Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

There have been so many of these that I'm not even trying anymore. If you are a rational human being and think sucralose is disgusting, then steer clear of this. If you are a mutant and it doesn't bother you, well then sit back and get ready to enjoy some berry flavoring. I've said it before but if they got rid of the sweetener altogether, this would be a good seltzer.

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.

As I've said a million times, I'm not a huge coffee fan. I do like coffee ice cream though. It's toned down and it is delicious most of the time. When I saw that Marley now made a vanilla chocolate swirl coffee drink my first thought was “Well there goes keeping up a brand image.” What on earth did Bob Marley have to do with ice cream? Did he ever sing about it? Not that I know of, but I've never really delved into his catalog. My second thought was “Is this really a necessary flavor?” It's like they are marketing coffee to kids. Being a big dumb kid myself I obviously picked up a can. You know what? It actually tastes like someone made a cup of coffee and then cooled it down by letting a soft serve twist melt in it. It has a very accurate flavor, but unfortunately who actually wants that flavor once they try it? It was good for about two sips and then it got to be a bit too much. Also, there is a weird almost banana taste to this. There is no banana in it, unless that's where they got the potassium, but it has this weird underflavor that isn't quite the fruit, but close. With each sip the mystery flavor got stronger and my enjoyment decreased. This just seems unnecessary and only well executed for a short period of time. No banana no cry.

Look at that little lemon guy on the label. There's something I just don't trust about that fella. He's hiding something behind that smile and sunglasses. I mean he's under an umbrella and I think he's slyly trying to tell us he's a shady guy. You know what I was right. He was hiding something and that secret is that this is carbonated. Nowhere on the label, except in the ingredients list, does it give any indication that what you're about to imbibe is a sparkling lemonade. I expected this to be a dull “classic” lemonade with far too many added ingredients. The fact is if the bubbles weren't present this would be a fairly piss poor lemonade. The bubbles transform it into an interesting lemon soda. Make no mistake it tastes like soda and not just sparkling lemonade, but it is still pleasant. It's sweet (they use cane sugar, which is always a shocker in plastic bottles) and it has a lemon flavor that tastes quasi accurate. This could have gone horribly wrong put the pieces fell into place well enough. That little guy is a trickster, but at least his trick led to a more enjoyable beverage.

There has been a lot of big moves happening in the beverage world this year. Ecto Cooler is back. Pepsi released its delicious 1893 line, and cold pressed juices are everywhere. To me the most important thing that has happened in the world of drinks is that Cawston Press is officially available in the States and that should be causing gigantic waves, but it's going mostly unknown. Until now I have only ever had Cawston products while in the UK and they are no joke. They produce sparkling beverages that are based on the most wonderful apple juice. I believe all of their flavors start with that same base and then more is added to create the desired flavor and so far they have all been flawless.

This past weekend I completely lost my mind around midnight on Thursday and decided randomly to fly to Atlanta the following afternoon in order to go see The Cure. I ended up with ridiculous seats and a set list that I thought only existed in my dreams. The show was the happiest I have been in a long time. The following day I hung out with some friends down there, ate some amazing food, and went to the Coca Cola museum. It was a wonderful day. As I was getting a ride to the airport to fly home this can was pressed in my hand by my friend, and fellow soda enthusiast, Dakota. Now I had two ridiculously wonderful days and this soda was the perfect cherry on top of a great trip.

As I stated, it has a sparkling apple juice base, but the addition of the lemon juice skyrocketed it to a whole new realm. This is the greatest sparkling lemonade I have ever tasted. It's like someone made perfect lemonade and then poured some perfect apple juice into it and them soaked some elderflower in it. It's a slightly appley lemonade with a light floral taste to it. This very easily could have been too tart, but the apple mellows it out and makes it perfect. Do yourself a favor and if you run into any Cawston Press sodas in your travels pick some up. You won't be even remotely disappointed.

I'd like to say that it's hard to mess up cream soda, but sadly that is not the case. It seems like it should be such a simple soda to make but I feel that a lot of the time it just falls short. When I was in high school I used to bring “40's” of IBC cream soda to parties, because I thought I was hysterical, but more importantly it was just a great cream soda and it became my ideal for the flavor. Throughout the years my tastes have refined quite a lot, but I still compare every cream soda to IBC in my head.

Twigs keeps the IBC dream alive in my mind and in my taste buds. This is sweet with a nice vanilla flavor that isn't too out of control. As I sip this on this warm summer night I feel like I should be 16 sitting around a fire in the fields somewhere while my classmates are getting drunk on whatever booze that could steal/convince someone to buy them. I thought they were dumb then, and I think they are dumb now, but it's all part of the teenage experience and it makes me smile.

Anytime there is a soda that is flavored by a berry that isn't one of the big 4 (straw, blue, black, rasp) I will happily drink it. “Rare' berries are almost always tasty, and so are the sodas that are based off of them. This is a diet drink that is sweetened with cane sugar, agave and stevia., but I will say that if it were solely sweetened with cane sugar it would be ridiculously good (as long as Jones didn't go overboard with the sugar, like they seem to like to do). As it is it is still quite an enjoyable beverage, stevia and all. It has a vague off-diet taste, but the flavor of the huckleberry is nice enough to distract your taste buds. It helps that it's a blend of sweeteners and not only stevia. Jones is doing pretty well for itself.

So tangerines are superior oranges, correct? A little sweeter, with a stronger flavor and they are easier to peel. How about we just accept them as the standard from here on out? A good orange is fantastic, but I feel like I have more bad oranges than good ones, and I've never had an unpleasant tangerine.

I was hoping that the improvement that is tangerines would translate to this soda, but unfortunately this is mostly just generic soda flavor with a sweet hint of a slightly different orange. It's not bad, but it is completely forgettable, which is not something we look for here at Thirsty Dudes. This is certainly not the gourmet soda that it claims to be, but at least it has cane sugar and isn't super thick and syrupy.

Someone make me a proper tangerine soda. I need to taste the superiority…€¦wow that sounded unintentionally fascist.

When I think of “classic” lemonade what comes to mind is an ice cold picture on a sweltering hot day which only contains three ingredients; water, lemon juice, and sugar. It's a simple recipe that can be hard to screw up if you keep it basic. Claire Baie did not keep it basic. They used concentrate and added a handful of other ingredients that do nothing but detract for the simple glory that should be this drink. It doesn't taste like childhood freedom it tastes like plastic and fake lemons.I could have really used a nice lemonade today too. Damn.

Purity is a company that I have grown to know and love. Their juices are of high quality without putting a huge dent in your pocket book. I'm currently in San Francisco recording a couple of songs at Tiny Telephone and I took a walk to the Mission for burritos and refreshments and my guys grew huge when I saw this bottle. I'm talking cartoon wolf ogling an attractive woman huge. In my head even the "ha-wooga" sound happened.

When I got back to the studio I cracked this open and my first thought was "Wow this is kind of week." The mate flavor is hardly there and it kind of tastes like a watery grapefruit juice with a touch of ginger in it. I had expected to be blasted with a strong bitter mate flavor and have the other flavors there to round it out. The more I drank it the more I grew to enjoy it though. It is tame, but every drink doesn't need to be in your face. There is nothing wrong with this beverage at all. The grapefruit and ginger tastes are very authentic, because it is made with organic juice. I do wish the mate was stronger. If it were this would get high marks. As it is it leaves a bit to be desired, but it is still very enjoyable. I'm just a boy with high expectations.

A couple of years ago when Sneakz was launched, it was less than stellar. The vegetable taste seeped through too much and when mixed with chocolate it was like someone used Hershey syrup as salad dressing. The company realized the error of their ways and corrected their formula into something that was more than just passable. They also expanded their line to include strawberry and this vanilla.
I'm assuming they used the same basic principles they developed for the new chocolate version and applied them to vanilla because I don't taste vegetables in here at all. This is full of carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach and cauliflower but you would never know it by taking a sip. It's all vanilla, but not in a cheap ice cream kind of way. It tastes like actually vanilla beans were used. You can't ask for much more than that in a drink of this variety. You get ½ a serving of veggies and it tastes great. That's a win all the way around.

This is the liquid equivalent of walking up to a roulette table placing down most of your stack on 13 black. You watch that wheel spin and the ball is going around and around. It starts slowing down and you can't believe your eyes it looks like you are going to win and win big. At the last moment it pops out and plops into 36 red. Sure you played a safe bet and also put down a little money on the last row of 2:1 odds, but the big money is gone. It's not a horrible loss, you came out okay, but it had such potential to be life changing.

This is simply brewed green tea with matcha and ginger root in it. No sugar and no other extraneous additives. It should be wonderful in its simplicity. It tastes like tea. It tastes like real ginger. It's good. If you brewed this at home you wouldn't think twice about it, but there's something just a little off that makes you question if it is worth purchasing. That thing is it's a little on the watery side, which leads to it being a bit weak. I like my green tea strong and prominent. This is like beginners green tea. It's as if there is extra water in it to act as training wheels for those not used to the wonderfully strong bitterness that it usually has. Metaphors and similes aside, this is enjoyable, but it could be amazing and it just slightly missed that mark.

Many fools out there would consider us experts when it comes to the beverage world. The truth is we are just two dumb guys who like to drink a lot of drinks and write about what we think about them because we are apparently narcissistic and think the world needs to know our opinions, you know like the rest of the internet. Actually this is something that keeps us busy. It's our version of collecting stamps, records, or comics. Whatever our reason for doing what we do, and no matter what people think of us, no one has ever mistook us for authorities when it comes to coffee. We are complete idiots when it comes to this field of beverages and we have no idea what the little things about certain coffees coffee are that make them more desirable than other coffees. Keeping that in mind this is what I have to say about Zingerman's Cold Brew.

This tastes like…€¦coffee. There is nothing extra added to it, just straight up brewed coffee beans. I don't know if that is technically correct since it is cold brewed for 16-24 hours and it doesn't get heated up (I always think of brewing as “cooking.” Am I wrong?). The reason for this is that it reduces the acid and makes the coffee smoother. I can actually acknowledge that this does seem smoother than “iced coffees” that I have had. So it's got that going for it. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I can detect the different notes in the coffee, because my palate isn't that refined. All I can say is that it tastes like coffee with no harshness to it. It's not the kind of drink that is going to win me over and make me a card carrying member of the Loyal Order of Coffee Aficionados , but I do enjoy it more than I have enjoyed other straight coffees that I have tasted, so that's something.

I'm not sure if they were meant to be released together, or if it's just because they have the same parent company but I keep seeing Mountain Dew Black Label and Pepsi 1893 displayed together. I was shocked by how much I am a fan of the 1893. It's a throwback to the way cola was originally made, and there is something about it that is just classy. It's like they took one of the baseline companies for all soda and made it seem like it was upscale. Even though they had already gone back to an original recipe with Dew Shine, I was hoping that Black Label would be another old time soda. The can didn't have a fancy look to it, but it was more visually appealing than Mountain Dew's normal output.

Now this is much better than a classic Mountain Dew, but this is not the high end soda that it is posing as. Words/phrases like “crafted” and “black label” are a buzz these days and lead a person to believe that this is something that was prepared with more care and in smaller batches. The truth is that this is just soda created with slightly better ingredients than the company would normally use. Sure there is sugar instead of HFCS and there is grape juice involved, but this really just falls somewhere extremely close to their Dark Berry and Pitch Black flavors. It's like someone took their flagship flavor and added berry and grape juice to it.

I really wanted this to be better than it is, but to be fair it is one of the better Mountain Dew flavors. It's an improvement, but they still have a ways to go to create something (besides Voltage) that I would go out of my way to purchase for pleasure and not review.

When you see that something only has 15% of an ingredient in it that seems kind of laughable. 15% is such a small amount, and one would think that it might not even register much in the way of taste. The thing is that 15% of juice in an energy drink is on the high side of things and somehow it makes all of the difference. Phyzix does not taste like a traditional energy drink, and it actually tastes like juice. This actually tastes more like pomegranate than acai to me, but the two are fairly similar and I'm not complaining. I drank this faster than expected as it didn't taste fake and chemical.

A nice thing about this is that the energy doesn't hit you all at once and give you the jitters. It has a nice pace to it that kept me going for hours. It wasn't as crazy a burst, but I prefer it this way. I mean I'm not taking speed here; I am just looking for a little boost. This is the direction that I would like to see the future of energy drinks heading.

I can't believe that the big day is finally here. All of our closest friends are here; Dr. Frankenstein, his wife Elizabeth…€¦well that's it. Everyone else wants us dead. They are all we need though. Oh there is the caterer with the grape soda. It's weird that it is the only thing my bride to be requested. Oh no, my lovely is coming out, I'm not supposed to see her before the ceremony, I need to hide! Ahhh! Oh crap. I scared the caterer and he has spilled the soda everywhere. Oh no, it's all over my bride. Hey wait, it has stained the white streaks in her hair purple. That looks kind of cool and modern. Hmm, I'll play it off like I didn't see it and pretend I think she dyed her hair. “Honey! You look beautiful. I love what you've done to your hair, very chic. Are you wearing grape perfume? It smells wonderful . it reminds me of this grape soda I had once. It fell somewhere between a generic grape soda and a sparkling grape juice. It really was the best of both worlds. I bet you would have loved it honey. Now, let's get married!” Phew, I narrowly escaped catastrophe there.

I feel like out of all of the soda flavors out there root beer is the one that can have the most nuances. Even though all of the varieties fall under a specific umbrella the differences between them can be vast. Baumeister falls on the good side of those differences and produces a dark, crisp root beer that is heavy on the wintergreen. To me that makes this stand out amongst a sea of what I like to call “store brand root beer” flavored drinks. As a general rule, the earthier a root beer tastes, the more I'll like it. This doesn't really taste that way at all, but something about it is really hitting all of the right buttons right now and I love it. It's definitely very sweet, but it's in a good way, and not a root beer barrel way. Does anyone actually like those candies for more than like 30 seconds?

It always seems that the drinks that we are lukewarm about, especially the diet ones, are what companies send us the most flavors of. There has been so much Claire Baie in our lives over the past few months and I'm afraid the sheer quantity is effecting our reviews. As I've said before these drinks were not created with me as their target audience. It's true that I watch my sugar intake sometimes, but I have never been on a diet, and I am not a fan of zero calorie sweeteners, especially sucralose. There is a world of people out there who are on diets though and rely on beverages such as this to help curb their craving for sweet carbonated drinks. I think those people would be happy with this. If you drink sucralose on a regular basis you have to get acclimated to it and that weird taste probably doesn't even register to you anymore. That taste is what is holding this drink back in my eyes, but if take that out of the equation and you have a decent kiwi strawberry drink. I've had a lot of kiwi strawberry stuff in my life, but I don't think I've ever had a fresh juice where those were the ingredients. Man, I bet that would be the best. Compared to that this would be a pale imitation, but since 99.9% of the population has probably never drunk such a thing this is very passable.

When I think about bamboo I don't think about leaves. I only think about the stalks and building structures out of them. In my early adolescence we would build some pretty rad forts our of bamboo stalks that were hidden in patches of the plant. They were great and we really felt like we weren't only a couple of hundred yards from my friend's back yard. Now that I think about it they did have leaves, but they grew so high that we didn't really have to deal with them. I certainly never thought about brewing them into tea. To be fair I thought Nestea was what tea was at that time so I was more than a little ignorant.

This is surprisingly good though. You could most definitely pass it off as a light green tea, and then snicker because your guests have no idea they are drinking bamboo, and they would have probably passed had you called it bamboo tea. The hibiscus really shines more than the bamboo, and that will never earn a complaint from me. The blackberry taste is very light, but it complements the hibiscus nicely. The label says this is “light, crisp, & refreshing” and it certainly is not lying. I just spent hours painting a fence in 90+ degree weather and this is hitting the spot perfectly. This bamboo stuff really has something going for it.

Apparently flavorless is code for this tastes the way a dentist office smells; sterile and chalky. It's all calcium citrate malate, malta dextrin, dimagnesium malate, silica and cholecalsiferal and no fun. At least it serves the purpose of helping with bone and joint health.