ok in a thread about the jim beam fire I started a side discussion about if southren comfort was considered real whiskey :
So my question fellow dopers is soco real whiskey… whiskey flavored or a spirit all by its self ?
Where’s the “Bad Whisky” category? I’ve always assumed it’s a cheap blended whisky, right? But now I’m doubting that, so I’m not voting.
I loved it, what, fifty years ago? Wow. But haven’t tasted it since. Maybe I should…
For us Midwestern kids raised on crappy beer, it was a gateway booze. It showed us that there were tasty brown drinks out there. But I barely remember the whiskies we drank with coke or 7-Up (“Ah, yes, we of course are Of Age, my good man. And as such, I’ll have a Seven and Seven, and a Comfort and Coke for my Also Very Adult date…”).
Also according to Wiki, it originally had a whiskey base. The current owners are planning to restore that.
The website refers to SC as whiskey.
It’s not whisky, not really a debate. I might look at the website to see where **burpo the wonder mutt ** saw them claiming to be a whiskey but the bottle says “liqueur”.
Eta:in Canada anyway. The labels look different on the website.
Whether it has whiskey as a base or not, it is not in and of itself a whiskey. It is a liqueur, much in the same way Drambuie is a scotch liqueur.
No, it’s not whiskey. It’s not even made from whiskey, although as noted, the new owners are changing that. It’s just flavored vodka.
Liqueur. Excellent flavoring agent for my deep-dish peach pie, but undrinkable.
thanks to a particularly bad night when I was 17, I can’t even smell SoCo or any whiskey without gagging.
thats me and tequilia but i was 21 …
Wow, they have no shame. They call it whiskey a number of times on their home page:
How should we vote if the answer is “No, it’s a separate spirit?”
Of course it’s not a whiskey. It’s a liqueur. It’s no more a whiskey than Drambuie is Scotch or Grand Marnier is oranges or Kahlua is coffee or Amaretto is almonds.
Back in college (when the drinking age was still 18) I and my friends used to drink it because it went down easier than straight whiskey. But even then we were under no illusions that it was some kind of whiskey.
I fail to see the distinction between the third choice in the poll and “no.”
SoCo is at best, whiskey-adjacent.
I’ve never had it. I developed a taste for real whiskey early (19, bright college years) and never needed to drink sweet stuff.
I was going to post “Southern Comfort is Bourbon like Drambuie is Scotch,” but I’ve been beaten to the punch (har!) at least twice.
Containing whiskey does not make Southern Comfort whiskey, any more than rum cake is rum.
I assumed the OP meant the third option to be “it’s its own special category”, which is why I felt comfortable with voting “no” as it’s in the well established category of a liqueur.
Other than the Drambuie I mentioned, Yukon Jack is another example of a whiskey-based liqueur. Taking whiskey and adding sweeteners and flavorings to it make it a liqueur. And, somewhat surprisingly, as mentioned before, SoCo apparently for many years wasn’t even whiskey-based (from 1979 to 2017 it was based on a neutral grain spirit) so calling it a whiskey then made even less sense (or, more emphatically, absolutely no sense.)
Original Southern Comfort is 35% abv and therefore can’t be whiskey even if they changed its base to something that had been distilled to something less than neutral.