This Is the Riskiest $11.50 You'll Spend at the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival

Can you believe that EPCOT’s International Food and Wine Festival finally starts TODAY?

2023 EPCOT Food and Wine Festival

We’ve been waiting MONTHS for this festival — we’ve had a 3-month drought with no festival in the park, and while we’ve found plenty of things to keep us entertained (it is Disney World, after all), we’re so excited to try all the items at this year’s booths. We’ve got our whole team in the parks to cover it all for you, and that does also mean the dishes that we’re not huge fans of. However, there’s one dish in particular that we’re telling you it’s WORTH it to try…even if the name and look make you want to run the other way.

Flavors from Fire is a festival booth that’s been around since the 2017 Food and Wine Festival. This year, similar to the menu in year’s past, you’ll find lots of options from the grill, including a regular burger, a plant-based burger, and Smoked Corned Beef.

Flavors From Fire

However, the dining options are not what make this booth a little…interesting, to say the least. This year you can grab the new Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter and the returning Four Virtues Bourbon Barrel Zinfandel, both of which sound perfectly normal, but the third drink…the third drink is the Swine Brine.

2023 Menu

Swine Brine is made of Jim Beam Bourbon, apple cinnamon cider, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard and has a whole slab of meat inside of it. So does it fit with the booth? Absolutely. Is that a good thing? …Debatable.

Swine Brine with Jim Beam Bourbon

So why are we telling you to get this drink? Well, for one, it’s arguably the most intriguing and unique item at the festival, and it’ll be very impressive to some if you say you bought it to try it out. But on another hand, we won’t lie — when we tried this drink for the first time in 2020, we were very skeptical and were pleasantly surprised! It won us over in one sip — it was cool and fresh, and we absolutely recommended it.

Swine Brine (2020)

When we tried it last year though, it wasn’t nearly as much of a hit. It started off with a sweet cocktail-ness and then immediately hit us with a strong flavor of bone broth which was alarming in the worst way. The pork inside the drink also looked gray in color, which was pretty off-putting. Unlike in 2020, it was a hard pass for us.

Swine Brine (2023)

What does this mean? It means we’re giving it another try this year, and we think you should too! We’ve seen this drink be great, and we have faith it can be again.

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What do you think about the Swine Brine? Tell us in the comments!