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.
In the world of hard seltzers, Vizzy is a name I see a lot but have yet to try. It’s not the industry pioneer, like White Claw. It’s not an industry leader like High Noon. It’s not readily available at the open bar at weddings like Truly. So there it is, recognizable but not yet something I could actually say is good or bad.
Needless to say, Vizzy needed to stand out. Unleashing a creamsicle seltzer in time for hot days at the pool? Yep, you’ve got my attention now.
Coors did their own take on the orange classic in a limited edition seltzer offering last year, but I was unable to find it in time (what I also miss from Coors’ limited summer selection? A pretty decent shandy. Anyway …). I was worried that was my last crack at the ethereal taste of childhood mixed with the unmistakable tenet of drinking in the 2020s. Thankfully, Vizzy — owned by Molson Coors — stepped up to fill that void.
Vizzy Orange Cream Pop: B-
I took my first sip, after which I generally write down my first impressions, then I took a long pull afterward. This beverage is a battle between dessert and seltzer. Splenda-sweet orange vs. the dry carbonation of a La Croix. You get the creamy treat up front, then the unmistakable blandness of a seltzer, then a lingering fruity coffee-sweetener aftertaste. The orange is there throughout, but the vanilla sort of comes and goes, only really shining once the last gulp has cleared your uvula.
Drinking straight from the can doesn’t really change much. This seltzer scrapes the idea of a cream soda/orange soda hybrid (that’s also 4.5 percent alcohol by volume) before settling back to its low-cal roots.
It’s a weird experience and it makes me want more. There are very nice moments in this can, and the valleys between are a tradeoff for the 90 calories within. There’s a way to make this a proper canned cocktail at five percent ABV and around 160 calories, but that’s not what Vizzy’s going for. It wants to give you 75 percent of that flavor at around 57 percent of the caloric cost, and it’s a trade-off that mostly works.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?
This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink a Vizzz Orange Cream Pop hard seltzer over a cold can of Hamm’s?
On a hot day where I’m already a little full? Sure. It’s a fine seltzer, it just doesn’t go above and beyond those low-flavor seltzer constraints that plague most of its competitors. But it’s OK. I could drink a few of these without complaint.
