Lemonade - 275 Reviews

I have been in Florida for the past five days and I have not done any reviews. I apologize but it wasn't for lack of trying. Where I was wasn't exactly "bodega friendly" and everywhere I went had stuff we already did. To my surprise, when I went to Wendy's to get a strawberry tea they had this little number. Sure, I wish this was a blackberry tea and not blackberry lemonade but I was hot and needed to cool down with something. This was a good choice but a choice I probably won't make again. Why? Well every sip was very sweet and that's just part of the lemonade. She is naturally a sweet beast and Wendy's "medium" is too large and that is a lot of sugar to ingest. The lemonade was nice, though and the blackberry was quite present in every sip. You could see some "stuff" at the bottom (sugar and lemon bits), which is always good when it comes to lemonade.

My thirst was quenched and my temperature dropped but blackberry tea it was not. I know it's not what I ordered but with every sip I wish that it existed. Wendy's if you're reading this, whatever you do to extract the blackberry to put in the lemonade, put it in the tea, too. Your strawberry tea is now a staple every time I go there. The blackberry would instantly and surely surpass that.

It's mid May and I think it's finally safe to say that winter is officially over. I know it should have been over for a long time, but it snowed here in late April. Something it wrong with Mother Nature. She needs to go see a doctor STAT because up is down, left is right, cats and dogs…€¦. You get the drift. It's finally sunny and warm (if not downright hot at times) and that means bust out your lemonades and teas because we need refreshment.

For the most part Made has treated us well in the past. They have provided us with some spectacular beverages as well as some average ones. Only once have they steered us wrong, and that just happened to be with another drink that was composed of lemons and green tea (also strawberry). The problem with that was that the lemon was too strong, and it had a weird plastic taste to it. From the taste I will safely say that this is that self same drink, before they added the strawberries to the mix. It just doesn't taste right.

Maybe this combination was doomed from the start. It is more than likely that green tea and lemonade just weren't meant to co-mingle. I wanted to like this, but I just can't. It doesn't sit right. Also, going back and reading my old review put dumb Robert Palmer songs in my head and I am holding Made accountable for that terror.

The K-9s hatred of the postman is a well documented thing, but what many people don't know is that there was a time in Great Britain's history when man's best friend had a bigger enemy.

The year was 1942, and I know what you're thinking, but the previously mentioned enemy was not Hitler. I mean I'm sure the pups didn't much care for him, but he was not the target of their contempt. You see it was an unusually hot and sunny summer that year and lemonade stands were all the rage. Run by kids and adults a like, pop up shops were all over the united kingdoms. People needed a way to beat the heat and keep their mind off of the ongoing war between the axis and allies. For a few weeks that summer life seemed like it was going to be okay and the problems of the outside world seemed but a dream. Then trouble started brewing. The temperature hit an all time high and something about the mixture of the heat and the smell of the citrus drove the local dogs crazy. Whenever someone passed by that was drinking lemonade or had done so in the recent past barking and snarling would ensue. The summer of tranquility soon came to an end and the council shut all of the lemonade shops down. People went back to their miserable lives and the war marched on.

To help remember that life can be grand, even in the most dire of times, Mad Dog has produced a sparkling lemonade energy drink for the inhabitants of Britain. It is possibly the best tasting carbonated lemonade that I have ever tried, and that is saying a lot since it's also an energy drink. The thing is that all of the normal chemical candy energy drink flavors are not present; it simply a great tasting lemonade with very harsh carbonation. It's sweet to an extent that it's almost at the lemon soda point, but it keeps it's integrity and truly remains lemonade. If the energy properties of this drink wouldn't crash their fragile little hearts, all of the folks who were old enough to remember the glory of 1942 would surely have loved this.

Is that an accurate portrayal of mid-20th century England from a 21st century American's point of view?

Here is another company who graciously put together a care package for me during my stay in the United Kingdom. In the early days of Thirsty Dudes we reviewed a bottle of their elderflower presse that we found in a gourmet shop. It was great but it had a hefty price tag, due to it being imported and all (shipping on glass bottle beverages is obscene even in the states, let alone overseas). I was thrilled to have access to a variety of the flavors for my trip. For the most part I found them to be outstanding, this bottle of raspberry lemonade was no exception.

Let me start by saying that sparkling lemonade is very rare in the US, but in the UK it is everywhere. It's nearly as common as cola is over here. Actually I'll say that it's as common as lemon lime soda is here, which is an inferior flavor in every way. Lime on it's own is great, and I've learned on this trip that sparkling lemon can also be wonderful. I can't say that it is my favorite, but it certainly has its charms, especially since it has real pressed juice added to it. If it were just lemonade this would be nothing to scoff at, but that extra juice pushes it in the exact right direction. I mean anything that has pressed raspberries in it has to be fantastic, especially when it makes you feel like you're eating perfectly ripe berries like this does. It's so damn good. Before I knew it I had drunk this entire oversized bottle, which led to a lot of guilt. I dealt with it though and continued to drink an obscene amount of sodas over the course of my trip. I do it all for you our fair readers. Just remember me when I'm huge and diabetic. Help pay my medical bills. I mean it's only fair since I told you what some drinks tasted like…€¦.right?

You've got Brisk, aka, the worst "iced tea" money can buy, right? Let's all be civil about this and just come together and agree on this one thing. You've got Israel and Palestine, which no one can agree on. That's fine. I think they call that a "stalemate" right? An unwinable situation. Brisk is cut and dry. Black and white. You've got that. We have to live in this world and lets call it like it is.

You've got Brisk. You mix brisk with lemonade and cherry and you get...drumroll...a weak cherry lemonade juice conglomerate. It's not terrible and it's actually better the more room temperature it gets. Maybe that's the problem I've been having all these years is that I like a nice, cold iced tea and I've been giving myself these things that my body craves but with Brisk, it's the opposite. I should be drinking it like I drink a hot chocolate. Sounds completely unrefreshing but who knows? This, once lukewarm, loses the bite that Brisk has and you can taste some cherry and some lemonade. I should put those in quotes. Let's try that again. It tastes like "cherry" and "lemonade." It's like an artist depiction of those flavors. It tastes like a cherry and like lemonade but isn't one of those things. It's close. If you could have something taste a fraction of what it tastes like, that's what this is. It's not weak, it just doesn't taste like what it's "supposed" to taste like.

There has been a lot of quoting in this. Maybe this whole thing is an art installation. I'm waiting for someone to come in wearing sweater shorts and no shirt with a noose around their neck that says something like "Mother" and music plays that is nothing but someone yelling, "Father." Am I plagiarizing someone's art exhibit? If so, you should stop being an artist and pursue something else, like customer service or call center operator.

Brisk has expanded their list of beverages with their new Half & Half line. We've talked a lot of trash about this company throughout the years, yet they took the high road and sent us some samples of the new flavors. I didn't know they had it in them, but that was a classy move.

When I first saw this, my initial thought was, “Of course it's Brisk, so there is a ridiculous amount of it.” 24oz of their products seemed like more than any human should really ingest. This though, this was something different. For starters in order to cut down the amount of sugar in the drink they mixed high fructose corn syrup and sucralose. The result was only 13g of sugar per serving (39 per tall boy). It sounds like an absolute disaster, but somehow they have made it work. It's not very syrupy and yet it doesn't taste diet at all. Actually it doesn't have that harsh Brisk flavor at all. I was pleasantly surprised that I actually enjoyed this.

This tastes like 3 parts mango and passionfruit green tea and one part lemonade. Actually the ratios might be even more skewed as I hardly taste the lemonade. It tastes like a version of bubble tea (minus the tapioca) that would be available in a gas station. It's not mind blowing, but it has its merits and is much better than I anticipated. I would happily drink this again, I just wish it came in a smaller container, as I have no self control when it comes to beverages and I drink until it's gone. Good thing I don't partake in alcohol, or my life would be a mess.

Made, well Made makes things simple. Unlike a lot of companies they know that people don't need/want a lot of extraneous garbage in their beverages. When someone orders flavored lemonade they want water, lemon juice, sugar and whatever fruit juice is flavoring it. Anything else is just unnecessary. Little kids on the side of the road don't even give you that much. To be fair this is way better than any roadside lemonade I've ever tasted, so that little bit extra is well played.

The way the levels are in these ingredients leaves it more mango than lemonade. I'm okay with that. It is a bit sweeter than I would like it to be, as you lost all but the faintest tinge of the sourness of the lemon. For prepackaged lemonade it's AOK though.

Did Made start off as a little roadside stand run by a couple of youngsters? As they grew older did they start buying out other kids stands? Do they represent the interests of Big Lemonade? I have no idea, and I honestly don't care. It's a drink that I enjoy that doesn't have weird artificial ingredients in it. It also has a nice “retro” look to its label. Get into it.

Halfway through the last day of my juice cleanse, this is exactly what I needed. It's a nice simple drink, well sort of. This is lemon, shilajit, cayenne, agave and Himalayan sea salt. Basically this is an ever so slightly salty, spicy lemonade. This is a better version of the lemon detox drink (lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper), with shilajit (a concentrated tar form a plant) replacing the maple syrup. My roommate did that detox once years ago and I don't think its benefits outweighed how bad he felt/looked. Being one drink out of 18 though, it's nice. The cayenne gives it a nice burn, similar to the ginger in the other drinks, without being too overpowering.

It's probably the sweetest of all the juices I've had so far, and that's a nice change of pace. I never thought I'd get sick of juice, but I'm just about there. Well, if it was 100% fruit juice I'd probably jump all over it.

"I got you a drink and I checked your list so don't give me any grief." my mom said to me. Is that what this has come down to? My own mom feeling harassed by the way that Thirsty Dudes is going? My tax lady can't make heads or tails about what it is that we do. People ask me if this is my job and I laugh at them. Is it me? Am I the problem? Look, I will admit fault where fault is due but come on, I'm hardly threatening and who am I to give you a hard time for buying me something. So what if we already reviewed it. I can still be gracious and appreciative, can't I?

This drink, one that we haven't done yet, is a perfect example of a drink you should just calm down and drink. Look, I understand it's been a pretty gnarly winter and that we all need a little break. Normally I would be against such thing, but if everyone in the North East could swap places with the South West for a week, that would be great. We'll take your drought issues and you can take our subzero temperatures.

We can all meet in the middle, say, Topeka, Kansas, and share a couple cases of this. It's a honey lemonade pop and it will give us cold cats a precursor to the luxurious warmth and sand we will enjoy. You will kiss the sweltering heat goodbye with one final hurrah of everyone's warm-weather drink, lemonade. Who doesn't love honey and we should all just be grateful that we get it as a tasty bonus in this drink. We can all celebrate the fact that we get a bit of a reprieve from our element-ridden lives.

So I will gladly shake the hand of anyone and have a little "Trading Places" action while we swap houses. It could be fun. It could also teach us lessons about ourselves aside from cursing the names of our parents for moving to such awful places.

We've drunk A-Game before but now, and this is no pun intended, they have brought their A-Game because this is pretty great. It's got the drinkability of a Gatorade but has a tiny bit of bite from the lemonade and a pretty good strawberry taste. Strawberry lemonade is pretty much always a win for me but I won't put it by companies to screw it up. This drink doesn't have any sort of unwanted bite like you might get from some other lemonades that are made with garbage sugar. I'm no scientist but whatever crystalline fructose is, it makes a good sweetener. There is also honey in here and actual sea salt. It's a pretty good drink all around. A-Game, A-Game.

This bottle explains that Hubert Hansen would drive around the studio lots of Hollywood selling his tasty lemonade to anyone who would pay the price. It leads us to believe that many a rising star refreshed themselves with his tart beverages. What the bottle doesn't tell you is all the lemon related pranks that he also pulled on those lots. He would swap out actor's waters with highly concentrated lemon juice just for a laugh at their pinched in cheeks. He would rub lemon juice on the eyepieces of all the cameras and then squeal with glee as the operators screamed from the burning. He even shoved a lemon into the tailpipe of a producer's car that had made a rude comment about Hubert's beverages. A young writer witnessed this prank and went on to add it into a script he was writing called Beverly Hills Cop.

It was through a retaliation of one of these pranks that this blackberry lemonade was born. The producer who's car had been lemoned the previous week decided to switch out Hubert's batch on lemonade with old laundry water. The problem was that he had nowhere to just dump out the lemonade without it being obvious that something was amiss, so he poured it into a tub that was a prop in one of the movies and then filled the lemonade jugs with gross gray water. The result of this rebuttal prank was that producer received a black eye, care of Hubert's left fist and when he revealed where he had put the lemonade it turns out that it had been mixed in with some blackberry jam that was being used as war paint in some John Wayne movie. The mixture was delicious and it caused the Hubert's line to expand into flavored lemonade. It remained tart and wonderful, but with a healthy dose of blackberry flavor. Is there anything that fruit can't do? It tastes authentic and natural, as if someone just squeezed the hell out of some lemons and mashed up a whole mess of berries and then mixed them together with a bit of cane sugar. To think this was all because Alfred Hitchcock didn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

This is a drink for a warm summer day down in Georgia. This humid 90+ degree mess is “warm” to the locals, but to northerners like myself it's “sweltering.” I don't know how people get anything done down there. When the weather is that hot I just want to be a bum and sit in front of a fan until the sun falls down. Of course I live in the land of 5 months of winter, where I also want to do nothing except hide under mounds of blankets and either read or play Zelda and Final Fantasy games, so who am I to talk?

The label on this says it's half tea and half lemonade, split right down the middle. My taste buds assure you that that is not the case. To me it tastes more like 65/35 split with the higher side going to the tea. You can taste the peach tea more than the lemonade, but the all American summer beverage is still very present in this liquid. Actually this could very well be an even split if the lemonade they used was a little on the weak side. You can taste the lemons, but there is no tartness to it at all. Oh, and the peach flavoring they used is natural and it really tastes like you're biting into a fuzzy fruit instead of a gummy ring.

Sure, I would have preferred that there was more of a sting from the lemonade to this, but when it's “warm” down south, this would do just fine in keeping me cool, refreshed and with happy taste buds.

What we have here is a subject that is more than just a sweetened lemon tea, but at the same time it is not quite a half and half, or Arnold Palmer if you will. Argo walks the line, and they do it with the perfect grace of a Flying Grayson. While their balance is impeccable, the true majesty of this iced tea is the restraint they have showed. Up until this liquid hit my lips I had never tasted a beverage that was lightly flavored with acai. When they superfruit is involved it has always been all or nothing, and let me tell you it has one strong flavor. Argo held back with the acai. It's definitely in there, but it's more of a general flavor that let's everything else shine as well. As soon as you take a sip it is obvious that the base of this is white tea that has nicely been blended with lemon juice as previously mentioned. The treat for me is that you can taste the cane sugar in it, even though the drink is not overly laden with it (less than 25g in the bottle).

Acai is not a flavor that I normally reach for. I'm actually not a very large fan of it, but Argo Tea has found a way to use it in tandem with other ingredients and make it delicious. It has assumed a roll as part of a democratic team, instead of the vicious dictator that it normally rules as.

In the era of the diet obsessed 80's Crystal Light reined supreme. For those of you who don't know it was/is a flavored, artificially sweetened powder that you would mix in with water to make your very own “healthy” drink at home. While they have come a long way in recent years, the original flavors tasted like poison to me. It was just one big pile of diet grossness.

The True company is following in the same footsteps, except they decided to make their product from 100% natural ingredients. Instead of sweetening them with aspartame or sucralose they opted for stevia. While that has made a world of a difference with their other drinks, I don't think this lemonade ever stood a chance. Lemonade by definition is sugar sweetened lemon juice and water. If you deviate from that at all things start falling apart. The flavor of the stevia is far too overpowering in this to an extent that it's a little hard to make out the lemon flavor. Instead of tasting like lemonade it ends up resembling a creation that was brought to life by some cheap skate teenager at a local Dennys. I've been there before, in my formative years. You order a water with lemon and then put sweetener in it to create your own dull version of lemonade. The problem is this particular restaurant had stevia packets instead of sugar and everything just went wrong.

I can assure you my dear readers that lemonade does not have the same effect in winter as it does in summer. There is a reason that it is a beverage that is celebrated in the warmer months. It's refreshing qualities help to fend off the oppressive heat. Now when you're standing in a freezing basement watching bands play an a December eve, you may want to rethink your choice if you grabbed a lemonade to keep you hydrated. I simply do not know what I was thinking.

The Chill line is Veryfine's attempt at the inexpensive tallboy game. 23oz at only $1 is a deal…€¦or is it? I mean sure it's inexpensive, but wouldn't you have been content with a nice 12 or 16oz drink instead? Do you really need that much liquid, sugar and calories? Lucky for us Veryfine took that into consideration when formulating this beverage and used a mixture of corn syrup and sucralose to sweeten this lemonade. I must admit that they are two of my least favorite sweeteners, but at least the combined three servings in this can only contain 24g of sugar. A tallboy of Arizona's lemon iced tea contains 72g.

Perhaps some of you, and it's more likely most of you don't particularly care about the healthiness of your beverages. All you want to know if what does it taste like. If you ever hung out at my house whilst I was in high school, you are probably well aware of the ever present jug of blue juice that was in my fridge. What it really contained was an overly sweetened Berry Blue Kool Aid. This drink tastes exactly like how I made my Kool Aid as a disillusioned teenager. The thing is that while I used to dump insane amounts of sugar into my concoction, this will not give you the diabetes. Even though it has sucralose in it, it taste in no way diet. It also doesn't taste overly like lemonade either. It mainly just tastes “blue.” You know you know what I mean by that too, so do with it what you will.

Oh Sir Limonitz. What brings you to this part of town? You don't leave your castle as much as you used to. It seems that you just wave your scepter around having us peasants to do your bidding for you. Sir, if I may say so, you have become rather slovenly since you have taken this position as a proper sir. Don't think that we haven't noticed that you have begun to overflow out of your once respectfully fitting clothes. We still adore you, sir, we really do, but I thought that it would be nice if someone told you before it got out of hand.

So what brings you here to these parts? A new beverage? That's fantastic. Your last lemonade was very good and we can only hope that this one is as well. Let me see here. Ahh, strawberry. Good fruit choice, sir. Oh, it smells wonderful. It smells like a veritable bouquet of strawberries. I also appreciate the bountiful amount of pulp that is swirling around in here. Let's take a sip...wow. Sir, you have outdone yourself with this. It tastes as good as it smells and it probably bites harder than your little dog that you've got there. It's got a wonderful lemonade base but the fruitiness of the strawberries cuts through. Sir, you have outdone yourself. Now I know why you have us doing your tasks for you; so you can invent things like this drink. Keep up the good work and, Sir, please, take care of yourself.

Were there teas made to accompany a science fiction movie based in the desert? No one knows for sure, but I would like to start off those rumors that have not previously exists, right now. There it is. I am now claiming this tea was made as a marketing aid for a fake movie to get US soldiers out of Iran. No one told the tea company that the movie was a fake. They were just about to launch a line of teas and they didn't have a name, and tying it in with what would obviously be a popular movie seemed like a nice cash grab. Too bad for them it never came to be. Also, too bad for them that Ben Affleck decided to make a movie based on said fake movie and draw attention back to the name. Did any of this really happen? No one knows. The answers have all been lost in the sands of time. Maybe the truth will come out under a cowl with a gruff voice in the near future.

Whatever its origins may be Argo makes one heck of a tea. They have messed around with various incarnations, and I am pleased that they keep coming back to using hibiscus as their tea base. If you don't like hibiscus you are a fool, plain and simple. This beverage is simply hibiscus tea, cane sugar and lemon juice. The last ingredient is what makes it part of their “squeeze” line, which is their fancy versions of the half and half, or Arnold Palmer game. I am a fan. It tastes like real lemon and not some gross cleaner. I don't understand how so many companies get the lemon flavor wrong, but Argo is right on the money.

This is a “no way to lose” beverage. It's a quality lemonade mixed with hibiscus tea, with no extraneous ingredients. I love it and so should you, unless you want your taste buds to be wrong. I don't mean to be a jerk, but if you don't like this you should go see your physician, because something has gone wonky inside your mouth.

Popeye and the crew from Sweet Haven are back with their first foray into diet energy drinks. You see everyone thought that Wimpy had put on a bit too much weight with all his cheeseburger conniving ways. Seriously, how long does one man expect to live when all he consumes in beef patties smothered in cheese? Since his blood work came back last month he's been on a kale diet. He claims that it doesn't give him enough energy to make it through all of the whining he has to do on a daily basis, so they formulated him this lemon mint beverage. Being the health conscious team that they are, they help back on using taurine and it's friends and stuck to vitamins and caffeine. Also knowing that their friend was doomed to some burger related cancer they didn't want to speed on they also chose to sweeten the drink with erythritol/stevia.

The results of it all are a nice lemony beverage with notes of mint in it that aren't over powering. It has the stevia coolness to it, but with the lemon and the mint it's not bad at all. In fact it's fairly enjoyable, even for those of us who don't like diet drinks. Calories to flavor this can't be beat.

For those non-teetotalers out there, when my friend Steve tried this he instantly proclaimed that it would taste amazing as a mixer with vodka. This is a win-win-win for everyone right here.

First let's look at the pros:
This is a non-carbonated energy drink. While it's not entirely novel, but it's a nice option regardless. On top of that it is also an iced tea energy drink. Something about that makes it seem more natural, even though there are unnatural things afoot. The sugar content is on the lower side for these types of drinks, which is always appreciated. The final plus is that it doesn't taste like a typical energy drink. The weird chemical candy taste is not present at all. When companies can achieve that, they get my attention.

Now on to the cons:
This smells like a cheap lemon flavored iced tea, and the taste is right there as well. This tastes like it should be a close relative to Brisk. While that may be a very good thing for some people, I personally am not a fan of that fake tea taste. In fact, this doesn't taste like a “half and half” at all. There is no classic lemonade flavor in this can, it's just an overly lemon iced tea. Again, perhaps that's good for some, but I'm not on board. The final con is that along with the glucose this also has sucralose in it. That is the reason for the lower levels of sugar, but it also takes the flavor down a notch as you get hints of diet occasionally.

There it is. Take these lists and decide for yourself if this is the kind of thing you want to put in your body or not. I personally did not make it through the entire can.

Pete went to Italy to try to experience new things. He was a huge car fan and really wanted to see Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Alfa Romeos in their natural habitat. On the plane over he said that he wanted to see a Countach, 512 TR, and a GTV 6. Anything else was pure icing.

Pete was there for a couple days and didn't see any of the main cars on his list. Sure, he saw some Alfa 164s, some newer Murcielagos and a Ferrari Mondial but he saw those in the States a fair amount. He was only there for one day and he decided to get something to drink. He stopped at an Italian cafe and rather than drink some coffee, he decided to get something local to where he was, which was lemonade. He sat down with his lemonade and watched as his final hours passed him. He was happy, though. He got to relax and now he was relaxing with a pretty good lemonade. It was lightly sweetened enough to let the sourness of the lemon to come through. Also, it made him feel good that there was pulp in there. It made him feel like it was handmade.

Just as he was finishing up, he heard something loud coming around the corner. He looked up and a gorgeous, red Ferrari F40 sped past him. He never though he'd see one and thought that it was alright that he didn't see the other ones. Maybe next time, he thought.