Tuaca Liqueur's New Bottle: Or, How To Get A Temporary Tattoo from L.A. Ink's Corey Miller

Tuaca, the Italian liqueur that you may remember as a bar shot staple in the pre-Red Bull days, has a new look thanks to Corey Miller, the tattoo artist of L.A. Ink reality show fame and owner of Upland's Six Feet Under tattoo parlor.

Regardless of how we feel about the citrusy vanilla liqueur, which the company says is based on a Renaissance-era formula originally created for Lorenzo de Medici (Did they really use so much sugar back then?), the new bottle design is pretty terrific.

In a recent article in Tasting Panel magazine, a beverage industry trade publication, Miller said he approached the design “just like a tattoo.” He notes that “It's a different thing to actually put my art on something tangible, something that's going to be reproduced. That's really cool.”

“Cool” being the operative word here, as Miller's dragon-like Florentine lion design was inspired by Renaissance imagery but still has the appropriate reality T.V.-era shock value. His design is etched in thermochromatic ink, a dye that changes color as the temperature changes, so the artwork morphs from light gray to cobalt blue when the bottle is chilled. A read-to-drink reminder, in essence (the “perfect chill bottle” as Tuaca had dubbed it).

Whatever it's called, this is one case when we're after the fantastic things on, not in, the bottle.

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