I’m going to coin a new term, ladies and gents: we’re living in what I think can be described as a “post-flavor” landscape when it comes to a new class of spirits, and I think Whicked Pickle is part of this continuing evolution. De-evolution, perhaps.
Back in the 1960s and up through the 2000s, vodka was unchallenged as the booze for people who thought spirits were icky, however honestly or ignorantly they might have come to that opinion. For the majority of that time, vodka was pitched as liquor that doesn’t taste like anything. It was gaslighting, of course—if college students could afford it, it was bound to taste like rocket fuel even in mixed drinks. Despite the loud enthusiasm of the well-meaning friends of our late teens and twenties, just about none of it “went down like water.”
“I don’t like Whicked Pickle, sure, but I could never have predicted the specific *why* of my dislike. On a technical level, I actually appreciate the novelty of its brand of bad.”
At the beginning of the 2000s, we saw more vodka hit the market trying to taste (horribly unconvincingly) like other things. I remember it started with Smirnoff’s awful cranberry vodka, and Pinnacle took it to a gross extreme with flavors like Birthday Cake and Key Lime Pie. Then, the 2010s came around and Fireball took the nation by storm when it realized that it could be its own mixer, and you wouldn’t even taste the bargain-basement whiskey on offer if they blew out your palate with fake cinnamon.
But somewhere around 2018, and maybe as it was pushed along by the pandemic, no shortage of Americans decided that they were just straight-up done with flavor. Every girlfriend ever (including mine) decided they were going to stock the pantry all the way up to the rafters with La Croix sparkling water, and young people decided that White Claw was the happening new thing when they wanted to get buzzed.
Now, here comes Whicked Pickle. I thought I was going to hate everything about this. I expected it to basically be an assault on the senses, with that being the point of the thing. Basically, the spirits equivalent of: “You won’t have a chance to notice how rough this whiskey is if we kick you right in the nuts as you’re drinking it!” And then, doubled over, a dude’s like, *WHEEZE* “I didn’t even know I swallowed it!” It’s not just pickles and whiskey, friends. It’s spicy pickles and whiskey! Gross, right?
Here’s the reality though: I don’t like it, sure, but I could not have predicted the specific why of my dislike.
Whicked Pickle actually falls into that vaguely weak-dick La Croix / White Claw hellscape where flavor goes to die. There’s lots of weird stuff going on, yes. However—somewhere in the middle of suggestions of dill, pepper, cinnamon, and earth—you’ll really need to try to taste the whiskey. It’s all a lot of confusing whispers, really. (This is excepting the saltiness, which emerges from time to time as a shout.) I think the intent is to give consumers a whiskey-like, sort of boozy thing that slithers its way down the throat and leaves you scratching your head as to what it was you actually experienced before you can ask: “Was it smooth, or was it not?”
Perhaps this a win for some drinkers. Whicked Pickle has very little of the harsh ethanol burn that really cheap spirits have (as well as the litany of crappy flavored vodkas, which claim to taste like donuts or blueberries, but at best can only taste like those things if they were dipped in paint thinner). Instead, you can look back at the trail of carnage through the finish, which is salty, dill-heavy, and oh-so inexplicably dirty. It tastes a lot like dirt, is what I mean.
There’s also a level of heat I don’t think anyone asked for. Maybe this is just to make the branding work, with the flame logo and “Whicked” and all of that. But the best way to describe the effect is obnoxious. The fake cinnamon flavor of red hots candy hangs on for dear life and refuses to go away. It actually may be the longest finish I’ve experienced in a spirit—maybe ever.
Again, the weird thing is that Whicked Pickle is not totally gung-ho about everything it has to offer. It doesn’t want to give the consumer too much flavor in the arrival or development, lest they quickly tire of the assault. Instead, it’s a passive-aggressive spirit. Maybe the 35% ABV has something to do with this, too—one more way of turning down the volume for those planning to consume a lot of this stuff at frat houses.
Whicked Pickle is basically the liquor form of what I’ve started calling “young people music.” By that, I mean songs like this or that (and of course this one) which are built around these soaring, anthemic choruses that are actually super fucking boring when you really set aside the time to listen to them and all of the “whoa-oh-ohs” they have to offer. These songs masquerade as a triumphant expression of youth and vitality, but in reality they’re so pat, non-offensive, and devoid of a point of view that you could completely see them being used in a car commercial. (Also, check the view count on those videos. Like White Claw, they’re tremendously popular with young people.)
So this stuff is really not that Whicked. Like a lot of young people, it’s just confused about what it is, what it wants, and where it’s going. Along the way, it makes a weak claim that its offensiveness is intended to be “edgy” or “ironic,” but cumulatively it all comes across like a succession of bad jokes that fail to land. Evaluating the product on just a technical level, I appreciate the novelty of Whicked Pickle’s brand of bad, but it’s still bad nevertheless.
