Do Canadian celebrities make good whisky?
Trailer Park Boys and Drake came out with new whiskies, so we put them to the test
What do Drake and the Trailer Park Boys have in common? They found fame on Canadian television, they drop a lot of F-bombs and they like their whisky.
The similarities likely end there and the vastly different presentations of their two new-in-Ontario spirits represent the gulf that exists between the core audience of the sensitive hip-hop superstar and the fictional trailer park trio.
Drake’s Virginia Black Decadent American Whiskey looks luxurious, with art deco styling and a golden crown cap (notably nicer than the cheap plastic cap on a bottle of Crown Royal). It resembles an oversize container of brown cologne that seems as likely to appeal to women as men. It retails for a neither cheap nor expensive $39.95.
And in this corner is a drink that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously: Liquormen’s Ol’ Dirty Canadian Whisky, the “official” spirit of the Trailer Park Boys. It’s a rye whisky distilled in Alberta and bottled in Newfoundland. The bottle is plain, but the manly labelling is appropriately fun, styled as an Old West “Wanted” poster, with a sketch of the Boys — Ricky, Bubbles and Julian — disguised as liquor-swiping bandits.
It sells for $29.95, putting it at the budget end of Canadian whisky, though it’s not the cheapest. (Wiser’s Deluxe, for instance, is $25.75, but it doesn’t have the endorsement of three famously foul-mouthed Mari- timers.) Since both drinks just became available at the LCBO — with Virginia Black breaking a single-day sales record — we couldn’t resist comparing the two. How hard could it be to tell the difference in a blind taste test? Surprisingly easy.
Without knowing too much about whisky, only one of them tastes like something Drizzy would dare attach to his brand. Virginia Black — which is not made in Virginia, as the bottle states in curiously large lettering, but in Indiana — is smooth, sweet and ever so slightly smoky. You can imag- ine the charming rapper hand-delivering it to bottle service guests at Toronto’s Sher Club or that “classy strip club” he’s expected to open next year in Houston.
Liquormen’s, on the other hand, tastes, in the words of one member of our panel, “like rubbing alcohol,” and you can’t imagine the Trailer Park Boys would feel miffed by that assessment. In fact, they could be flattered, like they’d perfected moonshine. I wouldn’t go that far, but the drink is definitely a rough ride, difficult to down without scrunching your face. The point, one imagines, is to keep drinking until you no longer feel the pain.
Not surprisingly, most of our panellists picked Virginia Black, though a couple preferred the Liquormen’s — a better blank slate to mix with Coke or ginger ale. If you want to do your own taste test, you’ll have to buy both bottles. It’s highly unlikely you’ll ever see both drinks at the same party. Drake fans and Bubbles fans: Canada’s true solitudes. Would I drink it again? If it’s in front of me and on the rocks, bottoms up.