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Top Ten Worst Bar Drinks

 

1. Jagermeister

Jagermeister is the most popular shot sold in America in the last 25 years. Through peer pressure and clever liquor company advertising and promotion, Jager consumers have been convinced that they love this drink which is basically made from fermented weeds. Originally designed as an after dinner drink to settle the stomach, it's an herbal digestif, similar to Fernet Branca, but sweeter, kinda like minty motor oil. In style and taste, Jager is not dissimilar to cough syrup, except pupa barflies will pay $5-$9 a shot for something you could not pay them to ingest back when they were sick kids. This medicinal smelling green liqueur from Germany is so popular with the get-hammered set, dispensing machines holding several bottles at once can be found in almost every college bar across America. Considering what this stuff tastes like, its immense popularity is stupefying.

2. Irish Car Bomb

In their quest to eradicate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, the Irish Republican Army killed both soldiers and civilians in a civil war that resulted in 10,000 deaths over a 30 year period. One of the most popular ways to send a message that Ireland should be unified back then was to blow people up in cars. What better way to celebrate these human atrocities than to name a drink after the most grotesque murderous act of war since the land mine was invented? The drink has 2 major components: the "shot" (Jameson's Irish Whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream) and the "beer" (Guinness Irish Stout). An updated Irish version of the Boilermaker, the drink is made by dropping the shot, glass and all, into a pint glass half filled with stout, and chugging down the foaming mess before it erupts out of the glass onto your shoes, to the delight of your stomach, who hadn't had so much fun since the day you chased that pack of mentos with a pepsi big gulp.

3. Lime Flavored Beer

With a metallic taste rivaled only by off-brand imitation diet peach soda, Lime infused beer saves you the trouble of adding lime juice into your beer, which I know you love to do. Actually, the only lager beer that Americans use lime in is Mexican lager beers (Corona , Tecaté, etc.), so beers like "Bud Lite Lime" and "Miller Chill" must have been created to fill the void when you are hankering for a Mexibeer and are either too lazy to squeeze a real lime, or are someplace where there are no limes for miles like Tunisia.

4. Coronitas

What's the point? So you can use a bottle opener every 3 sips? Do you think you'll drink less beer if the bottle is smaller? Did somebody raid the mini bar? And where do you find baby limes? This beer product looks like it was ordered off the kids' bar menu and makes no sense unless you only want half a beer, which never happens.

5. Black and Tan

For the indecisive drunk, blackish brown Guinness Stout is slow-poured (to the glee of busy bartenders everywhere) over the back of a special spoon to layer it above golden colored, heavier, lager beer, traditionally Harp. This creates a neat looking, 2 color drink that tastes like bitter, flat, watery beer, similar to a brewski that's been left out on the bar overnight, then chilled and re-served. Savvy beer buffs don't mind waiting the extra 5 minutes it takes to make this gimmicky drink, nor paying the same higher price as 100% uncut Guinness. Newbies discovering the beer drink for the first time almost always hold their glass up to the light in amazement to see the two layers, exclaiming, "Wow!", as if the bartender performed rocket surgery. Black and Tans are often cut with cheap lager, usually Pabst Lite or whatever off-brand the bartender can't seem to give away even on dollar pint night.

6. Red Bull Vodka

AKA Vod-Bull, Vod-Bomb, and the popular DVR, for Double Vodka Redbull. The rancidly sweet taste of berry flavored vodka together with the calming effect of riding a bike on train tracks can be yours for only $2  more than the average highball. One of the many problems with being a wide-eyed drunk is the alert sense  of confidence that you can drive everybody in the bar home despite having had 6 of these things. People who order diet-red-bull vodkas are an especially strange breed, saving 100 calories per drink in their quest for a healthier lifestyle.

7. Long Island Iced Tea

The king of all evil, nightmare-like hangovers in a glass and the worst possible tasting concoction since scotch and tomato juice. Gin, vodka, tequila, rum, orange liqueur and sweet & sour mix with a splash of Coke. Traditionally under poured and overpriced, this combination of the bar's cheapest and worst tasting products was originally called the Texas Roadrunner in the 1960s. Popularized in bars near Long Island University in the mid 1970s, the name changed to Long Island Iced Tea and subsequently became the biggest selling drink ever amongst people who want to get drunk as fast as possible, even if the drink tastes like embalming fluid. The added splash of Coke gives it enough color so that you can supposedly fool people into thinking you are sipping an innocent arnold palmer in that dive bar full of cosmo swilling lushes at 1:30 in the morning. Bartenders who have to pour this drink will often skillfully pick up all 4 well-liquor bottles at the same time between the fingers of both hands, missing both the glass and the spill-pad, drizzling the ice with booze before filling the pint glass with mostly sour mix for $12. Guys who order this drink as a poor man's ruffie often don't realize that two rounds will turn their date into a slobbering little puking machine in their car on the ride home 15 minutes after paying the bar tab.

8. Zima

Lemon-lime flavored malt liquor. Enough said.

9. Any Obscure or Outdated Drink

People who order a Harvey Wallbanger, Brandy Alexander, Sidecar, Moscow Mule, Ramos Gin Fizz or anything made with Yellow Chartreuse in any bar today deserves whatever the bartender decides to put in their glass. Bartenders generally don't like obscure or dated drinks for several reasons: they are either a pain to make, require rarely used products stored on the farthest shelves, like Galliano and flower water, or make them have to stop their rhythm to look up the recipe in a book, all while 50 people are drunkenly shouting their name for another round. Gin Fizzes requires somebody to go find a raw egg that the bartender has to separate and pull the whites from, and Brandy Alexanders will be returned if they're not garnished with nutmeg, even though Christmas was 6 months ago. After the bartender makes up most of the recipe, you will likely get a bad version of whatever you ordered, and only after the pissed off bartender makes every other drink for everyone else in the building, and then takes a smoke break.

10. The Premium Dirty Martini

It's been a quarter century since the original recipe for the martini evolved from "gin and vermouth" to "vodka with a bottle of dry vermouth waved above it like a magic wand" to "chilled, watered down vodka". Many bars don't even bother buying dry vermouth anymore, and if you ask a bartender these days if he has Cinzano, he might worry that there's some kind of Italian herpes going around. Originally, back during prohibition when booze was distilled in bathtubs and backyard stills, dry vermouth smoothed over the choke factor of first-batch raw vodka and gin to render it drinkable by humans.

In today's vodka happy society, multiple distillations have replaced dry vermouth as a way to take the edge off. Instead of distilling the popular clear hooch just once, it is re-distilled to filter the impurities that make vodka edgy. Repeating this process not only further smoothes out the product, but the time and effort involved make it much more expensive. Smirnoff is distilled 3x, Belvedere is distilled 4x, and Grey Goose from France a whopping 5 times. Slick-sounding premium-brand drinkers ordering "Dirty Martinis" will pay up to $15 a shot for a drink that has been stripped of impurities, and then mixed with a generous portion of bar olive brine containing tap water, olive juice, salt and enough human skin oil from several bartenders hands to cause a pasty white film on the inside of the olive jar.

Also, because of the mystique of Ian Fleming's fictional James Bond character ordering his Vesper martini (incorrectly) "shaken not stirred", amateur boozers fully expect to see the bartender vigorously bruising the ice in their $15 chilled vodka drink until it is tap-watered down to a weak last-call-like pour. Why? Because James Bond is cool, those little ice crystals floating in your drink are cool, and it's cool to shake any kind of food, especially cocktails. -CP

About the Author

Carlos Pineiro is a freelance writer and 38 year restaurant industry veteran from Santa Monica, CA where he lives with his wife, singer Barbara Passolt, and their beach loving poodle, Mookie Wilson.

hammered girl at the bar on her birthday