Postcard from Norfolk – Potato vodka

In the small, charming, Georgian town of Holt, where there is one posh shop for every 0.7 people, there’s a fabulous grocers. It sells all sorts of stuff. If you do your weekly food shop in a supermarket, then you are probably exposed to a limited range of stuff, because supermarkets buy food in huge, American-sized portion amounts and so are able to offer you a trolly load of crisps for a fiver because they have aisles full of crisps. But if you look closely, you’ll see that there are only three or four varieties of crisp, but a hell of a lot of packets and, hey, they are crisps, so who cares.

Passing the shop window I see a familiar logo on an unfamiliar product. It’s the Tyrrells logo. Tyrrells are a Herefordshire based crisp company that recently became a bit famous because they refused to let Tesco stock their product, reportedly because they did not like the way Tesco treated small farmers and wanted nothing to do with the company, but I suspect in reality because they did not want the sort of loon faced chavs who listlessly chew crisps in an open mouthed, slack-jawed ruminating manner before throwing the packet away onto the street to be eating their product when they do so. And very good crisps they make too.

This time, the logo was on a bottle of clear spirit. Ah ha, either they’ve gone into producing water, of that’s potato vodka.

Running into the shop I accosted the man behind the counter and asked if it was made by the self same sorts that made the crisps. He believed so. What was the vodka like, had he tried it? Indeed he had, it was smooth and creamy. Well, I opined like a true barbarian, if it’s half as good as their crisps, I’d be a happy man.

Doing a good job of trying to conceal his horror that anyone would pollute their palate with crisps when they could be marinating it in vodka, he sold me a bottle.

Like many bottles of spirits bought on holiday, this one went into the cupboard and probably would have stayed there with the other yellow, green and red concoctions bought in a moment of madness abroad that makes you think you can recreate the magic of a foreign place simply through alcohol, when the truth is you need alcohol served from a vastly overpriced mini-bar to really achieve the effect, or when you eventually get drunk enough for a traffic light themed drinking game. However, one evening I remembered it and poured myself a shot-glass full. Hummn, it was indeed smooth, and creamy. But what it was most of all was a glass of transparent spirit made from whatever they have left over when they have finished making the crisps. Gasping and shuddering, I followed up with a glass of water.

Okay, I wonder what it adds to a coke? What it added was alcohol, which is probably not what the people who invented coke had in mind when they innocently blended cocaine, sugar and caffeine, no, they wanted a stimulating drink, 110% global market share and the heads of those bastards at Pepsi on a spike at the factory gates.

All was going well until, bored one evening, I decided to enhance the film I was watching through the simple addition of alcohol. It must have been a very bad film or a very good vodka and coke, or several very good vodkas and cokes because the next morning the bottle was more or less empty and I was convinced that the cultivation of the potatoes, the setting up of the crisp company as some sort of front, the distilling of the vodka, the bottling and the placing of the bottle strategically in the window of the shop I was passing was all simply an elaborate plot to kill me with hangover.

A couple of days and a lot of paracetamol later I resolved to avoid the stuff in future. Some drinks are simply to be avoided and anything that is potato based and probably made in a tin bath has to be near the top of the list, right up there with the lemoncello my mother-in-law makes, from a recipe she has on a tea towel she bought on holiday in Sorrento!

Still, if they bring out a prawn cocktail flavoured liqueur version, I could be tempted.