Nothing says "party" like cake and pop. It's true. Pizza might help. Pointed hats, too. I feel that the basis, the core, of a party is cake and pop. If you don't provide these things you are either:

1. Old


2. A lame adult

That's about it. I hope that you, my faithful Thirsty Dudes and Dames fit into neither category.

So today I had a get together at my house and, as one would assume, had ice cream and plenty of beverages. I got this new stock from College Club when Jay and I went there about a month ago and I decided that it was time to bring it to the masses. People all seemed to want the cream soda and the cola champagne. I happily opened both of them and let them have at it. I've had the cream soda before and loved it. The cola champagne was a new addition and I was excited to try it.

I. Did. Not. Like. It. You know who would like it? Nay, love it? 8-years-old kids. An 8 years old boy would love this because it is wildly sweet and it tastes like bubble gum. A couple people liked it and one person said that it was better than the cream soda, but they are simply wrong and I did not let them get away with such blasphemy.

They can't all be winners and it's pop like this that can be a fun experiment and if it sells, it sells, but it won't be sold to me again any time soon.

My roommate went to New Jersey last weekend with one of his bands. They went to a Hispanic market and he apparently spent way too much money on drinks and snacks. This has been sitting in our fridge since then (hence it's half gone in the picture), so I decided to have a glass and write a little review.

First off this has a perfumey aroma like lychee, which was completely unexpected. When I read fruit flavored I generally think of a fruit punch. Apparently the fine people of Columbia think differently. To me it tastes like bubble gum flavored pop with a little bit of lychee thrown into the mix. The thought of that is completely repulsive to be, but in practice it's actually kind of good. There's a bit of a red cream soda flavor mixed in there as well. With each sip I become more acclimated and I like it a little more. This is strange and nothing what I expected. I will say that this is a seven-year-old's dream come true. Some fat little kid out there would down this entire two-liter bottle in less than five minutes. That kids parents are doing a terrible job with raising that kid.

When most people think of the word passion their minds are automatically filled with the ideas of love and sexual lust. It's a positive thing that can lead to joy and fun. What people forget is that passion can also go the other way. You can also hate someone with a deep passion. It's any extreme emotion. So my question is were passion fruits names for love or hate?

I'd like to think that it was such a delicious fruit that it caused two ancient tribes to go to war. Both wanted control of the passion fruit orchards (they grow on trees right?) and were willing to go to extremes to gain said control. So I guess it would work both ways. Their absolute love of the fruit resulted in extreme hatred for the other tribe. I totally understand that. This juice smells and tastes wonderfully. It's only 14% passion fruit juice and if someone tried to take it from me I would probably slap them involuntarily. Imagine what I would do for the actual fruit. Did that just blow your mind? If so you should probably put down the bong because it really wasn't that deep of a thought.

This is a limited edition flavor of Mountain Dew that they just recently brought back. I remember it being around a few years ago, but I never got around to trying it. When I first saw the name Pitch Black, I was hoping this was going to be a blackberry soda. Sadly its not, but black grape is equally intriguing.

The black color of the soda is actually a very dark purple. I've never heard of a black grape so I'm assuming they just decided to market it this way because it's a lot catchier than Pitch Purple. The taste is decent, but not amazing. The grape flavor is really tart which is nice, but then the usual heavy Mountain Dew taste sets in. Overall, this isn't the best limited edition flavor they've concocted, but it's not horrible.

Can you get mad at someone if they only do 50% of a task but the 50% that they did do is stellar? I mean, you can't be totally mad at them, especially if it's something like your nephew coming over, telling you he's going to wash and detail your car, but right before he's supposed to start vacuuming up all your crumbs from eating toasted English muffins on your drive to work, you sister calls and tells you that little Mason has to come home. You assume that he's done so when you go into your car the next day and notice that there are still a mound of crumbs because you can't get up five minutes earlier to eat at the table like a civilized adult, you are a bit surprised. Here's the thing, though. He simply offered it to you. He didn't have to do any of it. He did half and to all of the people on your treacherous ride to work love the look of your clean Toyota Yaris sedan with the radio that looks like it had the display ripped off of a calculator you had in 3rd grade.

Xing has not let me down thus far. Yes, some drinks I like more than others. This I was interested in because it was their first endeavor to the realm of half and half. It's a tricky market because Arizona has been dominating the market and people's minds with their Arnold Palmer, which, in my opinion, isn't fantastic. This, though, is mostly just lemonade. I can't really taste the tea with the exception of at the very end where it might have been tea because it tasted differently but actually could have just been because the can was in the sun for a while.

Here's the thing...the lemonade was quite exceptional. It made me forget that it was a half and half at all. It's a strange predicament to be in where I have to rate a drink that I liked but didn't taste anything like what the label said. For that reason, I have to put it right in the middle.

If you like half and half, we've got tons on this site to check out, but if you like lemonade, you might just want to pick this up and forget that there is tea in it all together.

Jay and I love to ride bikes. Problem is that it's been raining like every single day for weeks and we can't do it. A few days ago, Jay and I went all over the place and ended up riding 28 miles. That may not be a lot for some, but it is to us. I've ridden in a couple benefit rides and clocked 60 miles before, but that doesn't happen when we're just cruising around.

Tonight, Jay, Thirsty Dudes editor Dan, and I rode around looking for some bike path. It should also be noted that it was 10:30 at night when we left, so it's not like we were taking some daytime stroll. Long story short, a train-yard got in the way and when we eventually got around it, we somehow made it closer to home than to some mystical bike path that we weren't sure existed in the first place. Total ride was about 18 miles.

On top of that, I did like 5 hours of gardening today by pulling up shrubs that I didn't want and cleaning up the leftover holes. Needless to say, I burned a couple calories and I knew that it would be time to break out one of my protein drinks.

This one I've been sitting on for quite some time and as phallic as it is, it still had to be done. I thought that it might be super sweet and maybe stingy with all the vitamins, minerals, and just plain stuff but I couldn't be more wrong. If you drank this without knowing was it was, like out of an unmarked Solo or Dixie cup, you would swear it was just some regular juice. I don't know about the citrus berry, but what I do know is that this drink smells and tastes like strawberry Twizzlers and that is fine with me.

Obviously I can't judge this based on it's supposed effects since I drank it one time and not regimented like it would probably ask for. If anyone has, I would love to hear your results. I know that if you're looking for some protein and can't take those shakes anymore, three rather delicious sips and you're done.

Lemonade is something that you sip on a beach, or on your back deck. Better yet it's a nice beverage to slowly sip when sitting in a gazebo. I don't know why or where it came from but I have a pretty immense love of gazebos. They are so relaxing and nice to look at. If I even end up owning a house you can bet your ass there will be a gazebo in the back yard. Now back to lemonade. It's is a wonderful drink in all the above situations. It is not a good choice as refreshment for hiking. It burns the throat, and it's way too sweet. I made a poor choice today, but I still enjoyed this bottle of Calypso. I do have to say that the lemon in this bottle was way stronger than in any of their other flavors I have tried. It was super strong lemon with just a hint of pineapple and passion fruit. I could have gone for a little more pineapple in it, but I'm sure that would have ravaged my throat even more. I will say that this is also the first of their products that I've had where I could actually feel the chunks from the lemon pulp. If I wasn't hoping for them I probably wouldn't have realized, but it was nice.

It was very nice out today. People were out doing yard work, hanging out with parks, and walking their dogs down the road everywhere I went. What did I do today? I took a little stroll with my lady friend around Elmwood Village and then went with Editor Dan to explore an old cement factory that has been abandoned and left to rot for well over 50 years. Let me tell you, I think we had most people's plans for the day beat. There are also some caves back their, but they were either sealed off by a rock slide, or we are too big of idiots to find them.

I can also tell you something else. When exploring you work up a mean thirst. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up some refreshments. Unfortunately for us their selection was pretty beat. I grabbed this Arizona, because I needed something and it was cheap. I thought we had already reviewed it, but when I checked it somehow had slipped through the cracks.

This was an old standby for myself for years. I would go to the University Heights section of town to go to basement shows all the time. In-between bands we would walk to the nearby gas station for iced tea and this is what I purchased 90% of the time. I always referred to it as "dirt flavored." To clarify it actually tastes nothing like dirt at all, but the coloring and design of the can always made me think of some old tincture that surely would taste like dry mud. It's actually way, way sweet. It's green tea with mango, pear and lemon juice in it. It also has some herbs in it that make it a half-assed energy drink. I don't think I've ever felt any energy from one of these, but I sure do like the way they taste. It's very different than any of the other flavors of Arizona. I believe it is the only fruit flavored green tea they produce. The green tea compared to the black makes all the difference.

If this were a new company that I found I probably would have given this a three bottle review, but since I have so much history with this drink, and I started drinking it before I discovered non-HFCS teas, I will give it a four. I loved it back then when I was ignorant, and I still enjoy it a great deal now.

I often wonder what one would want to "detoxify" themselves of. Obviously if you smoked a pound, or kilogram to our metric brethren, of week, you might want to get that out of your system. It's the same with any sort of drug. Aside from that, you can't really "detoxify" yourself of a giant hamburger that you shouldn't have eaten but the menu said that it had chipotle in it and that is your weakness. Water, I feel, would probably be the best detox drink because it doesn't leave anything behind. No sugar. No carbs. I think I've heard that cranberry juice is a good cleanser, but once again, what are you doing that you need to be cleansed?

I kind of expected this to be lighter than a typical aloe drink, you know, because it's called "Aloe Water". I thought that it might be in the beginning, but after you take a couple sips, you're right there with the rest of them. One thing that I did notice is that the "chunk count" is less in this than in many of the other aloe drinks I've had. That's never good. If I'm buying a drink, knowingly with chunks in it, I never want to chance that I will take a sip and not have anything to chew on. Taste? It tastes good. It's fruity but you still get a pretty good aloe taste to it. Think of a very light fruit punch mixed with an "original" flavored aloe. There is honey in the ingredients but I can't really pinpoint it in the drink itself.

If I ran this company, which also makes Coco Water, I would drop the tagline of "Natural Detox Drink" because it makes me feel dirty every time I read it. I would say something like "100% All Natural" or "All Natural Aloe" or "Naturally Sweetened". Why make something out of nothing. I have drunk my share of aloe drinks and I've never heard it be considered detoxifying.

Also, don't smoke a pound of weed. Go outside and play.

This has been sitting in my fridge waiting for the perfect moment to drink it. It sounded incredible. The Honest company has a history of making amazing drinks, so when I learned that they made a chocolate line I was very interested. I'm not a huge fan of coffee, but I have enjoyed every Mocha that I've ever tried. You know Mocha, hot chocolate with a little kick. I hardly consider it coffee. It's more of a chocolate drink with a little coffee added.

Since today is supposed to be the so-called rapture, I decided it was now or quite literally never. I guess that's not true. If it were the rapture all of the good Christians would be raised up to heaven while my friends and I had some more time left to suffer on Earth. I would celebrate that suffering with a whole mess of drinks. Seeing as it's all a fairy tale anyways I will drink this mocha cacao in celebration of me being intelligent enough to realize that angels aren't going to come carry people away today.....or ever.

On first smell this has a weird scent. Almost like the chocolate milk that is left in the bowl after you eat some Coco Puffs, but stronger. I took a sip, and this was not what I was expecting at all. It was as if they melted down baking chocolate, watered it down and added two shots of black coffee. First you're hit by the watery baking chocolate taste. It's bitter, but not the good bitter like when you get some quality dark chocolate. As you hold it in your mouth that flavor stays, but as soon as you swallow and take a breath the coffee sets in. I always find it odd when drinks have distinct waves of flavor. In some juices it's nice, but for this it's not working for me. I would have preferred this all blended into one tight flavor.

I really, really wanted to like this, but to be honest I couldn't make it through half of the bottle. I had expected a richer chocolate taste. If you really like coffee maybe it will be something you really enjoy. I'll pass it off to an angel if I see one today.

Do you remember a few years back Fox had a pilot for a show called "Drive?" It was a pretty cool concept. Someone kidnapped this dude's family for undisclosed reasons and the only way to get them back would be to race from point A to point B and (probably) win. I don't know if you could earn your family back just from participating in a race and losing. That seems pointless. Needless to say, the show didn't get picked up, but I actually wanted it to. I don't know how you would keep a show based inside of a car interesting for 23 episodes to the general public, but I would have watched it. The "code name" for this drink is "drive" and I don't think that the driver of the kidnapped family would have been too keen to have this be his titular product. It's simply too strange.

You have to drink through garbage to get to "the good stuff" but then you're left with more garbage. This isn't one of those clichè "artificial sweetener" discussions either. It's kind of like you taking blood orange powder mix, which doesn't exist, putting it in your mouth, and then pouring the water directly into your mouth making juice in there. Obviously, the traditional, mom and pop, way of making juice is to put the juice in a container, mix water in, stir, and then drink. They skipped a couple steps and it shows.

I haven't really been impressed with the Vitamin Water Zero collection, thus far. Their LifeWater collection is better than this. If you're looking for a diet drink in this water-esque realm, stick with the LifeWater.

Editor Dan picked this up for me a while ago. I would have drunk it much sooner, but something about the label just screamed, "diet" to me. I think it's the pink they used in their design. So for weeks this has been sitting in the crisper of my fridge with a handful of other drinks. This morning I woke up late and had to get to work in a hurry. Juice was an obvious necessary. This was the only bottle of juice I had that was already cold. I shrugged, grabbed the bottle and headed for the door.

I was still skeptical about how this was going to taste, so it wasn't until an hour into my workday that I finally opened it. I took a sip and instantly wished the bottle was larger. It didn't taste too much like pomegranate berry, but it did taste like the most perfect mixture of grape and apple juice. I really don't taste berry in this at all. I can see a little pomegranate in the grape flavor, but I don't know why they named it what they did.

There is also resveratrol in this. You don't know what that is? What are you some kind of dummy? Don't worry I had never heard of it before either. In tests done on bugs and animals it has shown to lower blood sugar, and it seems to be anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory. It hasn't been proven to work in humans yet, but if it's not going to harm anyone why not take the chance of it working and throwing it into the mix.

So far this has been my least favorite of the Celsius line. The sucralose in this is just overpowering. It somehow tastes like a diet ginger drink with some diet berry flavoring added to it. If you're used to the diet taste it's probably tastes fine to you. I didn't really enjoy it at all. I will still give this a three-bottle rating though as it gave me all the energy I needed to exercise. So much in fact that Mike and I rode our bikes for nearly 30 miles last night and I didn't feel exhausted at all. Hopefully it also actually burned off those extra calories like it promised to as well.

When I was in college, I had a friend called Chad. Chad worked for Student Associates, which basically meant if there was a promo going on from an outside company, he would be on of the people to work it. Handing out products and flyers and just doing promotion was his gig. Kind of like a hired street team, if you are familiar with that term, a term which I feel died out as soon as people started spending time online on Facebook and Twitter and not on the streets where things used to happen.

One of the companies that he did stuff for was Starbucks. They had him handing out cases of their new Frappuccino in the smallest possible containers. Those lil' baby 4oz containers like V8 comes in. 4 ounces? Am I a child? Nay, I am a man who wears child sized clothing.

So Chad took a case of the stuff and gave it to my roommate, Evan, and I and we didn't know where to start, so we decided to just jump head first into the case and destroyed about half that first day, got sick, and struggled to finish the second half.

This Illy Latte Macchiato tastes a lot like that but less sweet and more coffee taste. It's teetering on the edge of my dislike for coffee and my like for coffee tasting things. It's pretty good. There is just the right amount of sugar to offset the otherwise strong coffee taste. I think this is a good product for people like me that don't hate the taste of coffee in things, but don't like coffee itself, all the way up to coffee lovers.

Good job, Illy. You've got a huge market.

Gorgeous packaging is a selling point to me. I like when people put some time and effort and thought into it. Shouldn't everyone? Does anyone not care when an item is packaged nicely? All you Mac fan-boys, you don't love how well your hundredth iPod is packaged? They do a better job of their packaging than their products. What? How many iPods have you owned because they last about a year and a half before they just stop working. Alright, alright. I'll stop. Now back to drinks.

This tea is fantastic. It's such a dark brew of black tea. One of the darkest ready-to-drink beverages I've ever had. I think that companies try and play it safe. They brew it lightly so that it's not as heavy but brother, this is not that company. It's perfectly sweetened and you can really taste the honey, which isn't overshadowed by the sugar.

This is my first drink from Argo and it will not be my last. You hear me, friends? It will not be my last. I only know one place around here, which is Merge Restaurant in Buffalo, that I can get it, but I hope that Argo steps up their distribution, charges a little less, and pleases me and you by making it more readily available.

I love energy drinks. I used to try them all out of curiosity long before this site was around. What's great about them is they really work! I stayed up all night hanging out with my friend Biff until 6am, and I had to wake up at 11 to meet some friends for lunch. So I'm dead tired right now.

The unfortunate thing about energy drinks is most of them are gross. Some that I've tasted over the years puzzle me how bad they are. Monster usually is good so I decided to give this flavor a try. I had a feeling this was going to be Orange flavored due to the can color, and I was right. More so, it has a great orange flavor. It tastes more like Orange soda than an energy drink. This is easily one of the best I've ever had. I'm already energized!

I challenge anyone to read the name of this soda aloud and not think of Billy Ocean. It is a scientific impossibility. Even those humans who have never heard Mr. Ocean will automatically get "Caribbean Queen" stuck in their head. I think Journey should hire that wonder to do a parody for promotion of this soda. It would go something like this:

"Caribbean Creme
Now we're tasting vanilla cream
And our hearts they drink as one
With some coconut for fun."

Okay that was terrible. How am I ever to support myself as a jingle writer like I've always dreamed? Looks like I'll have to stick to screen printing.

Now back to the soda. This is one of the strongest vanilla flavors I've ever had in a soda. It's all due to some pure Java vanilla bean extract. It's pretty intense. The coconut is more subdued. I don't really like coconut, so I feared it would overpower the rest of the drink. It's really not bad. There is a hint of it, but it doesn't leave the gross coconut aftertaste. That's what I really hate about that specific fruit. Overall this is very tropical tasting and I believe it should be enjoyed on the beach.

Now I need to find a company that a parody of "Get Out of my Dreams" will work for.

Long meetings. You spend all day at an office and sometimes it's alright. You've got your little desk and it's done up the way that you like and sometimes you can listen to music there. At my desk, I don't listen to metal because there are others around and the others wouldn't appreciate it. No, not like the movie "The Others," which was one of the most awful movies I've ever seen, next to "Bats" of course. I mean, come on. Nothing happened in the whole movie and even the payout was just discovery of nothing. Ugh, Nicole Kidman, you're the pits.

Long meetings. I'll start again. Nothing can save you short of a car hitting your building or someone smoking in the stairwell, which sets off the smoke alarms which means that the fire department come and evacuate the entire building. Since neither of these happen, I needed something. A guava juice is the perfect escape from reality and I was lucky enough to have one in cache.

I enjoyed this drink in all its gritty goodness. As I've said previously, I don't know what Maaza does to their drinks but they're right on the fence between nectar and juice and I don't want them to move. It has a great guava taste. Pretty sweet, but the flavor was on.

Since I'm writing this and I'm (usually) not a disrespectful jerk all the time, I am out of the meeting writing it, so I finally got out, but unless a meal is provided, there should be no such thing as a three and a half hour meeting. FACT!

So the Teavana ad keeps popping up when I load our site. I have to say their tea is delicious. Possibly the best I've ever had. To be fair I haven't had much loose-leaf tea in my life, but the types I've had from there are over the top good. They have tea that has been picked by trained monkeys (Okay I think it was just a story about a monkey picking tea, but for the sake of the review let's pretend it's their tea that is monkey picked). Having a trained monkey would be pretty rad. At first I think I'd have him run errands for me, but eventually I would probably just hang out with him and play Uno or something. If I were ever in Japan I'd sure as hell have that little bugger pick me some tealeaves.

The leaves Teas' Tea uses may not be picked by monkeys, but it is pretty pure tasting. It's all natural and unsweetened. It's water, green tea and ascorbic acid (vitamin c). In the world of unsweetened green tea it doesn't get much better than this. Lucky for us Big Lots got a bunch in and they are blowing them out for $1 a bottle (they are normally about $4). I will be drinking this all day at work for weeks to come. Now how do I acquire a monkey, and then how do I train it?

Just yesterday Editor Dan and I were talking about how The Rob's Really Good teas were decent, but that none of them have been as good as we had expected them to be. I mean when something is named "Really Good" it better live up to it. Also the artwork on the labels at first glance looks cheesy, but the more I look at each of them the more I like it. On top of that it's all organic. So yeah, they haven't been bad (well maybe the Drink Your Salad one was a bit gross), but we wanted more from the company.

Today I drank their blueberry variety and I would like to append our conversation from yesterday. It would now read "Yeah they are okay, but I really expected more from them, except that blueberry one. That one is fantastic." It's a sweet tea with actual blueberry flavoring in it. The label calls it "organic blueberry essence." So if I'm any sort of scientist, which I am, I can tell you that means that the life force that lives in all blueberries runs through the ions in this drink. Once you drink it, that life force becomes a part of you. I'm not positive but I think that means that once you drink this you can actually talk to blueberries and those happy little buggers will talk back. There is even an artist's rendition of how they look after you drink this on the bottle. Unfortunately the life force will only remain in your system until you pee it out. Too bad I don't have any blueberries on hand to talk to. I'd like to see what their take of Lost Highway is.