So: Supermarkets/drugstores/convenience stores can sell beer, malt liquor, hard cider and mead. The short version is that distinctions are largely based on ingredients and how a beverage is made, and to a minor degree about the percentage of alcohol by volume. Trying to make sense of the complexities of which stores can sell what becomes an exercise in foundering in the State Liquor Authority website, which I recommend only for frustration masochists.

Talk about grooming the next generation of drinkers.Īnyway. Which means it's in front of innumerably more young people, a demographic generally associated with being attracted to candy. Introduced last summer, it's now available in 170,000 stores that cannot sell spirits, according to the company. It's a malt-beverage version called simply Fireball Cinnamon. Let's set aside aesthetic and palate considerations to ask an objective question: How the hell is this stuff now in supermarkets and gas stations?īecause it's not actual Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. annually than Jameson Irish.īased on Canadian whisky, Fireball has a potent cinnamon kick that tastes like the similarly named Atomic Fireball candy that's been around since the 1950s.

The little bottles sure look like Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, a brand established in Canada in the mid-1980s that in the past decade has become the fifth-best-selling spirit in the United States, behind Smirnoff and Tito's but ahead of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel's and others Fireball sells more than two and a half times more cases in the U.S.

Malt liquor bottle fumy display