Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

It looks like Scooter is all excited to head home and crack open a nice cold bottle of cream soda. He looks so happy and it looks like he can't get home soon enough. Looks can be deceiving my friends. I propose that Scooter is not racing home to have a nice. I believe that he is actually fleeing the scene of a crime. A crime that he perpetrated at the Cooper's Cave Ale Company.

If their Butter Beer was ant indication, Cooper's Cave knows how to make a high quality soda, especially a cream soda. I believe little Scooter went into the brewery and messed with the levels. For years he had been trying to get them to develop a cantaloupe flavored soda for him. It haunted his dreams and he needed it rushing over his taste buds in waking life. Mr. Cooper always brushed him off, but this morning Mr. Cooper was in a bad mood and he snapped art little Scooter and told him harshly that they would never produce such a soda and that the little festering bowl of dog snot should just leave him alone. Scooter ran out crying. After he calmed down, he decided he wanted revenge. He snuck into the brewery when the workers were on lunch and decreased the flavor by half. Now there was twice as much water to everything else ratio. Bad news bears. It left the batch very plain and uninteresting. The cream soda was more of an aftertaste. Looks like Scooter won this round. I wouldn't cross him if I were you.

Seriously though, I don't know if I got a bad batch of what, but the levels seem really off in the bottle. As I said their butterscotch cream soda was insanely flavorful, and this just pales in comparison. Something is awry.

When I first saw this I got really excited because I was under the impression that it was ginger flavored aloe juice. The packaging really looks like it should be aloe. The four people I offered this two all asked if it was aloe when I handed it to them. When I realized it was a ginger green tea I was slightly bummed, but it still sounded great. I had no idea how great it actually would be. This is my new favorite drink. It's jasmine green tea (it tastes extra floral, but in the best way possible) with real ginger juice in it. On top of that the main sweetener in it is honey. There isn't a burn from the ginger, but the flavor of it is very strong.

I was halfway through the bottle before I was able to place what this reminded me of. It has the aftertaste, and the after swallow feeling, of bubble tea. It's like the faint film that the tapioca balls leave in your mouth. It's strange but incredible. This is seriously my new favorite drink. I need to make a trip back up to Toronto (where I found it) and buy a case. I want everyone I know to try it and fall in love with it like I have.

Kristall has done it again. This is a light and flavorful top-notch soda. Carbonated orange juice is something I can get behind. It falls somewhere between juice and a soda in terms of flavor. It's similar to Orangina, but it really tastes more like oranges. I really wish this was available in Western New York. Unfortunately it is not, so I have to wait until I'm someplace there is a Whole Foods so I can buy a couple of bottles.

When drinks come in these tetra pack they always seem like they are going to be too small for me. Ahh my American gluttony. Truth is that these packs keep me from being a slob. I just finished this up and I'm actually pretty satisfied. I should probably start drinking more things in smaller packages. Maybe then I won't over-stuff myself.

In my world this is more of a juice than a smoothie. It's a great juice, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have the consistency of what I think of when I think smoothie. This is just a mixture of nine different fruit juices. There is nothing added to it to thicken it up. I'm okay with it. It tastes like you're eating a bunch of fresh fruit. Well done Juiceheads.

Death Valley in a time when the west was old was probably a completely terrible place. It's over 100 degrees all day, there's no decent place to go to the bathroom, and more often than not you're going to find a scorpion in your boot. I think one of the worst aspects of the old west that is never portrayed in movies is just how terrible everyone must smell. Sure they haven't showered in weeks, or months, but what really grosses me out is just how bad everyone's breath had to be. Have you ever smelled someone's breath who hasn't brushed their teeth in years, and whose teeth are undoubtedly rotting out of their head? Not for me.

Basically I have no interest in the old west. I like at least minimum comfort, and I just need to have clean teeth. This bottle of cola says that it's a taste of the old west. I'm calling shenanigans. This is far to delicious to be from such a dire time. This is one of the greatest colas I have ever tasted. It's incredibly smooth and flavorful. This is so much more than a Coke or a Pepsi. It's not nearly as harsh as contemporary colas. I can't get over how smooth it tastes. It's almost as smooth as a quality cream soda. The cola taste is very strong and it doesn't taste like a sugar water.

Now I can't get the idea of gross old west mouth rot out of my head so I'm going to go brush my teeth about a half dozen times.

Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke? Did one of you turds replace my soda with cough syrup? This has the smallest amount of carbonation I have ever experienced in a soda. It's to the point where I had to think about whether or not it actually was carbonated. As far as the flavor goes it starts off tasting like a semi-decent black cherry pop, but as soon as you swallow it's nothing but medicinal. I had less than five sips of this and then I couldn't drink anymore because of the cough medicineness of it all. Ugh.

Tour ended a couple of days ago. Our last show was in Boston, MA (okay Allston). We showed up a bit early and no one was at the venue, so I decided to hoof it out to the local Whole Foods. My phone told me it was a mile away, and I thought that's no big deal. Let me tell you, that was the longest mile I've ever walked. The temperature seemed to be constantly dropping. I had to cross several thruway on and off ramps, go over some decent sized bridges and the neighborhood quickly went from nice to way shady to way nice. Strange times. I'm glad I made the trip though because the store had a bunch of drinks I had never seen before. I was the most excited about this one. It's a soda with actual fruit in it, which is a total plus in my book. On top of that said fruit is blackberry, my favorite.

Because it was made with actual juice I expected this to be pretty sweet. I was actually expecting something along the lines of an Italian soda. I was shocked, but not disappointed to find out it was rather dry. It still tasted totally like blackberries, but it wasn't overly sweet. It unfortunately also did not have chunks of blackberry in it. They must have filtered them out, which is a shame. Some small pieces would have been wonderful. Even with that being the case, this is a soda I can totally get behind. I like that more companies are making sodas with less sugar. We really need to wean this country off of so much sugar.

Honeydrop huh? How about we rename this drink "Honeyheapingspoonful." I don't mean that in a derogatory way, as I think this is a very pleasant drink. My issue is that from the name/label you would think that this is a juice that is lightly sweetened with honey. Nope! This is a honey drink lightly flavored with blood orange juice. It's like nothing I've ever had before. Also, I don't believe I've ever had a blood orange flavored drink that wasn't carbonated. It was a nice change of pace.

Oh how adorable a little bottle of smoothie. It has the cutest little face on it and an ever so appropriate name "Cuties." This may have been your first thought process if you are either under the age of 10 or over the age of 45 and lived alone except for your 14 cats. Truth be told you wouldn't be thinking this is so cute if you knew it's dark history. Remember those monks from the 90's that recorded their chants and sold them in mass quantities to the yuppie crowd? Have you ever wondered why we don't hear from them anymore? I mean obviously it's not because that was a stupid novelty of an idea. It must be something more sinister. The last ingredient in this bottle is "Monk Fruit Concentrate." That's too much of a coincidence for me. After doing some digging I uncovered the ghastly truth that Cuties has been harvesting the "singing monks" mind grapes to add a little kick to their smoothies.

They start off with a nice thick smoothie that tastes very strongly of tangerines and mangoes with just the slightest hint of banana. From the taste you can definitely tell it's a protein drink, but it's not as chalky as you would expect. It is the monk's mind grapes that give it that quality. Tell me you still think this is cute now that you know that it contains monk brains! You do? Well then you my friend are quite the sicko!

This review should go something like; Oops someone dropped an open CO2 tank into the vat of Vitamin Water blah blah blah. I'm tired, I'm sick and I don't have it in me right now.

When I first tried this it tasted exactly like a carbonated Vitamin Water. The more I drank the less sure I was. I did still enjoy it though. It's really light tasting, and that is something that is fairly rare in a sparkling beverage. It also didn't have a distinct melon or pineapple so much as it has a general tropical taste. I'm very interested in trying the other flavors. Now I will pass out in the van and wake up in another city, in another state.

Sit down children and let me tell you a tale of the Cherry Tree. Deep in the forests of England there is a tree that is very rare indeed. It may look like any other fruit bearing tree, and to be fair that is what it is. The only difference is that the cherries this specific and wondrous variety brings forth tastes of cherry cola. Scientists the world 'round have tried to figure out what causes that flavor, and more importantly why it can only grow in that one place. All of their efforts have just left them scratching their collective noggins.

The Fentimans company has bought all of the land these trees grow on and have begun to use them to create a new soda in their line. The result is the best cherry cola I have ever tasted. It also helps that ginger root extract is the second ingredient, above even sugar. Don't worry though it doesn't have a ginger burn to it. It just rounds out the flavor a little. A lot of their other sodas taste fermented, which is a little off putting to me. With this one the magic cherry, cola and ginger flavors blend together in a way that overpowers that pesky fermentation. Thumbs up all around.

Soon we will be at the date, which Marty Mcfly traveled to in Back to the Future 2. Unless technology changes at a very rapid pace I don't see that version of the future coming true. Do you know who is to blame for this? Doctor Emmit Brown. He broke his own rule. He brought something back from the future. He discovered a cream soda in 2015 that really excited his taste buds and he just couldn't help himself from bringing some back and marketing it as his own. That's right, Dr Browns is actually a cream soda that "Doc Brown" brought back with him on one of his earliest trips. As a result he really messed with the time space continuum. Our society did not progress as quickly as it would have, but what would you rather have flying cars or tasty soda? Okay, I would take a hover board over and soda any day, but I hear they have a complex out in the desert where they actually made them. It's at that Laser Tag Institute of Technology. I need to make my way out to that desert.

Truth be told, we really have no choice in the way our future turned out. Doc Brown rolled the dice and we get what we get. So let's just sit back and enjoy the soda. It's a fairly light cream soda, with a nice sharp vanilla flavor. It's better tan most canned cream sodas, and that is saying a good deal. Cream soda is one of the few sodas that I actually completely enjoy in can form. Curse Doc Brown if you must for your lack of technology, but at least he supplied us with this tasty treat.

Mark! How many times have I told you to stop eating those damn caramel candies at work? You have absolutely no gauge as to what is an appropriate amount of candy to stuff into your mouth and you end up drooling on everything. It's bad enough when you're working in our cubicle and it gets all over the desk, but now you're working at the cream soda vats and you're disgusting caramel drool is leaking into the syrup. Not only is that just disgusting, but completely unhygienic. What if the health inspector showed up, what would you do then? Jesus Mark! Choking him to death is not going to fix anything. You know as well as I do that if you kill one, two more will show up in his place. This batch has to be thrown out and you're back in the cubicle. What!? You already shipped out a bunch of cases of this stuff and labeled it "Caramel Cream Soda." You're a sick man Mark. No I will not try this. I don't care if you say it tastes like you put 12 caramel candies in your mouth and then drank a cream soda. Who would want that? Who would want a drink that was grosser watered down caramel than delicious cream soda? Oh that's right, you would Mark because you are a sick, sick man. You know what you're fired! I don't care if I'm only the janitor. You're still fired, now drag that sack of caramel out of this factory and never show you're drool covered face around here again.

It's been a long drive, but now you've reach your destination. 11 hours on the road is a long time. It seems even longer when it's been pouring rain for half of it. You get to the house, but no one is home. Luckily you have a key on your enormous janitor-esque key ring. You let yourself in plop down on the couch to just relax. You suddenly realize that you are starving. Problem is it's pouring out so you can't walk anywhere, and you got a bitchin' parking spot that you really don't want to give up. Looks like it's toast with peanut butter yet again. This time you decide to spice it up by sipping on a can of mango nectar during your meal. The food is as decent as you would expect. You went for the honey roasted peanut butter, and boy are and boy are you glad you did. The juice on the other hand, not so great and you wish you had chosen more wisely. It tastes like mangoes alright, but old ones that have begun to slightly spoil. It has that borderline smoky flavor to it that acidic things that are on the verge of going bad get. It's also more of a thinned out syrup than a nectar. What can you do though give up that parking spot? I think not. You'll suffer through that slightly less than mediocre juice, and you'll live another day to complain about it via the internet.

Along the I-95 in South Carolina there is a little oasis of wonder, Well wonder and racism. I'm talking about the famous tourist trap South of the Border. If you've ever driven on the 95 you've more than likely seen the hundreds of billboards for this rest stop of stereotypes. It's really pretty terrible. I can't believe there haven't been protests of some sort. Our Christian (our drummer for this tour) may have been the first person of actual Mexican descent that any of the employees had ever seen. I wonder if they thought he was one of the many statues around the area come to life. You know to seek revenge for the generalization of his people.

I found this carton of juice in a cooler in a "pantry" there. It looks like the crappiest juice I can ever imagine. This looks like sub prison grade juice. I don't know if I trust any sort of beverage that comes in a little carton like this. It looks like I bought it out of some weird olde timey vending machine on the side of a country road. It actually expires this week, so I wonder how long it's been sitting at south of the border surrounded by ponchos, sombreros and over-sized mustaches. I was told that I would be lucky if I don't acquire some sort of parasite from it.

Shockingly it's not all that bad. I expected it to be ultra thick like Hawaiian Punch, but it's fairly thin. It also has actual juice in it, which is kind of blowing my mind grapes. It's not a high quality juice, but what do you expect form a $.70 carton. It tastes like a generic fruit punch, but you can tell it has some real fruit juice, and not all sugar water. All an all I don't mind it. It's much better than the Sunny D the hotel tried to pawn off as orange juice this morning. That is just completely unacceptable. Now I should probably ride the giant sombrero and call it a day.

The Fest in Gainesville, FL is one of the best times of year. I would take that weekend over Xmas any time. Even on years such as this where there wasn't very many bands I was interested, I still had an incredible time. It's the "punk rock family reunion." People from all over the country (and world) that I have met from playing in bands are all congregated in a tiny college town. It's really a special thing to be surrounded by so many great people. Fest ended last night, and I was sad to have to leave everyone behind to head out to the next town. I know I'll see everyone again next year, if not sooner, but it's always a bummer.

We had an 11-hour drive to Richmond, VA (we wanted to avoid the south which is over-saturated with touring bands). I was first to bat for driving. I downed this energy shot to help get me where I needed to be. It certainly did its job. We made it well into South Carolina before I felt the need to give up the driver seat.

As far as I know 5-Hour Energy was the first company to get into the energy shot game. I somehow had never tried one until now. It was much better than I expected. It wasn't as harsh and as chemical tasting as other ones I tried. It did have a very distinct grape flavor. That's a rarity in this world. Usually the shots just have a general sweetness to them. I'm still not a big fan of energy shots, but if I have to get one in the future i would pick this over any other ones I've had thus far.

If I didn't know any better I would have gathered from this bottle that Frubob was a company that made knock off Pez and then tried their hand at the beverage game. Look at that picture. It looks like little Pez with pineapple stalks coming out of the top. Lucky for everyone involved that is not the case. This does not taste like a gross candy beverage, and they needn't worry about receiving a cease and desist letter from a classic candy company.

This is in fact a mixture of pineapple and apple juice, with no sugar added. To be honest if they had added sugar it would have been so sweet that it was undrinkable. The best part of this is the chunks of pineapple in it. They are the size of the chunks in most aloe drinks, but with a slightly different texture. It gives the juice a more natural flavor, and feel. I know what you're thinking, and you don't have to worry. This does not cross the line into vomit pineapple flavoring. It's sweet and perfect.

Last night my band played in Atlanta. After the show we went to a friend's house to crash for the night. As soon as we got out of the van he told us that even though it looks like a bad neighborhood it was in fact a safe place because the house Martin Luther King Jr was born in was a block away. Less than a minute from him finishing that sentence a guy came up to us with a gun demanding wallets. Several of the people got a gun pressed to their head and a handful of them got pistol-whipped. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Luckily no one was seriously injured. The cops came took statements and we went to a different neighborhood to stay. One of the kids who lived there put this drink next to me while I was sleeping. We were in the ghetto and this was a "ghetto" energy drink. Little Jon makes it so yeah it's backed by southern rap.

Let me tell you this drink was nearly as terrible as our night. It's in the running for worst energy drink I've ever had. it tastes dark and heavy. Almost smoky and only vaguely like pomegranate. I will never drink one of these again and I really have no interest in going to Atlanta again for quite some time. Watch yourself kids.

What we have here is a miracle of science. No it's not a cure all or some sort of tonic or elixir. What we have here is a watermelon flavored drink that doesn't taste like candy. Specifically it does not taste like watermelon Jolly Ranchers, which has been the standard for watermelon flavor for the past two decades, even though it tastes absolutely nothing like a fruit.

Somewhere in an underground laboratory a group of rouge scientists gathered to tackle this problem for once and for all. They did so in fear of losing their scientific titles, as the Grand Science Authority has strictly prohibited research in this field (Jolly Rancher donates obscene amounts of money to their organization in return for them not working on the "watermelon problem." These brave men and women worked against the grain and achieved something great. It turns out that all they needed to do was use watermelon juice concentrate.

Martinelli's used this new technology to create this sparkling lemonade. It tastes pretty much as is to be expected. A carbonated lemonade with a hint of watermelon to it. I'm personally not a huge fan of carbonated lemonades. Something about the bubbles and the bitterness doesn't quite sit well with me. If it's something you are into you should stand up and salute the brave scientists who risked it all to bring this new and exciting drink to your lips.

M.A.S.H. was there ever a television show that was more boring, with a more depressing television show. When I was young it would bum me out so much when I'd be watching cartoons or Three's Company (one of the best shows ever) and they would end and that stupid song would start. Bummer City, Vietnam should have been the name of the show. Now that I'm older maybe I would enjoy the show a bit, but I think my past prejudices would hold up.

Maybe the actors would liven up more if the US Army would have packed their provisions with MASH drink. I didn't know what to expect with this when I bought it. I certainly did not expect it to be carbonated. It says on the bottle "A water drink," but just by seeing it I was calling their bluff. My best guess would have been an extremely intense Vitamin Water type drink. It turns out it was a lot like an Italian soda. It was sharply carbonated and tasted exactly like a mix of mango and blood orange. It was one of the best surprises I've had in awhile in the beverage world. I drank it while I was walking around Columbus, OH and I stumbled across a creepy tunnel that I circumnavigated. (Can you do that if it's not a globe?) I took sips periodically, and by the time I finished it the carbonation was gone and it was flat. Even flat it was still good. At that point it tasted like I originally expected it to; Vitamin Water.

The moral of this story is that instead of watching stupid reruns of M.A.S.H. you should go outside and explore creepy tunnels where you will find nice cats and then stumble upon a hobo encampment.