Lemon - 3 Reviews

In the era of the diet obsessed 80's Crystal Light reined supreme. For those of you who don't know it was/is a flavored, artificially sweetened powder that you would mix in with water to make your very own “healthy” drink at home. While they have come a long way in recent years, the original flavors tasted like poison to me. It was just one big pile of diet grossness.

The True company is following in the same footsteps, except they decided to make their product from 100% natural ingredients. Instead of sweetening them with aspartame or sucralose they opted for stevia. While that has made a world of a difference with their other drinks, I don't think this lemonade ever stood a chance. Lemonade by definition is sugar sweetened lemon juice and water. If you deviate from that at all things start falling apart. The flavor of the stevia is far too overpowering in this to an extent that it's a little hard to make out the lemon flavor. Instead of tasting like lemonade it ends up resembling a creation that was brought to life by some cheap skate teenager at a local Dennys. I've been there before, in my formative years. You order a water with lemon and then put sweetener in it to create your own dull version of lemonade. The problem is this particular restaurant had stevia packets instead of sugar and everything just went wrong.

I assume Georgia gets sick of being synonymous with peaches. Like Salem and witches, these places have more to offer than being a one trick pony? Now that we're on this horse segue, when have you seen a horse do more than one trick that it's derogatory to be known as a "one trick pony?" Horses run; not a trick, and they jump over fences; trick. A horse that is a one trick pony can now be just labeled as a horse. Backtrack...

Salem had witch trials in the late 1600's. We're four centuries past that and although they milk it, there are other people that live and work there that have other things to do that constantly carve pumpkins, affix faux moles, and practice their shrill laughs.

Salem; check. Horse talk; check. Alright, back to peaches. Peaches are fine. I don't like them but I don't hate them. There are just some foods that I don't eat for no reason other than I don't want to. Furry fruit is one of them. Look, they taste fine. I don't eat them. The thought of a peach lemonade entices me, though. I made myself a glass of this and slammed the whole thing. No problems there. What did I think? Well that's why we're all here, right? At the edges of our seats awaiting my very important review of a powdered peach lemonade. I shall serve you your main course of review right now. Please be seated.

This was the first time since I've been on a True Citrus kick that the Stevia was overpowering. It wasn't too much that it was undrinkable but it was distracting. The peach flavor was good albeit a bit "candied" for my taste. The lemonadidity (not a real word...yet) was about a five out of ten. Between the candy peach and the non-traditional sweetener of the lemonade, this took a turn for the unfortunate "average" column. A couple strikes will do that to you. Baseball strikes. A couple bowling strikes would put you on top of the world. That phrase simply wouldn't work if I was referencing bowling. I don't know much about sports but that I know. Strikes in baseball is bad. Strikes in bowling is good.

We're getting there. I feel like with this, a larger company in the world of diet and concentrates, using Stevia actively as their sweetener, we are getting off the sucralose, corn syrup, and aspartame train and onto the future Hyperloop. Yeah, I skipped bullet train and went right to Elon Musk's vision of a better, faster, cleaner tomorrow. Is this that much of a jump? No, not really. Other companies have been using Stevia for years but it's just nice to see that it's trickling up into the bigger dudes.

Not only does it have a natural sweetener, but also the taste in itself is pretty good. It's got great lemonade taste and a good, fruity raspberry taste. All together it's not too sweet and not really too much of anything which mixes can tend to be. This is right on mark.

With the proceeds from the sales of this, maybe they'll help build that dream train. I'll ride that thing and take a transcontinental trip at over five hundred miles per hour all day long.