Defying God, I Drank The Doritos Juice

It was maybe a few months ago where Empirical announced they were making and releasing DORITOS HOOCH, which is to say, alcoholic Dorito juice. I said at the time, this is the booze of bad decisions. Nobody’s out there drinking the Dorito Juice and feeding orphans. Nobody drinks the Dorito Liquor and rescues a puppy from a river. Doritos Hooch isn’t saving your marriage. No, you drink this stuff, you end up under an overpass, underwear on your face, your body burned from the heap of Hot Pockets you orgied upon last night with the other Dorito Juice drinkers, all of whom now probably communicate via a hive-mind telepathy of cackles and screams.

Needless to say, I wanted some.

I wanted some not because I was hoping to have one of those nights where you get drunk and fight a police horse, but rather, because I am weirdly susceptible to foods that maybe shouldn’t taste good. It was just prior to the pandemic when I kinda made the news trying a mac-and-cheese ice cream from one of our local ice cream joints. (This was in February 2020, thus marking February as perhaps a month of culinary disaster foods.) And I recently tried the Kraft mac-and-cheese collab with Van Leeuwen ice cream. (The local stuff was gross, because they froze the noodles in there, and they were hard angry teeth-cracking pasta boulders. But the Van Leeuwen stuff was actually pretty legit if you can find it.)

It’s not that I want the gag gift foods. “Oh, we made Kale chewing gum lol.” That’s there just to fuck with people. I want the stuff that… shouldn’t work, but also might work?

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I bought the Liquid Doritos.

When it was announced, it was not available for purchase by like, normal humans, and honestly I expected it never would be. But I put my name on the list anyway, and then I received an email that said “psst hey kid, I hear you like making mistakes,” and then gave me a link to buy the Dorito Juice.

I clicked that shit so fast I cracked my trackpad in half.

How could you not? Doritos* is the ultimate snack. It’s like the UR-SNACK, the snack of Ancient Hyperborea, a zesty salt beast from before the advent of time itself, when it was just Triangle Doritos and Circular Oreos floating in the pre-creation void.

So, yeah, I ordered it.

And then I played the waiting game.

Two days ago, Fed-Ex came to my door in a hazmat suit, and deposited a mysteriously trembling package on my front step with very long metal tongs, and in that box was:

Dorito Juice.

Okay, fine. It isn’t called that.

It’s just, Doritos X Empirical, I think?

Whatever.

Point is, I drank that shit.

You can, if you want to go along on the adventure, see that happen here, on Instagram, where I posted a reel of me drinking the Dorito Juice.

My now-blogged thoughts on the DRUNKEN DORITO MILK, then:

It is a clear spirit with no identified provenance. The ingredients, as you’ll see here, say nothing more than BASE SPIRIT, which for all I know, means the box it came in is a ghost trap, and they trapped a ghost in there and force-fed it Dorito powder until it pissed zesty ectoplasm into a bottle.

(I also like that the front of the bottle just says the word UNCATEGORIZED, which actually feels pretty accurate to how you would describe this to anyone in any direction.)

That said, the closest spirit I get from it is tequila.

I don’t think it is tequila.

But it kinda vibes tequila.

In the parlance of the youth, it is giving tequila.

It smells that way. Like tequila and corn chips. On the nose there’s no Doritos zest. It’s just corn chips. Like you took a waterproof duffel bag full of tequila, emptied a bag of tortilla chips into it, and let that all come together for a week or three before filtering the tequila — now redolent with corn chip miasma — through. It’s not unpleasant. It is, however, distinct.

Drinking it, I honestly expected a very bad experience. I first assumed that the sip would be like battery acid and that it would hurt my face and throat and very possibly some part of my soul, perhaps even irrevocably, the damage so complete that no afterlife would have me. It just has that sense about it. Like, if you told me “Taco Bell makes wine,” I would assume that wine would taste like the inside of a vigorously-used prison toilet, and here, I figured Dorito booze would be a real rough rider, a spicy mix of vinegar, kerosene, cigarettes, and infinite regret.

But that initial taste, and subsequent tastes, were mild — pleasantly mild but with flavor, not just liquid cardboard. And boy does it bring the Doritoness.

This is liquid Doritos.

Boozy liquid Doritos.

It is very, very savory.

Not salty savory.

But umami savory.

Doritos have MSG. This juice has to have MSG. I use MSG in my cooking when called for, and the taste is absolutely present here. It’s that, plus all the zesty Dorito flavor — the nacho business, the spirit of the snack chips distilled into a, well, a spirit. It’s almost magic.

And the aftertaste, as I note in the video, is long. It grips your mouth like the hug of a once-lost child. It lives upon the tongue, on your gums. It puts up shelves, it hangs up pictures of its family, it pays a year’s rent in advance. You are the landlord of the taste after just one sip.

So, the thing is, this all sounds weird and maybe horrible but I gotta tell you, it… isn’t? It’s actually… not bad? Again, I bought this bottle, nobody gave it to me, this is not coerced via some sponsor deal or at gunpoint. I have the bottle and I am sure I will drink it all. (Er, not in one go. I still think this might be a bottle of Liquid Mistakes if you do it right. Right, meaning, wrong.) Given the tequila whiff, I figured —

Hey, margarita.

So I made one.

I give you, the Doritorita.

Or, umm, the margorito? The margadorita? The dormagaritota?

I dunno. Shut up.

It is:

• 1.5 oz DORITO JUICE

• 1 oz Combier orange liqueur

• juice of half a lime

• half oz simple syrup

• glass rimmed with a mix of: chili powder, salt, coconut sugar, and MSG.

It was pretty legit.

I figure, if you need a good way to break your DRY JANUARY, why not with a margarita formed of Dorito Juice?

One must only hope they do not make a Cool Ranch Juice. I mean, I’ll buy it but there’s no way that doesn’t end me up in some special singular Hell. Or at least the hospital. Probably the hospital.

Anyway.

Cheers.

Drink your Distilled Dorito Broth responsibly.

Buy my books so I can afford more dubious food collabs.

* I note here, for the sake of completeness, that at the very fore of the pandemic I did an, um, deep dive on the history of Doritos that began with the phrase, “Buckle up, butterdicks, it’s time to talk about Doritos.” It has since been assumed I, a cringe-fed goon, actually talk like this in my daily life, as if I show up to Home Depot and find a worker there and say “Hey, chucklefucker, where’re your wall anchors at, you herky-jerky cheese dick?” but it was supposed to be a riff on the whole “buckle up let’s talk about Triscuits” thing. Anyway it was a fucking joke about Satanic snack chips and some people take shit way too seriously here on Al Gore’s Internet.