Bryan wrote:
>
> Pricier than Sheldon's Crystal Palace, the stuff is called Boru, and
> it was on sale for $8.97/750ml. I'm certainly no conno-sewer of
> vodka, but <$12 vodkas always have an off taste. This was more along
> the lines of Svedka, SKYY, Absolut, or 3 Olives, but at a far cheaper
> price. It's on sale for a few more days, so I'm going to get some
> more.

Back in the days I lived in the college dorms about 1976-7 before the
fall of the Berlin wall we tried a blind taste testing of vodkas. This
was done by college students not training specialists but I'm never
going to be a trained specialist when it comes to vodka so the results
were good enough for my purposes.

We tried 3 top shelf vodkas. Absolute, Finlandia and Stoli straight
from the Soviet Union with the label in Cyrillic. I didn't know of any
other top shelf brands at the time. We tried 3 discount brands Popov,
Kamchatka and a discount version of Smirnoff. We put all of the bottles
in the freezer over night and marked rows of shot glasses with letters.
Someone filled the shot glasses randomly in a room out of site. It
turned out no one could identify any of the top shelf vodkas by brand,
no one could tell the discount vodkas by brand and only half could tell
the top shelf ones from the discount ones.

My conclusion - If you find a top shelf quality vodka on sale for the
price of a discount brand buy it on the spot. Pour it into an empty
Absolute bottle. Keep it in the freezer. Chances are no one will be
able to tell it's not Absolute. As long as you could tell it was top
shelf quality that's all that will be needed for the vast majority of
the population.

> Eleven days until no more beer, and I'm using up odds and
> ends right now, not planning on buying more, except for one box of
> good beer to say goodbye to my favorite carby adult beverage.

You know they make zero carb beer, right? It comes in concentrated
form. Just add water to return it to normal beer strength. Like all
substitutes it's not really the same as the original but I know plenty
of people who have developed a taste for the zero carb form of beer.
It's called whiskey!