a crappy review

I hate articles that insist on telling you their entire life story before they get to the point, so here’s the point.

NIO Cocktails are dumb.

Now if you are interested in how I came to that hard won conclusion here’s the whole crappy story.

I must have been talking about cocktails, photographing cocktails, or thinking about cocktails. I was almost certainly drinking cocktails.

Whatever I was doing, it was something that Instagram tapped into and decided to flood my feed with… cocktails

How to make cocktails. Where to drink. Things that go wrong when drinking and of course ads for what to drink.

Enter NIO cocktails.

I am a sucker for good packaging.

NIO has a great look. Luca and Alessandro were thinking outside of the box when they decided to put the cocktail IN a box. I had read… or heard in a review that NIO was owned by Diageo, but I can’t find proof of that, and I’m not interested enough to rewatch the reviews to find it. After finding ad after ad for the product I decided to look into it a little more closely.

This is why I’m writing my crappy review. After looking for honest reviews of NIO I found that, I could find none. It seemed like every review I came across was paid for or sponsored by NIO. So I plunked down MY OWN MONEY to buy and try NIO.

They use decent booze in their cocktails, so good on them for that. The Vodka sour uses Ketel One.

Now here’s the first reason this is a dumb product.

I paid $65.34 for 6, yes six cocktails. OK fine. It’s an experiment to see what they are like so I can handle that. It isn’t the first time I paid over $10 for a cocktail and won’t be the last. Generally speaking, I pay that much for a drink when I’m in an airport at 8 am or at a restaurant or a concert, not when I’m sitting in my kitchen.

I got out a tumbler and filled it with ice. I then tore the corner off of my vodka sour and poured it over the ice. When it stopped coming out I thought ‘that’s weird’, and I shook the box, then I squeezed the box, then I peered through the little port hole into the package that held my ten dollar and eighty nine cent cocktail.

This is a standard tumbler. It is not a giant glass. It has a lot of ice in it. To more clearly explain my point I made this quality illustrated image.

It was then I realized I had been screwed by the metric system; just like NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. I looked at the box 100 ML. Ok how much is an ML? It’s between 0 and not a full glass.

Mind you this is not 100 ML of booze. It’s a complete cocktail.

So it’s a miniature barbie sized cocktail wrapped in a cool expensive box. I like packaging… but not that much.

So? How’s it taste? So far I’ve tried 3 of them.

Vodka sour. I liked it and finished it.
Gin sour. Tasted it. Then let it sit mocking me with its 100 ML of pomposity. Once the ice melted I dumped it.
Milano Torino. I wanted to like it, tried amending it with soda water, dumped it.

I don’t know that I’ll even try the others. They may be a better conversation piece than a cocktail.

So now I am poorer but wiser.

/crappy review