Her work has appeared in Food & Wine, Eating Well, The Wall Street Journal, SevenFifty Daily, VinePair, Wine Enthusiast, Travel & Leisure, and more.Our 15 Best Baked Chicken Wing Recipes of All Time Are Why Napkins Were Invented Chicken wings are a real crowd-pleaser. Humboldt’s Finest, for instance, has more of an herbaceous, gin-like flavor, and the Ketel One Botanicals line is quite subtle, melding garden freshness with just a touch of sweetness.īetsy Andrews is a freelance journalist specializing in food and drink, travel, and the environment, and has been writing about wine and spirits for two decades. Vodka by nature is a neutral spirit but some flavored vodkas-salted caramel, peanut butter and jelly-are intentionally quite sweet. But some flavored vodkas, particularly the new “botanical” category of vodkas infused with natural botanicals, are more gentle in their alcohol content.

But you can sure find that flavor in vodka.ĭo flavored vodkas have the same alcohol content?įlavored vodkas do not all have the same alcohol content. You’d never, for instance, see a marshmallow-flavored gin. Flavored vodkas, on the other hand, can be made with any type of flavorings, both natural and artificial. The hallmark of gin-indeed, the thing that makes it gin-is an infusion of fragrant, herbaceous juniper berries. What's the difference between flavored vodka and gin? Winter wheat, rye, corn, and potato are most common.

But the vast majority of vodkas are distilled from starches. There are vodkas made with milk, blueberries, and maple syrup as their bases. Vodka can basically be made from any ingredient with the sugar in it for yeast to ferment into alcohol. Vodkas that are too intense, such as a chile vodka that blows your head off, or too cloying are difficult to blend into cocktails, as they wallop the rest of the ingredients. Let’s face it: The vast majority of flavored vodkas are destined for cocktails. You’re looking for smoothness and cleanliness, which means it’s been distilled plenty of times, and the cut from the still has been carefully selected so that no off flavors end up in the bottle.

The last thing you want in a flavored vodka is an ethanol burn at the end. Vodkas like Finlandia Cranberry use locally sourced berries and pure glacial water to provide that natural fruit flavor. Some flavored vodkas don’t quite taste like what they’re peddling. If you like your vodkas on the fruitier side, go for something like Finlandia Cranberry (view it on ), but if spice is nice in your opinion, you can’t go wrong with Hanson of Sonoma Habanero (check it out on ). Here are some of the best flavored vodkas to try today. 'There are some beautiful flavored ones, and they’re just more colors on my palette of ingredients to use in cocktail preparation.”įor Slava Borisov, bartender at Travelle at The Langham hotel in Chicago, the key to using flavored vodka as a base spirit is “adding other ingredients that specifically highlight the vodka's main flavor”-for instance, a chile-flavored vodka to lay down the spice in a Bloody Mary, or a berry-infused vodka to boost the cranberry juice in a Sea Breeze. “It is nice to see smaller artisanal distillers bringing in vodkas that have character,' says Abou-Ganim. But times have changed, and flavored vodkas today are as well-crafted as any other spirit. Vodka has gotten a bad rap partly due to the outlandish, oftentimes poorly made flavored versions that flooded the market decades ago.

“I’ve had 40 years working in the bar business, and one of the reasons I became an advocate of the spirit is that the backlash was hard to swallow,” he says. Tony Abou-Ganim, renowned bartender and author of ' Vodka Distilled,' has no patience for people’s dislike of vodka, let alone flavored varieties.

Flavoured nice shot