Water - 252 Reviews

The world of vitamin waters is pretty murky. While there are some really good ones, there are also a lot of bad knock offs. Whole Foods usually knows what's what when it comes to drinks so I figured this one would be a safe bet. What surprised me though was how tart is. Most "lemonade flavored" drinks aren't tart at all. They throw a little lemon flavor in there but don't make your lips pucker at all. This is the closest lemonade flavor vitamin water I've ever had, and I love it. It's a delicious light, flavorful, and thirst quenching lemonade.

These drinks are the beverage worlds equivalent of Tribbles. Don't act like you don't know what a Tribble is. I know you're secretly a nerd and have at least a beginner's knowledge of Star Trek, so you can just stop pretending that you are clueless as to what I'm talking about. Again, this drink=Tribbles. No matter how many I drink of them whenever I open my fridge/cupboard there are more waiting for me. I think they may actually be asexual organisms that are just reproducing. If they were spectacular drinks I would celebrate this and encourage them to reproduce at high volumes. Truth be told, I'm not a fan of diet drinks, or things that taste like seltzer water. I don't flat out hate them, but with so many other drinks floating around my world I'm drinking these out of a sense of duty. In reality these aren't bad at all, but they are completely middle of the road. This one in particular tastes like a slightly dry diet orange soda with just a hint of mango. You really can't even make out that it's mango, but there is definitely another fruit flavor there other than orange. To be completely honest I would have probably enjoyed this a bunch more if they had completely forgone a sweetener instead of using sucralose. Oh well, I'm sure that when I go to move more drinks to my fridge tomorrow I'll find 8 more bottles of this stuff. KKKKKHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!!

Medicine is no laughing matter. If you are sick, I suppose that you can laugh when you are stricken with illness and you can laugh that you have antibiotics and your disease will soon be no more. Anyhow, this whole medicine cabinet candy store scenario has gone on too long. People raiding their mommy and daddy's medicine cabinets and taking prescription pills is not a good life. You know that is no way to live your life, right? You know that the pills you took that were in an Oxycodone are actually just laxatives right and now you're going to have the toots. Medicine is not a joke and should not be taken unless prescribed to you via a doctor. Cool? Done.

If you feel the need to take vitamins, those you can almost go crazy with. Vitamins will make it so you don't need medicine if you do it well. Want to have fun taking vitamins? Try some of these Karma waters. The other ones are more juice than medicine. This one is more medicine and serious than the other ones, I've got to say. This was thicker, more opaque, tasted exactly like mango and orange would taste if mixed with vitamins for kids, and probably did the trick.

So seriously, stop it with all the pain medication abuse. Just quit your job at the plant. That will improve your life. Get a job doing something you like. If you can't do it, go back to school and go for it. We don't want anything to happen to you. If something happens to you via overdose on your grandma's old pain meds from her back surgery, it's on you, but I can't say I didn't tell you. Drink vitamins. Have a better life.

Dear The FDA,
Can we get a little stricter on ingredient lists? I mean what constitutes natural flavoring? I could soak muddy rocks in a vat of water, would that fall under the category of natural flavoring? Take this can of Noah's for instance. It's a nice little drink. It's obviously flavored soda water, but the ingredients only like carbonated water and natural flavoring. Since the can also states that it contains 0% juice, I want to know what it is that I'm drinking that is creating that berry pomegranate flavor. I like the flavor, a lot actually. This reminds me a lot of the Dry Sodas. I hate seltzer water, but I really enjoy those, and I enjoy this a good deal as well. The Dry bottles list what is flavoring them though. This is just natural flavoring. Does that mean that they just soaked fruit in the carbonated water and then strained them out? How about a little guidance here? I like this drink it's lightly flavored sparkling water that makes you feel like an adult, even though it looks like it's marketed towards kids. If you could get kids hooked on this stuff instead of regular soda, the world would be a better place. I'm just the curious sort. Also, what is this that I've been hearing that if a drink has less than 4 calories, companies can now claim them to be zero calories? FDA, you either need to go back to school for some basic arithmetic, or stop being such a liar.
Sincerely,
The Thirsty Dudes

Alright men, this is it. This is the one that we have to win with. Thirsty Dudes have not given us a good review of any of the drinks we've made so this one has to count. Let's give it everything we've got. No fruit flavor since they consistently do not like it. I don't know why. I mean, it's not the best but it's not the worst. So let's do what we do best.

Gentlemen, I see that you've all worn your sneakers, white T's, blue jeans, and leather jackets. Max, I see that you've worn a jean jacket, that's cool, too. What I've gathered you all here to do is make the ultimate cool drink. I'm dubbing it "Triple Chill" and we're giving it all we've got. All chill, no funny business. Let's get to work. We're doing a 24 hour work shift. I'm going to get pizza and pop for everyone for lunch and dinner. A cool set of meals for a cool set of dudes.

Alright. Guys, I would like to thank you for a job well done. You have worked very hard and have made a lot of drinks and I am sending a couple bottles to the Thirsty Dudes. We made this for the masses but we had Thirsty Dudes in mind. Let's see what they have to say.

One week later
Guys! They reviewed it. I didn't even read it. I just printed it out so that I could read it. Everyone into the conference room in five minutes. I'll read it. Here's what it says:

Pure Cool has done it again. A strange tasting minty drink that misses the mark just about everywhere. I don't know what they use for mint but every sip tasted like I was drinking the water out of a urinal. You know when you pee on those urinal cakes and it is that strange minty-ness? That's what this tastes like. I did appreciate no fruit as that would have made this drink a complete abomination. I think that if humans ate plastic, and that plastic was mint flavored, that is what this drink is. Start a fire. Sit back in your nice leather chair and put your feet up. Pop a couple of minty plastic chips in your mouth and enjoy the night. That's what this drink makes me want to do. Ahh, to be a plastic ingesting human is to enjoy a bottle of Pure Cool Triple Chill.

I...I don't know what to say...We all worked so hard. Jim...you tested it, right? It was good wasn't it? Maybe there's just something wrong with the Thirsty Dudes. Yeah, that has to be it. Those guys have a messed up palate. These drinks are great and we are not in denial. They don't like them. So what. We're still in business, aren't we? Then let's keep doing what we do best! Back to work! Pizza for everyone!

Karma was a stripper who was fantastic at her job but in need of a career change. She was great, though. She could take off her clothes faster than anyone else. That's what makes a good stripper, right? Who can take their clothes off faster? Isn't stripping a race? That's a sidebar. Anyhow, Karma loved fitness and when she wasn't at work, shakin' it, she was at the gym or jogging or eating healthy. She was the model of fitness. She was also attractive enough to be a model. She noticed when she was at the gym that people were just drinking water and she thought that something could be done about it.

So she grabbed some chewable vitamins and drink mix, put them in a little pouch, and started selling them to people at the gym as a type of water enhancer. You would get the hydration you needed from the water, the vitamins that would help you with the workin' outs, and the flavor to make it all go down easier. Francis Frankson was a budding investor who also worked at the same gym saw what Karma had come up with and thought that with some light tweaking, this could be a hit product.

Cut to three months later and the company Karma was born. Francis set Karma up with a bottler and a spring water supplier and found a company that would sell them the powder mix at wholesale and the kicker is that they partnered with a bottlecap maker who designed a cap that would store the mix. People all around would write Karma letters telling her that the Balance drink was a good tasting drink that tastes more juicy than Flinstone vitamin. Success! Karma was an entrepreneur and could leave her job at Bouncin' Booties.

Carmen hates to take his vitamins so his mom decided to do it the dumbest way possible; make a game out of it. Some parents say something like "You don't get any dessert if you don't take your vitamins." You could do the old fashioned "Go to your room until you're ready to take your vitamins." or something along those lines. It doesn't need to be punishment, either. It could just be something kids have to do. "Look kid. Do you want brittle bones, weak joints, or jaundice? You don't have to know what it is, just take your vitamins. Medicine has come a long way since I was a kid. I'd kill for medicine that tastes like slightly chalky candy. My brothers and I used to throw up when my parents gave us medicine so you take your candy medicine and shut up." That's informative.

Carmen's mom though, she hides vitamins in things. She essentially drugs her kids. I know that sounds bad, but you can't really think about it any better way. This time, she puts vitamins in her kids Kool-Ade and gives it to them with a straight face. No second thoughts. Just “Here's your "juice" kids.” To make it even worse, the kids love it and when they ask for more, she has to string the lie out because she's not going to give the kids more vitamin/juice mix and if she just makes them juice, they're know that it tastes differently.

A lady from the CPS came to inspect the home life of adopted Carmen and they asked how she gave her kids medicine. Carmen's mom didn't hesitate for a second. After tasting it, she saw why she did it. It tasted good. It tastes like a fruit juice and vitamins but the flavor is so good that you don't care at all that it might or might not have vitamins in it. The lady from CPS left leaving Carmen's mom with a warning that eventually she will have to stop doing this because all kids have to take some vitamins.

Noah, dude. Did you see this? I know. It's very insensitive. All of those animals stuck on that boat. You listened to the man upstairs, built the arc, traveled for a long time, and then had to resettle. You spend months on a boat with monkeys thinking they owned the place. There was just animal poop everywhere. I know that the documentary maker who added your story to his book, "The Bible" didn't add any of the gross stuff. You would spend most days picking up pooh with a shovel and throwing it overboard. That's not glamorous. Also, people died in that flood. Did the maker of this drink forget that? Flood your thirst? Seriously. People died. I know people that died. This guy took your name and your story and exploited it to sell his drink. You want one? Alright. You can have mine.

What?! You like it? How could you, Noah? This is an insult to your experiences and your story. I know that was a long time ago and you work in a Best Buy now but it's still something you did, something you accomplished. Good lime flavor?! I don't even know you. I suppose you think that it's nice and refreshing because it doesn't have any sugar. What? Dude. Noah. Dude. You've gone soft. Your once calloused hands have softened back up. Alright, I know I'm being hard on you. I'm sorry. While you're back there, can you get me a pair of Beats headphones in purple? Thanks. My customer is going to be sore at me for talking to you for so long and clearly not working and getting the headphones they wanted.

The zero calorie Cascade Ice drinks are basically just flavored seltzer water. The 2-calorie version on the other hand is lightly sweetened with sucralose. It's not enough for it to taste overly diet. Actually, this is the least diet tasting diet drink I have ever tasted. It actually is made with pink grapefruit juice concentrate, which gives it an authentic grapefruit taste. The artificial sweetener makes sure that it's not overly bitter like straight grapefruit juice would be. This also has an incredibly strong grapefruit scent to it. I enjoyed this way more than anyone would have expected.

Blackberry and blueberry? Is there a line that I can draw a giant, red "x" on because I want it. Oh, I can simply pay a little more than $2 and buy it? I suppose that is just as easy. Mix in water? Childs play. No problem. I can mix stuff and remember not to breath while the deadly fruit dust occupies my nasal cavities.

Oh...hold on a second here. What went wrong? Sixteen ounces of water, check. Mix, check. Mixed, check. Clean glass? Check. What's the deal? It smells great. Inviting. I keep going back for more but why? It has a bit of a bitter taste to it. It tastes like water first, or just wildly weak juice, which is strange, then like a sucralose taste, even those there aren't any unnatural sweeteners. I'm counting Stevia as a natural sweetener here, folks. It's almost bitter and it is not until the end when you get a woosh of fruit and cool Stevia sweetness. Yes, the final battle is worth coming back for more and I have almost finished my entire glass, but at what cost?

If you are down with diet drinks, this will be an easy fight for you. If you, like me, saw a naturally diet drink mix that comes in delicious flavors and think that you are on to something, you are only half right.

Hey seltzer heads! Yeah, you guys! I've got something for you. It's in the trunk of my car. Yeah, it is legal. Just because a man has a pallet filled with a random assortment of drinks in the back of his windowless van doesn't mean they fell off a truck or anything. Maybe a man just likes to spread the word about sparkling drinks once in a while. Who I am is not of any importance to you, ma'am. My license places? They fell off the van so don't worry about it.

Coconut? Yeah, I've got it. It's right here. Made by a company called La Croix. I guess they are some fancy French company or something. Michigan? Well, ma'am, sorry about shutting you up earlier. Yeah, I guess these guys here are from America. I thought we hated the French. Taste? Oh, now you all want free samples? One can. One can between the...twenty-one...twenty-two...twenty-three of you. Here. One can. No more. Good right? Coconut-y, right? Unsweetened, right? Yes? Right? How many pallets can I put you down for? One? I drove all the way out here from None Of Your Business-burg for one pallet? Fair enough. You've got me. That will be $674.99. Yeah, and ninety-nine cents. I've got to make ends meet too, lady.

I'm here, at work, post Christmas, all alone. I'm surrounded by the soothing sounds of The Best Show Christmas Extravaganza. I am eating chocolate Teddy Grahams, because I am apparently eight. To inverse the ageism of that, I am drinking cough medicine disguised as cranberry lime seltzer water. It does not taste like cranberry or lime and somehow even has a Vicks tang to it. I don't know how it was done as they added water and natural flavors.

I do not have a cough nor do I want one. I do want to know how products like this make it past testing. I know what a cranberry tastes like and this isn't it. I even will go as far as saying that I know what cranberry lime tastes like together and this isn't it. I will say there is lime in there. I have concentrated and discovered lime much like Christopher Columbus laid claim to the pre-discovered land that is America.

I wish I hadn't eaten all of those Teddy Grahams. The eight year old in me wins again.

'Round these parts, we call it "Spicy Water." That's the water you make with your carbonation machine and just don't add flavor. I'm talking about that pop machine that looks like a penguin that makes pop for you when you want it in cool, 1 liter bottles. My girlfriend always gets "soda water with lemon" which is just carbonated water. It's strange though. I drink water all of the day and enjoy it but once it's carbonated, it gets a bit of a gnarly taste to it. She loves the stuff. I don't know what her problem is. I sneak sips periodically and find it quite vile.

I knew what I was in for when I tried this and was actually proven a little bit wrong. It's got that strange bitterness or whatever goes on inside carbonated water, but the pomegranate taste is great. This is actually a drink that has no sugar or carbs or anything, tastes fruity, and for some might be quenching. I made a little face after every sip, but, as previously mentioned, I don't fancy “fancy water.” I do like flavored waters, which would basically be this sans "spice" but this is a world apart from a drink like Hint or equivalent.

When my mom reads this, she's going to be sore at me because she loves seltzer water, too. Seltzer water used to only be used for clowns but now it's used for clowns and moms. I'm not going to draw any lines comparing the two, but you can.

This should be something I love. Over the past year or so I've fallen in love with low sugar "dry" sodas. They provide the bubbles and the flavors that I need without being anything more than liquefied sweetener. The thing is I think that a very small amount of sugar may be needed when drinks are carbonated. I still don't understand it after 32 years on this planet; if you drink a glass of water it's cool refreshing and tasty (in a tasteless kind of way), but if you take that same water and carbonate it the flavor changes. It acquires this taste that is borderline bitter. Is it the CO2 that I taste? I can only assume it is, and it can ruin drinks for me. If that added taste wasn't there this drink would be perfect. It has a light pear taste and there is a nice mellow ginger aftertaste. This is the kind of drink that you could enjoy after a nice meal. It's just too bad that I can't get over the "seltzer water" taste it has. Seriously, if this were uncarbonated I would probably be raving about it. Dear taste buds, please start liking the taste of unsweetened carbonated water. There is a world of drinks out there that are way better for us that we are just not enjoying because of it.

I'd like to think that when Talking Rain was trying to get an advertising campaign together for this line of drinks someone in the board meeting spoke up about it being the obvious choice to have Chuck Berry as a spokesperson. I'd like to think that the idea (along with a sampler of drinks) even made it to Mr. Berry's desk. He sat back in his chair and thought to himself "Well, why not?" He was getting up their in years and wasn't able to perform nearly as much as he used to. Also, the contracts he signed early in his youth didn't really pan out for him as well as they should have. Why not take on one last job? It would be easy. They could just play his classic songs "Do the Twist" and "Twist Again." At the end he could be standing there with a guitar play a little lick and then say some tagline. It would be easy and help provide a little extra for his family when he inevitably shuffled off this mortal coil. He was just about to respond to the offer when he cracked open a bottle of the mango acai flavored water. He took a sip and it wasn't as good as he would have hoped, but it was good enough to get his endorsement. He continued to write his response, taking sips every so often. He's an old timer and never really got he hang of computers so typing took him awhile. With each sip the drink tasted worse. Even though everything in the drink is organic, it tasted off. It almost was like a more flavorful cleaner. It doesn't really make any sense. It only slightly tasted like mango and it didn't really taste like agave. Maybe it's what the watered down acai was to blame. Chuck hesitated in his typing, took one more sip and decided they shouldn't have added a sweetener at all. If it were just water with mango and acai nectar mixed in it would have been more palatable. He closed his browser and turned off the computer. The beverage was sub par and he was the legendary Chuck Berry. Why should he give them a courtesy response?

If we learned one thing here it's that Check Berry can be kind of a jerk about returning emails. A simple "No Thank You" would have been fine and courteous. Looks like the fame has gone to his head.

Ahh cascading ice. Nothing tastes better than a nice avalanche rushing over a citrus orchard. A nice, giant ice dam covering all of Florida and pulling forth all the natural juices from oranges and lemons sounds delicious. Mother nature doing her job. Moving millions of tons of ice downward, squeezing juices from fruits to make crisp, cool, fresh water.

If that were the case, awesome, but there is one more step to make this drink do what it's supposed to do and that's to be carbonated. I suppose, at some state, man has to come in, bottle it, and put it on shelves. Using the previous scenario, all would happen as described, then man would break off chunks of this citrus ice into clean wheelbarrows, take them to the carbonation factory where they carbonate whatever is poured into "the hole" and then it bottles it and it's off the consumers everywhere.

The result? An unsweetened Sprite. People, it is just seltzer water with orange and lemon. I guess it would be like an unsweetened Ski. Wait, does Ski have lime or lemon? Now I don't remember.

I have reached this conclusion from the name of this beverage; Karma. If I am to believe the nonsense that I just thought up the taste of this beverage is dependent on how well you have lived your life in regard to others. By this way of thinking I've just learned that I have had a very mediocre relationship with my fellow human beings. I haven't been terrible to them, but at the same time I have never done grand things for them either. If I ever want this to be a top-notch drink then I am going to have to start being a better human being. Damn.
The drink is along the same lines as the Activate line. It's a normal flavored beverage that has a packet of vitamins in the cap. Before you drink it you push down the to of the cap to release the vitamins into the drink. Then you shake it all up and take your maiden sip. I wish the base drink was actually a brewed green tea instead of just green tea leaf extract. That and the secondary sweetener of Stevia rebaudiana make the drink taste a little fake. If I had been a better person I have no doubt that it would have been brewed tea and just cane sugar. I can just imagine how much better the drink would be. It actually does taste like passionfruit, but the coldness of the Stevia kind of ruins it. It's basically a fresher version of a tea version of a Vitamin Water (that was a mouthful) that was unfortunately sweetened in a way that I'm not into. Guess I'm off to be a sweeter dude to the world. I really want better tasting drinks.

Before I even begin to think about describing the flavor of this drink I have to mention the packaging. Is it necessary? I don't know, but I can tell you that it is really, really cool, even if it is a bit impractical. It's like someone took a 20oz bottle, but it in half and put the top of a can of pop on top to seal the goodness in. I really don't see any benefits of this, besides looking awesome. The joy of plastic is that it is resealable, which this is not. Also, I don't know how well it would work for stacking the cans. It seems like they would fall over a lot easier with that bottom. Oh well, I'm not a stock boy so it's not my problem. I'll just sit back and admire the strangeness of it.

Now on for the purpose of this site, to let the public know how different beverages taste. I shockingly really enjoyed this. Flavored sparkling water isn't really my forte (I can't stand the seltzer taste), but I guess when you add a bunch of sugar to a carbonated water it technically becomes a pop. This tastes like a very light pop that actually tastes just like mangoes. There is no seltzer flavor in this can at all. My only issue is that by the time you get towards the bottom of the bottle/can (should we embrace "bottan" or "cannle" for it's name?) you get a slight hint of the aspartame that is hiding towards the bottom of the ingredients list. Other than that this is great with about half the sugar of normal soda.

The first couple of sips of this I absolutely hated it. It's not its fault though. Let me lay it out for you. I love water. Seriously love it. For as much garbage as I drink for Thirsty Dudes, I drink at least 5x more water. The thing is something happens to the glory of water when you carbonate it. The simple act of adding air bubbles changes the flavor in a way that I wish it didn't. What can't carbonated water taste just like regular water, but make you burp? I really want that.

So I took a couple of sips, got kind of grossed out and put it in the fridge because I didn't feel like writing a review. Cut to a couple of days later I came home from band practice and decided to finish off the bottle. At first it was still gross, but the more I drank the more I became acclimated to it. I'm in no way a huge fan of it, but for a style of drink that I don't like, they did a good job with it.

One thing I find odd is that instead of flavoring it with a little bit of juice they used fruit oils. I guess that way there is zero sugar in this.

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't reviewed a single drink in the past week. This is because I have been working at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas. I worked 80 hours in 6 days and it was insane. But it was well worth the long hours and dust storms. I got to meet Henry Rollins, Brian Posehn, Donald Glover. I saw first hand how insane Odd Future are when I did security for their set when they instructed the crowd to disregard security and rush the barricade/stage. I was several feet away from Ryan Gosling on several occasions. I met lots of amazing people, made some new friends, and have stories about Danzig, Slayer, and many other experiences to share and remember for years.

The reason I'm mentioning all this is because this is the only water I drank for 6 days. If it wasn't for these bottles of water all over the fest, I probably would have died. So in a sense, this water saved my life and sanity. It's not special water; it tastes just like any other water. Unlike most bottle water, it will hold a special place in my heart.