Sable & Rosenfeld Tipsy Cherries (Whiskey)
I thought this was going to be one post about four kinds of cherries, but instead it’s four posts, each covering one type. The reason is that this post would be rather long to do all at once, and I’d rather let each of the products I’m considering stand alone before I start considering them in context of one another.
So, first out of the gate: Sable & Rosenfeld’s Tipsy Cherries have the sort of standard dayglo red appearance that has become standard for maraschino cherries. The individual cherries are plump and firm in the jar, and most have stems intact. These are not cherries that appear to have had a rough life.
They have a heavy cherry candy sweet smell with a very subtle hint of whiskey. Along the same lines, the taste is overwhelmingly sweet with only the mildest suggest that they contain whiskey or that they were ever fruit.
The S&R Tipsy Cherries aren’t bad, but they are fairly nondescript. The slight hint of whiskey isn’t enough to distinguish them from run-of-the-mill grocery store cherries in flavor, but their appearance is pretty top notch for this type of cocktail cherry. I could see them fitting in quite well in a White Russian or something else that is overall heavy and sweet. Both visually and on the tongue, they have the effect of a candy item. I probably wouldn’t use them for an Old Fashioned, unless I didn’t have an alternative handy. Again, it’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that in something like an Old Fashioned, which is so dependent on balance, they wouldn’t add much aside from additional sweetness.
In summary: If you’re interested in a standard type cocktail cherry, you could do much worse, and they are lovely to look at.
