The CoronaRita Disaster of 2011

The dump heap

 The CoronaRita is a corporate-designed dangerous beverage.  This fad drink is showing up at Mexican restaurants all over, and as with any fad, it is my job to try it, hate it, and report back.  The CoronaRita is a margarita with a baby seven-ounce Corona beer lodged upside down in it.  Like a hurricane tore through a cantina and some enterprising busboy found this the next morning and said “Hey—wait a minute!”  Really a contraption as much as a cocktail,  this is a drink for people with nothing to talk about, you know, engineer-types with no social skills that could spend the entire time explaining why the corona slowly empties into the margarita.  I don’t like this drink because it begs the question, if my follow-up drink to a margarita is a corona and it’s already inside my premiere drink, then what is my follow-up drink?  It’s like having tiramisu-stuffed trout.   

 There’s no good way to drink the CoronaRita and salting the rim is futile since the rim is half taken with the plastic corona carriage piece, and the perverse sight of you trying to lick the side of this device may lead others to think you lick random items like the ketchup bottle or the check tray when it comes.   Maybe they could salt the rim of the straw.  Or sink a salt shaker in the damn thing.  Maybe submerge an entire meal.  If you were to drink normally out of this mouse trap you would put your eye out with a corona bottle or the effort would at least result in a ‘clean up at table six’ announcement in Spanish.  The double-beered hat with straw is cute at the Browns game but less attractive when ordered at the rehearsal dinner, yes?

            So, as advertised, the level of the upside down Corona did decrease as the ever-weakening margarita was consumed, however a design flaw revealed itself at the bottom of the glass where an icy log jam prevented the last half of the beer from emptying.  So after some attempt to encourage nature,  I tried pulling the bottle out of the glass so I could finish my mini-beer but after some wrestling the contraption came apart but the impact emptied the beer into the ice and was now beer on ice, one of my favorites.  And the whole process of trying to liberate three ounces of beer doesn’t look the least bit alcoholic from the table peering over. 

So at the end of the day, while James Bond would not be caught dead drinking this drink, his job does require travel-- and this device, with some minor adjustments, could certainly serve as a sort of alcoholic pet fountain for a drunken relative left behind.