I've never been to anywhere in the world that could be considered tropical. The closest I've ever come is Disney World in Orlando, Florida. While some may call it the happiest place on earth, I don't think anyone has ever called tropical. That label is reserved for places like Hawaii and the Bahamas. I have no desire to go to these places because they are very hot, and I don't like extremely hot weather.

But if I were forced to go to somewhere tropical at gunpoint, I would imagine drinking this there would be very fitting. While I'm not crazy about coconut water, this one is actually pretty good. It tastes really fresh and has a real creamy taste to it. While the summer heat in Buffalo doesn't compare to the tropics, this is definitely helping me …€˜beat the heat' as they say. My only complaint about this is you can't really taste the pineapple. This is disappointing to be because pineapple drinks are delicious and I was really looking forward to tasting the combination of coconut and pineapple.

Hmmmm....it's half things that I like and half gross. Yes, it is a fact that I like chrysanthemum tea and licorice. Whatever else is in this can makes it taste downright dirty. I can't place what it is that I don't like. Honestly, it might be the licorice that overpowers the rest of the tea. You know when you just bought a bag full of black licorice Twizzlers and you eat a few too many and you get that strange, numbing flavor in your mouth? This is like that but there is no slow roll up on that flavor, it's just there when you sip it.

I wanted this to be good. The rest of it is a little tea and then disturbed by a slurry of, to me, unnecessary flavors. I give them credit for having an all-natural tea with some different flavor, but to my palate, it is not something that I desire.

Sorry, Taiwan. Not this time.

To me Tetley is an old ladies tea. A grandma tea if you will. It's what my grandmother always drank, and it was probably my first experience with tea as a child. I was young and dumb and I thought it was complete garbage. Now that I've wised up through the years I love tea. It's probably my favorite beverage. The thing I loved about Tetley when I was a kid was that each box of tea came with a little ceramic animal. My grandmother's cabinet was filled with them (She was a women who loved her tea). Playing with them filled many hours of my youth.

When I was up in Canada recently I saw this at a grocery store and I felt I owed it to that forgotten porcelain army to buy it and review it for the site. Let me tell you 2 liters is a lot of beverage. Especially when it's a way sweet beverage. This is a good quality low quality iced tea, if that makes any sense. There's nothing special or fancy about it. It's actually more like sugar water than tea, but it kept me coming back for more. The lemon flavor is also very strong. If this came in tall boys it would be a nice and refreshing drink to pick up at gas stations on road trips. As it is I'll keep nursing this huge bottle.

I bought this because I had no idea what "korker" is.

Is it named after a person?
Professor Korker worked tirelessly into the night and the day before his hundredth birthday, he came up with the perfect pop. Everyone said he was crazy but he did it anyway.

Is it a fruit?
Ecologists from all over the world went to all reaches of the earth to try and find a fruit that was only known to the Mayans. It was brought from the heavens to cure all disease and ailment and when their society crumbled due to the non-stop fighting about who was going to win the second American Idol, they took their secret, legend fruit with them.

Is it slang?
Hey, don't be such a shmuck and grab me that korker.

Is it a mediocre blend of what I think are lemon and lime?
Yep.

Unfortunately, this drink did not deliver any of the hopes and dreams I had for it. I wanted all of the above except for the last to be true, but from beginning to 2/3'rds of this bottle, I was let down. It didn't taste like your typical lemon and lime combo. It wasn't as sweet and it just wasn't as flavorful. It was a very fast and tame flavor. This is for people who just want a little bit of pop. It wasn't dry, it just was...safe. Sometimes safe isn't where you want to be.

I wonder if they wanted to put the strawberry seeds in here? Is there any pop with stuff in it? Aloe has chunks. Some lemonade has chunks. All of those Kato drinks have chunks in it. Juice seems to take the cake when it comes to accompaniment. I bet, if done well, this drink would be awesome if it had actual strawberry seeds in it.

Where is this all coming from? This might be the most honest fruit flavored pop I've ever had. Not to mention it's mixed with everyone's favorite sweet fruit, rhubarb. Yeah, rhubarb is technically a fruit. I thought it was a root, but I guess roots would grow underground. "Plant" would be a good second categorization, but it would also be wrong. Either way, the taste of strawberries and rhubarb...rhubarbs(?)...rhubarb is pretty fantastic.

I feel like this is a real "country guy" pop. Like you get this at farmers markets and ho-downs. I would like Jackson Hole to please respond if you read this and let me know if either of these assumptions is true. I hope they are.

Mohawk Place is the only bar in Buffalo that I think is worth going to. It used to be a biker bar, but over the years it has transformed into a "punk" bar. All of the employees rule, and I've become good friends with most of them. I DJ there bi-monthly, and when my bands play Buffalo that's where we do it. It's a dive bar with the perfect size stage and the room is big enough to hole 200-300 people, but doesn't seem empty when only 50 people are there. It is a beer and mixed drink bar with nothing too fancy. The other day someone asked the one bar tender to make him a mojito. For some reason that is hysterical to me. Don't get me wrong I think they are tasty (minus the alcohol of course), but the idea of someone drinking one at Mohawk is completely ridiculous. It's way to fancy pants for that place. I didn't witness it, but I can imagine Erik the bartender semi freaking out of the guy, and that makes it even funnier to me. I had that on my mind today and when I had to make a decision between Give flavors, it was a no-brainer to go with the mojito grapefruit.

This is an all-natural energy drink. It's a good thing to be in this day and age. It's made with yerba mate, gotu kola leaf, guarana, gingko biloba and rhodiola rosea root extract. Nothing chemical. Nothing gross.

The can did not instruct me to, so I did not shake it before opening it. As a result three distinctive sections of flavor were in the can. The first third of the can was mostly grapefruit with just the tiniest hint of lime and mint. The grapefruit flavor was great, just the way I like it. The second third was more mojito flavor with a hint of grapefruit and a slight note of yerba mate. For the end of the can it was mostly all yerba mate with a lime/mint aftertaste.

I would have preferred more grapefruit flavor the whole way through the can, but it was still pretty great. Better than most energy drinks. I will definitely be giving their other flavors a shot.

If you ever find yourself in Buffalo at Mohawk place, order a mojito and see if you can get the bartender to snap.

This is a drink that would have a cameo role in my dreams. I can just imagine it now. I'm trekking across the prairies on a mission to get who knows where, but it's somewhere important. I suddenly come to a gate. Why is there a gate in the middle of the prairie with no fence? I surely don't know, but if you think I'm going to try and bypass it you my friend are the crazy one. I approach the gate and suddenly dozens of screaming undead souls come out of the ground in front of it. I am informed that if I do not dance with them they will tear into my flesh and eat every last morsel, even my pancreas. Who likes to eat pancreas? The undead I suppose. Before I know it someone has cranked "Jungle Boogie" and we're all getting down. There's even a dance line and everyone is trying to outdo each other. I make mention that I'm getting thirsty and one of the zombies pulls this bottle from his chest cavity. I blow off the dust, twist off the cap and take a big gulp. The pineapple is refreshing without being overly acidic. Then the ginger kicks in. At first it's just the flavor, but after I swallow the burn sets in. It's a good burn. The kind of burn that will give you the little push you need to out-dance the undead. Just as I'm about to pull out some big moves I wake up. My first thought would be "Where can I score me some of that juice in the waking world?"

Today was the gay pride parade. I don't see how it's possible to not have a good time seeing hundreds of people having the time of their lives. Free like gay birds, these people did what they wanted, wore what they wanted, and acted how they wanted together as a society. If only every day, people were so accepting.

In between the parade and the after party, I went to our local beer merchant who also sells some pretty good drinks for the likes of the youths. I was lucky enough to find singles, or loosies, of Saranac's black cherry cream pop. I had come across this in my supermarket but it was only available in a sixer and I wasn't exactly ready to commit to that long-term relationship. So I picked this up, took a sip and was surprised. It had a really good black cherry taste followed by a smooth cream taste. While this was oh so cold this was good, but it was a warm day today.

I am an adult at times and I don't chug pop. What's the point? I sip and get the flavors I deserve. As I said, initially this was good and the half dozen of people who co-drank this with me agreed. I walked two blocks and something happened. The syrup congealed and got downright unsatisfying to drink. Everything kind of blended together.

If you want to try this and you want it to be good, drink it quickly or somehow keep it cool.

It's a rough place to be, out on the hard streets of Aloeville. People were getting hooked on the heavy stuff left and right. Personally I've seen more than a handful of friends fall victim of its sweet siren song. It seemed that everyone was out to get the sweetest stuff they could find, and the bigger the chunks the better. More and more dealers were popping up everywhere. It was getting to a point where you couldn't be on a street corner without someone trying to push it on you.

That's when Aloe Water came onto the scene. They came up with this crazy idea that this city needed to be shaken awake. They thought the aloe world had become too complacent, and it was time for a change. They started producing a light aloe drink that wouldn't kill you so fast, to help clean up the dirty streets of this run down town. They went for the smallest chunks they could find. We're talking orange juice pulp small here. They also wanted more of a hint of flavor, rather than the way companies of old would bash it over your head. Sometimes they put a nice light pineapple. It wasn't harsh at all, just like they soaked chunks of pineapple in their aloe juice and then strained it out.

Before long things started to look brighter. Diabetes counts went down. People seemed happier. A new era began.

Are you aware that there is never an inappropriate time to yell "It's Science!" Be it in the lab, at the dinner table, the zoo, an ICP concert it is always appropriate if said in order to confirm a statement you've made. If you're out for pizza and a friend thinks it tastes gross, but you really like it, you can say something like "It's really good because they didn't go overboard with the sauce. It's Science!" You have just won the argument. There is nothing they can say to come back from that.

Science is truly at work in this soda. It's to such an extent that it doesn't even need to be said. I knew going in that it was going to taste like grape. I opened the cap and the strong sent of grape hit my nostrils. My mind still expected orange, right until the point that my taste buds registered it as grape. It messes with ones brain. It's like listening to Beatles records backwards only to find out that Paul is the walrus. Even at the end of the bottle my brain still processed it as a mixture of grape and orange even though there is no orange flavor in it. If I went into this blind folded it would taste of pure grape soda, yet my eyes continue to mess me up. You win this round Real Soda.

To whom it may concern,
What are you doing over there? Do you have three separate divisions? Your drinks have completely different flavors. You've got your Joe Shmo brand garbage like Brisk and this half and half which is quite possibly, top five worst half and half's I've ever had, and your TrueLeaf and your new 100% Natural line which are pretty amazing. So what's the deal? Here's what I think.

You've got the classics, the relics, the veterans, and the original line up. These guys are the people that started Lipton. They make stuff the way it should be made; real sugar, actual, real tea, natural flavors. These guys make the TrueLeaf.

You've got the new jacks, the rookies, the kids making the 100% Natural line. It's good for you and has natural sweeteners, which don't taste like liquid sewage and actually let the natural flavors shine through. They utilize the newest technologies and natural ingredients to allow the flavors to act as they should and stay low in calories.

Then you've got the 80's guys. Those jerks. Giant lapels and even bigger hair, these know-it-alls will do anything to turn a buck. Take this half and half, for instance. It's too sweet. It is clearly made from excess or overstock Brisk. Then there is lemonade in there. You can't really taste it, but you are left with the feeling on your tongue like you just drank lemonade but can't taste it. You know they're churning this out by the gallon and those 80's dudes are just sitting on their cigarette boats, blaring Van Halen's "1984" so loud that it's veering the ship off course.

Old dudes and young guns, why do you let yuppie jerks get away with bringing your entire company down? Yes, I understand that they carry the load of the company on their padded shoulders, but don't you want to be known as a quality tea manufacturer rather than a drink powerhouse? It's money versus integrity.

I love a lot of your stuff and I don't like a lot of your stuff. You've released more than any company and you've got a lot coming out all the time. Try and turn down the poor quality stuff and turn up the classic tastes.

Sincerely,
Mike of the Thirsty Dudes

Mike did not enjoy the Beaver Buzz citrus energy drink. As we all know, Mike it wrong sometimes. Actually Mike is normally infallible, it just turns out he doesn't like energy drinks. I in turn thought it was one of the best energy drinks I've had. I was excited to drink the tea version of it. Non-carbonated energy drinks always seem weird to me, but I'm starting to come around. It reminds me a lot of Arizona's green tea. It's very sweet, with a green tea after taste when you exhale. It's decent, but it's not as good as the other two Beaver Buzz's I've had. That being said, I would still pick this over most "normal" energy drinks.

Also, it's Canadian and it's still hysterical that it's called Beaver Buzz. I appreciate their sense of humor.

Sir, I'd like to hire you to work for our company. We're looking for someone who can go through all of our peaches and pick out the finest ones to be used in our teas. Your outwardly French disposition leads me to believe that you would be perfect for the job. Sir don't tell me that the French have no history with peach picking. I am the head of this corporation. Do you think I came this far without knowing a thing or two about the different nationalities and their fruit traits? I'm just going to need some information from you. Can I please see your passport and work visa? What do you mean you don't have them? Carol get me immigration on the horn, we have an illegal in the office! Why should I listen to you explain? What could you possibly say to make me not call the authorities? What? You're a penguin? I'm sorry I thought your beak was just a comically over-sized nose. So a French penguin huh? Well you surely don't have any peach experience. How about you just model for the image on our label? Okay let's keep this on the down low. I don't want any animal INS on my butt about hiring illegal birds.

So we learned today that penguins know squat about peaches and that the fictitious head of the company that I made up can't tell someone with a huge nose from a penguin. What I also learned was that oolong tea is halfway between black and green tea, and it definitely tastes that way. Also this tea is delicious. It's supposed to have a little more sugar than the other Honest Teas, but I can't really tell. It's "just a tad sweet" just the way I like it.

At first I thought this tasted exactly like orange juice, then my thoughts turned to Sunny D. Then I realized that it is pretty much dead on "orange drink." This is what gas station beverage junkies have dreamed of for years. Imagine if you took one of those huge gallon jugs of orange sugar drink and added pulp to it. Okay, so that's not really that crazy of a concept, but that hits this on the nose. It has a very strong and sweet orange flavor. The aloe chunks in this aren't very big at all. They are the size of the largest pulp chunks you would get in orange juice.

While I do enjoy this the more I drink the more I question why I'm not just drinking orange juice with pulp. Also, why is it making my mouth slightly numb? Did someone drop some Auragel in my bottle when I wasn't working? Now we're going to have to listen to the baby cry because we have nothing to numb his gums. Good job guys!

I just ate five pounds of lentils. Okay so maybe it was about two pounds, but it was so many lentils, and they were covered in so much hot sauce. It was wonderful. When I got home from the diner I was stuffed, but I wanted a nice sweet sparkling drink. I'm borderline food coma here, and I still crave a pop. What's wrong with me? How do I not weigh 500 pounds?
Muscatel it is. It's a wine grape, but this doesn't taste like wine at all. At first I thought it tasted like some weird freezie pop, but then I realize it tastes kind of gross. Wait maybe it does taste like a wine of some sort, because wine is also gross. Way to ruin perfectly good grapes by making your crappy beverage wine makers of the world.

I want this to be good, but it's just not. It tastes old. Jerid said it tastes like it's been sitting open on a shelf for years and is long expired. Maybe he's right. He tastes right. I mean it tastes like what he said, not that his flesh tastes right. Maybe it does. I've never actually tried it. Hey Jerid come here....

Prometheus Springs really has a niche and rule at it. Aside from ginger beer, no one dares compare to the heat that Mr. Springs brings to the table. They're pros and they know it. They've got the gall to burn people's mouths and have them crawling back for more.

I enjoy giving their drinks to unsuspecting people and having them take a normal chug just to watch their faces. I giggle when they look as if they just unknowingly ate rat poison or got shot, unsuspectingly, in the chest. Sometimes it's hard to get them to try it again with a sip rather than a chug strategy.

This new line is tamer, I feel, than their previous line. It's way more approachable and I think they toned it down a titch. I find this new line more drinkable from beginning to end a lot easier. I haven't seen it on the shelves yet, but as soon as it does, you've got yourself a little sweet and spicy treat. The flavor is great, too. A real good, smooth mango taste and it's just sweet enough that you could probably grab another if you wanted. If you didn't know, you would have no idea that it's going to take your throat for a vicious trip down a lemon juice rain, razor blade hallway. I all of a sudden want to draw what that looks like. Could someone create a flash game where you have to walk through a razor blade hallway with lemon juice raining down through the sprinkler system? If you make it to the end, you win. You lose by incurring a certain amount of pain. When your pain bar reaches full, you have to go to a fat nurse like the one you had in your high school, and she's got a terribly short skirt and you think you can see "it" but you can't be sure.

Dudes, this tour has been great. We've been to 26 states and we're on our way home. I can't believe we got up and out of the hotel so early after last night. Dude, you threw a chair out the window of a 28 story hotel into a swimming pool, and that...is neat. Let me stop on to this Arby's and get a jamocha shake.

Oh, crap. Now I've got this shake and I've got to pump gas. I don't know why we would get an RV and not get a driver. Seems dumb. So now I've got to put down my milkshake and pump 80 gallons of gas.

Great, done. I smell like gas, but who cares because I've got this...oh, come on. My milkshake melted. Why didn't you turds move it from the dashboard? I'll still drink it, but if I wanted cappuccino, I would have bought cappuccino. I wanted a milkshake. Drats.

Seriously, if this is gross...it's not bad. It basically tastes like a melted jamocha shake. You guys are lucky that it's still drinkable. If it weren't, I would have quit like I almost did in Nebraska. Why you threw your drumsticks at me still doesn't make sense. So I stole your snare drum and ran around with it. Who cares? Don't get so upset. You took all the strings off my bass before we went on set and then the roadie, who didn't pump the gas because he's thoughtless, brought it on stage and didn't check. Idiot. Next stop, Kansas City!

The weird thing about diet drinks is the more you drink them, the more tolerable they become. Normally I despise diet sodas because they taste like chemicals, but I've been drinking a lot of Diet Pepsi over the past couple weeks. This is because I've been staying with my mom for a few weeks until I found a place to live (which I will be moving into tomorrow) and all she has here is Diet Pepsi. Being the soda fiend and night owl I am, I have been drinking enough of it to build up a tolerance to fake sugar in soda.

I realized I had built up this tolerance when I took my first sip of this diet birch beer. I was expecting it to taste gross, but the first sip wasn't that bad. In subsequent sips I could taste the Splenda. This is a really light birch beer. It has a slight bite in the aftertaste, but not nearly as much as I would like and tend to expect from standard birch beer. This definitely gets filed in the "not the best, but not the worst" file.

Thad, could you come here for a minute? Thad...wait your name is Tom? Alright, Thad. Well the guys here at the office have gotten together and decided that your employment here is no longer needed. You want a reason? Thad, you've left the coffee pot on overnight at least two dozen times and you've only been here two months. That's like every other day. Now, Thad, we aren't a large company, but we aren't a small company, but do you know what I don't like doing? Sending poor Sheila Larson to the store to buy a new coffee pot every other day. Sure, she's lost a lot a of weight because I always ask her to get it during her lunch break and she claims that she doesn't have time to eat, but a little weight loss never hurt anyone.

So, as you can see, this is a troubling offense and we can't sit around while this happens day after day. Every day when I come in and unlock the office, I'm greeted by the smell of burnt coffee. Now, I've worked here for 42 years and I've drank burnt coffee before, but once a month is about par for the course. Every other day, well, I didn't work my buns off for 42 years to still be drinking burnt coffee.

Did I tell you that I was in the Korean War, son? Well I was. It was very difficult times. We didn't want to be over there as much as they didn't want us over there. The few days we weren't fighting for your freedom, the boys and I would sneak into town and grab some ice cold pops and relax until our sergeant found out and made us run laps and clean socks in the rain. Well one day the boys and I bought this drink called McCol or McCool or something and, I'll tell you what, if I didn't know better, I would think that you weren't burning the coffee at all, but pouring this stuff into the pot every night. I'll tell you something that stuff tasted like fizzy, burnt coffee.

Now, Thad, I'm sorry, but because of my bad memories of Korea and you inability to remember to shut the coffee pot off before you lock up leaves me no choice but to terminate your employment here at Consolidated Cardboard.

Last night I kept having a dream where I was with John Lithgow and I had to stop him from dying. Sometimes it was accidental and sometimes he was trying to kill himself, but over and over I had to intervene. Then I looked down and noticed a 3" in diameter hole in the ditch of my arm. My arm was hollow and all dried out on the inside. Thinking about it now makes me want to vomit all over the place. Needless to say I slept like garbage.

Now it's later in the day and I'm going to be up late watching some bands play, so I needed a little boost to help me through the night. I didn't want anything too intense so I grabbed this Rumba. I mean it says 100% juice, so it can't be full of too much garbage. In reality taurine, caffeine, ginseng and a whole mess of other stuff in it, but I can pretend it's all-natural.

First off it's weird because it's not carbonated and it's always weird when energy drinks aren't. It tastes like a highly acid orange juice with a little tangerine and pineapple thrown into the mix. There's a slight energy drink taste, but it's mostly just fruit juice. I like it way more than I like highly disturbing dreams. Oh yeah, while I was distracted Mr. Lithgow ended up offing himself. Services will be announced later in the week.