All’s Swill That Ends Swill
Spotlight On
by Clark Westfield
June 2013
100 bottles of beer on the wall, 100 bottles of beer… Only in New Jersey.
Fear not beer drinkers, for this issue has nothing to do with you. It revolves around liquor, hard booze, happy juice and rot gut. Actually rot gut might be a suitable term for what the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) uncovered in a yearlong investigation of bars and restaurants that were substituting cheap booze and in some cases – rubbing alcohol and caramel food coloring – for what customers thought was top shelf liquor. Talk about not getting what you paid for. That’s like arranging a date with Selma Hayek and having Amanda Bynes show up.
Yay government! Operation Swill rocked the house! Finally, a federal organization that actually did something good for a change (I’m talking to you IRS). Apparently, we care about the booze crews more than the Teetoatler Partyers. At any rate, agents from the ABC visited 63 establishments in January and began reporting their findings. In all, 29 venues were charged with scamming their customers. Get this – 13 of those places were TGI Friday’s! So maybe that Jack Daniels steak was actually more like an Old Spice steak. Maybe that bourbon-rubbed chicken was instead dipped in city street hot dog water. Freaky Fridays indeed!
The investigations were very thorough. Working on consumer complaints and an inside informant (Rule number 1: NEVER piss off a bartender or a waitress), these agents ordered drinks neat (that means with no ice, not properly arranged on your table) and kept samples for analysis using a new technology with a device called the True Spirit Authenticator. The True Spirit Authenticator. Sounds almost religious, like a mystical experience that takes place in the desert and involves meditation and peyote buttons. And somewhere Johnny Depp already has one.
The fact that New Jersey is at the forefront of exposing this scam makes me proud. It also reminds the less than naive that if it’s happening here, it’s going on everywhere. Wherever liquor is being sold, in trendy hotspots or family-friendly chains like Friday’s and even Applebee’s, there is cause for alarm, or at least a cautious eye. Or tongue. Here is the advice given by the ABC to weed out the water in the whiskey:
Use your senses. Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between top-shelf liquors and marginal brands… But other times there’s a real difference, and you can usually tell by using your senses. For example, taste. Ask the bartender for a sip of that Dewar’s before he dilutes it with soda. It if tastes unnaturally harsh, it might be a fake. Other senses can come in handy, too. Do the colors look weird? Does it smell like paint thinner?
Paint thinner. How hammered do you have to be to not be able to tell the difference between a 15 year old Macallan and paint solvent? I’m thinkin’…pretty hammered. So beware New Jerseyans. As your summer kicks off (and we here at www.eNJoynj.com have no doubts that this is going to be a banner summer), please remember to not only drink responsibly, but intelligently. Operation Swill may have enlightened the public as to the evils of the old bait and switch, but there are many out there who just don’t care if it’s going to affect their profit margin. So it’s up to you. Know. Your. Booze. And for the rest of us…100 bottles of beer on the wall, 100 bottles of beer… It’s just safer.
More to Come…CW