Our man on the barstool mixes up Kenny Chesney’s Blue Chair Bay
If you've ever picked up a magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room, you've likely and unknowingly just read a Who's Who of liquor magnates. Why do you think paparazzi follows these people around? For their charm and good looks? No. It's for the booze!
Clooney, Fergie, Timberlake, Diddy, Trump and newcomer Pharrell all have distilleries that pump out bottle after bottle of star-studded hooch. Even the pimpled ’90s supergroup Hanson and Danny DiVito have fallen off the proverbial band wagon.
One of the latest celeb labels to jump hot off the presses is Kenny Chesney's “Blue Chair Bay” premium rum.
When Kenny isn't filling Neyland Stadium with rain-soaked country music fans or polishing his four CMA Entertainer of the Year awards, he has a little place down in St. John's where he likes to shake the sand out of his boots while enjoying a sip of the favorite local water.
I'm imagining that since all of his crazy friends are always dropping by to drink all of “Kenny's rum” anyway, it would be a good idea to just get some with his name on it so they would remember where they'd been the night before. And rather than go through all the trouble of cluttering up the living room with vats and bottling equipment, he thought, “I'll call up Mike Booth over in Barbados and see what he can come up with.”
Now, before you think that Chesney is just some guy that thought up a clever marketing idea, this guy is serious. He's whachacall an “aficiando.” The guy knows rum. He explains, “Anyone who knows me knows I've drunk a lot of rum in a lot of places. And the more you drink, the more you know what you wish you could have.” So, he and Booth came up with three variations of his brand that are straight off the Caribbean beach. Literally. Blue Chair Bay's White, Coconut and Coconut Spiced rums are aged less than 100 feet from high tide.
Over the weekend, I was invited to to a deck party under the stars at the home of my wonderful friends Jamie and Susan. Unbeknownst to them, they and guests were destined to be guinea pigs in my devious plan to spring some summer drinks on them and see if they could winter them and fall for it all.
I concocted a recipe of Kenny Chesney's Blue Chair Bay Coconut variety mixed in a humongous container with pineapple and guava juice, limes, oranges and cherries, ginger ale and some confectioner's sugar.
Word spread throughout the assembled crowd pretty quickly and soon there was a queue of empty cups and anxious faces forming like a “Weekend At Bernie's” conga line that lasted well into the evening.
Before you start harkening back to the dentist’s office waiting room again, it's not as overly sweet as you might think. There are other popular coconut rums out on the market that will do that for you. Obviously though, part of the point of coconut rums is for them to be placed in sweet and colorful tropical drinks that will instantly transform even the most dank family room in Minnesota into a sundrenched beach surrounded by palm trees.
The Blue Chair Coconut does have some sugar kick to it. But it's not quite as cloying as some I've sampled. It's not as amaroidal (bitter) as others, either. It's in the middle of the two, what Baby Bear would describe as “Just right”.
(Note: Please don't serve liquor to bears or other woodland creatures.)
Cheers!