Mellow Corn is Kentucky Malört

I was in the Welcome Back Inn and saw a bottle of Mellow Corn. You don’t see Mellow Corn prominently displayed. It’s bottom-shelf. It is cheap corn liquor with a terrible label and, as it turns out, not the greatest flavor either.

I was looking forward to it. I’d only read about Mellow Corn. I mean, I’d seen it in the wild on the shelf close to the floor, its blunt yellow label gathering dust. It retails for twelve bucks, and that’s too much.

The bartender poured my shot, and I tried it like I do any whiskey, checking the bouquet and taking a tentative sip. Which was a mistake. This is a shot whiskey. I should have hit it like a prom queen on spring break doing Fireball. I should have killed with a merciful gulp, but no, I sipped. I tasted it.

Mellow Corn is terrible.

I know there are whiskey writers out there who’ve written apologetic screes about Mellow Corn. They use words like ‘uncomplicated,’ and “simple flavor profile” and basically do everything in their power to justify drinking swill. It shouldn’t be bad, it’s aged in Heaven Hill barrels. It’s a classic corn mash. It’s been around since 1945. Goddam mixologists should have made a Mellow Manhatten by now, but they haven’t because the ‘simple, uncomplicated’ flavor is cardboard, and the nose is microwave popcorn from an insurance office in suburban Omaha, and I’m not gonna roll over for it.

Mellow Corn is Kentucky Malört—change my mind.

Only don’t change my mind because you can’t change my mind. Malört is a hideous, perverse liqueur. It tastes like it’s distilled from an old creosote fence post splashed by the viscous urine of a three-legged leprotic mule who smokes too much. As an adopted Chicago native, I can tell you that none of us really like it. We drink it out of duty and solidarity—and to watch newbies gag. Malört is ghost vomit, and no one should drink it.

Mellow Corn tastes like it was distilled from Orville Redenbacher’s underwear and aged in the glove compartment of a 1974 Pacer abandoned in an Indiana field as a home for diabetic raccoons. It tastes like the lower back sweat of a dustbowl farmer from 1928. It tastes like late-stage bone disease.

But it has a place in the whiskey pantheon.

Mellow Corn serves the same function in Kentucky Malört in the 312. You buy a shot to watch someone drink it, then pound them on the back like they’ve passed some kind of test; like they’re in a club. And they are; they’re in a club of people who’ve tasted Mellow Corn, and much like Hotel California, you can never leave.