I remember back in the day – circa 1999 – when putting Jolly Ranchers in Zima was all the rage. I also remember that putting a Jolly Rancher in a Zima was so completely gay that even Barbara-Streisand-ticket-holding-cakeboys didn’t even do it. Jolly Ranchers Y Zima were for the future Real Houswives of Whatever County audience and the fat-guy-in-a-skinny-guy-shirt-metrosexuals that would marry them.

Fireball Whisky is what I would have drank back in the day – circa 1999 – had I possessed the Nostrodomian-like foresight and intuition to put a crushed-up Atomic Fireball in a glass of Whisky.

A few days ago a made a stop by my local parasite liquor store (That’s a liquor store owned by a grocery store but with a separate entrance so the Bible-thumping grocery store owners can save face) to pick up some staples when at the checkout I came across an auspicious sample display with little 50ml bottles of Fireball Whisky spilling out of the bottom.

At first, while I swiped my debit card and paid for the Fris Vodka I had come for, I thought, “That’s pretty cool.” But then, when the clerk asked me if there was anything else I needed, I picked up one of the little bottles and said, “What’s this?”

“They say it tastes like like a fireball. You know? The ones like when you we’re a kid,” Replied the clerk.

I bought 10 at $1 each.

I was giddy, and like a high school girl with a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, as soon as I got to my car I cracked one open and slammed it. At first I held my breath, but as soon as I exhaled I felt like running balls-out-naked across a playground while hysterically laughing and screaming MY MOUTH IS ON FIIIAAARRRR!!! I was a 5-year-old with the most awesome candy known to man. Candy that would get me drunk.

I shit you not. This stuff tastes just like you just ground up an Atomic Fireball with a set of robot teeth and chased it with a shot of Wild Turkey. Absolutely amazing. Gave some to my dad – loved it. Gave a shot to my mom – loved it. Wife – loved it. You get the idea. I have yet to find a single person who doesn’t like Fireball Whisky. But the looming question remained – would it mix?

Fireball Whiskey and Coke – Tastes like drinking a Coke with an Atomic Fireball in your mouth.

Fireball Whiskey and Sprite – Tastes like drinking a sprite with an Atomic Fireball in your mouth.

Fireball Whiskey and Orange juice – Tastes like drinking OJ with an Atomic Fireball in your mouth.

You get the idea.

I’ve gotten pretty buzzed off this stuff but not drunk or hammered yet because honestly 6 or 7 strait, room temperature shots of Fireball Whisky is all you can take in a short period before your throat feels like it’s been turned inside-out and dragged down a road made out of 1,000 cheese graters. But a good kind of road made of cheese graters:)

After falling in love with this stuff I decided to take a walk over to their website and see what the company was all about. The gist of it is that this type of Whisky was invented by some lonely, bored and snowed-in Canadians in the mid-80′s as a cure for frost bite or some shit like that. Either way, I dig the owner Richard’s style as much as his product. Fireball can now be bought in Canada, the United States and England, and is also available in Israel, Norway, Sweden and Finland. I bought a 750ml for about $14.

I also found some good recipes on the site too.

If someone offered you $10,000 if you could crash 100 parties in 100 days from Memorial Day to Labor Day, could you do it?

This is the exact proposition that Function Party Crasher, Willie, was offered and is currently attempting in his quest to prove that Function Drink’s Urban Detox is indeed the drinking man’s liquid hangover cure of choice.

And while I’m not one for crashing parties on a nightly basis, I do like to get the party started on weekends. Currently my hangover cure of choice is drinkwel vitamin supplements, a lemon-lime Gatorade and a solid amount of sleep. But when it comes to maintaining the drinking lifestyle, one can never be too prepared when it comes to hangover prevention.

I decided to see if Urban Detox could replace Gatorade as my post drinking, drink of choice—not so much as a hangover cure or preventative—but more so as a healthy alternative to a beer only diet. Because let’s be real. Just because something has antioxidants, doesn’t mean that it’s going to cancel out those 6 beers, 4 patron shots and 2 four lokos you downed the night before. It’s just not.

So with that in mind, I gave Function’s Urban Detox Goji Berry and Citrus Prickly Pear a try. Prickly pear is one of the key hangover cure ingredients according to the label on the bottle. Apparently it helps with those pounding hangover headaches you feel the next day. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that the Citrus Prickly Pear flavor was delicious. It’s lighter tasting (see: less syrupy) than Gatorade, and better tasting than G2 in my opinion. And while I can’t accurately vouch for it’s hangover curing abilities just yet, I can say that Function is a great alternative to the sugary Vitamin waters, Gatorades and other “healthy” drinks available out there. And if Function Party Crasher Willie makes it to all 100 of those parties, I’d say that’s a pretty bold statement in and of itself.

Give it a try and leave a comment with your thoughts…

Since the very beginning, The Drunk Pirate has been dedicated to the drinking lifestyle.

Beer, liquor, malt beverages, drinking games—pretty much anything that gets you crunk. But there’s always been a not so glamorous side to the drinking lifestyle. It’s a side we’ve all encountered but love to forget. We call them hangovers, and they’re a fact of life. Like your ex-girlfriend getting knocked up by some toolbag after you break up, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen, it’s a matter of damage control.

For this reason, we’ve come to accept hangovers, much like we’ve come to accept little Toolbag Jr. when we inevitably get back together with the ex-girlfriend. Sure we all develop our own little rituals to deal with hangovers. We’ve even covered some of our favorites in a previous hangover posts. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop searching for something better.

Enter drinkwel, the multivitamin for healthy people that drink.

The concept seemed simple enough. A specially formulated alcohol nutrition supplement that provides short-term relief and long-term support against the negative effects of alcohol. Bold words for what sounds like a hyped up multi-vitamin. But with a money-back, feel healthier guarantee, it was worth a shot.

The instructions said to take 3 capsules daily with food and water, and to take 3 additional capsules with water before bed if drinking. This seemed like a hell of a lot of capsules to me, so I bent the rules a bit. On Monday, after a particularly long day in the office, I started my routine of 2 capsules a day to get prepared for the weekend. By Friday, it appeared the placebo effect was in full swing as I had convinced myself that I had more energy than usual. It was time for a reality check and to see what this drinkwel stuff was all about. I had to be up early on Saturday to meet a friend for some kayaking. So that Friday I drank myself under the table and skipped my usual 4th meal in favor of three drinkwel capsules and a lemon-lime Gatorade. Six hours later, I was kicked back in a bright yellow two-seater kayak drinking a Four Loko, feeling like a champ. By all accounts it appeared drinkwel had done its job.

But even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once and a while. To really push it to the limit, I made sure to hit all my favorite drinking holes that night for a second round of testing. The next morning, after a full night’s rest I was still feeling like a champ. Now I don’t know if a couple days of heavy drinking are enough to hand over the hangover cure title to drinkwel, but with each passing hangover-free weekend, it’s getting harder to deny the apparent health effects of drinkwel when applied to the drinking lifestyle.

If interested, check out their site at drinkwel.com

For most of my life I’ve been able to maintain a relatively good physique by eating and drinking whatever I wanted just as long as I made a concerted effort to go to the gym at least twice a week. Most of my life.

As my early twenties became my late twenties, I began to notice I was buying my pants and shorts on different racks than before. 32′s gave way to 34′s and by the time I was 30 I was in a 36″ waist. WTF? I hadn’t changed the way I did anything in more than 10 years.

Several months ago – at nearly 32-years-old -  I had what most alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. My body was changing the way it processed everything I put into it as my metabolism began to slow. It had also begun to view my half-hearted attempts in the gym with a  general malaise matched only by Stephen Hawking if he were to watch a 5th-grade algebra lecture.

It was time for me to take care of myself and get back into shape.

I started by cutting out a lot of processed foods and soda. Gone were the sour cream and chive Lays potato chips and in were the 100 percent corn Santitas. I even went so far as buying a calf and feeding it organic grain until it was nearly 700lbs. After butchering I had 400 lbs of lean, organic beef that cost me less than $.99 lb when it was all said and done. I was living the healthy lifestyle.

Between mountain biking on the awesome trails behind my house, going to the gym twice a week and changing my eating habits, I went from 215 lbs of out of shape 31-year-old to a 205 lb 31-year-old in moderate shape. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t look good naked like Brad Pitt or anything, but it was a vast improvement. But I felt great, and was stronger than I had ever been.

The problem was that I kept hovering around that 205 lb mark. I did have the foresight to check my body fat percentage before and after and found that it had actually gone down several percentage points. But nonetheless i still had a bit of a gut and some very manly love handles.

What the hell? I was exercising, eating better and drinking almost a gallon of water a day but still looked like I was a lazy bum. Then it hit me. My Achilles heel was indeed my favorite past time…Drinking.

The numbers don’t lie.

I sat down with a calculator and figured out that during any given week I was consuming an extra 10,000+ calories in liquid form. Trust me, its not hard to do. If you buy a 1.75L of Platinum 7x Vodka and enough 120 calorie per serving Simply Orange orange juice to mix with it and polish both off over the course of 7 days, you’ve essentially consumed an extra 5 days of calories. Here’s a handy little calorie chart if you don’t believe me.

Now I’m not saying I drank a 1.75L of liquor every week. Some weeks I just drank beer. (Don’t get me started on how Steel Reserve has 225+ calories per 12oz) And some weeks I didn’t drink much at all. I just wanted to illustrate how drinking on a regular basis can lay waste to the best laid plans of living a healthy lifestyle. Specifically drinking liquor with any type of mixer.

With this new knowledge in hand I knew it was time to make some changes to my drinking habits. It was time to trim the fat. I decided I would cut out those fattening, sugary and calorie laden mixers like orange juice and coke and start drinking my liquor straight.

I knew this was a firm decision. A decision similar to the one the first guy who had sex with a monkey and contacted AIDS made, and would take some conviction on my part. It takes one of two things to be able to drink straight liquor on a regular basis. Either a fat wallet to be able to afford the finer spirits that were meant to be enjoyed all on their own, or a strong will with an equally strong gut to be able to tolerate the alcohol I could actually afford. Did I mention this gig doesn’t pay that well?

I eventually ventured into Spring Hill Liquors to see if I could catch something on one of their famous half-off discounts when I happened upon the Scotch section of the store. It was at that precise moment I remembered a cheap Scotch called Speyburn, that years ago, I had drank on a regular basis.

I remembered it was something like $13 the last time I had it. Unfortunately, by this time Speyburn had obviously developed a following and was now selling in the mid $30 and up range. Then on the second shelf from the bottom, right above the generics I saw a sign that read “John Barr Blended Scotch Whiskey, Reg. $17.99 Now $10,99!” We have a winner.

I scooped up my bargain find, paid the man and headed home.

John Barr is another great example that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get good booze. I would take the Pepsi challenge with just about any scotch on the market with the exception of the ultra smooth scotches like Johnny Walker Black. It’s great by itself over ice or with just a splash of water to tone it down. It’s nice and sweet and I’ve never gotten a headache of any kind while drinking it.

The funny thing about drinking scotch is that not only am I cutting out calories by not using mixers, I’m actually cutting calories because I just don’t drink as much as I would if it were say, Jack and Coke.

I stuck with the John Barr for quite a while and it was the boost I needed. I dropped into the 198-200 lb range and can actually wear some clothes I haven’t been able to wear in a while. I still throw in other liquors and beer for the sake of having things to write about, but I can say that John Barr Blended Scotch Whiskey is definitely worth trying if you’re looking to shed a few pounds without giving up one of your favorite past times. Plus it will probably offset all the food you’re going to eat this holiday season.

A few months ago my buddy Jeremy and I made it a mission to find a bar we could call our own. We’re both graduates of the University of Florida and if there’s one thing college taught us, it’s having a place to knock a few cold ones back on Friday night is a requirement. By the way, Jeremy is the one who introduced The Drunk Pirate to Firefly vodka for all you fans out there. But I digress.

If you’ve read my Top 15 Ways to Save Money When Going Out, then you know that finding and building a solid relationship with your bartender is the key to strong drinks and prompt service all night. Well, following my guidelines we have indeed solidified ourselves as regulars and now enjoy some of the strongest, longest lasting drinks at the bar thanks to our two oh-so-favorite bartenders Matt and Meredith. Our recent accomplishment has convinced me that people need to know more about the people that put the happy in happy hour. Here are some answers to frequently asked bartender questions.

What tricks do bartenders use to cheat lousy customers?

Auto-gratuity – Many under-appreciated bartenders will turn to the auto-grat button on the cash register to ease the pain of dealing with an especially annoying customer. By automatically charging them gratuity, knowing they’ll be too drunk to notice when they go to pay, the bartender can usually guarantee a respectable tip from even the stingiest jackass.

A$$hole Tax – Run your mouth too much and that $10 Long Island might go up a dollar or five as the night wears on. Knowing that you have no idea how much a drink costs anyway, the bartender overprices the drink and pockets the difference.

Watered Down Drinks – The easiest way for a bartender to own a lousy customer is to make sure the H20 content of his or her drink is kept sufficiently high—ensuring that his or her fun level stays sufficiently low.

Oops All Gone – Sorry, all we had left was Patron—that’ll be your first born son please.

What’s a bartender’s least favorite type of customer?

1. People who snap their fingers – Nothing says please ignore me, I’m a jackass and will likely be a stingy, whiny, pompous jerk when you finally do come over here like someone snapping their fingers.

2. The guy at the bar who thinks he’s the only one who needs a drink – There’s 25 people all waiting to get a drink and all this guy can do is keep yelling out “I need a drink down here!”

3. People who order Amstel Light – You can’t be serious.

4. The guy who orders one drink followed by 6 waters and a napkin – There are people climbing on the ceiling to get another drink and then there’s this guy taking up two seats at the bar—one for himself, the other for all his damn napkins and water glasses.

5. People who don’t have the money ready. – It’s like showing up to a sorority formal without an industrial-size box of condoms—mistakes will be made and consequences will follow.

6. Whiny girls who order twenty cosmos and tip a dollar. – Sorry sweetie. Not even your boyfriend is willing to put up with that kind of treatment without a little payment.

Drinks that will get you laughed at:

1. Fuzzy Navel – Unless you’re a 17-year-old girl with a fake ID, that’s just embarrassing (The Drunk Pirate does not support underage drinking, because that’s just less alcohol for us).

2. Buttery Nipple – Repeat after me. “Just because it sounds funny doesn’t mean you should order it.” This rule also applies to Jägerbombs.

3. Michelob Ultra – Save your dignity and just a order a water with extra lemon—pansy.

4. Sex on the Beach – Like the act it’s named after, this drink is only a good idea in theory.

5. Red Head Slut – As if the name wasn’t warning enough.

6. Anything Blue – Do you really want to start down this path?

7. Anything Pink – The only people I should see carrying around a pink drink are sorority girls and Care bears. And if I’m seeing Care bears, then I had waay too much blue in my drink to begin with.

8. Anything that takes more than 30 seconds to make – Anything taking longer than 30 seconds to make and the bartender is just making shit up as he goes.

What’s the best way to get your bartender’s attention?

1. Call their name – Not to be confused with calling them a name.

2. Smile and make eye contact – Unless you’re a single guy over 50—then you’re just going to creep everyone out.

3. Look sad and in desperate need of a drink – Good alternative to the smile and make eye contact for the single and over 50 crowd.

4. Hold up some dollar dollar bills – The key here is more than one.

James also wanted me to make a note for all our fans out there that this is post number 100. So if you haven’t read the 99 posts before this one, well then get on it, because at this rate it’ll be another 3 years before we make it through the next 100.

I’ve tasted the watermelon-flavored Four Loko and it tasted almost completely, but not entirely unlike pink battery acid. The Four Loko orange blend however, tastes a little more like a reputable street cleaner worth spending your money on.

It’s a little lighter with not so much of the bite as its pink whore of a sister counterpart. It actually tastes a lot like Sunkist with some vodka or 151 mixed in it. Which is great if you’re into that kind of internal S&M liver-destroying thing.

But seriously, the overall taste was more than tolerable and the effect of the 12 percent alcohol content on my writing ability was more than negligible on the positive side. In case you’re as drunk as me that means it made me a more suave and debonair writer for at least an hour or two.

I do however have one gripe…2.99? Are you serious?! This stuff should be no more than $1.99 . Granted one or two cans will get you housed but it isn’t like a pill that’s had $300 million spent on marketing on it. I don’t know. Maybe if it were a Friday night and I had a few of these in me I might think differently. But It’s not and I don’t. So $2.99 is too much for this flavor of Four Loko. Youd probably be better off buying a 1.75 of Popov Vodka for $6.99 vodka and 3 liter of warm orange soda from the Quickee Mart for $.99. Basically the same thing.

Some of the greatest food and beverage discoveries were born out of either necessity or just good old fashioned curiosity. I mean seriously, who was the first guy to eat an oyster? Was it out of necessity to avoid starvation that he decided to eat the giant snot-like creature he found living in a rock he found growing in the mud of a coastal saltwater marsh, or was it a decision born of blatant human curiosity to see if he could eat the same stuff the otters were eating?

Either way, people have been eating, drinking and mixing things – that arguably should or should not go together – since the beginning of time.

That being said, one of my favorite things in the world is a good black and tan. You may recall another post I did some time ago, where out of necessity, I mixed together Natty Light and Steel Reserve to create what I called The Poor Man’s Black and Tan. Yes the original PMBT was created out of necessity due in part that I had been drinking and couldn’t drive myself to the store to retrieve the materials for a proper Black and Tan.

The newest iteration of the PMBT however, was the culmination of centuries of the aforementioned human curiosity. In other words I had some Steel Reserve and a bottle of Yuengling Black and Tan and I wanted to see what would happen if I mixed the two.

As I reached in my freezer I opted not for my usual vintage A&W Dog n Suds mug, but rather for my 32 oz Cheers mug I stole from the Cheers bar in the Cincinnati airport on my honeymoon.

Assuming the Yuengling was the heaviest of the two, I poured it in first. I tried my best to use a big wooden spoon to marry the two in such a fashion as to render a distinct line of separation but now in retrospect think that a nice metal spoon would have been a better choice since the coarse wood caused more mixing by the roughly flowing beer than it prevented.

Once both bottle and can had been emptied, what I was left with almost completely but not entirely resembled a genuine black and tan. There was a separation between the two which obviously could have been made more apparent with a little more patience and the proper equipment (as stated earlier) and there was a nice head of foam.

I was amazed at the utter beauty of the cross-bred brew I had created but didn’t expect what came next.

It tasted AMAZING!

I’m not kidding. The Steel Reserve lightened the Yuengling Black and Tan up while the Yuengling B&T took away the bitterness and overall skunkiness of the Steel Reserve. I even tested it on my wife before telling her what it was and she said she really liked it. And as with any Steel Reserve creation it pack enough punch that after two I even thought Dane Cook was funny.

I can say with all honesty that I’ll be drinking this version of the Poor Man’s Black and Tan on a regular basis. Try it for yourself and tell me what you think. If you can actually get it to separate nicely, take a picture and send it in and I’ll post it on the site.

I’m going to assume since none of these people look like they know each other that these 40 photos were taken on 40 different nights hence the name, 40 Nights of Drunk.

And yes I know there are some pictures taken in the daytime. Work with me here. Or at least send me in your drunk pictures to james@thedrunkpirate.com. I might send you some free stuff.

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I’m pretty sure that this is a first for the alcohol industry. An infused, infused vodka. I don’t even know the proper way to write that. Is it infused-infused vodka?

although I usually leave the flavored vodkas to the sorority girls, my instincts told me I needed to try the new Firefly flavors in the name of The South, journalism and science.

Would it be a complete abomination like all the other flavor infused vodkas? Would it tarnish the reputation of a brand destined for greatness? Or would it be the proverbial icing on the cake?

Firefly released four flavors. Raspberry (which until now I never realized there was a P in raspberry), Mint, Lemon and Peach. First up to bat was the raspberry.

The first thing I found was there’s really no discernible raspberry smell to the vodka. Now I knew from experience original Firefly wasn’t really a vodka to drink straight. It’s kind of like drinking a shot of actual sweet tea before you add water and sugar to dilute it. This version was no different. The strong undiluted tea flavor was to overpowering for me to make out even the slightest nuance of raspberries.

I decided to try adding some water but it just didn’t seem to do the trick like with regular firefly. I then decided it was time to go Spiked Arnold Palmer on its ass and mixed it half and half with some Simply Orange Lemonade.

Jackpot.

The taste hearkened me back to my days at Applebee’s when the raspberry tea flowed like wine when northerners who flocked to Disneyland like the salmon of Capistrano ordered it by the gallons.

It tasted as good, if not better, than the original Firefly Spiked Arnold Palmer. The thing is the raspberry isn’t overpowering. The fact that this is sweet tea vodka still takes center stage in the taste. The raspberry comes into play more in the aftertaste than anything else. The one thing I wish I would have tried was making a Daily Palmer.

It’s like your drinking it and thinking, “Man this is good sweet tea,” then after you swallow and exhale you get just a hint of the raspberry that almost seems to cleanse your palette for the next sip.

The funny thing is this flavored vodka makes a great digestif. Which for those of you who are drunk means, ” Is a great after dinner drink.” The first night I tried it was after I had a great grilled rib eye and was full as a tick. This is actually one of the few liquors that are good to drink on these hot and humid Florida nights.

The Verdict

Unlike all the other infused vodkas, Firefly Raspberry definitely has a place in my collection. Since my first taste I’ve spent several afternoons on my back porch watching the sun settle behind the trees while drinking Raspberry Firefly Vodka. Firefly also has a pretty cool new site that you can check out to get stuff like recipes and cool gear.