replacing ‘thousand’ with ‘kilo’ and ‘million’ with ‘mega’ (Paul works in programming), so for our purposes a pound is now 32 kilodong. Got it? Let’s move on.

It’s all bottles and cans in Vietnam. Apparently you don’t buy anything on draught because they water it down and the water’s not safe to drink. It’s not a problem though, because the problem never came up. And anyway, if I got a problem, a problem got a problem till it’s gone. An added bonus is that because it’s all cheap, you can even justify drinking stuff out of the minibar. I don’t think I’ve ever used a minibar before for anything other than keeping my own drinks cold, but at 60p for a can of Bia 333, well, you might as well, because when you get back to your hotel after a couple of hours pounding the concrete in 35 degree heat, you’re ready for the refreshing rasp of an ice cold beer.

I’ve never really thought about it before, but ice cold beer hits the spot in hot weather in a way that other ice cold drinks can’t. Sure, coke is fricking awesome when it’s ice cold, but there’s something about it that doesn’t match up to a beer. What it is, is that coke (and other soft drinks) are sweet, so once the initial refreshment has subsided, your mouth feels all sticky and you want another drink. Beer on the other hand, is sharp tasting, but not sweet at all. This means the liquid leaves your mouth feeling refreshed and satisfied – with the added bonus of ‘buzz’. Though you may still want another one. And that’s my scientific explanation for the day.

A bit of advice here (should you be in Vietnam), for if you are offered a drink, say on a tour or something. It works like this: if they put it in your hand, it’s free. If it is offered to you on a tray, you’ll be asked to pay – but later. That almost rhymes. I’ll see if I can work on that. If handed to me, then free this drink be. If offered on a tray, I should expect to pay. There you go.

We drank a lot of beer in Vietnam – every day, except I think, two days when we were on a cruise around Halong Bay. I’m pretty sure beers were 60000 dong on that boat, so we weren’t having any of that. We had a couple of cocktails in happy hour, when it was two for one, but you had to have two of the same cocktail. Mrs Cake pointed out that this didn’t make sense since all the cocktails were the same price, but them’s the rules, so don’t go breaking em.

ah, sweet Glenfarclas

I think we overpriced ourselves a little on that trip, booking one of the more expensive cruises, because when we got there we were surrounded by lawyers and people who were clearly more affluent than us, people who weren’t concerned to be paying a premium on their drinks. We’d be there at dinner, drinking our free water, saying no whenever the waiter asked if we wanted to order drinks, while they’d be buying cocktails and bottles of wine. It made me feel a bit cheap. At least I had my Glenfarclas downstairs in the cabin.

When it came time to embark on the cruise, I started to think that maybe I ought to have bought a full size bottle of something in Duty Free at Manchester, instead of the half bottle. I was having little fantasies about turning our deck into the party deck – like it was a teen movie from the 80s. Everyone would be hanging out with us, and I’d be the centre of attention, wearing shades even though it was night time and divvying out generous measures of scotch. We’d all be wearing Hawaiian shirts and passing doobies around, while a conga line weaves in and out of the cabins. At least part of that fantasy is Teen Wolf, I think.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. It was a pretty sedate cruise, and our neighbours were a polite family from Germany and a really annoying, noisy family that we assumed was from the US. One of them was a camp little lad who sang tunelessly to himself (you could hear it through the walls), and said everything five times:

“Dad, this is wet. This is wet, Dad. Dad, this is wet. This is wet. Dad, this is wet. Dad; it’s wet”.

The teenage daughter could be heard to be losing the cabin keys every single time it was time for them to leave the cabin. The mother was ok, but the dad was a bit of a dick who wouldn’t set a good example for his kids by wearing a life jacket during the canoeing excursion.

So no partying on deck two, then. That was ok. I find socialising with strangers tiring, and all I wanted to do was lounge around with the missus and a glass of the good stuff.

Yes, I am hardcore

Ok, what else should you be looking for when you go booze touring in Vietnam? Well, they have a much wider selection of alcohols than I expected, and it’s cheaper and more readily available than in Malaysia, which was the last [and only other] place we [have] visited in Southeast Asia. I remember paying the equivalent of £10 for three 330ml cans of Jaz lager there, on the island of Tioman. You could get twenty bottles of Saigon for that price in Vietnam.

They don’t encourage drinking in Malaysia, being that it is largely a muslim country. That’s actually a good thing since health and safety is pretty much non-existent – with all the holes in the pavement and rubble around there’s a good chance you’d break your leg if you went out and got shit-faced. Not so in Vietnam; there’s plenty of cheap booze and all you need do is make sure you look out for mopeds. Crossing the road takes a bit of practice, but the general rule is just keep going.

On our first full day we met our friends Paul and Victoria in HCMC. They happened to be there at the same time as us, so it was great to be able to meet up and go drinking.

Vietnamese vodka

They were staying in the backpacker district on Bui Vien, where it’s all happening. Street bars overflow into the road, people go up and down selling all kinds of crazy stuff (I was offered weed twice, sex once, my fortune and a neck massage… this last one from a guy. Who’s this? I asked Paul as I felt some hands on my neck – because when people do that, you just assume it’s someone you know. I dunno, he said. Oh! It’s a guy.)

So we went out drinking, and decided to try some of the local stuff. First up was Vietnamese vodka. It came in a surprisingly generous measure, but as soon as I tasted it I understood why; it tasted like vodka but appeared to be watered down. Later (at a different place) I asked if they had anything stronger, explaining that the Vietnamese vodka appeared to be watered down. The waiter looked puzzled and suggested Vietnamese whisky. That was satisfactory. I don’t know which brand it was, but it was fine. At least I remember it that way, which is to say I don’t really remember it at all. I later discovered that the vodka would have been Hanoi vodka. It was available all over the place, and turned out to be only 29% ABV. I wouldn’t be buying that to take home.

Vietnamese whisky

I didn’t really expect that there would be much choice in the way of Vietnamese vodka, but at Hanoi Airport, I found I was wrong. We were due, in a couple of days, to head to the largest island in Vietnam, Phu Quoc and, not knowing how much booze was going to cost, or even how readily available it would be, Mrs Cake and I figured it might be useful to take some with us. The Glenfarclas was on its last legs by this point, and we needed something that Mrs Cake could drink (ie: mix) anyway.

On perusing the various shops in the airport, I passed over the Hanoi vodka, and soon found a brand by the name of Nep Moi, at 77 kilodong and 39% ABV. That’s about £2.41 for 60cl. I was reluctant really because I was aware that asian palates can vary quite significantly from our western ones (see Baiju), and you just never know with vodka, do you? Especially at under £2.50. I reasoned it out though, and figured if it’s shit, I can just pour it down the sink for that price.

So I was on the verge of buying it when Mrs Cake found another variety, Lua Moi at 84 kilodong. At the time, that was £2.61, and it was an impressive 45% ABV. We immediately had a winner.

I waited until the first day in our beach front bungalow on Phu Quoc before breaking the seal on that one, and I was immediately impressed. Yes, it’s strong, which goes in its favour, but in terms of flavour, there is none of that bitterness that so many cheap vodkas seems to have – and that surprised me because when I say “cheap” vodkas, I’m referring to your Red Squares and Smirnoffs, brands that retail from £10 to £18. Lua Moi was really cheap by comparison.

I’ll tell you something else, I’m going to say this vodka was so good that I’m going to rank it 2^nd behind Stolichnaya in the all time vodka hierarchy, and to be fair, considering the value factor, it may be even better than that. I can’t say without a direct comparison, and I do love Stolichnaya, but value isn’t the most important consideration anyway. I’d happily place a £100 bottle at number one if I liked it enough.

I relied on the Lua Moi for the entire week that we resided on Phu Quoc. I did start to wonder, would I drink and enjoy this if I were at home, and had all my other bottles to choose from? The answer, I determined, is yes - probably early on Friday evenings, which is when I normally go for the vodka if I want it neat.

Before Phu Quoc though, I unexpectedly got the chance to explore some more unusual Vietnamese drinks, when we did a two day tour of the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta is the main agricultural area of Vietnam where they grow millions of tonnes of rice and fruit. It didn’t sound that interesting in the guidebook, but yes, it’s good. You basically tootle up and down the river in various sized boats, occasionally pausing to don one of those comical conical hats. There’s not a lot of wildlife to see, because if it moves, I think they eat it, but you know, they make up for it with houses on stilts, floating markets and the like.

snake wine

The first stop was a factory, where they seem to make everything – sweets, rice paper, snake… related… things… alcohol, and snake-related alcohol. Our guide, Xuan, let me try their banana wine (which was nice) as well as the snake wine. That’s the snake wine you can see there in the big jar with snakes in it. You’ll find this stuff for sale all over Vietnam, and when bottled, in most cases the snake will be arranged with a scorpion in its mouth. Judging by episodes of UK Border Force and… that New Zealand one (is it Nothing to Declare?), I’m thinking it would probably be illegal to bring a bottle into the country, not that you’d want to anyway, despite the fact it is supposed to increase one’s virility (no problems there, thanks). Imagine if the bottle broke in your bag, and you had to get the dead snake out of there… ew.

I certainly didn’t want to buy one, but I was glad to be able to try it. I was only given a little, but I think I’d say it tasted a bit aniseedy. It reminded me a little of Hierbas Ibicencas, but I couldn’t give you much more detail than that. It looks like I was the only tourist prepared to give it a go. You’re not hardcore unless you live hardcore, and yes, I am hardcore.

They call it snake wine, but it’s more like snake spirit really, as its alcohol content is around 45%. So it’s pretty hard with or without the snake. Similarly, the banana wine is also more like spirit in terms of strength. I don’t know why they call it wine.

The next part of the tour involved going to a house to sample some different kinds of fruit, one of which was longan, a small fruit with a large seed that they also use to make liquor. On arrival, our host gave us each a thimble-full, which we were encouraged to neck. I thought it tasted like grappa, and therefore enjoyed it very much. Mrs Cake wasn’t so keen, so I got to finish hers and since I professed a liking for it, I was offered another sample before we left.

After we’d set out on the boat again, I asked Xuan about the longan wine, whether it was available to buy in the shops, and he said it wasn’t; the man at the house distilled his own, but he could probably get some for me. Another tour from the same company had been just behind us, so he put in a call to the other guide, asking if he could pick some up, and how much it was (150 kilodong/ £4.70).

I thought about it for a bit, and figured this was what I was looking for; a kind of alcohol that is exotic and difficult to find. I asked Xuan whether it was safe – having been to whisky distilleries on Islay, and hearing that they have to discard the high and low alcohols during the distilling process to ensure nothing dangerous gets in, I wondered whether they took the same care with a home still in Vietnam? This could essentially be like moonshine and make me go blind. The guy at the house obviously wasn’t blind, I figured (unless he was like Denzel Washington in The Book of Eli) or dead (unless he was like er… Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense), so I rationalised that it was probably all right, and Xuan said it was safe. Even in Vietnam his company would probably get in trouble for peddling lethal poisons to visitors. Possibly.

longan wine

I decided to go for it, and after lunch the other guide had caught up to us and Xuan presented me with a mineral water bottle filled with longan wine, that didn’t look unlike urine. I opened it and gave it a sniff to make sure. It was the real deal, so I immediately formed a plan to conduct a comparative tasting between it and my £48 bottle of Domenis Blanc e Neri grappa on my return home. You’ll be able to see the results of that in some future post.

I asked Xuan if it were legal to distil your own spirits in Vietnam, and he said it wasn’t, but it turned out he was joking.

Our friends Paul and Victoria had moved on to Laos where, coincidentally they picked up their own bottle of exotic booze in a water bottle. This was supposedly whisky, though you can see from the picture that it is colourless, and therefore unaged – I think we all know what the Scotch Whisky Association would think about that. This bottle actually has a label, and was apparently properly sealed – unlike mine, which was clearly just a re-used water bottle with some cling film and an elastic band over the cap to protect against leakage.

Laotian "whisky"

I did eventually take the longan wine over to Paul’s house for him to try, and I got to try the Laotian whisky in reciprocation. I quite liked it, while Paul said he enjoyed the experience of trying the longan wine rather more than the spirit itself.

So, on to Phu Quoc which was a lovely protracted period of drinking casually and relaxing: Saigon beer for lunch and Lua Moi vodka in the early evenings [and at bedtime] for 7 days.

There was a family run convenience store (open 18 hours a day, 7 days a week) just up the road that sold cold beers at a fraction of the price of our resort, and had a surprisingly eclectic mix of spirits on offer. In fact, I was surprised at the number of shops and stalls in Vietnam that sold beer and spirits. I suspect you don’t need a licence over there. I had been reluctant to buy spirits from any of the shops in HCMC or Hanoi (except the fancy liquor stores that frankly looked expensive), figuring that a country that is so renowned for knock off culture in everything [I bought a Vietnam football shirt in HCMC that says ‘Adidas’ on the outside, and ‘Mr JR Hung’ on the label, like it’s someone’s PE kit] is probably the same when it comes to alcohol – is that genuine Johnnie Walker for sale on that stall, or is it poison? I’m pretty sure some of my online research had mentioned that there are a number of deaths caused by drinking dodgy Vietnamese booze every year, so a policy of caution seemed to be the best bet.

Nevertheless, I was willing to give it a go once I saw our local convenience store. It all looked perfectly above board, and since we were there nearly every day buying beer (there was no fridge in our bungalow) and on one occasion a second hand bottle opener, I had plenty of opportunity to scout out its wares. It was there that I found my purchase. It’s a brand called Wall Street, and it’s a blend of scotch whisky and Vietnamese Spirit. I’m not sure what that means as yet, but you can be sure I’ll tell you about it once I open it.

 In terms of strength, Wall Street is only 39%, which means the Scotch Whisky Association wouldn’t even consider it to be ‘genuine whisky’. In its defence, nowhere on the box or bottle does it claim to be whisky anyway. It was 225 kilodong or £7.05, so quite expensive really. In a restaurant on the beach though, a single shot of it was 100 kilodong, so that makes the bottle at 75cl excellent value.

Since arriving home, I’ve found that there is a ‘Diageo’ label around the top of the bottle, but what that means I have no idea. There is no mention of it among the brands on their website, and I haven’t found anything out about it elsewhere online so far. Maybe it’s got some Caol Ila in it? I suppose I’ll never find out for sure, but I’ll let you know what it’s like somewhere in the fullness of time.

It was a fantastic holiday then, full of joy, adventure and alcohol. I love Southeast Asia, and recommend it to anyone, except probably my parents. They wouldn’t know what to do – with the heat, with the food, with the mopeds… but I love all that. I love the sweating, the activity, the buzz, the atmosphere. I wish I could live there. But now it’s over. I don’t mind flying for 16 hours when you’ve got your holiday to look forward to when you arrive, but when it’s the other way around and all you’ve got is 50 shades of grey Manchester weather, jetlag, rain and work to look forward to… it’s hard to feel optimistic. Still, at least I’ve got a couple of new bottles of booze to look forward to opening, and I’ll be ordering that Japanese single malt before too long…

Thanks once again for joining me this week. Hopefully you’ve found it interesting and will feel like coming back sometime soon. I’m going out now for dinner and drinks with some very good friends, but I’ll be back next week with whatever I’ve got planned for then. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you later.