Soda Pop - 1421 Reviews

The image on the can is a cow wearing an upside down American flag. It's pretty fitting for the current political state of this country and that is all I will say about that.

Even after all these years it still kind of blows my mind that Barr's is just the cheap soda in Scotland. It's everywhere and the cans have 39p printed right on them. Their counties garbage soda is a high quality soda here and I am jealous. Actually, I'm more envious. I would also probably drink way more soda if I lived there and that's not going to do me any good.

Another thing Scotland apparently likes to do is add raspberry flavoring into other sodas. They somehow made the best ginger beer by doing just that. Unfortunately it didn't translate as well with cream soda. This starts off so great. It's a nice fruity cream soda that is reminiscent of Crush's Soda Mousse. Somewhere in there though it takes a turn and a taste rears up that is similar to coconut. I don't know what is causing it, but it takes me out of a wonderful experience. It's like they used coconut water instead of regular water for the base of this drink. It's just strange. If that particular aspect of this drink were gone this would be completely fantastic.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Chipotle does not need to go into everything. I like a nice smoked pepper taste as much as the next human, and I put chipotle Tabasco sauce on a decent amount of my food, but I 100% do not need, nor want it in beverage form.

This is not horrible. If I tried hard I could probably drink the whole bottle, but something just tastes not right about it, like the time you ran out of milk and decided to pour orange juice on your serial instead. You powered through that bowl, but you did not really enjoy it.

I've had chipotle dusted dried mango before (which again was okay, but not necessary) and due to that I kept expecting this to be mango and not pineapple. Even concentrating on the pineapple flavor I still get a bit of mango somehow. Psychosomatic folks. The pineapple taste isn't as strong as other sodas of that flavor I've had in the past either. This doesn't even taste like chipotle to be honest, it just tastes weird. It has no spice to it, which I would have expected. Well it tastes like spice, but not spicy if you catch my drift. It's certainly not for me and I'm guessing it's not for most of you either.

Oh yeah, it's also sweetened with a mixture of cane sugar, agave syrup and stevia to keep the calories down. While it's better than it would be in full diet form, it's still not doing any favors for the taste.

I had this whole idea for writing to Scotland and telling them that we were cool now and that all is forgiven for that Iron Bru garbage that they spewed into the world. Then, I realized that Cawston Press isn't made in Scotland. I just happen to have been there the first time I drank it. Well, it looks like I still have beef with Scotland, but my love for England is still running high, due to it being the home of these sodas.

No other company in the history of Thirsty Dudes has gotten a five bottle review consecutively for all of their products. They are truly a gift to the beverage world. With this soda that took their patented sparkling apple juice and added a top notch ginger beer to it. This has it all, flavor and burn. You can taste the flavor of actual ginger and not just an intense burn, but it has enough kick to keep you interested.

It seems like a bit of a hefty price at $7 for a six pack, but that's less than $1.25 per can, and that is not bad at all for this quality of soda. I can't wait until their other flavors make it over to the US.

There are two types of cola in the world. The first is “cola,” which includes products such as Coke and Pepsi and it is the taste most people associate with this work. The other is “kola” and there are different ingredients at work, which leads to a slightly earthier taste. If you're into the whole craft soda thing, this is probably what you crave. It's not just one general taste. There are different elements at work and you can make them out separately in the taste. Don't get me wrong there are many times in my life where a Coke is exactly what I need to hit the spot, but more often than not I would prefer something like this.

Kola Nut is slightly bitter and gives the whole beverage a unique flavor. It tastes special, and that more care was put into your beverage. In my head small batches of Caleb's Kola are brewed and carbonated and it's not just a syrup that is added to sparkling water. If this were just a tad bit darker tasting, it would be perfect. As it is I still enjoy it to a great extent and I wish more companies would follow in their footsteps.

Part of me wants to trash this for being glorified carbonated sugar water and part of me wants to praise it for being a smallish local company (Detroit) that is still putting out soda in glass bottles that is sweetened with cane sugar. The thing is that this is neither terrible nor great. It simply falls in the grey area of life. Towne Club gets some points for making a strawberry melon soda, but the execution could be better. It tastes so sweet that it makes it hard to decipher the different fruit flavors. I was certainly not able to drink even half of this bottle. Saying I drank a third of it is being generous. I'm sure there is someone out there who loves this and swears by it. I can only assume that same person devours Pixie Stix and Sweet Tarts all day long. They also most definitely live in Michigan. No one outside the mitten can have that much love for this soda.

My brother finds drinks sometimes and thinks he's going to be mean and buy me stuff he thinks might be gross. This isn't the gross one but is part of the group that he bought me. This one was actually really nice. It was sweet and really spicy, the way that ginger beer should be. It most certainly still had its feet in ginger ale territory but was dabbling in the ginger beer world. The spice was nice and it burns in all the right places. The fact that it was unfiltered means that it was laden with stuff at the bottom and you know how the Thirsty Dudes love stuff in their drinks. A+. Would drink again.

By naming their company Americana are they insinuation that that their products are artifacts of American history? Are these sodas a glimpse into our nation's past? If so, we've had one hell of a history of soda, because this is ridiculously delicious. Fruit sodas are a tough sell for me. They rarely turn out correctly and mostly taste like sugar water that is flavored nothing like fruit at all. This tastes distinctively like berries and I'm not talking about those of the straw-, rasp- or even blue- varieties. This is pure huckleberry, or so I'll assume as I don't think I've ever had the fruit in its natural form. It doesn't taste artificial at all, but rather like someone carbonated juice and added a bit of cane sugar. Sure it's fairly sweet, but some sodas call for that. If only America still tasted like this instead of like racism and hate I wouldn't feel so disgusting all the time. Okay I would still feel gross from consuming too much, but I wouldn't feel as bad.

I knew I was in for a wild ride when I didn't even have this cap completely off and I was blasted in the face by the familiar sent of anise/licorice. How is it that I hate black licorice/black jelly beans more than I have hated almost anything in this world, yet I kind of dig that flavor when it's in beverage form? Sure this tastes a bit like carbonated Nyquil, but it's still somehow pretty great.

There really isn't anything about this that would make me think sarsaparilla if I blind taste tested it. I would just assume it was supposed to be an anise soda, because that's all I'm getting. Perhaps sarsaparilla is something different in Australia, where this drink comes from.

This bottle is only 9.3oz, but I think it would be perfect at half that size. I really enjoy it, but it gets to be a bit too much for me at about the half way point. I really hope I stumble across this companies other flavors though, because I anticipate great things from them.

What exactly does the year 1922 have to do with ginger ale? A quick google search came up with nothing but a couple of ads that came out that year. Wikipedia tells me that ginger ale existed in a marketable form for decades before that. Perhaps, since this is a sugary beverage, they chose 1922 to celebrate the first successful insulin treatment of diabetes. Okay I dug deeper and it turns out that 1922 was the year that College Club Beverages (the company that makes Fiz) opened its soda streams. That makes more sense. Since I couldn't find any info, I'm guessing that ginger ale was one of, if not the first flavor they produced.

This is a nice little soda. It's sweet, but not in the “this is 99% sugar water and 1% flavor” way. It tastes like a fairly standard modern ginger ale. You don't actually taste the earthiness of the root, or the spice, but there is no mistaking that it's ginger ale.

So here we are, two for five with Sotea. Most of these flavors don't really work. Carbonating tea is always a crapshoot, and more likely than not turns out less than stellar. The same thing can be said for putting mint in drinks. I don't really want my drink to taste like I just brushed my teeth or I'm chewing gum while drinking it. Somehow this Mojito Mist beat both of those odds and is actually pretty darn good. It launches past acceptable into really enjoyable territory.

While I've never had a real mojito, every virgin version of one that I have drunk has been great. There is something about lime that counteracts the weirdness of mint and makes it acceptable for it to exist in beverage form. Neither are overly strong and blend together into a new uber flavor. The tea in this tastes a little weird, but it works with the lime and the mint. This is one unusual soda, but I find myself with an empty bottle wishing that there was more. That doesn't happen often these days.

"I wish they would bottle the flavor of vanilla cupcakes so I could drink it all day." Yeah? I dare you to drink this for a whole day, dude. Two sips and I'm tapping out. It smells like a sixth grade girl, also. You remember when they all wore that temporarily good smelling cotton candy perfume? I liked it but for a limited time. This...I could be surrounded by six girls talking about Taylor Swift, Shopkins, One Direction, lip gloss, Gary from third period and Snapchat at the same time and take that longer than I could deal with the immense flavor of this.

Smell? Spot on. It's a cupcake. Taste? Sugar flavored sugar. It's so sweet and completely distracts from the flavor. The kid that you remember that used to sneak and eat sugar cubes from the coffee table wouldn't be able to drink this. This is turning into quite a "dare drink." Have at it, friends. Don't send me the doctor's bill, though.

Do you identify with the majority of Americans who ingest far too much sugar, but find it hard to give up soda pop? Do you just crave the bubbles, but seltzer doesn't taste right to you? At the same time do you think that artificial sweeteners are just the worst? I was once where you are friend. I wanted out of the sugar game, but I had my vices. For me the change came in the form of Polar vanilla seltzer. It bridged a gap for me and led me down a path where I drink an abundance of seltzer, to a point where I had to look it up if it was bad for me. I understand that this might not be the gateway beverage for everyone, but I have good news. Izze is here to hold your hand while you eliminate a lot of sugar from your diet, at least of the soda variety. Their Sparkling Water line is essentially seltzer water with 2g of sugar added. I know what you're thinking; 2g is not a lot when a can of Coke has 39g. The thing is that it's just enough to give a faint hint of sweetness and overpower the weirdness of seltzer and help you acclimate yourself to it.

This actually tastes sweet to me. I don't know if it's because I don't drink much sugar these days, or if it would taste like that to anyone. Would Coke taste sweet enough with only 1/3 of the sugar they use? I would really like to taste Coke with different levels of sugar and see where it really needs to fall. I feel like the current amount it a bit extreme. Whatever the case may be with that, I think there is enough sugar in here for anyone to enjoy. Then once their body gets used to the lower sugar content they can ween off of it. I know that's probably not the Izze plan, as they need to maintain sales, but it's probably for the betterment of our countries health. Hell, people could just stay with these instead of normal sodas and I bet the effects would be astounding.

Did I mention at some point in my tirade that it also tastes great? I don't really get much watermelon, but it has a nice berry flavor. It's light, due to the lack of sugar, but it's just where I want it to be. Nothing is disguising it and that is how I like things. Low sugar, great taste. It's like a 90's beer ad.

Towne Club started selling soda in the 60's and it was the prime rival to Faygo, decades before it was coopted by the clowns. I did not know that, but Wikipedia just informed me and I always have more respect for such long running companies. Sure, the company has changed hands throughout the years, but it's still bottled in burnt out Detroit. Do people in Detroit get upset when people talk about how their city is falling apart? I've been there many times and it is certainly one of, if not the most, run down cities I have ever been too, and I travel to a lot of garbage places. Oh well, I hope they have pride in their city. The crappiness of Buffalo is what made me love it and I kind of hate that it's starting to become nice, because it's taking away the things I loved about the city. Maybe the denizens of Detroit feel the same way. They can live cheaply, so they can do what they want with their lives and not be tethered to a job struggling to make rent. It could also just be a terrifying place to live. I have no idea.

I will say they have some decent local sodas. As an adult it would be very rare that I would reach for one of these, but in my younger years when I craved all the sugar I could get, I would have loved it. It's slightly fruity cream soda that reminds me of the pink Crush cream soda (soda mousse) in Canada. I loved that as a teenager, so logic follows that I would have loved this as well. This is mostly sugar flavored, but there is enough of a “cream soda” taste that shines through to make it interesting. It's nothing mind blowing, but it's a local soda made with cane sugar with a wide variety of flavors in a classic looking bottle. I can get behind those things.

I love grocery stores. I don't really know why, but when I'm traveling I love stopping in at local stores and different chains. Even when I don't need anything I just like wandering around in them. I live in the land of Wegmans, so it's hard to beat what I have at home, but I still enjoy the differences of other stores. I've always been a fan of Kroger. Their stores look pretty standard, but they generally carry some different and decent stuff, especially for vegetarians. I recently was told about their new Private Selection line and I couldn't wait until I was back in their territory to check it out. It is their fancy store brand stuff. They call it artisanal. I call it delicious, well at least this soda.

Some other things that I greatly enjoy besides supermarkets are huckleberry and hibiscus. I used to be a big fiend for cream soda in high school as well, even though I don't drink it too much these days. Actually I guess I drink the adult version of it every day in the way of drinking Polar's vanilla seltzer. This soda took three things I am a fan of and mixed them together into something that is greater as a whole. Real fruit juice is used and the cream soda doesn't taste even remotely cheap. The huckleberry and hibiscus mix together nicely leaving only the faintest tinges of floral. This all interacts with the vanilla in a way that couldn't be better.

The fact that this is as good as it is and is a store brand is kind of a game changer. Sure, it does have a higher price (I think it was $5 for a 4-pack), but it's on the cheap side of the quality that you receive. I do warn you that once you try this there is a chance you will never look at another cream soda the same way again.

If your company makes an apple soda, it's more than likely that you are doing it all wrong. Chances are you have loaded it with sugar, or even worse, tried to make it sour apple. You needn't bother my friends. There are only two ingredients needed for an apple soda and they are apple juice and sparkling water. I mean you could probably directly carbonate the juice and it would turn out just as good. The people at Apple Rush are smart folks. They know that sometimes people crave carbonation, but at the same time they don't need loads of added sugar (there are 36g of sugar in this bottle, but it's all from the fruit directly).

This is fantastic. It tastes like high quality apple juice with bubbles in it. Why would anyone need anything else out of an apple soda? I mean sure maybe you want to throw some other fruit in there, or perhaps some spices, but if you're looking for straight up apple pop, look no further. I'm going to come close to guaranteeing that you won't find a company who does it better.

So here we are. We have finally completely the trifecta of drinks. When we first started Thirsty Dudes we stated that there were three drinks that were no longer in production that we wished we could get our hands on to review; Orbits (which we found be sold in Canada 14 years expired), Ecto Cooler (which got a re-release with the new movie being out), and now Crystal Pepsi is in our hands. Nostalgia for the 90's is high right now. I mean I snuck into an En Vogue concert last week in Michigan and alternative bands are on the rise once again. Pepsi knew that if there was ever going to be a time to bring this back it was now, and let me tell you, people are talking. Well, there is a slight murmur on the internet about it.

We shot a video of us drinking a bottle and discussing our thoughts on it. The conclusion is that is tastes like re-carbonated flat Pepsi with a hint of 7Up mixed in. It's odd, but still enjoyable. Sure the video cuts off after 5 minutes, and sure we probably kept rambling nonsense for five more without realizing it, but do you really need to hear more of us pretending we aren't awkward by pretending to be awkward?

Whenever someone offers me a fruit flavored soda that I have never tried before this is what I secretly hope it will be like. I'm in my late 30's and I have no need for sparkly sugar water anymore. If I drank that stuff the way I used to I would be way overweight and feel like garbage all of the time. This though, this is the dream. This is just sparkling juice with no sugar added. The base is very much apple juice, which makes me wish it was autumn, well that and I'm sick of these obscenely humid 90+ degree days. So they start off with a sparkling apple juice, which would be great on its own, then they added a bunch of straight up blueberry juice, and sent the thing through the roof. When was the last time you had a blueberry beverage that actually tastes like you had a mouth full of berries instead of a mouthful of dumb candy? Like dry land (and dry air) delicious fruit sodas are not a myth. They can be found and are produced in Florida of all places. Oh man, I just imagined how humid it must be down there right now. How are there not mass suicides? My thoughts go out to you denizens of the south.

I travel a lot. Be it touring with bands, or just for leisure I like to leave Buffalo a lot. I love it here, but I appreciate it more when I'm able to take a break and then come back to it. When I'm out in the world I don't often do touristy things. I prefer to go on adventures and find the weird, cool things cities have to offer. Recently I was in Boston for the probably two dozenth time in my life and my friends who I was with really wanted to check out Cheers. They love the show and it we had some time to kill, so we walked across some park or another and checked it out. I must admit it was pretty neat to stop in for a few minutes. I really had no interest in eating there, or having a drink because…€¦yeah I'm not a fan of bars. The television nostalgia was nice though. They each picked up some souvenirs and I grabbed this bottle of root beer.

Being a novelty item I had low expectations for this soda and it ended up sitting in my fridge for a while. Obviously they went to some bottling plant and just had them slap a Cheers label on it. Normally in those situations the soda is completely uninspiring and more sugar water than anything. This was more robust than I had expected. It was better than store brand, which is the barometer that I use for root beer quality. It's a little dark, and fairly sweet. It did its job and I found it quite refreshing on this hot, anxiety ridden day. And no, I do not want to go where everybody knows my name. I want to hide out in the woods where I will come in contact with very few people. At what point do I need to admit that I have a problem? Oh, probably when I run out of drinks to review.

No matter how many flavors of Jelly Belly soda I try I am continuously surprised at how they don't taste like carbonated garbage water. Confectionary companies making soda has rarely, if ever, turned out well until now. So here I am with a bottle of soda that I don't really enjoy, but I can't say that it's bad by any means. I just am not a big fan of pears. They are at the lower levels of the fruit chain for me. I mean they come nowhere near the atrocity that is bananas, but they are still not even close to my favorite. Let me take an aside here and ask if we can hold whoever it was that created bananas responsible for war crimes? I think they would be getting off light.

Back to the subject at hand; this tastes like someone took a pear at the peak of ripeness, juiced it and mixed it in with some sweetened sparkling water. It only tastes vaguely candied, and that is shocking. I can't believe how much it actually tastes like pears since it says there is 0% juice in here.

I may not be a fan of this, but I can certainly respect it. I also know a bunch of people who would love this. It's a shame they aren't here to drink the rest of it, because I more than likely will not.

I'm pretty sure that everyone in the world who remembers New York Seltzer from its original run was excited when they heard that it was coming back (if they heard that it was coming back). I'm also pretty sure that 99% of those people who actually got their hands on one twisted it open, took a sip, and thought “wow I remember these being a lot better.”

Has the world changed, or is it just our tastes? Is this the exact same recipe that people enjoyed back in the day? If so have our taste buds just evolved? This tastes like an average peach soda. The flavor isn't overly strong, but it's there and it's sweet. I want something special from this and it's just not there. There is nothing horribly wrong with it, but I want it to be spectacular and it's just not.