I have a friend—let’s call him Pete—who keeps threatening to write an article that resuscitates Southern Comfort, disabusing drinkers of the prevailing belief that the traditional infused whiskey is merely sweet swill for the barely pubescent. When he talks of Southern Comfort, he talks of the perils of good taste, such perils being the so-called good taste that conspires to prevent certain people from enjoying Southern Comfort.
I thought about Pete—and about good taste, as well as infused spirits—as I poured a second glass of Sweet Tea Vodka, from the Firefly Distillery of South Carolina. The stuff should be swill, consigned forever to be a base spirit for Long Island Iced Teas. But it’s not.
It’s actually pretty good. Hyper-sweet, but good. Especially when mixed half-and-half with lemonade, yielding what I might as well call, with apologies to the man, a Drunken Arnold Palmer.
I first tasted Firefly Vodka, distilled from the juice of muscadine grapes, a couple years back. At the time, Firefly was doing its distillation in Florida, while trumpeting its product as South Carolinian. That seemed a bit lazy to me.
In the years since, Firefly has relocated its distillation to Wadmalaw Island, off the coast of Charleston. And now, in a move that is either way too moonlight-and-magnolias Southern or proudly provincial—I’m still not sure—they’ve added the aforementioned Sweet Tea Vodka, made with their muscadine spirits; flavored with tea grown at the nearby Charleston Tea Plantation; and sweetened with cane sugar from not-too-distant Louisiana.
The result is a drink that aspires to Southern provenance, one that mixes well with lemonade, one that, for now, I’ll call a Southern Comfort for the 21st century. It’s a flavored vodka that might—on a summer day, when the thermometer is pushing 100—make me willing to suffer the ire of just the sort of drinkers who style themselves arbiters of good taste.
Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka is currently available in four states, with an online shop coming soon.
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