Like most college students, I’m a cheap son of a bitch. There are very few times that I’ll open my wallet for anything that isn’t an absolute necessity. Having said that, I am still being provided food and shelter while at college; right now, “necessary” has a pretty broad definition. In my case—and, let’s be honest, yours too—alcohol most definitely falls into that category.
The same argument goes through my head every time I’m in a liquor store: is my stinginess worth the involuntary gag reflex triggered by Towne Club vodka? For the majority of my college career, it was. I was content chasing shots of Burnett’s with a swig of Natty Light because it left a few more dollars in my wallet.
That all began to change this past summer, as I began to look around the liquor store for ways to save money without being forced to ingest something closer to a paint remover than a distilled spirit. Tucked away in the corner of Wagner’s on Wisconsin Avenue I spotted my soon-to-be favorite spot in Georgetown: the clearance rack.
In a liquor store, the clearance rack is the equivalent of the island of misfit toys, stocked with steeply discounted booze that no one has ever actually seen on their proper shelves in the store. It makes me wonder, only half-jokingly, whether liquor stores order things specifically to stock their clearance racks.
Each time I head to Wagner’s, I wonder what treasures await me on the clearance rack. What sad and lonely bottles, marked with the red sale price tag, would be there now, looking for a nice warm home? Would it be a bottle of poorly-marketed flavored Jose Cuervo, or the unfortunately named “Red Headed Burst” premixed shots? Whatever it was, no matter how poorly thought out of a name or strange combination of flavors, it was almost always a much higher quality of booze than I was used to, at a price that I was. Finding a few ten dollar bottles of Pinnacle French vodka—a drink that could easily hold it’s own against bottles three times the price—has been the highlight of my school year so far.
Every now and then there would be a few misses to go along with all the great finds. A few weeks ago my roommate decided to pick up some Stumbras Buffalo Grass Vodka, which looked promising—when has a product of Lithuania ever led you wrong?—and was marked down by a similarly promising 40 percent. I realized why some things end up on clearance racks though: whatever I tasted was closer to buffalo piss than buffalo grass.
I have a dream that one day, people will judge a liquor not by the color of its price tag, but by the contents of its bottle. Until that day, when we all hit the lottery, or at least until we get salaried jobs, the clearance rack of misfit drinks is our best bet.
Tell Dan how cheap you are at dnewman@georgetownvoice.com.
