Elvis Presley Coconut Water Vodka Is...Not a Joke

Yahoo Food

Our restaurant and drinks editor, Andrew Knowlton, has a lot of bottles of booze in front of him. In this column he goes through them, one by one.

Think of a flavor. Any flavor. Now take that flavor and put it into vodka. Yep, somebody already beat you to it. Glazed doughnut. Check. Vanilla frosting. Check. Milk? Check. Of course, people wouldn’t make this stuff unless other people were drinking it. So the real question is: Who are you people?

The latest questionably flavored spirit to cross my desk is Three Olives Elvis Presley Coconut Water Flavored Vodka. Yes, that’s coconut water flavored, and yes, that’s THE Elvis Presley, eagle-emblazoned aloha cape, Hawaiian leis, and all, crooning at you through the frosted glass bottle.

The bottle itself is kind of appealing, in a white-jumpsuit sort of way. But once I’m over the hologram effect, I start asking myself: Why coconut water? Why Elvis? Did Elvis even like Hawaii?

Three Olives declares that the vodka was made “in honor of Elvis Presley’s long-standing love affair with Hawaii.” Whatever the connection, Elvis-as-vodka is pretty low impact, clocking in at only 30 percent ABV (most vodkas hover around 40). And at $21 for a 750-milliliter bottle, it’s less than a sculpted jet-black wig for your next Elvis-themed affair (which has got to be where the majority of sales will come from). If a bottle just happens to appear on your desk, unsolicited, you might consider mixing it into a coconut-water cocktail. Beyond that, the whole Elvis thing still has me scratching my head.

Now, if they had taken a peanut butter banana sandwich fried in bacon fat and turned that into a vodka, one I might stumble across at 4 a.m. after a bender, then we could talk. Elvis, a noted teetotaler, would have been more likely to bypass the booze and go straight for the coconut water—which, if we’re being honest, is probably a wise choice.

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