There are a decent amount of breweries out that that make sodas along with their line of beers. I always wonder what prompts them to do so. I'm not complaining, but to be honest, I can't see there being nearly as big of a market for pop as there is for alcoholic beverages. Maybe they do it out of nostalgia, or perhaps they do it because being around so much consumable liquid all day every day makes for some thirsty employees. They certainly can't sit around drinking the beer all day, or things would most definitely get messy around the brewery. Whatever their reasons I thank them for following through. The soda that comes from breweries is generally of a higher quality than your everyday pops that you find at the corner store. They take more time in making their beverages and it shows in the flavor.

I recently met up with Night Birds to do a mid-west tour. I took a bus to meet them in Cleveland, which caused me to get to town a couple of hours before they were to arrive. When you're in that town with some time to kill and an empty stomach they only viable option is to make your way to Melt. It's a gourmet grilled cheese bar/restaurant with a ton of vegetarian/vegan options and a soda list that rivals a lot of bars beer list. After a public transportation mishap and a two mile walk, I found myself sitting at the bar eating one of the largest sandwiches I have ever handled and drinking this wonderful bottle of ginger beer. At first I thought it was really tame, but the more sips I took the greater the ginger burn. I wasn't disappointed in that department. Actually, I wasn't disappointed at all. It had a nice natural ginger flavor with a slight burst of lemon. It had more lemon than any other ginger beer I have tried, but it worked ridiculously well with the ginger. It's also on the sweeter side of most sodas of this flavor, but you know what? I'm totally okay with that.

Someday I will actually make my way to Ithaca. It's in NY only a couple of hours from where I live, but for some reason I've never been there, even though it sounds like a place I would totally love. When I go I shall drown my non-existent sorrows in bottle after bottle of their ginger brew.

My history of sports is as follows; I grew up with friends who loved sports. We lived on a cul-de-sac and played football, hockey, and did it all the time. I was never good but loved playing with my friends. The older I got, the more I accepted the fact that I don't care about sports. Not that I didn't enjoy playing, but there were other things that I liked doing, like music. I started playing music in between plays on a drum machine that I still have. So from that point on, I felt that sports drinks just weren't for me. I would never get as much out of them as the rest of my friends did. Yeah, anyone can drink Gatorade but it's not made for me.

Fast-forward to fifteen years later and I still don't play sports but I work on a drink review site where I drink all sorts of drinks that "aren't for me." This drink would be enough to make most couch potatoes want to pick up a racket and sweat it out on the court. The mix between the cherry and the pomegranate are totally fantastic and I wish I had more. It's a water type drink that has a dark fruit taste. I've often got an issue with cherry where it tastes a bit medicinal but this has none of that. This drink is sixteen ounces of pleasure.

I don't hate sports. I don't play sports. I don't pay attention to sports. I was disappointed when our city's hockey team's goalie dropped his limited edition ice cream flavor. That's as passionate as I get with sports. I am missing out on the bond people have where they sit together and talk about this guy and that team and all that other stuff. I would rather sit down and play video games with friends and talk about bands no one cares about. I think I can say the same for Jay and Derek.

I found this in a bar in Boston a couple weeks ago. I went along with my friends as they bar-hopped around Cambridge, drinking nothing but water and Diet Pepsi. Finally, at our last stop they had this fine beverage on the menu so I obviously ordered it. There's only so much Diet Pepsi I can consume in one night.

I am a fan of Squirt, so whenever I find a different grapefruit soda I have to try it. I have never been disappointed with a bottle/can and this was no exception. It was very sweet, which surprised me since a lot of sparkling drinks are lightly sweetened. It also had little chunks of grapefruit, which was pretty awesome, and a great surprise.

I apologize for the crappy photo. Bars aren't known for their stellar lighting as you might know.

Our buddy Donnie over at Buffalo Eats gave us this little number. He thought he was going to get us something gross and to most people he would have succeeded but we're not most people. We've been around the block. Yeah, this is laden with chunks but you know what, son? Nata de coco has a pleasant chewiness to it and the flavor isn't too bad either. Apple lemon? That's new. That's different. It tastes like kind of a cruddy apple juice with some cruddy lemonade in there but together mixed with la chunks (French) it somehow comes together in a nice and chunky way. I love this chunky drinks category.

Ben, look at those annuals over there. Can we get a couple of those hanging baskets? No, the yellow ones and the blue ones. Yeah those will look nice in the front. Should we do mulch? I know it's a lot of work but you only need to do it once. I know you need to kick the mulch in every once in a while but those are the things you need to do to keep a nice looking yard. No, roses are too much work. They look great for about three weeks out of the year and then they just get wily. Do you want to do any vegetables in the back? We've got the space and it's not like we are not going to eat them. It's fun to go back there and say, "Oh hello tomato."

I love it back here in the garden department, Ben. I wish that I could just bottle it up and keep it with me. The smell of soil, dirt, flowers, trees, mulch and so on. I love it. I want it. What Ben? You have heard of a drink that is like that? Wait, a drink? You drink it? When I said, "bottle it up" I meant just so I could open it up and it smells like this garden center. I don't want to drink the smell. That implies that I am drinking molecules of manure, dirt, and thistles. I don't think that I want that. Is that what it tastes like? Oh, thank God. What does it taste like? Lemon lime? Eh, I don't know if I would have gone that route. Now that we are talking about this I want to try it. You have it in the car? Oh, great. Let's get those hanging baskets, some of these packs of vegetable seeds, and cash out.

This is the drink? It's in a nice bottle. I'll try some. Ooooh man...that smell. Remember when I said that I wanted to bottle up the garden center, I might have just immediately regretted saying that. The garden center should be a treat unto itself. You shouldn't be able to harness the smell of anything because there is a time and a place and that time and place is exclusively limited to the time you are inside of the garden center. The taste isn't so bad but it's thicker than regular juice or any of those waters. It's probably the chia seeds all ground up and hidden. Really, Ben? This is a chia seed drink? They really must have ground them up good because I don't taste any of them. All I taste is lemon lime genericness and the smell of a plastic garden center. Ben, I like you, I like our future garden. I do not like this drink. Let's go get our hands dirty and do some mulch.

I like good chocolate milk. Who doesn't? It's chocolate milk. It's kid stuff that just follows you through the years that wonderfully never leaves. You reach adulthood and then you realize there is a world of different products out there including the beloved chocolate milk. Some of them are good and some of them are bad and some of them are the same products that have been out for twenty years that are just fine as they are. This falls into the "bad" category. It's a "natural chocolate shake" but it is more like a protein drink that tastes like a diet protein drink because it's filled with an array of different sweeteners that just makes it feel like chalk and low grade chocolate. What else is there to say? No thanks. If you're on a diet and can't find any other chocolate milk, fine, go with it, but if you can find even a local gas station chocolate milk, steer towards that. Just don't do it with your car. Buffalo is becoming synonymous with people driving through stores and restaurants.

Carrots? Really rabbits? Just carrots? You're not very civilized now, are you? Bugs Bunny can dress up in all the fancy suits and dresses he wants. All the wigs and all the hats and all the lipstick in the world won't bring him up to the caliber needed for this drink. Four ingredients; carrots, apple, ginger, and lemon. Done. Bugs, you are a legend, but you stick to carrots. You can't handle the subtle heat that the ginger brings and aren't ready for the subtle sweet and sour of the apple and lemon. You could only handle twenty five percent of this drink and it simply doesn't warrant buying it.

I grew up on you and your hijinks. Your friends and foes got me through a lot of hard times but this carrot just is, as Madness said, one step beyond.

I think that the chronology of it happens like this:

1. Thirsty Dudes is created.


2. Some dudes read the reviews and decide they know the key to our hearts.


3. Joia is created solely to please us.


4. We find Joia drinks and review them all highly.

All of these drinks are wonderfully handcrafted and include a fantastic blend of ingredients that no other companies let happen. Allspice in a drink? That's crazy. Well, lame drink companies, it's not crazy. It's fantastic. Even if it is crazy, it's done with a logical base and really delivers. You get a little ginger, more flavor that spice, but it's there. The apricot really blasts through but the allspice hangs out with you like the faithful friend. Beginning to end the drink keeps on delivering.

Joia, we know that you used us as a cheat sheet to make "the perfect drinks" but we don't care. Keep up the good work. If this was math class, we would lean over and let you cheat off our paper and sorry about our poor penmanship. If all else fails, answer "C."

I have had a turmeric drink before and it tasted like water strained through a handful of Indian food. I really like Indian food. Jay and myself frequent Indian restaurants a lot but I'll tell you right here and now, I don't want to drink it. This drink, as Jay has mentioned every drink that cannot be reiterated enough is that this drink is not for everyone. It's spicy and does have a rather peculiar taste. That's taking into consideration that every ingredient under the sun inside of it. Spicy ones. Exotic ones. Fresh ones. Look at the bottle. There are ten or so ingredients that you wouldn't put into a drink yourself but they did.

What do I think of it? Well I'll tell you. You have a drink that is a good dinner drink because it is spicy and is almost a meal in itself. It's not think or chunky but you sip it so it takes a while to get through it. It's also not really sweet, regardless of the honey, so I don't know if you would spend time mulling over this drink. Well, maybe you would. I think that you and a friend could sit down and watch some fancy foreign film and split this with a friend. I could not drink this whole thing myself. I know Jay can't either because I went to his house and he gave me some of a drink that he reviewed a day before.

This is one of the strangest drinks we have had on Thirsty Dudes only because it's so complex. I welcome more drinks like this onto our not-award-winning-in-a-long-time website.

Spring is here. Well, I hope it is. In Buffalo you never know. It could snow tomorrow and no one would be surprised. But for now, I am really enjoying this frozen lemonade. It's not as sour as I had hoped, but I'm sure they have to appease with those who like mild lemonade.

There's not much else to say about this. It's refreshing and light, and good for a warm day like today.

I've got a soft spot for Nesquik. It's great. I love the stuff. My grocery store across the street from where I live is pretty good at stocking it. This one I had never seen before so I needed to buy it. I probably went across the street for something like peas or the like, got distracted, and bought chocolate milk.

This is good. I might prefer the regular variety of chocolate milk but this is good. It's not too much and the mad scientists somehow managed to cram even more delicious chocolate into an already pretty chocolaty drink. Great job scientists. None of this is bad but I think it might be one of the "new take on an old classic" things that I just prefer the old to the new. I'm typically not stubborn about thing, and I'm hardly holding a grudge, but this is just a titch less great than the original.

I will be the first person to tell you that I don't eat enough vegetables. I eat more than probably the average amount; probably because I have a kid and don't want him to be a diabetic chunk by the time he is old enough to ride a bike. At the same time, I am pretty opposed to "hiding" vegetables into other foods like "this ravioli secretly has a serving of vegetables in it." and sold that way. Just give your kids vegetables like my parent's did me and don't take "no" for an answer. You're the parent. You make the rules. Don't let your turd kids tell you what's what. That's your job and you suck at it so now companies have to make up for you inability to be a good parent by injecting vegetables into your kid's junk food tricking them so they don't get antique diseases or just fall apart at the seams. Kids. Eat some corn. Not all vegetables are great but corn is. Peas are fine.

This drink is carrots and mangos and tastes like 90% mangos. It's not going to make up for your lack of health food but it's better than pop and one step closer to something like a V8 which is both delicious and healthy minus the sodium. This is a good juice all together. It's one of the better mango drinks I've had. It's nicely sweetened with sugar and still manages to keep everything represented. I like it. You should like it. Find it. Like it.

Lemonade is tough, man. Well, actually. Lemonade is simple. I guess mass amounts of lemonade is tough because not many people get it "right." Some get it close. Some do a fair job. Some bastardize the second easiest drink created next to sweet tea, which is equally hard to mess up and equally hard to find a decent one. I'm not saying this isn't decent but I'm not saying it's anything more. It's certainly tart so they got that right but there is a certain flavor in the back of my throat that is just not common with lemonade. It could be the corn syrup that's allowing it to linger and get worse as it stays there but I'm not really counting that against them too much. Look, it's fine. If you want lemonade in the wintertime, you've done it. If you want lemonade for around a dollar, you've got it. If you want something that you can share with friends while you're skating around an empty parking lot working on your ollies and kickflips, you've got it. If you want something that you want to double down your investment and get it back tenfold, you're far off. This is fine. This is safe. This will sell. This has to exist. See where I'm going with this? It's average and will sell millions of bottles because it's just like what else is out there. It's not breaking any barriers and making anyone think but it's not supposed to. It's right where it wants to be and it's doing a great job being there. That's not where I go, though.

Dear World,
I would appreciate it if you could start giving me a $5-$10 a day stipend to spend on high quality juices. You see I blew the 1.3 million dollars that we made from Thirsty Dudes last year on a sweet jet and I can't afford to purchase my beloved juice now. I know I should have thought it over more, but at the time the plane seemed like such a good idea. I didn't take into consideration the continual cost of fuel, and I obviously can't afford that either, so here I am with this giant jet in my backyard, just sitting there. I know I could sell it, but do you have any idea how much one of those things depreciates just by taking it off the lot?

Back to my point: I love juice and it helps to keep me healthy. World, you want me to be healthy don't you…€¦and happy? I mean if you really don't want to keep me in supply of fresh juice, could you at least send me some Life Juice every couple weeks or so? It's the closest bottled juice that I have ever had to something that was juiced before my very eyes. I am particularly fond of this Positive Balance one. It's basically a mix between their Oh My Greens and Happy Belly juices. I mean there are some slight differences, but that's what it tastes like to me. It's a mixture of spinach, kale, parsley, cucumber, celery, beets, apples, carrots, ginger and lemons, and yes you can taste each and every one of those fruits and vegetables in it. Luckily the celery isn't as strong in this one, so it's basically perfect. It tastes like how a horse pasture in the country smells, well minus the poop. That might sound like a bad thing, but I assure you I mean it in a very, very good way.

So, what do you say world? Will you support my juice intake? I mean if you really want to lower it any more, I guess I could settle for Naked juice, but I wouldn't be nearly as happy as I would be if you just gave me butt loads of Life Juice.

It's that time of year again. The great hunt in Sweden is upon us. Every year in late March Sweden sends its greatest warriors out into the fields and meadows to hunt the most dangerous beast of all, the “Easter Bunny.” The Western world only knows of the cute, cuddly rabbit that is used as a spokesperson for the commercial holiday. Like most holidays there is a darker history to it. In the third month of every year a fierce beast awakens to roam the Swedish countryside murdering children in order to steal their Fish (Swedish Fish to us Westerners). No one wants those children murdered, especially if it's just for candy. So warriors head out and set up traps made from sugary treats. Once it's captured (it's not exceptionally hard since Anni-Frid from ABBA designed a mechanism to hold the devilish creatures) the Easter Bunny is exsanguinated and it's blood is gathered into barrels, where it is malted. The results are called Dryck Paskmust and the Swedish drink it on the morning of Easter Sunday to celebrate a battle won, and in hopes of a great harvest the upcoming year.

Here at Thirsty Dudes we were lucky enough to procure a bottle of this sacred treat. Look at those hell demons on that label. Each of those foul creatures has been laid to rest and we are celebrating on their life force. For some reason their blood is carbonated, which just cannot feel good as it is coursing through their veins. It has a sweet candied semi-energy drink taste to it that is mixed in with the malt flavor. It's one of those drinks that tastes a bit strange to those who did not grow up on it, but I'm sure is a much sought after treat to those who have had it since birth. I just keep finding myself wondering if all of this death could be avoided if barrels of Swedish Fish were just left in the fields for the bunnies. Can't we all just live in harmony?

We've all licked an old woman before, right? Whether it be on a dare of for pleasure, we know what old women taste like. Whenever we, the Thirsty Dudes, drink anything lychee, it brings us to horrid nights where we used to spend time with old ladies. Dancing, swooning, and kissing on the cheek. Lucky for us, this drink was a little bit different.

Right off the bat, the cane sugar is apparent as can be and actually tastes very good. It's like it almost has a bite like it was freshly made with real cane. I do not doubt that it's real, but it's the freshness of it that took me off guard. The chunks are as lovable as always; multisized and incredibly prominent. You can't get a sip in without getting a mouthful of those little gummy buggers. If you were scared of them and you tried to skim through your teeth, you would be left with a mass of gummy chunks on your teeth, which might be worse for you.

The flavor was actually pretty good. It was strong and very floral but it wasn't too much like many of the other lychee drinks that we've done in the past. All together it was a pretty good mix of sweet, chunky, interesting, and fruity. It was surprising.

We drank this on air for the sixty-third installment of the Buffalo Eats podcast. They seemed to like it and we all agree that it was not as bad as we thought that it would be which made it more than acceptable. Listen to our other podcast and the rest of Donnie's podcasts. He's a great dude and easily gets sidetracked by talks of music, video games, and other odds and ends just like us.

For those of you who do not know, I have a love of melon. I don't know when it started. I don't know what brought it on, but over the past couple of years I've been drawn to anything melon related. I even got a honeydew Swiss cake roll from Chinatown in Toronto. It was mind blowingly good. I tend to stay away from Ramune drinks, as they tend to be far too sweet for my tastes, but how could I turn down a melon one?

We drank this as part of our second visit on the Buffalo Eats podcast. While I was stoked on it, I was afraid it would be too sweet, and I wouldn't want to finish it. I figured this was it would be shared, and perhaps we could capture the sound of the marble being popped in for some live magic. Do those marbles serve any real purpose other than fun? I mean they are fun, but it seems like it's a lot of extraneous bottle design for a little fun, that so many companies have embraced.

This definitely tastes like candied generic melon. I assume it's supposed to be honeydew, due to the green color (no pun intended). It was pointed out in the podcast that it tastes like a Jolly Rancher if they made a melon flavor. I can see where they thought that, but the flavor doesn't have the intensity that those candies do. Perhaps it tastes like a watered down, overly sugared version of that. Yeah…€¦let's stick with that.

I rarely have trouble sleeping but last night and the last couple nights, my mind has been racing and it's all about one thing and that thing is SimCity. I have been building a region with two dudes from work and have stayed up later than I have in a long time. One o'clock, two o'clock. Who cares? I need more simoleans. I need more power. I need to build another block of residential. I've got a sewage problem. There is always something that needs to get done. After a week of intense game play, it has eaten so much of my nights up that I am ill. I just need too much sleep now to compensate.

In hopes that this knocks me into a nine hour coma, I am trying this drink. It's small, two swigs, and it's gone. It's a little diet but less than most diet drinks. It's fruity but doesn't taste like a "real" fruit. I assume without doing any research that "dreamfruit" is not a real fruit. I don't know if all the fruits, but I am going to jump the gun and say that it isn't real. It might be psychosomatic, but I am getting sleepy. That's good. It's been about ten minutes. I have to manage the strength to brush my teeth and wash my face and then just fall into bed. I just need to stop doing this review.

As you should know, Jason, Derek and myself made 1.3 million dollars last year. Jason bought a jet in which to tour with the Failures' Union, I bought a red and a black Ferrari Testarossa, and Derek paid back all his gambling debt and bought a gently used Geo Metro. We all wear fancy denim and eat only the finest tacos shipped overnight from Mexico every other day. We no longer drink water, tea, or pop but we drink pearl infused drinks. It has to be this way because nothing else can quench our thirst the same anymore. There is something about the effects of pearls on a man's stomach and face that just makes it irreversible. You can't go back to things that poor people drink like water. We scoff a lot more than we used to now that we've got all this money.

Our foray into the pearl infused drink line is this Seksi drink. It's a decent sparkling drink that does taste like pomegranate but does taste a little odd due to the sucralose. Sure it's the last ingredient on the short list of ingredients but it's strong enough to be somewhat distracting. Either way, this is our drink now because everything else is just not civilized enough.

Next time you see an airplane in the sky blaring nineties-esque indie rock, wave to it because it's Jay on his way to play some fancy, island music festival with U2 and Coldplay. If you see a Ferrari blaring down the road, holler at it and if you are lucky, I'll throw you some drinks at the next stop. If you see a Geo Metro with a bearded dude driving it, don't distract Derek because it pulls left and is a bit sketchy in second and the brakes need some work. Also the sunroof is aftermarket and leaks like a sieve.

The rest of the Green Fit beverages have had a fairly mediocre taste. Since they are functional beverages that places them on the better end of the spectrum. This is the flavor I was least looking forward to. Look, I've come around on coconut water. I don't think it's the devil's spit anymore, but it's not my favorite, and coconut flavored things tend to be on the toasted side of things and I still cannot get down with that. Luckily they went heavy on the lime in this and the coconut is along the lines of coconut water.

The combination of the lime and the whey protein makes this taste more than a bit like key lime pie, well a light liquid version of it. The stevia is the only thing that detracts from that, but in a drink like this, you're not going to use regular sugar, so stevia was definitely the best possible choice. I think lime may be the secret to protein drinks. It makes the strange quasi-dairy taste seem appropriate and not just something you have to power through. It's always odd when the thing you fear becomes your favorite out of the bunch, but that is what we have here.