[MrMon]

There are a couple of things I find interesting about Rain vodka. First off, I'm not a big vodka drinker, but I love the stories behind all of this stuff. As we have seen documented here, a lot of what is behind vodka is marketing, quite simply, vodka is supposed to be tasteless, so MrWookie's rule about it "not tasting like ass" is a pretty good one. Once you get to that point, there is really no reason to pay more. Oh, there are tiny differences between them, but we've already seen that there are now several recommended cheap vodkas that fit that bill. And this is even more true if you are mixing the stuff, for then paying big bucks is just wasting money.

In the case of Rain, it's one of the few Vodkas actually made and marketed by a distillery, not a marketing arm of some company. Most vodkas are made on order through contract to an industrial firm like ADM. All the effort goes into the marketing and packaging, the producers are just producing raw spirit. (Legend has it that in all those big grain deals with the Russians in the 1970s that the Russians found it too expensive to ship the grain to Russia, so they had ADM in Peoria turn it into alcohol, shipped it to Russia via barge, bottled it, and sold it back to us as Stoly.)

So who makes Rain? It's made by Buffalo Trace, the guys who make a pretty fine bourbon. (As a side note, Buffalo Trace used to be known as Ancient Age, which is still made but pretty rot gut.) And it's made with 100% certified organic corn from some place in Illinois, so that accounts for the sweetness. And since you've likely never heard of it outside of this thread, but all the liquor stores guys seem to know of it, that says something.

Now, when you get to flavored vodkas, that's a whole other ballgame, where what flavorings and methods you use can make a real difference, but when you're dealing with vodka, just remember the Wookie Rule - The cheapest stuff that doesn't taste like ass.