Jun. 9: Vodka bears—a waste of alcohol

It took a week to make my vodka bears, which is longer than most people need. Here’s my story.

My supplies were a glass bowl, gummy bears, and enough vodka to cover the bears when they’ve been put in the bowl. Pretty simple:

Once the vodka was added:

I covered the bowl in saran wrap and put it in the freezer for four days. Vodka doesn’t freeze because there’s too much alcohol in it, so it’s pretty much just soak-soak-soak for the bears. This is how they looked when I took them out:

Let’s go in for the close-up so you can see what happened to those bears after four days in very cold vodka:

They had lost most of their detail, but still had a basic bear shape. The saddest thing was that they tasted TERRIBLE. I was so disappointed. It was like someone sprayed an entire can of hair spray into the bowl and ruined a perfectly good bag of gummy bears. Why would someone do that and then make me eat it?

I had to try to fix these bears, so I poured in two cups of pineapple juice:

Even though it looked like bad split pea soup at that point, I wasn’t about to give up. I covered the bowl again and put it in the fridge for four more days.

I have no more pictures, because when I took the bowl out of the fridge tonight it still looked like it was full of bad split pea soup. I fished a bear out with a spoon to try it. I had the highest of hopes. I was, again, disappointed. The bears tasted like hair spray nuggets that had been soaking in pineapple juice for four days. Not good.

And then I gave up. I don’t know what I did wrong. I suspect it was the crappy vodka I used. However, I don’t know if I’ll try this again, at least not with better vodka. I guess I forgot that I don’t really like vodka.

Before I tossed the bowl’s contents down the garbage disposal, I grabbed a straw and drank some big sips of the liquid. At first I thought it wasn’t too bad, but I think I was getting mostly pineapple juice. The next few sips tasted more hair spray-like, and not like the good Hairspray movies. Ugh. It was horrible. But I had sipped enough that now I’m feeling a little dizzy and my head is super-sweaty. So at least I got a buzz from this failure of an experiment. I can’t remember the last time I felt buzzed.

(Oh, fine. It was yesterday.)

P.S. It wasn’t really yesterday.