5 Bubbles - 3 Reviews

It looks like the storm is clearing up. I mean there's still some ominous clouds in the sky, but at least it's stopped raining and if you look to the west you can see the sun peeking out a bit. Bai, that is exactly how I feel about this drink. After the less than stellar coconut and guava version of this I feel like you're finally getting some things right. This is a diet sparkling blood orange drink in which the diet taste isn't punishing your taste buds. The blood orange flavor comes first and it tastes great. It's a hard flavor to mess up, but then again so is guava and look where that got us. The taste of the erythritol/stevia is still there in the aftertaste, but it's fairly subdued. The orange flavor is breaking through those dumb sweetener clouds. I'm glad this is good because up until this carbonated line came around I was really into this companies work.

I would like to speak with whoever was in charge of deciding how much sweetener was to be put in this beverage? Did they have a cold the day the decision was made? Were their collective noses stuffed, so that it affected their sense of taste? I don't know what situation would make me not want to fire them, but I hope something is brought to my attention, because this is just ridiculous(drinkers of a product have the ability to fire employees of the company right). Normally when stevia/erythritol are used in a beverage it's towards the bottom of the ingredients list. In here it's the second thing listed; carbonated water then zero calorie sweetener blend. It's so overly fake sweet that it's hard to make out the intended flavor of the drink. Guava is generally a very strong flavor, like passion fruit. In here it gets lost and it seems like an afterthought.

There are people out there who will really like this. I personally just don't understand using that much zero calorie sweetener, just use less. No one will complain.

From the get go I wanted nothing to do with this beverage. My interest in coconut water is still relatively new and a carbonated version sounded absolutely terrible to me. Just as I feared this drink fell on the sunscreen side of the spectrum. It wasn't to the extent that it tasted like someone watered down their Coppertone and then introducing it to a Soda Stream, but it is close enough. If that wasn't a bad enough description for you, take into consideration that the all-natural, zero calorie sweetener is ridiculously strong, and nearly unbearable. Simply put, this is not for me.