What’s up with freaktails?

The sickly sweet, towering and extravagant freakshakes – milkshakes topped with kilos of candy, thick donuts and liters of whipped cream – have gained an (alcoholic) sibling: the freaktail. What’s up with that?

Freaktail? Not officially a term (yet), but a (made-up by us?) combination of freakshake and cocktail:

Freak·shake (noun)
Monstrous morphed milkshakes, incorporating insane sugar-hangover inducing ingredients. Think lashings of cream, chocolate and caramel sauces, and indulgent delicacies such as chunks of brownie, nuts, pretzels, biscuits and even whole slices of pie.

Cock·tail (noun; plural: cocktails)
1 alcoholic mixed drink
2 mixture: fruit cocktail; shrimp cocktail

Instafamous

I’m quite the sweet tooth, but there are limits. And those limits lie roughly ten kilometers before freakshakes. So the only explanation I have for the fame of these sugar bombs is their appearance. Because let’s be honest, they are Instagrammable and, as is often the case with food trends, we eat with our eyes too. The fact that this subsequently means thousands of liters of ice cream and kilos of sweets end up in the trash because nobody can finish the monstrosities but everyone does want a photo with them apparently doesn’t matter, because even now – 4 years after their ‘birth’ – they remain immensely popular.

Big, bigger, biggest

The cocktail world hasn’t missed that either. So increasingly extravagant cocktails are appearing on the bar as well. Is the bartenders’ motto ‘anything you can do, I can do better’? When we see bloody Marys and Caesars topped with donuts, shrimp, spareribs, chocolate, cheese, lobsters, fried chickens, hamburgers and oysters passing by on Instagram, it certainly seems that way. Whether it’s tasty, I doubt. But hey: at least you no longer need to order a snack board alongside it.

Sarcastic

Granted: you mainly find these monster cocktails in America. But the freaktail is also making its entrance in the Netherlands. Although, according to cocktail guru Tess Posthumus, it is still done in a classy way. “I think here it is mainly a sarcastic wink at all that Instagrammableness,” she says. “At Flying Dutchmen Cocktails, for example, we have the ‘West India Couperee’ on the menu. It’s a blue boozy milkshake with sprinkles on top. That sounds kitschy, but there’s a whole story behind it. The original recipe dates back to 1860. Back then it was made with Dry Curaçao, which is basically the same as Blue Curaçao, but that color was added later as a reference to the blue waters of Curaçao. By presenting it now as a blue milkshake, we are making a nod to the present and the past.”

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