One heckuva tea party

Sweet tea is as Southern as country-fried steak, front porches and gospel music. Only now, if you drink too much of the Firefly brand, you might just fall out of your rocking chair.

Firefly Distillery is now selling sweet tea-flavored vodka in Baton Rouge stores, restaurants and bars. And the sweet news is there’s no liquor whiplash: It really tastes like sweet tea.

“The sugarcane masks the alcohol,” says Scott Newitt, the distillery’s co-owner and an LSU grad. “Genuine and real. Southerners are genetically driven to this flavor.”

Newitt and his business partner, Jim Irwin, use tea leaves from a South Carolina plantation and sugarcane grown in Donaldsonville and New Iberia. It’s already the top-selling vodka in South Carolina, Firefly’s homestate.

Next year, Firefly plans to expand its sweet tea vodka into three new flavors using peaches from Georgia, lemons from Florida, and mint for a “mo-TEA-to.”

Look this month for the Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka, retail $18 to $20, at Calandro’s Supermarket on Perkins, Marcello’s, Martin’s Wine Cellar, as well as The Chimes, Ruffino’s, Sullivan’s Steakhouse, Mansurs, among others. fireflyvodka.com