Here's a new drink to consider next time you feel like imagining you are in the tropics, on a black sand beach, with a beautiful girl, getting plastered: VuQo. The Filipino coconut vodka had its U.S. launch this past weekend at CBS Studios. (Read more about it later this week in A Considerable Town.)
This girl was very popular with the cell phone and camera-wielding crowd.
VuQo Inc. marketing executive Giselle Arroyo with the VuQo girls.
The cheeseplate had this little person on it.
The lovely girl who greets you at the check-in table.
Silver-bikini girl, again.
Darion Basco (whose brother Dante Basco starred in filmmaker Gene Cajayon's The Debut) and his sister Arianna Basco. The boys sing and rap as The Basco Brothers.
A watermelon horse in the fruit plate.
This is the Pride Rice dance troupe. Or, part of them. The other (female) ingredients were on break.
Potent little shots of paradise.
VuQo is made from lambanog, a fermented coconut moonshine. Lambanog is inexpensive to make, can go up to 166 proof (over 80 percent alcohol), and is known — like grappa once was — as a peoples' drink. In the Philippine market, there is a popular brand of store-bought lambanog called Orgy. I kid you not. See?
(Photo via Andrew Wong's One Drop Flickr page.)
It comes in flavors like Peppermint and Bubblegum, and if that doesn't make you queasy, I don't know what will.
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