Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Margaritas don’t do much for me. It’s a bummer. I love hole in the wall Mexican restaurants. Their wave pools of frozen alcohol in various Trapper Keeper colors is always inviting. I know the fajita effect is a real thing that changes customers’ minds and alters orders, but I doubt it’s as powerful as a brief glimpse of day-glo tequila slush undulating like early-2000s special effects in a Mark Wahlberg-George Clooney-you’ll-cry-at-the-end movie.
Unfortunately, the expectation and the experience don’t line up for me. I have no soft spot in my heart for margaritas thanks to entirely too many bad memories and reactions to tequila. I’m sure I’m not the only one, so if you’re reading this and nodding just know you’re not alone. That stuff is stupid juice.
I *do* have a soft spot for Dos Equis, however. As a broke graduate student, they were a $2.50 staple at my local Flying Saucer. While buying in bottles never quite lives up to the taste of the Mexican beer fresh on tap, it’s still a regular piece of my restaurant equation if I’m at an aforementioned perpetual-motion margarita place.
This left me in a pinch when Dos Equis sent me a four-pack of their new product … a 10 percent ABV canned margarita. It’s not a malt beverage; there’s real tequila and lime in there and, oh man, this could be a quick review. Well, let’s dig in.
Dos Equis Classic Lime Margarita: B
Fortunately that lime comes through in the first sip. There’s a little boozy flavor, but nothing that burns or even suggests the 10 percent alcohol by volume. It feels more like a bigger Ranch Water than a margarita, which is a plus. It’s not quite an easy drinker — which is good, because it’s got twice the booze as a regular beer — but it’s also not hard to casually swig from.
It’s not gonna sway me over to margaritas, but for a 10 percent can it’s pretty dang good. The lime is legit, the tequila is present but not overpowering and the whole thing feels like drinking a hard seltzer on expert mode. I like it enough to keep in the fridge for other people and maybe crack one myself in the middle of a football Saturday. For a margarita, that’s heavy praise.
