Where Booze Meets Butts

Cigarette-flavored vodka. That’s it. That’s the subhead.

People hit me up all the time for drink recs. I usually just blink at them, the same way I would have if they asked how toilets work. Then I tell them the truth. I don’t care. Pick something, sip it, and deal with the consequences like an adult. I’m not in the hand-holding business.

But if you ask what not to drink? What to avoid like it’s leaking poison and shouting racial slurs through a bullhorn? Well, now that’s different. That’s my wheelhouse. I live to warn people about disasters, and believe me you, Ivanabitch Tobacco-Flavored Vodka is a goddamn Chernobyl in a bottle.

Ivanabitch hit shelves in 2013 and has been stubbornly clinging to life ever since. This stuff is the end result of everything that went wrong with the flavored vodka craze. A toxic mix of lazy branding, bad instincts, and a flavor that actively hates your mouth.

Let’s start with the name: Ivanabitch. It sounds like something a blackout frat bro yells across a Chili’s parking lot before projectile vomiting on his American flag board shorts. Not funny. Not bold. There’s a violence to it. It’s what misogyny looks like when it thinks it’s being cheeky.

And then there’s the flavor. Tobacco. Who asked for that? Nobody. Not one sane human being ever said, “You know what this vodka needs? The acrid bouquet of an overflowing ashtray.” It doesn’t evoke fine cigars or old-world charm, it tastes like someone boiled a carton of Newports in radiator fluid.

Think it can’t get worse? Buckle up! There’s a menthol version. Menthol. Because clearly the goal was to make something so revolting, so chemically, so deeply wrong, it could double as a hazing ritual. It’s what you drink when you've made peace with dying in a Greyhound terminal bathroom.

Ivanabitch is an assault on the entire concept of beverages. It’s the liquid equivalent of a hate crime. No one with a conscience should be manufacturing this. No one with dignity should be selling it. And no one with a functioning soul should be drinking it.

So no, I don’t do drink recs. I don’t believe in rescue missions. But if you’re wondering how far an alcohol brand can fall before it becomes something else entirely, something predatory, Ivanabitch is it.

I like to think that somewhere, deep in a forgotten warehouse no one visits anymore, there’s a dusty pallet of this stuff, surrounded by boxes of Ed Hardy T-shirts, Girls Gone Wild DVDs, and haunted Furbys still whispering in the dark. 

That’s where it belongs. Sealed up with the rest of humanity’s worst ideas.