Suntide Mimosas
Suntide Mimosas
A delicious pour of one of the best beers on the planet.
Suntide Mimosas

I have developed a breakfast drink hierarchy. It goes Caesars, then bloody Marys, then mimosas.

That's a personal preference rooted in the fact I don't much care for wine. I can sip champagne for a toast, but when it comes to casual drinking I can find tastier ways to get a headache.

I can appreciate the appeal, however. Adding some booze and bubbles to a current of sweet, tangy oranges is a winning combination. Factor in the chance to thin out dense juice and you've got an easy way to kick off your day drinking.

Suntide is trying to make things even easier. Its pre-made, canned mimosas promise sparkling wine and real juice at 5.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) per can. Are they any good? Let's see what we've got.

Classic Mimosa: B-

The opening pour checks out. Bubbles, juice, things of that nature. It's a rich orange color that lends me to believe, along with the 200 calories per can, we're getting a healthy dose of fruit here. The smell off the top is citrus and champagne-adjacent wine. It's not especially appealing -- there's a certain boozy sting that accompanies it despite clocking in at 5.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV).

It tastes better than it smells. The wine instantly takes me back to family dinners back in Rhode Island, where my parents would let me take a sip of their wine just to reinforce the idea that, yep, I don't like wine. But now that I'm older I can appreciate it a bit more. The mix here is more Andre than Veuve, but it's a mimosa. It doesn't have to be great, it just has to mix well with orange juice.

Suntide does that. It's not reinventing the wheel or delivering a premium drink. It's merely offering you a mimosa that doesn't require you to pack two big bottles and cups on your trip to the beach, tailgate, cookout, etc. The carbonation is crisp and the citrus is tart with just a little sweetness, snapping each sip off relatively cleanly.

It's too thick to be poundable (and at 200 calories, would be a rough one to blast through four cans of before a baseball game), but it's solid enough to keep you coming back for more. Mimosas aren't my favorite, and this won't put your local brunch place out of business anytime soon. But it's competent and convenient, which counts.

Peach Mimosa: B

This pours with a much lighter timbre than the original mimosa, which is slightly concerning. While the orange was opaque, the peach is effectively translucent. Can timbre relate to the color of a canned alcoholic beverage rather than the pitch of someone's voice? For this column's sake, let's say yes. Words are whatever we want them to be, and that's a perfectly diffuse statement.

The smell is much more full bodied than the color of the pour. It's fuzzy peach rings all the way down. The first sip backs that up. There's a bit of champagne influence toward the end of each gulp, but it's minor compared to the wine currents in the traditional mimosa. It's sweet, fruity and tangy. And, unlike the orange version, lighter and easier to drink.

The peach really does seem to mix with the sparkling wine more naturally here; instead of a hard boundary between fruit and fermentation, the two blend easily. It's still not exactly my cup of tea, but it's crisp with plenty of flavor and a nice crisp finish. For a non-wine drinker, this is a great compromise. Sure, it's basically training wheels to real grapes, but there's big juicy flavor to make for an excellent brunch drink.

Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?

This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Suntide Mimosas over a cold can of Hamm’s?

No, but I'm not much of a mimosa guy to begin with. If you want a tailgate brunch option and don't want to cram three bottles of Andre and a jug of Tropicana in your cooler, this is a much more convenient option.

This is part of FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: Suntide Mimosa review: The convenient way to start your day drinking

Reporting by Christian D'Andrea, For The Win / For The Win

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