Derek Neuland - 489 Reviews

It has been in the 90's and 100's the past week in Portland. This is very unnatural for Portland, and it sucks. I hate the heat, which is why I moved here. All I've been doing is sitting in front of a fan and drinking water. I decided to venture out into the sun today and found this lemonade tea at a corner store I don't frequent much. Hubert's has never done me wrong so this was a good thing to stumble upon.

Now I'm a big fan of half and half's and I've tried a good number of them in my day. It's hard to get the tea to lemonade ratio perfect, but Hubert's did a damn good job. The lemonade is sweet and tangy, but still lets the mellow green tea flavor come through. If this was more widely available it would be my go-to half and half.

Hotlips does it again. They have managed to make a delicious fruit soda that isn't sweetened with any sugar. I had to look at the ingredients three times just to be sure. And you know what? It tastes great. I'm not one to eat a pear normally, but this is delicious. It's really juicy and flavorful.

My only complaint (and this goes for all Hotlips sodas) is it's only lightly carbonated. I like my soda to be moderately fizzy, but you barely notice it here.

Ah, Gamer Soda, we meet again! In the past you have disappointed me with your bland flavor and lack of caffeine, but I'm willing to give you another try. I do still like that it doesn't have food coloring in it. I appreciate clear sodas that aren't lemon-lime or cream soda.

Now onto the flavor. It's good, but not great. This is definitely one of the better cherry soda's I've had, but it's nothing to write home about. It's crisp and flavorful, and most people would think this is a decent soda. I haven't played video games in a while (Mike will probably scoff at me for that), but I suppose this would be a good soda to drink while playing games if we want to get into that discussion. It's much better than any normal fruit sodas you can find at your local grocery store in 99 cent 2 liters.

Once again with a drink, I am of two minds. On one hand, this is a great iced tea. It'ss organic, sweetened really well with agave, and has a really nice flavor. And unlike a lot of sweetened iced teas, the sugar (or agave in this case) doesn't overpower it so you can still taste the tea. I must say, it is damn good tea. I don't think I've ever had guayusa tea before, but it's delicious.

So what's wrong with it do you ask? Despite the name, it doesn't taste like cherry or ginger. This is a shame because I was really looking forward to the ginger. I can't pinpoint, but it's still good. This, my friends, is the only reason this is getting a 3 instead of a 4, false advertising.

Apparently Pepsi is using their 'Next' line to try out new flavors. First was the Cherry Vanilla that Mike reviewed last week. Now I've come across this 'Paradise Mango' flavor. This is definitely a first for me, as I've never seen mango in a cola before.

Upon opening the bottle, a waft of mouth-watering mango hit my nose. I'm not joking, my mouth literally started to water when I smelled it. I don't eat mango that often, but I love mango flavored drinks. As soon as I took my first sip, my skepticism went away. This is incredible! It's got that classic crisp Pepsi cola taste, with a wave of mango right after. I keep catching myself smelling the bottle before each sip because I don't know if I've had a drink that has smelled this good in a while.

I hope Pepsi decides to expand this flavor into its normal line. I would love to see what this tastes like without all the fake sugar in it.

Not all cream soda's are created equal. We know this. It's not debatable. Some are amazing and delicious and some just taste like they were dragged through the river. Simpson Spring has always done us good as far as soda goes, so this cream soda already had a leg up before I opened it up.

Lo and behold, I was right. This bottle is delicious! If they were to add a tagline to this flavor, it would be "very vanilla". I don't know if I've ever had a cream soda that has this strong of a vanilla flavor to it. Some people might prefer more subtle cream sodas, but the creamier the better in my opinion.

Doctor, Doctor! The city's sick! It's summer and all the coffee is making everyone overheated. Won't these people learn that drinking a hot beverage when it's 80 degrees out is not good for you? Do you have a remedy!?

Iced coffee! Yes, this will work. Mmmmm, it's made with almond milk, and is mocha flavored. It tastes like chocolate milk, but sadly there's not much coffee flavor to it. I know it's in there because I suddenly feel energized. But with a coffee drink, I am hoping for some sort of coffee flavor to it.

So thank you Dr. Chao for saving the people of Portland from this heat. Your service to the community will not go unnoticed.

It's been a long time since I last took a trip to Hosmer Mountain. It's a great place to visit this time of year. The trees are full, the air is crisp, and there are not too many bugs around to bother you. Let's not forget the best part of Hosmer Mountain, the abundance of delicious soda everywhere. I managed to find this bottle of Sarsaparilla lying on a pad of moss under an oak tree. I had to wrestle it away from a raccoon, but it found another bottle a few minutes later so luckily it didn't claw my face off.

The soda you find at Hosmer Mountain is always delicious. This is definitely one of the best sarsaparilla's I've ever had. It's really smooth with a nice thick molasses taste to it. It's one of the sweetest bottles I've had, not to mention the strong vanilla aftertaste.

So if you ever find yourself in New England, do yourself a favor and climb Hosmer Mountain. Even if you hate nature, it's worth it to find the delicious bottles of soda scattered everywhere. Hurry before those pesky geo-cachers get them all.

I'm going to make some enemies with this statement, but I don't care: I don't like cranberries. It's true, I've always hated cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and most cranberry juice/drinks I've had are just gross. That was until I had this soda.

Now I'm not saying "I LOVE CRANBERRY" now. I'm just saying that this is the best cranberry drink I've ever had. That being said, I'm still not crazy about it. It's nice that it's naturally sweetened (no real or fake sugar), and yet still tastes sweet. The cranberry taste is strong yet not overpowering like straight cranberry juice.

Last night I participated in the 4th annual Portland 24 Hour Zine Challenge. From 10am on Saturday to 10am today, a bunch of nerdy zine kids went to the Independent Publishing Resource Center and each made a 24-page zine within the 24 hours. I wrote mine about every house/apartment I have ever lived in (there has been many) and I finished with 5 hours to spare.

This wonderful drink definitely helped a lot. In recent times I have significantly cut back my energy drink intake in fear of making my heart explode. When I was getting snacks and drinks for the challenge, I was excited to find this because I had never seen this rehab flavor before. All the ones I've had thus far were delicious, and this was no different. It has a slight energy drink aftertaste, but for the most part it tastes like iced tea and Sunny D. Some might recoil at the sound of that, but I love the flavor of Sunny D. There's real orange juice in it so maybe it was just in my head.

So next time you need to make a zine in 24 hours, this will definitely do the trick.

Mt. Angel is a local brewing company that makes one of my favorite root beers of all time. When I found out they have expanded into other flavors, I couldn't have been more excited. At first I could only find them in an expensive 6 pack sampler, but then I was able to find this single bottle for sale at New Seasons today.

Is it as good as the root beer? I can't say because that would be like comparing a milkshake to a burrito. They're both delicious, but in different ways. I've never had a marion berry drink before and I didn't know what to expect. It's almost like a slightly tart blackberry, which I really enjoy. I probably wouldn't go out of my way to drink this again but it's definitely worth trying. I could see this being someone who loves fruit, especially berries, really loving this soda.

I am a vegan iced coffee drinker. Sure it's easy to go to most coffee shops and get an iced coffee with soy milk, but what about at the grocery store? Coffee drinks have been having more of a presence lately in the coolers at stores recently. At first it was just the Starbucks Frappicino's, but as you can tell by our ever-growing coffee section many more companies have stepped up to the plate.

That's all great, except 99% of them are made with dairy milk. Every once in a while there will be a black iced coffee drink but I'd rather drink battery acid than black coffee. Then my dream came true when I found this bottle at the co-op. Not only was it made with almond milk, but it actually says VEGAN in bold letters across the front. Dr. Chao gets points with me because a lot of companies are scared of using the word vegan sometimes in fear of scaring away those who aren't (because you know, all vegan food is bland and gross).

As I expected, this drink is awesome. This was free of the gross chalky taste a lot of vegan milk drinks have. It is very comparable to an iced vanilla latte you would get at a coffee shop (in taste and price since this was only $2.99). I don't know how it compares to a dairy based drink, but I feel like even non-vegans would really enjoy this because almond milk is delicious. I'm really looking forward to checking out the rest of the drinks by Dr. Chao, especially the coconut milk based coffee drinks.

As if the 10 calories in Sugar Free Red Bull were too many, they recently came out with TOTAL ZERO. Imagine those words being emitted by an ominous voice and it makes the drink sound more intimidating. Sadly, it's not really that much different (taste wise) from Sugar Free Red Bull. I was hoping they were going to shake up the Red Bull recipe a little for this, but they stuck with what they know.

I currently have a sore throat and I was hoping that by drinking this it would help. I remembered last time I had a chia seed drink, it felt like it was massaging my throat as the slimy little things slid down. While it does indeed still do this, it didn't give the desired relief from pain that I was expecting.

Drinking this is weird because since there are so many seeds, you feel like you have to chew on them before swallowing. I have been trying for 5 minutes now and they just slide out from under my teeth anytime I try to chew. Now I'm thinking about all these seeds I'm ingesting and irrational worrying about that urban legend about swallowing seeds and plants growing inside you.

"We did an x-ray and we found a full size Chia Pet in your stomach". That would probably get me on the cover of Weekly World News, or at least #4 on a blog article titled "10 of the weirdest things found inside a person's stomach".

I was expecting this to have more of a mint taste. Maybe they forgot to mix it in, because all I taste is pomegranate. I love pomegranate, but I was excited to see what pomegranate mint would taste like. Maybe I should drop a 'wint-o-green' Lifesaver inside to see. Rats, I don't have any.

When I moved back to Buffalo for 10 months, the number one complaint I got from fellow reviewer Jason was that I didn't review more Hotlips soda while I lived in Portland. You'd think I passed up a chance to see a one-off Fugazi reunion by the consistency that he would bring it up. If he were my father, he might have disowned me, or at least cut off my allowance for a couple weeks.

So now I'm back in Portland where Hotlips soda can be found everywhere. For those who are not familiar with it, Hotlips is a Portland, Oregon based chain of pizza shops that also make their own soda. They are available on tap and bottled at various grocery stores around the greater Portland area. The great thing about Hotlips soda is that it's made with real fruit, something I didn't appreciate the first time I had one. It only contains whole ingredients, no gross chemicals or filler. People's biggest complaint with Hotlips is their soda is VERY lightly carbonated, so little that sometimes it seems like it's not at all. While it was off putting at first to me, I've grown to like it. Now don't get me wrong, I love carbonated soda, I just think of this as it's own thing and try not to compare it to traditional soda as far as the carbonation goes.

Now to this flavor, black raspberry. It's one of my favorite fruits so I might be biased, but I think it's delicious. Like most flavors, there are little chunks of berry in it that make the drink. If this weren't so expensive, I would probably drink these all the time.

Hubert's lemonade/limeade doesn't mess around. You'd think with a slogan like "Only the Best Will Do" and a sour faced lemon on the bottle, they were trying to talk themselves up in order for you to ignore the mediocre liquid inside. Hubert's doesn't need to sink to such tactics. Every flavor I've had by them has been some of the best lemon/limeade I've ever tasted. And that sour faced lemon isn't an exaggeration, it's really tart! The cherry flavor in this really shines through as well, giving the sour limeade a literal 'cherry on top'. Good work Hubert's, keep making awesome lemonade and I'll keep buying it

I have always heard that pu-erh tea was supposed to be super fancy. I'm not a big fan of hot tea so I never looked into it. When I saw this bottle at the store today I thought, "Hey I can finally try this and see what the fuss is all about". Verdict: I don't like it. After doing some "after the fact" research, I find out that pu-erh tea is fermented. In my top 10 most hated drinks, 8 of them are fermented. I don't know why, I wish I could like fermented drinks. Everyone swears by Fentiman's and Bionade, but I can't enjoy them at all.

All that being said, this is a good clean tasting tea. There's only a slight peach flavor, and an even slighter ginger flavor. The latter really disappointed me because I really like tea with ginger in it. Even though I'm not big on lightly sweetened teas, even if this had more sugar in it I think I would still not like it very much. Sorry tea connoisseurs, it's just not my thing.

The year was 2000. Y2K had come and gone without a sound, Bill Clinton was still president, and I had just graduated from high school. After graduation, I moved into a house in Buffalo just around the corner from the coffee shop Stimulance. This coffee shop would quickly become a place I went to a lot. From getting a bagel with cream cheese in the morning, to evenings drinking Snicker-chinos (a delicious coffee drink that tasted like a burnt Snickers bar). Lets not forget their classic weekly open mic nights. Oh memories...

So why am I talking about this coffee shop that has long since closed? Well it was the first place I ever bought a bottle of Nantucket Nectars from. It was a bottle of their lemonade and I was instantly hooked. This bottle is their half and half (half lemonade, half iced tea) and it's just as good as the solo lemonade flavor. A lot of companies get the ratio all wrong, but those folks in Nantucket know what they're doing.

My friend and business partner Alex Wrekk bought this for me today at a Pizzeria in a section of North Portland called Kenton. The photo is the only label that was there, the actual bottle was a generic brown glass bottle with no markings on it.

I was hesitant to try a drink in an unmarked bottle, but I'm glad I did because this root beer is great! It has a great anise taste (and I love anise). It reminds me a little of Virgil's, but more complex and not as heavy. The only word that comes to mind when trying to describe the aftertaste is "earthy". I hope that doesn't make me sound like a hippie.

Stumptown Coffee is what made me fall in love with coffee. I recently moved back to Portland, OR, the home of Stumptown Coffee. I would love to say it was because I missed it so much, but in reality it was to open a custom button/zine store with my friend Alex Wrekk called Portland Button Works.

We recently signed a lease on a storefront and have been slowly moving things into it this week. I felt it was fitting that the first drink I reviewed here was a drink I've been waiting to try for a long time. Stumptown came out with this lovely glass bottle of coffee just before I moved back to Buffalo for 10 months. I didn't get a chance to try it before I left, but now I finally found a nice cold bottle.

I don't know much about cold brewing coffee, besides that it tastes better than other methods of iced coffee. After opening this bottle, it smelled like I just walked into a coffee shop. It has that classic/awesome coffee aroma. I usually drink my coffee with soy/almond milk and a little sugar, but under certain circumstances I can tolerate black coffee. I wish all black coffee tasted like this, because it's incredible. It's really strong, but has so much flavor. I don't know blends of coffee well enough to wax on about the different subtleties in the beans. All I know is that this is delicious, and I would probably drink it every day if it weren't $3.50 a bottle.