Awesome Beverages

The oenophile in your life will appreciate The Durand, a handsome and simple wine bottle opener that removes old and fragile corks whole and undamaged every time. (Thanks Lucas!)

For those who enjoy entertaining at home, the iPad Drinkspiration app offers 3,000+ drink recipes with images; it also creates shopping lists and suggests cocktails based on the ingredients in your kitchen.

Break out the curly straws, cookies and shot glasses for Adult Chocolate Milk, with real cream and rich chocolatey taste, but with a very grown-up bonus: a 40 proof alcohol enhancement.

DQ Vodka’s unique bottle is made by one of the finest glass makers in Europe, with metal surfaces akin to high end automotive standards and satin chrome finish for the top and bottom caps.

Make dessert more grown-up with Cream, a 30 proof alcohol-infused whipped cream in 6 tasty flavors. We know it would taste great in coffee, so why are we picturing bikinis made of this stuff?

Piece of Cake Liqueurs has combined two of our fave things, cake and booze, into Chocolate Cake Liqueur, which can be paired with other spirits or taken The Awesomer way – one shot at time.

Monkey Shoulder whiskey is the world’s first Triple Malt, a blend of 3 of Speyside’s finest single malt whiskies, matured in Bourbon casks under a Malt Master’s supervision before being released.

The Way We See the World has created edible drinking glasses from the seaweed extract agar-agar in unusually tasty flavor combinations, like lemon-basil, ginger-mint and rosemary-beet.

MadeByAmmo’s Shotshell shot glass is machined from a solid bar of stainless steel with textured knurling at the base. The 2 or 4 glass Tactical Pack includes a military-spec pouch for storage.

TY KU, the world’s only sake-based beverage, is a liqueur filled with a bouquet of 20-odd flowers and fruits, including elderflower syrup, yuzu, plum and green tea, packaged in a self-illuminating bottle.

Smooth and lightly aromatic fenom is the first modern absinthe authentically handcrafted from traditional herbs including grand wormwood by one of France’s few remaining absinthe experts.

We’re with the Drinkhacker: the versatile French St. Germain spirit can elevate a wealth of cocktails with its sweet/uncloying lychee character, balanced with lavender, summer herbs, and lemon finish.

Drink up for science: the methodical minds of RND Vodka use a continuous glass column distillation method to create their small batch spirit, and are donating 5% of profits to science education.

From Jalisco, the newly released small batch Karma tequila is made with a multiple distillation process and no additives. Silver available now; reposado and anejo versions are currently aging.

Attention pyro wannabes: please make sure there’s sober supervision before making any of these drinks you can set on fire; we want you to continue to live – and to read The Awesomer afterwards.

Those tenacious brewmasters at Coors found a tasty pre-Prohibition secret recipe buried in the basement and decided to go for it. The result is Batch 19 – a lager with a bold, hoppy flavor.

The new Rich Oak 14-Year Old from Glenfiddich has significant flavors of oak, sweet vanillas and light fruit, due to a short maturation in both new European (12 weeks) and American (6 weeks) oak.

Australian designer Tom Hussey has created Kegless, a bag-in-box packaging concept for carbonated beverages that provides a sustainable alternative to conventional single serve packages.

Quadrupled distilled and triple filtered through Herkimer diamonds, Dan Aykroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka from Newfoundland is a pure spirit free of additives, packaged in a supercool bottle.

The sleek mypressi Twist handheld espresso machine uses canisters of compressed N20 to make 6+ shots with consistent 9-bar (135psi) pressure throughout, for hot cups of awesomeness.

A terrific stop motion animation video created by 41? 29! for Binboa Vodka from Turkey, using 550 bottles drawn by hand for the animation and 5000 photos taken in over 100 hours of shooting.

Dutch beverage maker Medea is offering a small batch, wheat-based vodka that comes in a bottle with a 255 character/6 message programmable LED display. Haiku contest anyone?