Post #737153 by AceExplorer on Wed, Feb 11, 2015 6:48 AM

The "mistake" in Ray's Mistake may have been the gin.

This past weekend I stopped by my local Wal-Mart liquor store looking for small bottles of Campari. (Duh, they don't carry a lot of variety.) But -- and this completely caught me by surprise -- they are the only place in my entire region where I've seen Barton's gin for sale, and I've even looked at various web sites. I had pretty much concluded that Barton's was going to be a local special-order item, or that it would be a mail-order item.

I observed that Barton's must be really really really good gin because it currently has bottom shelf placement at Wal-Mart and is priced at $13.xx for a whole 1.75 liter plastic bottle. It's labeled "extra dry London gin" and, when tasted neat, it really doesn't taste very good at all compared to the higher end London drys. If there was a shelf lower than the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart, I'm thinking that's where it might rightly belong. So it seems to be a low-cost well spirit, one that the distributors foist upon businesses with promises of higher profit margins.

I bought one jug of Barton's and will be testing various Mistake recipes in this thread. I'll publish some comments later when I get around to it. I have a list of 6 other cocktails I'm testing right now, so the lab bench is pretty full.