Sugar coating the issue

the world’s largest vodka brand is wooing those with a sweet tooth with flavours like fluffed marshmallow and whipped cream.

I’ll be first to admit that I have a sweet tooth. Sometimes there’s simply nothing more comforting than a scoop of your favourite ice-cream (rum raisin) or a few squares of chocolate. Or even both at the same time. So why is it that I’m disturbed with the growing trend to flavour alcohol – another of my favourite indulgences – with confectionary flavours?

Almost any flavour imaginable can now be found commercially infused in vodka, rum, tequila and even whisky. You can now buy honey and cherry bourbons, vanilla, toffee and bubble-gum vodkas, coffee, strawberry and watermelon tequilas, and mango, coconut and banana rums. Any flavour a focus group can dream up, you can bet your nelly it has already been created.

Perhaps the world’s most recognisable vodka brand, Smirnoff recently released two new flavours in the US – whipped cream and toasted marshmallow. The flavours have empirically met some initial consumer success, though they have also raised the ire of industry opponents who believe that these new products are aimed at underage drinkers. It is plausible that there’s some truth to these naysayers claims, but it’s also seriously likely that there are more adults with a tooth-achingly sweet palate than we’d care to acknowledge.

Even monks like it sweet

Flavoured spirits are not a new trend. As long as civilisation has had knowledge of distillation have we been throwing in all manner of flavourings and sweeteners to help the medicine go down. Chartreuse, a famous French liqueur made by a closed order of Carthusian monks, for example, uses 132 different herbs and spices to flavour their spirit. The monastic order’s hope was to create a ‘cure all’, but the medicine – despite all the lore and craft involved – didn’t really gain popular appeal until one crafty monk added honey to the recipe in 1764.

You see as much as we’d like to believe that the human race has evolved, advanced and become more sophisticated over the centuries, the fact remains that sugar-coating the facts, our food and, yes, even our drinks is going to help any product appeal to masses.

After hundreds of years of alchemists, the pious and scientists perfecting the distilling craft, it is heart breaking for spirit devotees to see that the marketing department’s answer to falling sales is to add flavourings synthetic or otherwise. This exasperation, however, has to come with the understanding that it is the privileged minority that have an ‘educated’ palate.

Whilst our taste for bitter, intense, complex and drier flavours develops as we get older, it is still just a handful of people in the grand scheme of things that enjoy the finer things in life – like whisky flavoured whisky for instance. And any privileged group needs to understand that that their position is only possible due to the masses.

Are you a single malt drinker? Keep in mind that single malts still make up less than 10 per cent of the entire Scotch whisky market. Without hugely profitable sales of blended Scotch and toasted marshmallow vodka, your unfiltered, cask strength, 25 year old malt would not be a viable product-line. And I wouldn’t have a job writing about booze. So here’s to flavoured spirits!

A necessary evil? An advance in tippling technology? Let me know your thoughts.