I drank Wild Boar Bourbon and Cola while playing a 1983 version of Trivial Pursuit. Half of the questions were about the Soviet Union. Fitting. Like oil and water, bourbon and communism just don’t mix. Drinking Wild Boar makes you feel like you’d be complicit in the Red Scare. The drink unlocks a primal desire to binge drink while listening to Van Halen, and scream about how the communists are ruining the country. Or, if you’re feeling contemporary, treat ‘communist’ and ‘wokie’ interchangeably.
Pissed off that I didn’t know the name of the USSR’s state travel agency, I abandoned Trivial Pursuit to realise that in Oz, Wild Boars are sold in 15% ABV cans. Enough piss to turn a 6-pack into 26 standards. With further research – i.e. drinking enough to realise that Wild Boar tastes like a mix of ten-cent coins, battery acid, and crude oil put through a French press – it was clear that Wild Boar’s core business model is to appeal to people that want to get as fucked up as possible.
Logically, I decided to do some research on why these damn ‘insert interchangeable term’ removed Aotearoa’s B&C heritage, or respectively, the 10% Diesel, 12% William Maverick, and 9% Cody – otherwise known as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of breatherism. A Godless nation we now are.
Here’s an extremely brief and marginally accurate recap: in 2012 RTDs, led by this ‘courtcase in a can’ trio, incited a mass moral panic which led to the Justice Minister (then Judith Collins) calling for the ban of any RTDs over 6%. With a slight amount of lobbying, the ban was backtracked and the alcohol industry set their own regulations under the Voluntary Industry Code for RTDs in 2012. Regulations that now maintain the 2.0 standard drinks per vessel, or 7% limit. Which, unfortunately, due to the butterfly effect, led me to drink Wild Boar’s flat bourbon and cola. And due to them not being 15%, I can still remember the metallic aftertaste and getting smoked in ‘80s Trivial Pursuit.
The moral of the story is to buy Diesels instead.
(As a side-note, RTD companies, according to this code, cannot advertise the effects of caffeine in their drinks. But I guess Nitro’s “Sleep when you’re dead” doesn’t count).
Hangoverness: Robert Baratheon after a hunting trip
Book Pairing: Anything from coke-fuelled Stephen King
Additional Use: Lighter fluid, drain cleaner