{"id":7287,"date":"2017-05-10T01:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T07:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=7287"},"modified":"2017-05-10T01:04:45","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T07:04:45","slug":"sudden-discomfort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/sudden-discomfort\/","title":{"rendered":"Sudden Discomfort"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe you remember that unflattering nickname for Southern Comfort, the booze of wayward and misinformed youth.\u00a0 Or maybe you’ve tried to forget that SoCo ever existed.\u00a0 It’s still around, but SoCo hasn’t been popular outside of frat houses for a long time.\u00a0 Now under new ownership<\/a>, the fruity liqueur is scheduled for a relaunch in July — this time with actual whiskey<\/a> as a key ingredient.<\/p>\n

SoCo used to be whiskey-based, back when it first started out in the 1800s.\u00a0 It was rotgut whiskey, cooked up in frontier outposts and shipped down the Mississippi River.\u00a0 In 1874, a New Orleans saloon keeper named Martin Heron got the idea to spice up the swill he was receiving to make it taste like cognac<\/a>, the preferred tipple of his Frenchified customers.<\/p>\n

Whatever Heron was adding to the whiskey (SoCo’s exact ingredients are top secret) it was good enough to keep him in business.\u00a0 Southern Comfort, as the recipe came to be called, passed through the hands of multiple owners and re-emerged after Prohibition.\u00a0 It got a lot of mileage out of claiming to be the “Grand Old Drink of the South,” and there was a movie tie-in to the release of Gone With the Wind<\/em>, a SoCo-based cocktail called The Scarlett O’Hara<\/a>.<\/p>\n

SoCo’s heyday was the 1960s when Janis Joplin adopted it as her booze of choice (once famously beating Jim Morrison over the head<\/a> with a SoCo empty) and her fans followed suit.\u00a0 But Joplin died in 1970, and then SoCo sold out to booze conglomerate Brown-Forman.\u00a0 Somewhere down the line, whatever whiskey was still left in the SoCo formula was replaced by neutral grain spirit, and it hasn’t been the same since.<\/p>\n

Enter Sazerac Company, the New Orleans-based liquor company that bought SoCo from Brown-Forman just last year.\u00a0 Sazerac has big plans to revive the brand.\u00a0 There will be a repackaging, and various flavored<\/a> versions (vile-sounding potions like Lime Comfort and Cherry Comfort) will be retired<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most important of all, as Sazerac honchoes told the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, will be the return of whiskey:<\/p>\n

\n

Sazerac thinks that the drink\u2019s future depends on consumers\u2019 thinking \u201cwhiskey\u201d and not \u201cliqueur\u201d when they buy or order it. \u201cFor us, whiskey is the root of the brand and we\u2019re going to embrace that, and not play in that liqueur space,\u201d Mr. Richards said.<\/p>\n

Sazerac has even played a subtle mind game in giving the 80-proof version a black label, a color favored by another famous whiskey. \u201cIf we\u2019re right between Jack Daniel\u2019s and Jim Beam on the shelf,\u201d Mr. Brown said, \u201cthat will be fine with us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Good luck with that.\u00a0 Once you’re labeled Sudden Discomfort it’s hard to go back.\u00a0 At least returning SoCo to its whiskey roots is a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you remember that unflattering nickname for Southern Comfort, the booze of wayward and misinformed youth.\u00a0 Or maybe you’ve tried to forget that SoCo ever existed.\u00a0 It’s still around, but SoCo hasn’t been popular outside of frat houses for a long time.\u00a0 Now under new ownership, the fruity liqueur is scheduled for a relaunch in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":7289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[146,546,1958,1959,1960,747,120,1284,174,991,851,1957,79],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}