Drink Smarter, Not Harder, with Smart Spirits

If it’s local, we love it. That’s basically the whole idea behind our site, right? But sometimes we find a product that isn’t made locally that’s cool enough that we want to tell you about it anyway. And also tell you how you can still support local while using it! Enter: Smart Spirits.

Some of you are nodding your heads, remembering when we first found out about Smart Spirits (which is actually distributed right here in Pittsburgh). Here’s the TLDR: it’s basically like a single cup coffee machine, but for alcohol instead of coffee. Your water is actually mixed with some high-quality, unflavored alcohol, and your “coffee pods” are the flavor pods to turn that unflavored alcohol into whatever you feel like drinking.

We were so excited about it this summer that we had to get a dispenser and try it for ourselves. You know, for research, so we could make sure we gave you good information. Guys…we were NOT disappointed.

Smart Spirits has 30 different flavors you can choose from, and they offer tons of cocktail recipes on their site and within their app. We decided to test it out using two other recipes, because that seemed more scientific. And we might have also wanted an excuse to get Soergel’s apple cider when we were at Wholey’s. Ahem.

So we made apple cider margaritas and apple cider mojitos. We were still able to support local businesses by getting our produce and our Soergel’s apple cider from Wholey’s in the Strip. Full disclosure: we already had cinnamon sticks and cinnamon sugar, although you could easily pick those up while you get the rest of your ingredients.

Smart Spirits made it so simple to mix up our cocktails. We picked our level of alcohol – because you can select how alcoholic you want it to be! Then we placed our glass under the dispenser, popped in our flavor pod, and watched our delicious tequila and rum pour out.

We had to take a sip of the tequila and rum before we added the rest of the cocktail ingredients, and we were amazed. They tasted so much like a top shelf tequila and rum that we thought about just sipping on them by themselves! But, the apple cider was still calling our name and we didn’t want it to feel left out.

It was seriously so simple to make cocktails using Smart Spirits. We love that the flavor pods allow us to make so many types of cocktails without cluttering up our bar with a ton of bottles that have like, three shots gone. So the only question left is: what flavor do you want to try first?

This content was provided by a local, independent contributor to Made in PGH, a lifestyle blog.