A few weeks ago, I was at the bottle shop stocking up for the increasingly frequent house sessions at my place. I saw “Vodka O” being offered 2 for $60. At $30 a bottle, it worked out to be around $5 less than a bottle of Smirnoff Red so I decided to give it a go.

Serendipitously I had read recently about how the quality of cheap vodka can be improved by using a simple charcoal filter.

lifehacker: Increase the Quality of Cheap Vodka with a Water Filter

So, what made the sale for me was the fact that it said charcoal-filtered on the label.

From the Vodka O site, the product description is this:

Using Australia’s purest water, our unique evaporative and charcoal filtering process creates a super smooth taste.

Vodka O is free from chemical additives and contains no residual herbicides, pesticides or fungicides, which means more natural goodness and fewer hangovers.

I don’t know about vodka being “natural goodness” but it turns out, the product description was otherwise not exaggerating too much. I did a side-by-side test of shots of Vodka O and Smirnoff Red, and the Vodka O went down smoother and was scarily easy to drink. I say scary because my friends and I did shots of this last night a little too enthusiastically.

And it was clean enough that I did not have a bad hangover. I declare this my new favourite vodka. Any Vodka O sales rep reading this out there? *hint hint wink wink*