While I love pineapples and all the juice they contain, it is sometimes nice to have it cut with another juice. If it's not a mixture of general tropical flavors, the go to for most companies is orange. It's a good choice. Oranges are great, but they are so common that people take them for granted. Mixed with pineapple they help cut down on the acidity that can make it painful to drink a lot of pineapple juice, and the oranges benefit from the pineapple flavor to make it stand out more amongst it's peers. I wonder how apple would work mixed it. I mean sure it would look silly on the packaging written out, but I bet if they used quality apples it would taste like liquid gold. Apple Pineapple or Pineapple Apple? They both sound ridiculous.

Unfortunately for all involved there isn't any actual juice in this bottle of Spartos, unless it's trace amounts under the banner of “natural flavors.” Actually no, small on the label it is written “no fruit juice.” It's a shame because while this is a decent drink (an even more decent drink considering that it is a fruity protein drink), but flavor-wise it falls close to Tang with a slight dairy edge. A citrus based tropical flavor, that is not quite orange or pineapple. The use of fruit juice would have solved that problem. Then again this is a water beverage and not juice, so that obviously wasn't what they were going for. It's just what I wish they had done. Don't get me wrong. I would rather drink this over 90% of the protein shakes on the market. Sometimes you just need to take the rough with the smooth.

This doesn't suck. It's just candy but it's good. You sniff it and it's watermelon and then at the tail end, it's pineapple. It's probably just half pineapple and half watermelon since I think they make both flavors. It's pretty sweet and is probably instant diabetes if you drink the whole thing but if you share this with some of your friends, you'll be fine.

Someone at the Faygo plant probably wanted to see what it was like so in the company break room and used the seemingly endless fountain drink machine to make it. Rumor has it that if you take a tour of the Faygo plant you can see but not touch the fountain drink machine. It's something like eighty flavors, most of which don't see the light of day: pickle, asparagus, triple cola, chocolate cake, steak and potatoes, and motor oil. It's Detroit. Motor oil runs in their blood. You have to work there to drink out of the fountain machine. If you apply and manage to make it to the interview process, you can fill one eight ounce cup. Other than that, no one can use the machine. Not even family, unless Faygo hires them. They can look but they can't touch it. Faygo will fire you if you try and smuggle out a flask of anything that isn't their regular line.

It is a bit audacious to call your company "Fave." It's just presumptive. That's not to say that this isn't going to be someone's favorite because it's not too bad. There are fruits and vegetables inside this little number and for the most part, it's pretty good. This drink is mostly fruity with only a touch of...strangeness. I know that makes it sound bad but it really isn't. It's a tangy juice with a little bit of lies inside of it. It's a white lie, which is globally acceptable for some reason. It's like there is an unspoken asterisk next to the phrase that means people don't get offended when you flat out lie to their face. Adultery, murder, and speeding don't get you in trouble if you explicit say it as a white lie.

I sat down with the owner of this company. We had chicken wings at my favorite place. He said he wanted wings and I took him to my favorite place. Yes, I am usually a snob when it comes to food and tourism and indigenous stuff but in the case of wings, I'm a classic man. He took a quick glance of this legendary site and wanted to meet Jay and I. Jay was busy so I met him. Solo mission. Mano a mano, just like the Hall and Oates song.

He told me that he thought I was really going to like this. I think he things that I really hang out in the organic section of the store exclusively the way that he kept telling me this was all natural and was made with real sugar. Today I decided to see just how valid his statement was. Two words. "It was." You can taste everything. Green tea complete with bitterness. Honey and more bitter ginseng. It really makes you look back at Arizona and question why they can't make an all natural tea. They must just be killing it with that green tea but as I drink this, it makes me feel like Arizona is way too sweet and this is where it's at. This is a great tea. Fans of Arizona rejoice that you can break free of the chains and drink something natural. I guess I'll go get dreadlocks and start eating quinoa and tofu for all meals. It's been real, meat and preservatives. That dude had me pegged.

Silly Americans. You thought the cold war was over and that you had won. You believed the movie Clue when it told you that Communism was nothing but a red herring and that capitalism was the true motivator. You have been duped and now we have infiltrated your very culture. Who do you think own all the Red Robin restaurants? It is us, working on getting you fat and slovenly. Did you really think that Red Bull was there to just help you get through your day? We created the company in order to weaken your hearts for the battles to come.

We even have some products over there for the sole benefit of our agents who are stuck on your soil. With all the garbage that you produce and consume we needed to make sure there were some things that were healthy for our people to consume. We bribed some of the higher ups at Naked and they created a special blend for us that they call “Red Machine.” It is a mixture of all of the finest communist fruits to remind our people what they are fighting for. Each bottle contains 13 raspberries, 11 strawberries, 3 cranberries, ¼ of a pomegranate, 1 ½ of an apple and 7 red grapes. We also mixed in 1/3 of an orange and ½ of a banana, as well as a bunch of other vitamins and the like to ensure continued health. While you and your countrymen choke on their excessive calorie and sugar intake, the people's people will remain at the peak of their health drinking these wonderful prepackaged smoothies. They taste like nothing but wonderful red fruit. It has been formulated so that the other ingredients are not evident in the taste. What you get has a strong berry flavor with the slightest hints of the bitterness of cranberries and pomegranate.

America, you stand no chance. Our day will come soon, and on that day all class struggles will cease to be. You will be too bloated with weak hearts to stop us.

In order to ensure that bullets don't pierce your person there are a few things you have to sacrifice, limited mobility for one. Also, if you're a sweet spy, the bulkiness of it all will ruin the lines in your suit. I also just learned that in order to become bulletproof, you also have to sacrifice flavor.

As with most energy drinks that don't proclaim to be a specific flavor, I expected the generic energy drink flavor of sugary candy. Well, diet sugar candy. I actually prefer the sugar free Red Bull to the original variety, so I thought this was going to be a little bit of decent, but nothing out of the ordinary. That proved to be not the case. This definitely has the chemical energy drink flavor, but it also has a weird almond smell to it that comes across as something completely different and weirdly citrus in the flavor. It's not something that I would ever purchase, as there are so many other varieties of energy drinks in every gas station ever. Maybe this will be your thing, but I couldn't really enjoy it. Maybe I'll unload a few rounds into it and see if it actually is bulletproof. My predictions: I'm going to tear this thing to pieces.

It's not often that you see concord and white grapes hanging out together. They're both grapes so you think they would be friends but no. I heard something happened at a family reunion where white grape brought a sexy banana to the barbecue and concord grape ended up making out with it behind the shed. Concord, you should never take you best friend's woman. Perry Farrell taught me that. White grape, you should be man enough to know that bananas will come and go and that that one was no good for you any way.

Maybe they made it up after a decade or so of a childish grudge and decided to collaborate again and come together on this little guy. The problem is that they wouldn't get out of the pool when they made this drink because it tastes watered down. The flavors are all there but it tastes weak. I like weak drinks but I think that with these two grapes together, a nice unaffected mix would have been nice since it is such a rarity.

These two are fine now but they lose a decade of their lives being angry at each other. We will ramp up to an uncut double grape juice but until then we have this, which is almost totally awesome.

One of my favorite things about traveling/touring is finding and trying regional beverages. Recently I found myself in a crappy little grocery store at 2am in Kansas looking for something to satisfy my hunger. There was no “natural” section to speak of, and hardly any vegetarian selections except for crappy chips and actual vegetables that I had no means to cook. Things were looking grim, and then I stumbled across a little display of these sparkling ciders. My night started to look up, but I left the store with a bag of flavored rice cakes and this bottle of cider. Sure I went to bed hungry that night, but I had a good taste on my tongue.

This is not a spiced cider, and I can only assume that they grow a different breed of apples in the Midwest than in Buffalo, so it ended up tasting more like a sparkling cran-apple juice than sparkling cider to me. I'm okay with that. It was still delicious. Basically if you give me a bottle of any juice that is carbonated with no added sugar, I am going to love it. The cranberry juice isn't very strong, so the apples do most of the work. Apples: The backbone of America.

“And when we hit the twin cities, I didn't know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore and I knew Profane Existence.”

Dear Craig Finn, You forgot about your beloved Minnesota Twins and their beloved Harmon Killebrew. I mean you even wrote a song about them with The Baseball Project. Man, that must have been awesome to work with Peter Buck. Oh you also forgot about all of the “crust lords” that reign supreme in your city.

Well Mr. Finn I'm here to remind you with this review of Killebrew root beer. Harmon's son makes it and it's a homage to his father. First off, this is the first root beer that I have ever drunk that comes in a resealable aluminum bottle. It's weird, but I like that I can reseal it without having to deal with plastic. The root beer itself is sweetened with “pure Minnesota honey,” which is nice, but for some reason they also use HFCS, which seems unnecessary. The honey gives it a nice taste that you don't get in everyday root beer. There is something about it that tastes slightly medicinal in the way that Moxie does. It's also very dark tasting. I can't help but think that this would taste a lot better in a glass bottle. You know, the way that root beer was meant to be served.

As a final note I would like to point out that this would make a great float if you mixed it with some vanilla ice cream. Maybe that's just because I've consumed way more ice cream in the past two weeks than any human should.

Apparently the world has gotten a little lax on the meaning of the word “pure.” If someone were to offer me some pure juice, I would expect it to be straight up juice with nothing added to it at all. I would also expect it to have not gone through any sort of process. I'm looking in your direction concentration. Mr. Pure seems to think that juices from concentrate still count as being pure. I suppose they get some credit for not adding any sweetener to this juice. It's just orange and pineapple concentrate and water, which is better than most inexpensive juices. My issue with this drink is due to that they are a bit heavy handed with 1/3 of the ingredients aka water. The juice tastes watered down, which brings me back to my pure argument.
To sum this up it tastes like watered down orange juice with a slight nod to pineapple. I guess if you're looking for juice in a gas station like I was it could have been way worse, but I'm not sold.

Two facts about me: I like sour things and I like energy drinks. Put them together and theoretically I will be very happy. Aside from the mash up flavor name of "Bubbleberry", this would have been one of the first drinks I would have proposed if I got a job at Rockstar.

Other things I will do in my first week at my less-than-ideal job at Rockstar include:

• Take the star out of the logo.


• Fire anyone who played "All Star" by Smash Mouth, "Rock Superstar" by Cypress Hill, or any other song that featured some play of "rock star" heavily in the lyrics.


• Make this drink not so gross by keeping the awesome sour taste but adding a good flavor to it that didn't taste like energy drink battery acid.


• Secure a deal with Rockstar Games to trade energy drinks for free video games for all employees.


• Ensure "Bubbleberry" is never on another Rockstar can ever again.


• Taco tuesdays.

Ladies and gentlemen, steal them from seafood restaurants or from your children, but do whatever you can to get yourself a bib, because we're in for a wild ride. Welcome to the 4th annual Westminster Chug-A-Thon, where literally dozens of people come to compete to see who is the national chugging champion. Due to legal issues, we can no longer use beer as our chugging liquid of choice, so this year we have a treat for everyone with some nice Blackberry Lime soda from the appropriately named Bibb company. We have a tanker truck full of the stuff, and that is about 8,000 gallons people. That's a whole lot of liquid, which means there is a good chance we're going to need the paramedics that we have on hand. It's also guaranteed that our contestants are going to be hurling the contents of their stomachs all over themselves, hence the bibs. There's only so much liquid the human stomach can hold, and they are going to need to empty their "tanks" several times if they are serious about winning. It's really a shame though, as the soda we're using is quite delicious. Actually, I feel odd calling it a soda, as it's more of a sparkling juice than soda pop. It's just blackberry and limejuice mixed with carbonated water and a little sweetener. With only 13g of sugar per serving, it looks like no one will be getting diabetes during this contest, which is good because we can't afford another lawsuit. Seriously though Bibbs has a great blackberry base with a strong lime flavor added to it that is nice and present without making you think that it should be called lime blackberry instead. It really is a shame that such a tasty drink is going to flood the streets in the form of regurgitation. With 8,000 gallons in the trunk there is sure to be enough leftover for everyone in the audience to enjoy a glass or two as well. So you're welcome and enjoy the event. Please put on your nose plugs though as we don't want another Stand By Me scenario this year.

I'm not wonderful with energy drinks, usually because I run myself on "E" a lot of the time. It's how I keep my slender figure. One thing you don't do is drink one on an empty stomach, which I idiotically did, and go and get the shakes like an idiot. I feel like my fingers typing this review are going faster than my brain wants to send down the commands for the words. It's probably bottlenecking in my stomach where the fantastic taco I just ate is residing temporarily.

Shakes aside, and let's be honest, that was my fault. This isn't a bad drink at all. It's fruity and is defiantly more "berry" than "lemonade" but I'm not really complaining. If you are on the "hater" side of the fence when it comes to Stevia and friends, you might and probably won't like this drink. It's not as bad as it could be but there is a prompt and abrupt interruption when you are enjoying the berry lemonade of it. The sparkling bit of it is a nice touch.

Vegetable based juices can be fickle things. If they are made fresh it is wonderful. All of the subtle nuances of the vegetables pop out at you, and it just feels like you are doing something healthy and nothing can change that. On the other side of the coin, if they are prepackaged and mass produced to have a longer shelf life the glitter in their eyes fades away and you end up with something that tastes more like soup than juice.

With this product Odwalla is walking a tightrope between the two. It certainly doesn't taste like it was freshly juiced, but it's not quite in soup territory yet. It tastes mostly of carrots and beets, with the carrots giving it that slightly dirty taste, as they are prone to do. There is a slight hint of ginger flavoring, but there is no burn to speak of. Drinking juice that isn't very sweet will probably be a shock for a decent amount of people, and I can't really see this going over too well with the general populace, but there are people out there like myself who will enjoy it, and they should give it a chance.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am about to propose something so radical that it may literally make your heads spin, so before I tell you please sign the waivers that you will find underneath your seats that will ensure that you cannot sue us in the case of death or dismemberment. Everyone sign? Good.

For decades the world has been plagued with garbage “green apple” flavoring. Nothing about that flavor tastes anything like the juice that would fill your mouth if you plucked a nice green apple from a tree and took a big bite. No instead it tastes like fake sour garbage. Everfresh is dedicated to putting an end to that tyranny, so we proudly present you with our newest product: Granny Smith juice. It is made with actual Granny Smith apples (albeit from concentrate) and nothing chemical or foreign. This is what green apple juice should taste like. Call your congressperson and demand that this be put in place of any juice that bears the fake green apple name. We are no longer children with candy on the brain and we deserve a serious juice. I fully expect a small parade for our efforts. Thank you and goodnight.

For some reason when Monster adds juice to their energy drinks they give them some sort of destructive name. Their tangerine/pineapple one is called Khaos and this one, which is more tropical, is called M-80. I don't know what juice has to do with causing trouble, but Monster has embraced it. Apparently their marketing department thinks that kids go to the grocery store, chug a few gallons of juice and then go out and blow up frogs and mailboxes. I'm all for blowing stuff up (well not frogs), but I don't need juice to do it. Any beverage will do. I mean, you have to stay hydrated.

Now Khaos is one of my favorite energy drinks. It tastes more like juice than anything else, but something went wrong when they were developing M-80. It has apple, passion fruit, pineapple and guava juice in it. It should be a home run. I was fully expecting it to be the best energy drink I've ever tasted, but as I said something got mixed up. It has more of a general Monster flavor with a bit a generic tropical mixed in than it does any of the individual fruit juices that are combined to make it. None of the individual juices are distinguishable. The more I drank, the less I liked it. I would have preferred an original Monster with it's generic energy drink flavor over this. You can't win them all.

Even though Welchs has a large array of juices on the market, my first thought when I hear their name is always “jelly.” I don't even eat jelly. I mean I have no moral objection to it, I just think that it's unnecessary. I generally eat my bread products dry, and if anything they get a little dab of peanut butter. There is no need to get fruit involved. Still, I hear Welchs and my mind goes to jelly.

This bottle only contains 10% juice. I wonder what percentage of their jelly is actually fruit? 10% is a joke in the juice world. If it's less than 40% juice I say it's not worth my time, and I have a hard time actually calling it juice and not “drink.” So to me this is not a juice, but at least the pittance of juice they used was actually partly mango and passionfruit. It was probably 1% each, with the other 8% going to that generic base, apple juice. So what we have is low levels of juice, which is only concentrate mixed with overly sweetened sugar water, yet somehow it ends up tasting great. I mean really, really good. You can very blatantly taste the mango, passion fruit and apple juice. It's the passion fruit that really shines through though. I had such low expectations for this, and I was pleasantly surprised. Well played Welchs.

A couple weeks ago I went to PAX East aka Penny Arcade Expo in Boston, MA. It's basically a giant gaming convention stemming from a long running webcomic about video games. It was my first time attending and I had a lot of fun.

In addition to all the new and upcoming games, there was a 5-Hour Energy booth set up in the front lobby all weekend. Normally I would avoid these little bottles of death like the plague, but the line for the coffee shop in the hotel was always way too long and I didn't want to get my ass handed to me when I was playing Halo 4 against some 6 year old. Over the weekend, I lost count at 4 or 5 of these consumed. I'm afraid to know the actual number, but I did manage to bring an additional 5 home with me somehow.

Does this taste like "berry"? Sure. Could it be mistaken for another flavor? Most likely. Did I barely notice the flavor due to consuming this in one sip due to over-exhaustion and wanting to just "wake up"? You betcha! Did it work? Indeed it did.

Like most teenagers in the 90's who didn't drink I spent many a weekend night at parties downing soda. There was no better way to do that than drinking IBC 40s. Okay they really weren't 40oz, they were only 32, but they had the same look. Many of the drinkers out there thought that we drank them to be “cool” and try to fit in. In reality they simply tasted delicious, and more importantly they did trick the drunkards into thinking you were also drinking, which led to way less questions as to why you weren't drinking, which led to way less taunts, which led to way less altercations. There the secret is out. I drank IBC “40s” so I didn't have to deal with idiots who thought they should give me crap because I chose not to drink alcohol.

As I got older, I started going to fewer parties, and started buying less IBC. It's just as well, as it seems they no longer make the large bottles. The dream died. In fact this is the first time I've had IBC cream soda in 10-15 years. Even though I've become a bit of a soda snob in that time, I can honestly say that this is still pretty great. I don't know if it's just because of nostalgia, but I really loved this. To me this is what cream soda should be. It sweet, and has a nice vanilla flavor without tasting like extract. It's also on the lower end of syrupy for being sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Now I want to go out in the fields with a couple of bottles of this and sit around a small fire watching as kids try very unsuccessfully to hook up with each other. It's the American dream.

There has been a birth in the royal family. The child was created out of wedlock, so the family kept the pregnancy quiet. That was all good and well until the birth occurred and they knew there was no way the secret could be kept, for with gazing upon the can brought nothing but love to the royal family. The union of cola and cherry was complete and cherry cola was born. The family felt to shame so they proudly shared their love with the world (well at least the Midwestern states, as I haven't seen this anywhere else).

While this may not be the world's greatest cherry cola (it is a bit on the syrupy side), it is still better than most. It has a stronger cherry flavor than I had expected. It's more along he lines of cherry Pepsi than it is Coke, which makes it strange that I like it so much, as I have always been on the Coke side of the great cola wars. I would still choose this over its big cola competitors.

I doubt the day will come when the world hears, “The king is dead. Long live the king” as RC Cherry takes over the throne, but as a prince or a duke, it does a fine job.

I just found out that his flavor was introduced in the 80s. How I have never seen it until now is beyond me. I guess that is what I get for living in the northeast.