Canned cocktail brands are a dime a dozen, with many coming from well-known spirit companies like Jack Daniels and Crown Royal. Dogfish Head, a creative independent beer brewery known for delicious and whimsical beers, including one made of crushed meteorites, is yet another company to jump on the canned cocktail train, and we sampled four of its canned cocktails to find the best and worst options. According to our ranking, the blood orange mango vodka crush was the absolute worst.
We based our ranking on tasting criteria like balance of flavor, cohesion, sweetness, and how refreshing the cocktail was. The blood orange mango vodka crush was way too sweet, way too artificial, and too intense to be refreshing. While citrus and mango sound like they could be a decent pairing, in the case of this canned cocktail, they were clashing adversaries. Both flavors were very intense and as far from cohesive as flavor pairings get, each one overpowering the palate. We could’ve forgiven a poor flavor pairing if the fruits tasted freshly juiced, but the glaring artificiality was almost as cloying as the sugary sweetness. As a vodka-based canned cocktail, there’s no spirit-forward flavor to mitigate the overpowering, sweet, fake fruit taste. The blood orange mango vodka crush is definitely not worth picking up if you want a refreshing, tasty canned cocktail.
Other Dogfish Head cocktails and better flavors
While we thought that Dogfish Head blood orange mango vodka crush tasted artificial and overly sweet, the company vows to use fresh juice and natural flavors. On the website, Dogfish Head describes the tasting notes as “juicy orange rid backed up with dried mango … with a lingering acidity and astringency.” Other online reviews of the vodka crush also note a lip-puckering tartness and a dry finish. Dried mango and citrus rind do present much stronger flavors than orange or mango juice. Unfortunately, we found the tasting notes to be an intense battle of flavors that resulted in a stalemate.
Citrus was a common theme in all of the Dogfish Head canned cocktails we sampled, so we found a much better pairing for the brightness of citrus in our top pick: blueberry citrus vodka lemon drop. We also liked the strawberry lemonade flavor. If you’re set on an orange citrus flavor, Dogfish Head also offers a rum mai tai canned cocktail with pineapple and orange, a well-known tropical and citrus pairing offered by most major juice brands like Dole, Welch’s, and Tropicana.
