We’ve seen slightly unusual flavours of vodka before: caramel, popcorn and chilli vodka are almost commonplace when you’re shopping for a ‘quirky’ gift online at 2AM. But electricity-flavoured vodka? That can’t possibly be good.
Like any quality review, the tech specs come first. The bottle is a little smaller than your average vodka-carrier, coming in at 500ml. The bottle is, as you’d expect, made of glass, with no chamfered edges or machined aluminium lids – although, that’s probably to be expected given the £12.50 asking price. It’s worth noting that it’s labeled as ‘electricity spirit’, not vodka, probably for some dubious reasons to do with health and safety. The liquid is also an unhealthy shade of blue, but not in a WKD-alcopops kind of way, more of a ‘this looks like it might be the runoff from a nuclear reactor’.
In any case, you don’t buy vodka to sit on your shelf. You like it because you hate the real world, and because getting drunk in Guildford on a weekday evening is the act of a responsible adult.
1701: Drinking begins
It’s after 5PM on a Friday evening, and of course, this means it’s now 100% socially acceptable to sit down with two shot glasses, a bottle of electricity-flavoured vodka, and drink ourselves into oblivion. So that’s what we start doing. (Note: the ‘ourselves’ here is me and my long-suffering girlfriend, who was cajoled into this with the somewhat dubious bribe that I’d make her cocktails.)
1703: Tasting notes
I know wine tasters like describing alcoholic drinks with a laundry-list of tenuous adjectives like ‘bold’ and ‘robust’ and ‘slightly carpety’, but there’s only one way to describe electricity-flavoured Oddka: like licking steel wool. Yes, I do know what steel wool tastes like, and yes, my childhood did involve a number of impromptu trips to A&E.
1710: Vodka Roulette
Having now downed about three shots each, we’ve decided that drinking straight Oddka is about as pleasant as doing shots of any spirit: namely, not at all. So, to try and make things more interesting, we’ve busted out ‘Vodka roulette’, which is like drinking normal vodka shots, only there are six of them: one Grey Goose (almost drinkable), four Sainsbury’s Basics, and one Oddka. You then roll a dice to see which shot you get. (Side note: there’s probably room here for an app that automates this whole process, but then takes embarrassing photos and shares them to your Facebook timeline for you free of charge.)
After one complete round of Vodka Roulette, we’re both about six shots down in the space of 20 minutes, and only slightly gagging from the taste of Oddka. This sparks another hypothetical question that needs testing: if you were given a bottle of Oddka as a present, could you manage to hide the taste well enough in other drinks to be able to finish an entire bottle?
1743: Cocktail Time
Because I had no say in the matter (and, because it was the only cocktail that I could a) make, and b) had the limited ingredients for), we decided to try a blind taste-test between an Oddka Cosmo, and a Smirnoff Cosmo. In case you’re not familiar with how to make a Cosmo, steps are as follows:
• Chuck a couple ice cubes in a cocktail shaker
• Add a shot of vodka, or Oddka if you’re the kind of deranged masochist who enjoys licking twelve-volt batteries.
• Add half a shot or so of Cointreau, or Triple Sec, or Drambuie, or whatever bottle the corner-shop man shoves into your hands when you drunkenly ask him for orange liqueur.
• Add a shot or two of cranberry juice, and maybe some ninja shit like squeezing a lime if you’re into that.
• Put the top on and shake the hell out of it
• Swear as the cocktail shaker explodes, leaving most of your kitchen covered in a faintly electricity-flavoured pink goop.
• Once we finally got two Cosmos in glasses, we discovered there’s a definite difference in taste, but Oddka-flavoured drinks aren’t too bad. In part, that might be because the Oddka’s sweet flavour combines well with the bitteness of the lime, or the subtle undertones of the cranberry blend to give a refined aftertaste; or, it might be because I was by this point • approaching that stage of drunkenness when you think a kebab might somehow be a good idea.
1820-ish: A Blur
I’d love to try and explain how the rest of the night went, but my ‘tasting notes’ at this point start to turn a bit weird. They’re faithfully reproduced below.
Conclusions:
My alcohol tolerance has slipped a bit
I need to invest in a new, more water-tight cocktail shaker
Rocking up to McDonald’s, already cling-onto-the-handrails-for-dear-life drunk, at about 9PM will get you some weird looks.
Oddka does not taste like electricity. Oddka tastes more or less what I imagine would happen if you diluted a bit of battery-acid in a bottle of Smirnoff. Don’t buy it.
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