Our Favorite Betty Booze Canned Cocktail Flavor Is Just As Good As A Handcrafted Drink

Not every canned cocktail is great, and buying one you haven't tried before can feel like a 50/50 bet. Some tips for buying the best include looking for premium spirits and traditional recipes and avoiding artificial flavors. The goal is to find something that tastes as close to the real thing as possible. But, while all of that's helpful, sometimes you need someone to tell you what to get — and Betty Booze has a canned cocktail flavor that's just as good as its handcrafted version.

Tasting Table taste tasters tried every Betty Booze canned cocktail flavor. After sipping each one straight out of the fridge from the can, and poured over ice, they were floored. They discovered a canned cocktail that tasted just as good as what you'd order from a bartender, and that was Betty Booze's Sparkling Bourbon with Apple Ginger Sour Cherry flavor. It might sound like a lot, but every flavor works hand in hand to elevate the spirit — the premise of any quality cocktail, canned or not.

Taste testers likened the Sparkling Bourbon with Apple Ginger Sour Cherry Betty Booze flavor to that of an apple cherry pie. The apple makes it light and sweet, while the cherry brings it just the right touch of acid to keep things interesting. It all only comes together to highlight the sweet smokiness of the bourbon, with a refreshing and bubbly finish.

The Sparkling Bourbon with Apple Ginger Sour Cherry canned cocktail from Betty Booze isn't the only one that impressed our taste testers so much that it disproved their doubts. In fact, Betty Booze's Sparkling Tequila with Lime Shisho flavor came in a close second to the Apple Ginger Sour Cherry — with our taste tester going as far to say that they'd choose it over a classic margarita any day. That's even despite the "sparkling" in its name, which many canned cocktails seem to lean on. It's not necessarily a negative thing, but it can be when paired with citrus or fruit flavors, as is the case of both of these cocktails.

The catch with carbonation is that it introduces more oxygen to a drink. That, in turn, introduces more opportunities for oxidation — which is an issue when you're working with natural fruit juices, particularly in recipes that are canned and meant to sit on a shelf for long periods of time. Combine that with the offsetting taste of the metal, and you get a lot of tin-tasting store-bought canned cocktails. But, Betty Booze seems to have found a loophole — one where they're able to pull off the fresh citrus and fruit juices while reducing oxidation distortion by using them in concentrated form.

Both of these cocktails list juice concentrates in their ingredient lists, which is likely why they taste so fresh. Add that to the 11 tips for buying the best canned cocktails.