Water - 252 Reviews

You know in the Declaration of Independence where it says “We hold these truths to be self-evident?” Well, all seltzers being created equal was most definitely not one of those truths that our Founding Fathers were referring to. It's probably because it's not a truth at all. It's a flat out lie. Sure 90% of the seltzer waters out there are created equally, but then there is the other 10% who rise above and boy do they shine. I've drunk a lot of grapefruit seltzer over the past few years and I have to tell you, this is #1 with a bullet. The secret to its success is really no secret at all; there is 8% juice in this can, which equates to 3g of sugar. I'll take that tradeoff for a far superior beverage. It's like your dear grandmamma squeezed her morning grapefruit into a glass of sparkling water. Juice is the key to a lot of things in this life. I've never been in a situation where real juice has made anything taste worse. Take note…€¦.well…€¦everyone.

I shouldn't like this. Cracking open this can should be a one way ticket to Boringville, USA. In my world lemon is overrated and unnecessary. I would rather drink plain water than with a slice of lemon in it. Somehow I find this quite refreshing though. Perhaps it's because the lemon taste it more upfront. Sure, it only has 5% lemon juice, but I assure you that lemon water you get at a restaurant probably have less than .5% juice. If there were sugar in this I would even call it a lemonade. It's simple. It's clean. It's a little bit of alright. It may not take you to Flavortown, but it would take less time to get there than to Boringville.

It's the time of year again when the sun is finally starting to shine in Buffalo and the temperatures are on the rise. That also means that it's time for Polar to release their Summer line and this year it's a doozy. Some old favorites like Mango Berry are back, but more importantly are the new flavors like this little guy right here. I don't know who the genius is that thought this up, but I would certainly like to shake their hand, scratch that…€¦give them a huge hug of thanks.

I never knew that pineapple was a flavor that I was missing from seltzer, but now that I have it I don't think I'll ever be able to look back. This is really 85% pineapple 15% grapefruit. I'm completely fine with that ratio. It could have been 100% pineapple and I wouldn't have complained, but as it is the grapefruit rounds out the edges a bit. The amount of this I will be drinking this summer is out of control. If Polar really wants all of my money they will make a pineapple vanilla. I would pre-order case upon case of it.

Most seltzers/sparkling waters keep things simple with just carbonated water and some sort of flavoring, usually under the umbrella of “natural flavoring.” Who knows what those natural flavors are? They could be any sort of weirdness that exists in nature, but has a similar taste to the flavor the company is trying to put forth. Who is to say that snail spit doesn't taste like blackberries?

Spindrift lets you know what you are getting, and I feel that due to the percentage listed they use more of it than most companies, which is apparent also in the taste. This can says it contains 7” juice and that comes from the “fresh orange juice” and “alphonso mango puree” listed in the ingredients. Sure that little bit of juice gives you 1g of sugar per can, but isn't they tiny amount worth knowing what's in your drink let alone how superior it tastes. It still very much tastes like a seltzer and not a sparkling juice, and that is the way it should be in this beverage. Both orange and mango are present enough to be noticed and taste real, but still faint enough to drink it without thinking about it.

I don't know if I will ever get used to non-carbonated energy drinks. Yes, I know the original energy drinks (coffee and tea) were not carbonated and served this world for hundreds of years without people complaining that they needed more. Times have changed though and when I see the word energy listed on a beverage the taste of chemical bubblegum-y citrus flashes across my senses. The thing is that it's not that great of a flavor, we've just become acclimated to it. It's a nice change of pace to have a product that will give you a rush of caffeine and vitamins to help get you through the day that is out of the norm.

This tastes like a plant was bottling some diet black cherry soda, but the line to carbonate it was out of order and also about 1/3 more water got into it than should have. I understand those sound like negative things, but this is better than any black cherry soda I've ever tasted. It also tastes way less diet than I had anticipated since it is sweetened with sucralose. I expected that horrible fake sweetness to punch me right in my uvula, but it turns out it's fairly mild. To such an extent that I believe it could be passed off as “energy flavor.”

Black cherry may not be my flavor of choice, but I have no real complaints about this. It gave me the little boost I needed to get me through my work day and it did it while maintaining a decent taste. What more can you ask for in these times?

Water is water, right? I mean sure, some companies water might taste a little different because of the bottles they use or the inclusion of trace amounts of sodium for some reason, but other than that it's all just water. WRONG! I used to be as misguided as you, but then I had special waters. The kind of waters that you would imagine only rich people could afford. Waters with a higher pH. These waters ARE different and they are deliciously smooth. This just happens to be one of those magical waters and it doesn't cost you a week's worth of pay like you might expect from something so extravagant.

Waiakea water is naturally filtered through volcanic rock and as a result it gets enriched with minerals (without tasting like mineral water) and it also makes it naturally alkaline. If you're a dummy like me, you have no idea what that means, so let me lay it out for you; It helps to remove toxins form the body and regulates the body's natural pH. It also does not decrease in pH over time and stays at 8.8. Does all of that really matter though? When you're drinking it all most people care about is the taste and it is good. It's water, but it tastes better than water. It's as if it is what all water hopes to become. It's crisp and clear, while being strangely smooth.

On top of all of that the company also donates 650 liters of clean water to Africa for every liter sold. Well played.

Am I wrong in thinking that jamaica and hibiscus are the same thing (also sorrel)? I'm pretty sure they are the same. I would look it up, but I'm in Mexico and I don't have internet access. So I will assume they are one and the same. I'm not positive what nada is, but I think it's the same fruit as I bought from some cart earlier with chili powder and lime. At least that's what I think the vender said. My Spanish is minimal and a lot of people talk very fast down here. I digress; this is sparkling mineral water with juice added. It's fairly sweet and floral. I like it, but it was a bit much to get through the whole bottle. I kind of wish I had went with the lime instead. All I really want to consume down here involves limes. This has been a fairly uninformative review, but it's what you're going to get, because I don't know what else to say about it.

Recently I began what I believe to be a long and happy relationship with Topo Chico. I have no idea why I had never tried it before. I always see it in Mexican restaurants, but I never went for it and I am a fool for it. It's wonderful sparkling mineral water with a little citrus added to it. I recently went to Mexico on tour and I knew I would see/drink a lot of it, and I was very excited. Little did I know that this lime variety existed and I tell you it is a game changer. This is exactly like the original, but better because of the lime instead of lemon. I'd love for everything that has lemon in the world be changed so that it included lime instead. It is the superior form of citrus.

I love that Sparkling Ice is taking a step back from sucralose, well at least with their Essence line. I just could not get into the dietness of it all. These new ones though have been mostly pretty great. It's just flavored seltzer water, but the flavors have been good, up until now. This isn't bad per say, but it really teeters on the “tastes like a cleaner” line of things. I feel like everyone involved in the lemon industry should file a class action lawsuit against household cleaners because they have ruined a once great fruit. I feel like the world used to embrace lemon in all its forms, but now folks are reminded of cleaning chemicals and it's a turn off. Big money could be made. Big, big money.

Once you get past the association, this isn't bad. I could do with a tad bit more lime, but I'm always going to want more of that. It's not really a flavor for me, but I wouldn't dump it down the drain.

Back to basics. I can't tell you how refreshing seltzer is after some of the crap we drink. Look, nothing we drink is literal crap or figurative crap. Everyone puts their hearts into the products they put out but come one, after 4600 reviews, we have earned the right to start calling things "crap."

This is great. It's pure simplicity. Water, bubbles and peach. I assume they have some sort of vat of peaches just stewing all their Georgia essence into some tube mechanism that sucks up the scent, injects it into water by way of science/witchcraft and then stores the vapors for someone lucky enough to drink it.

If you like seltzer, this is just seltzer. They can call it whatever fancy name they want. It's sparkling water with flavor. La Croix? Polar? The other one? Same deal, bro. Same deal. It's all great seltzer.

In a couple of weeks I'm going on tour in Mexico. Since we all know you are not supposed to drink the top water there if you are not a local I fully expect that I will get all of my refreshment from this company. If you've read Thirsty Dudes before you likely know that it took me over 30 years of my life to be able to enjoy seltzer water. It took me even longer than that to give Topo Chico a try, but once I did I kicked myself for not having it in my life already.

For those of you who are not in the know, Topo Chico is a sparkling mineral water. The minerals give the water just a hint of a flavor that makes it stand out from regular sparkling water. To add to that there is a bit of citrus in here by the way of lemon in a way that makes it interesting and not like boring restaurant water. Overall it tastes classic and classy. It's the kind of beverage that would pair perfectly with the world's greatest burritos. Oh Mexico, I can't wait to visit and hopefully I will not get stabbed while I'm there like people keep telling me I'm going to.

In an added note I just heard that Aldi bought this company, so now it will be easy to find at an affordable price throughout the US.

If I were to substitute all of the cans of seltzer water that I drink with La Croix brand, I would have to be a rich man. Perhaps that is just because the amount I drink is so obscene, but these cans are at least double the price of the 12-packs of Polar I normally purchase. Do you know what though? It's totally worth it. I love Polar, but La Croix put out the most flavorful seltzers I have ever tried. They have figured out a way for high quality fruit flavors to shine though without any sweeteners, which makes it zero calories. You could drink case after case of this stuff and not feel terrible about yourself. I bet you would have the most righteous burps too.

There is no mistaking this, it is most certainly a sparkling berry beverage. As long as you are not some sort of savage that needs your drinks to be more sugar than liquid, it is incredibly enjoyable.

Do you like water? Do you like having your throat itched by tiny bubbles? Are you sick of sugar? Then here you go. This is simply carbonated water and there's not much to it, because there is not supposed to be. Enjoy.

I just got married a month ago (pause for applause) and ate passion fruit for the first time. What a magical experience. What a strange, goopy fruit. It's so weird. I mean, I ate a ton of it but I don't think in a million years I could get my son to eat it. So slimy. It's like all slime and seeds. Strange that anyone would eat it to begin with but they do and it's wonderful.

This drink, sans goop, tastes just like it. I was surprised. La Croix does the flavor justice. I feel like that one is hard to nail. They might use real fruit juice or whatever "essence" is but whatever science they're doing in there, they've pulled in the right people.

I have to come clean. I have had a handful of new flavors that Sparkling Ice sent me sitting in my fridge for a little while now. Every time I would open up the drawer to choose a drink they would be staring right back at me and I haven't had it in me to taste a zero calorie sweeter tainted drink. Tonight I decided t finally give in and deal with that nonsense on my tongue and what is that? The Essence line isn't sweetened at all. They are all just seltzer water. This instantly made my night better. I expected to take a few small sips and introduce the rest of the bottle to my sink drain, but now I can sip it throughout the night and enjoy it.

This is fairly lightly flavored. It just has slight hints of citrus, which happen to be tangerine. A lot of sparkling waters, sweetened or otherwise tend to go pretty strong on the flavoring, but this is subtle. I could do with a little more, but I do like what they are going for. I also like that this doesn't taste like sucralose and my taste buds would like to express their thanks as well.

One of the few good things about the seasons changing and winter being upon us is the release of the new seasonal Polar flavors. They are a nice change of pace for a limited time. As the first snow starts to fall outside my window a cranberry cider seltzer sounded like a dream. While it may not have lived up to my hopes it is still a unique flavor. I've been hitting the cranberry and lime hard lately and I was excited to mix it up. My first thought upon taking a sip was “Maybe cider and seltzer shouldn't be combined.” Then I thought, “Well maybe I'm just a cider snob because I grew up with an amazing cider mill in my home town.” I settled on “cider without sweetness is just weird. That is what feels off about this.” The more I drank the more I got used to this strangeness on my palate. The cranberry isn't as strong as it is in the cranberry lime, but it does mingle well. I wouldn't drink this all the time, but for a seasonal treat it is quite nice.

It's easy to be nostalgic for other eras in human history. There were a lot of great things that happened and through forgetfulness things seemed like they were perfect. I often find myself wishing I was living in various decades from the past century when life seemed great and the internet hadn't ruined everything. At this point pretty much all of the “secret” spots my friends and I knew about and enjoyed when we were younger have been posted all over the internet and they have either been closed off, or there are now far too many people there for it to have that special allure anymore. Also, don't get me started on how self-important people are now. So I think back to times that I'd like to think were simpler. Then I remember that racism, sexism, homophobia and the like ran rampant during a lot of those times and things weren't perfect then either. I can say if this truly is a facsimile of vintage and what beverages were like in another era I think I could look past the horribleness and just bliss out, can after can.

Somehow seltzer has become a cool thing in our current times. I never saw that coming. I found my way to it because I was looking to lower my sugar intake, but still wanted bubbly drinks and diet soda is just awful. I don't know if that's the route most people take or if it's just a hot item now so they are flocking to it. I will say that I will reap the rewards because the flavors available have expanded greatly.

If you know me, you probably know that I love all things cucumber flavored. I think I may have even been attracted to my girlfriend in high school because she used cucumber melon lotion that was all the rage back then. It's delicious and it's refreshing. I feel like it sounds like I'm building this up for a letdown, but that is not the case. This is wonderful and it's what I wanted out of it. It tastes mostly like cucumber with a faint melon flavor. It's refreshing with no calories. This is guilt free enjoyment here and I could drink a case in a day without blinking an eye, although I would have to make a lot of trips to the bathroom. Everyone who's on a seltzer kick buy this. I'm afraid I may be the only one who will buy it and they will stop production and then I will go in a deep depression and live alone with my riches. When I die my final words won't be about a sled, but about a beverage I truly loved.

This, this was a pleasant surprise. I've been sitting on it awhile and I thought it was a boring old lemon soda. You know, the kind that only vaguely tastes like lemon and mainly tastes like sugar. At best I was hoping it would taste like a carbonated lemonade, since it's 4% real lemon juice. It was none of those things. Instead what I got was a boring seltzer water with lemon juice in it, which as it turns out isn't all that boring and rather tasty.

I find lemon water unnecessary. I'm the jerk that requests no lemon in my water when I go out to eat. I prefer plain old water. I love water; I don't need to spice it up with a fruit that has generally been ruined by household cleaners. Something about this is quite nice though. It thankfully doesn't taste like something I used to polish my furniture. It tastes like go ordered a plain seltzer and then instead of squeezing a single slice of lemon that was cut four hours ago into it, you grabbed one of those squeeze bottles that looks like the fruit and pressed it for longer than you are recommended to. Sometimes I look back on what I've been drinking lately and I don't recognize that man reflected in my glass anymore.

Spindrift has been good to me. For the past five years I have enjoyed their sparkling beverages with no added sugar. At first they proved to me that soda can exist in a delicious way without being full of sweetener. Then they were a gateway for me to start enjoying seltzer, which I drink constantly now. I thank them for helping keep me on a healthy track. I didn't always have their products available to me in Buffalo, but because of them I found other companies that filled the void. I cut a ton of soda out of my diet, and transitioned to drinking a lot of unsweetened iced tea.

Now it's summer and it's the most humid it's ever been in Buffalo (not an exaggeration, records have been broken). The heat is nearly unbearable, but I have my beverages to help me get through it, which I promptly sweat out.

I love watermelon, but I never get it for some reason. It's probably due to laziness, or maybe it's because eating it outside of a picnic/beach type scenario seems off. I was excited for this drink. It's in their sparkling water line and not the seltzer one because there is juice added to the sparkling water and that leads to a whopping 3g of sugar. This is the first time Spindrift has really left me wanting. Overall this would be great, except for one thing. The watermelon tastes more like the rind than it does the red mushy fruit part. I don't know if they just ground up the whole melon, but it's not really what I'm looking for when I think of watermelon. It's not horrible, but I wanted something different that they did not deliver. Oh well, one misstep does not ruin a company for me and I will continue to enjoy their other products.

This tastes like nothing, for that is what it is. It's just water with tiny bubbles. It doesn't taste bitter. It doesn't taste much of anything and that is a wonderful thing at times.