Disney is launching their own streaming service, as is DC Universe, Apple, Facebook, your middle-aged neighbor who still lives with his mother…so why not a streaming service solely focusing on booze? DrinkTV is a new channel available on Roku and AppleTV that offers new and curated content focusing on cocktails and beer. William Shatner has a show on the service where he and a guest blind taste wine from a brown paper bag. It’s called Brown Bag Wine Tasting. Shatner. Drinking booze from a brown paper bag. Genius.
You also get Drinktionary, where booze journalist Matthew Latkiewicz explains things. And then there’s Are You Smarter than a Drunk Person, where a really smart drunk person goes head to head with sober regular people in trivia. Then you’ve got The Brewdog Show, where the founders of Brew Dog travel the world collaborating with other brewers.
The whole idea behind the network is to give booze the same sort of coverage as high and low cuisine. I mean, how many shows are there where a chef/celebrity travels around eating from taco trucks? The answer is “a lot.” There are a lot of chef/celebrity taco truck travelogues out there.
“Why isn’t drink culture celebrated in the same way as food?” asks co-founder Jared Cotton in a press release. “We aim to change that.”
The highlight of DrinkTV’s programming has to be Four Sheets, which follows comedian and actor Zane Lamprey as he travels the world trying to understand foreign cultures by drinking with the locals. Most of the time, things get weird. There’s fire and vomit and alpaca llamas. It’s good fun and it will make you start looking for ways your own boozy adventures can take wild turns for the better. For example, in Peru, he drinks a tea made with coca leaves, enjoys chicha on the streets, and imbibes toxins from a frog. Mmmm, frog toxins.
A month of DrinkTV runs $2.99. You don’t get a new Star Wars show like on Disney, but you might find inspiration for your next night out.