10/01/2024 Southern Comfort

N.W. Neron's Southern Comfort Original (35%, OB, 10328624, b. ca. 2017): nose: bah! Chemically sweet. Chewy sweets from a non-recyclable plastic wrapper, new rubber, liquorice allsorts, and artificial blackcurrant flavouring. Not a good start. One can smell diabetes in this. Irn Bru, fizzy "fruit" drinks, containers of which can be found in most parks of the capital, discarded half full. It is that bad that even those who willingly buy (or steal) it do not drink it. Later, we have acrylic paint, and chewy, currant-flavoured gums, then purple jello left outside overnight, and turning hard. Every passing second makes the nose more pronounced, and more intolerable. Mouth: jello is right. Cholesterol levels going through the roof! Here are more artificial flavouring (currants, cherries), and chewy sweets, now flirting with (dodgy) cough drops. Corn syrup, industrial syrup (made with zero maple), and a distant wood bitterness. That may also be drums of paint, actually. Finish: is there any redeeming quality to this? Sickly sweet, teeming with artificial sweeteners and flavouring agents (berries, cherries, currants), this finish disappears in no time (it is still too long), leaving but a bitter after-taste. As one breathes a sigh of relief, it comes back via retro-nasal olfaction, radiating ultra-processed sugars and syrups of vulgar kinds. Only then does one realise the whole mouth is coated in jello on steroids. In the long run, herbs vaguely cling on, so submerged in fake sugar that it is hard to figure out which (wormwood, maybe). Headache in a glass. 3/10 (Thanks, ME)