How Can Fireball Get Away with Selling Tiny Bottles in Dry Texas Counties?

The first time I saw these tiny bottles for sale at a gas station in Smith County, I thought "Wait a minute, they can't sell liquor in Tyler," then I never gave it another thought.

Well, it turns out the "How" behind Fireball getting their teeny tiny bottles to sell in places where you can't purchase liquor could be construed as more devious than you might've imagined.

And now they may have to pay the piper... 

A class-action lawsuit has been filed in the state of Illinois against Sazerac, which is the parent company of the popular cinnamon-flavored Fireball Whisky, as it turns out those mini-bottles don't actually contain any whiskey.

Of course, the full-size bottles you've been chugging on Thursday nights, those legally are whisky. But to sell more bottles the company has also created a malt beverage with cinnamon and whiskey flavors. Notice that the description reads that it has whiskey flavor, no actual whiskey in it to meet the demand for their beverage.

Well, it is something they do address on the website:

We developed a great tasting malt beverage and an excellent wine-based product under the Fireball Cinnamon brand name.  Both are made using our proprietary recipe, capturing the essence of the Fireball taste experience consumers love. We can now offer Fireball in approximately 170,000 stores in the U.S. that can only sell beer, malt beverages and wine products, but not whisky.

And apparently, if you look closer you'll notice the bottle has “Fireball Cinnamon” written on it, not “Fireball Cinnamon Whisky” like the big boys.

According to NBCDFW, "the suit alleges that the labels of these two distinct products: “Fireball Cinnamon Whisky” and “Fireball Cinnamon” are virtually indistinguishable from each other and because of that, the malt- or wine-based version of Fireball misleads “consumers into believing it is or contains distilled spirits.”

We'll see how this one plays out.