So I bought a bottle of Danzka vodka a while back. I can't actually remember when or where, but it's been sitting in my freezer unopened for quite a long time. Tonight, having recently finished off my mead and some lovely port, we decided to open the Danzka.
Then we wished we hadn't.
It's quite a harsh vodka with an unpleasant burn, and patently needs to be run through a charcoal filter a good half-dozen times, but that's not what perplexes me. I've drunk harsh vodkas before, and the technique for all of them remains the same – swallow, don't sip.
What perplexes me is that it has a really strange taste. It is, theoretically, not a flavoured vodka but instead is a '100% grain neutral spirit'. But it definitely has a taste. It's almost a grassy taste, but it's not at all like Zubrowka, or Bison Grass vodka, which has a delightful summery grassy taste which comes, oddly enough, from the bison grass used to make it. No, this is more like fermented lawn clippings.
Yet even so, that's not the right description. There's something vanilla-y about it as well, something akin not to the yellow vanilla ice-cream of my youth, but of the high-end expensive vanilla-pod hand-made ice cream that you have to take a mortgage out to afford a small tub of.
Yet it's not really vanilla either. I'm not sure what it is. The taste itself is quite nice, or it would be if the vodka wasn't so prickly. But the undertones are a little bitter and the aftertaste moreso. I'm left with a slight impression of mouthwash which is not really all that nice.
So I find myself in the worst of both worlds – sipping the damn stuff, because I am trying to figure out the taste, but I really should be swallowing it to avoid too much of it hitting my taste buds.
Where's that charcoal filter?
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