High Fructose Corn Syrup - 485 Reviews

What better way to wash down fantastically delicious jerk chicken than with a spicy pop? Oh, none? That's what I thought. Jay and I went to local restaurant filled with hospitality and fantastic food, Dr. Bird's "Rastaraunt" and ordered food. They always have a good selection of things like Grace and DG but last time we went, they were all out of new things. It's fine. We don't expect everywhere to cater to us. Yesterday, though, they had this little number and we both "Oooo'd" at it.

We sit down. We eat. We drink. This is a very good drink and that is surprising because most pineapple pops are just too sweet. This was sweet but it tasted like the juice from a can of, you guessed it, pineapples. The ginger, while not as prevalent as in a ginger beer, still had a sharp little bit that accompanied the pineapple well. It did justice to the jerk chicken in a way that ice cream goes well after every meal or there is always room for Jell-O.

Johnny was a gamer. Big time. He was a terrible student at the same time. Reason being is because he would always do the minimum he could do just to get it done so that he could play video games. He handed his stuff in on time but it was never very good. He focused all his attention on games. Shooters mostly. He would get home from school, crank through math, science, history, and English, run downstairs and slam a hot pocket and run upstairs to retire to his room where he would have his headphones on with microphone just headshotting left and right. He would always have his Mountain Dew with him, too. Always. He drank a lot of it and loved the way that he could go all night and not get tired. Sure his schoolwork would suffer but he didn't care because he was leveling up.

One day the town he lived in had a pretty brutal snowstorm and the shelves in the supermarket were left barren except for things like rat traps, wooden spoons, and expensive olive oils. The Mountain Dew was gone and he was very distraught. He didn't know what to do so he scoured the shelves for what felt like an eternity until he came across a lone bottle of Towne Club that was left in a bin of dog toys. He thought that it looked like Mountain Dew enough that he had to at least give it a try.

At home, he put in his game, put on his headphones, and started playing. Shortly thereafter, he was thirsty and decided that now was the time to break open his drink. He opened it, took a sip and put it down and continued to game. He didn't think twice about it until the third or fourth sip where he noticed that he really liked it. He thought it tasted like a Mountain Dew but less sweet and with more of a lime or lychee taste. He looked at the scoreboard to his deathmatch and he was actually winning. Johnny found his new secret weapon against the enemy and it wasn't dual pistols with incendiary rounds, it was a tall bottle of Town Club City Rush.

"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.

In the world of apples there is a wide spectrum of tastes. There's your Fuji, the Gala, Golden Delicious not to mention Red Delicious, your Pink Lady, your Granny Smith and everything in between. Actually that's not a large array of flavors. It is kind of one central flavor with different degrees of tartness and sweetness.

There is one flavor that is missing from that whole wheelhouse though and that is the flavor of this soda. I get the general apple taste they are going for, but it's not much of an actual apple flavor. It's more the artificial flavor that we have been conditioned to associate with apple. Actually, the more I drink, the more I notice some semblance of a real apple flavor underneath the sugar and bubbles.

This isn't a bad soda by any means, but it's sweeter than anything I need to drink. It's much better than the apple-bubble gum flavor I was expecting due to the pinkness of the liquid. So, that's a plus for sure. Now I just want to tear into a nice Golden Delicious.

I find it baffling that in the 4+ years that we have been doing Thirsty Dudes we have yet to review Yoo-Hoo. It's an American classic for cripes sake. When this was brought to our attention I started looking all over for a bottle or can of it, with zero luck. I feel like I would always come across it when I was out looking for other beverages to review, but when I'm finally in the market for it; zilch. I ended up settling for a pack of juice boxes. They aren't what I really wanted, because they aren't what I remember from my childhood, but I'll take what I can get.

As a child I would have been perfectly happy being in the Shining if when those elevator doors opened an ocean of Yoo-Hoo came pouring out instead of blood. I would have sucked up as much of it as I could until I puked. Then, I would have moved to a pukeless area of floor Yoo-Hoo and then licked that up. Sure attempted murder would be just around the corner, but who can care about a thing like that when you're covered in such a deliciously sweet chocolatey treat?

If you've never had Yoo-Hoo before I'm going to guess that you are under a certain age. When I was growing up this chocolate drink was all the rage. It's essentially a version of chocolate milk, even though the dairy in it comes from whey and caseinate (from milk) and nonfat dry milk. You know what they are right to call it a chocolate drink, but it is very similar to chocolate milk, without being as gross.

I really thought this would be fairly disgusting now that I am an adult, and I don't need cheap chocolate drinks in my life, but I have to admit, I still love it. There are way more ingredients in here than make me comfortable, but taste wise this is pretty darn good.

I think it's safe to say that Faygo is the leader of the mid-level pop game. They have been around for over a hundred years, and have the widest selection of flavors that I have ever come across when it comes to the drinks with the bubbles. Most of those flavors are pretty standard, but they do try some untraditional flavors as well, all of which range from decent to pretty darn good. While I have yet to taste one of their sodas that completely blew my socks off, I've also never tried one that I flat out didn't like and that is what I think they are going for: middle of the road soda that will appeal to the greatest number of people with the lowest price point. I can't fault them for that, as I'm sure that business model has brought them quite a lot of money and made many people happy along the way.

With this flavor the Michigan company has strayed a bit from the norm. Fruit flavors in soda are mostly reserved for grape, orange, cherry and pineapple rears it's head more than you'd expect. Berry sodas are not very common, and when you find them more than likely they are more sugar than fruit. While there may not be any fruit juice in this, and it is fairly sweet, it doesn't taste like generic sweet bubbles. I'm actually not completely disgusted by this and I have already drank more than I had anticipated (I'm trying to cut down a lot of sugar form my diet, and drinks like this make that hard to do). I want to compare this to freeze pops or something like that, but it has no harshness and I think the flavor isn't quite the same. I guess the closest I can think of is it tastes like a Slurpee flavor that I had once, but since I can't remember its name that bit on info is pointless.

This definitely falls under the category of a flavor of soda that kids would love and adults more than likely have little to no use for. It's not that they don't like it, but they want to pretend to be mature and mature people apparently only drink dry sodas and coffee.

Option A:

Step One: Go out and buy yourself one of those fancy machines that allow you to carbonate anything. As a matter of fact, you should already have one in your home because how fun would it be to make random carbonated things? Actually, why don't I have one of those in my home? I feel like I have somehow failed at life because of this fact. Perhaps it's because I would inevitably carbonate things that should never have tiny bubbles in them. No matter. Get one of those machines, that is your mission.

Step Two: Brew yourself some low-grade green tea. Don't go getting all fancy, get some bags of Lipton or something. This isn't a pinky out kind of tea that we're going for. While your at it chop up a little ginger and boil it with the tea bags. Make asure not to use too much because we just want a hint of the flavor.

Step Three: Add a cubic buttload of corn syrup to sweeten up this mess we're creating.

Step Four: Use the machine previously mentioned in step one to add bubbles to your concoction.


Option B:

Step One: Get a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale.

Step Two: Brew some low-grade green tea, skip the sugar and ginger this time.

Step Three: Somehow make a concentrate of the tea.

Step Four: Mix your green tea concentrate into your ginger ale.



Either of those options would give you something close to this soda. Option B is probably closer to procedure you're looking for. This really tastes like a cheap green tea that has some light ginger ale undertones. I mean that in a good way though. If this had less sugar in it (58g) I would be all over this stuff. It tastes shockingly great.

You wake up in the morning and what is the first thing you crave? Water? Cereal? Juice? Hell, even coffee would be an acceptable answer. If you said a nice tall can of Mountain Dew, or any other soda for that matter, you live a sick sad life. There is really no reason to be drinking pop as soon as you wake up. I see no difference in downing a can and pounding a giant Pixie Stix. I don't care if a percentage of it is juice. That does not make it acceptable. While we're at it, can we acknowledge that 5% juice does not really count as it being juice, 5% is nothing.

Mountain Dew (or Mtn Dew as the can proclaims) may have realized their marketing folly, or perhaps they are just trying to expand their reach, and released two new Kick Start flavors that are meant for nighttime consumption. Now that seems a bit more reasonable (as long as people are planning on staying up awhile after drinking it and not go to bed 30 minutes later. From what I can gather these new sodas are Mountain Dew original with minimal juice mixed in and some electrolytes added “to taste.” Do electrolytes even really have a taste?

This variety certainly does taste like regular ole Mountain Dew with a bit of extra lime in the mix. I find it to be an improvement from the way people expect this beverage to taste. The downfall is that they used sucralose as well as high fructose corn syrup. While I appreciate that they are trying to lower people's sugar intake, the flavor definitely suffers. I didn't notice it at all at first, but the deeper I got into the can the more prevalent the gross diet flavor became. I'm not sure if my taste buds were picking it up more, or if it settles, either way it wasn't good for anyone.

It's not very often that you come across apple flavored soda. I don't know why that is, but it's a fact of life in the northeast. When one does pop up, it either tastes like garbage fake sour green apple, or it tastes as this can does. It's a flavor that kind of, sort of tastes like a real apple, even though apple is not one of the items listed in the ingredients. It's not quite exactly apple, but anyone who has had an apple before could place that flavor in a blind taste test. The apple it tastes like is of some variety of red apple. When making soda, stay away from the green apples, even though they are superior in their natural form. It's also very sweet, so much in fact that I could not finish this can, even though I enjoyed the soda it contains.

I live in a part of the country where apples are all over the place, and yet I have to turn to Ecuador in order to get an apple flavored soda. Something is very wrong with that. I demand a local company start making an apple soda, using real apples. Better yet, make an apple cider soda. Oh man, that would be just what I need to keep on keeping on.

It's not terrible to be in the middle. For the most part, if you are in the middle you are either content with skimming by or you like to stay hidden. That or the whole "glass ceiling" thing. You'll break it one day, friend. As soon as they understand that great idea of yours isn't as crazy as they once thought.

Speaking of the middle, no not the overplayed Jimmy Eat World song, but this drink. It is in the middle between a crappy orange juice and "orange drink" which is inherently crappy. I don't know where the "ade" comes from but I wish someone had helped "aid" this company in the flavoring of this drink. Yes, I know. Pun humor. If any drink dictates it, this one does. It's not bad, but it just tastes like it could either be better or worse and that in itself is its punishment.

Middle finger? Too strong for this drink. It just tastes a little diet, all fake, and like you thought, "Hey. Orange is orange." and mixed orange drinks together and called it a day and hoped your daddy wouldn't notice you drank most of his orange juice. Oh he'll know and you'll be in trouble. It's just orange juice though so he won't be mad for long. Just go outside and shovel or mow the lawn or something.

Mountain Dew? For breakfast? That's right, friends. Now, you no longer just need to write code or play Halo until the wee hours of the night to earn the right to drink it. Now, housewives, chefs, music teachers, and X-ray technicians can wake up, do the stretch, and just start chugging. Best of all is that it almost doesn't taste like Mountain Dew. It tastes like a black cherry pop with some black cherry juice mixed with some Mountain Dew. Just some Mountain Dew, not all Mountain Dew. It's the better parts of Mountain Dew but it's cut off before it gets carried away.

Look, now that everyone can drink it, you'd better get it because before you know it, librarians, film historians, garbage men, lemonade repair man, ham analyst, foot doctors, and kneecap surgeons are going to be buying it all up. Get in your car now if you think that a black cherry Mountain Dew sounds good.

What we have here is the most unfortunately accurate tasting soda I have ever come across. I know I complain a lot that most pops don't taste anything like the flavor they are named after, but I kind of wish this didn't. Actually, no I don't because there was no possible way that a teriyaki flavored beverage could be good. At least it's accurate and true to it's self.

Let me paint this image for you. You pick up some takeout on the way home from work. Once you get home you pull out your fancy pants bullet blender and dump your teriyaki chicken in along with a heaping cup of sugar. Once you have blended the living hell out of it you mix the remaining liquid into some soda water and viola you have this Japanese “treat.”

I want everyone in the world to try this. I want to watch as they make a disgusted face and then sit there because they can't complain about it. They knowingly tried a teriyaki soda and it turns out it tastes exactly like the meal they would have preferred to be eating. Dumb dummies.

Why is it that if there is a mix of lemon and lime in soda it at least has a quasi real lime taste to it, yet when said flavor is reduced to solely lime what is left taste remarkably like a green Freeze Pop? It's a mystery for the ages.

Canada Dry has found somewhat of a middle ground. When you first take a sip you get that uber sweet Freeze Pop taste, but without all of the harshness that is normally associated with them in their unfrozen state. The aftertaste fades into a somewhat believable lime flavor.

It's an interesting and enjoyable flavor, but only in small amounts. Half of this 20oz bottle was too much for me. I'm sure kids and sugar fiends alike would down this by the gallon, but I'll stick to stealing sips from someone else.

No matter how they dress it up, if you purchase a beverage that has the word “Nestea” on it, you know that you are in store for something sub par. Along with Brisk this company is half of a duo that are the only companies I have ever heard of to make harsh iced tea. Every other tea I've had was either smooth, bitter or sugar water. While this does fall under the sugar water category it also puts your throat in a moderate amount of discomfort. It's not quite a burn, but it's something that is weird and very much present in ever sip.

It has a slight fruity flavor that neither tastes like pomegranate nor passionfruit. Both of them have very specific flavors that just aren't present. They are also nowhere to be seen in the ingredients list. It seems that it's just an arbitrary name they slapped on their garbage tea.

Uh hello, I'd like to speak to your supervisor. You see I spent a lot of money, and I mean a cubic butt ton, on my tropical vacation and it was nothing like I was promised. In the brochure it was listed as a tropical fantasy. Now, I know that means different things to different people, but I believe there is a general underlying theme to everyone's thoughts on a perfect vacation of that sort. I can assure you what I received was nothing close to that. I chose the pineapple package. I feel like that's a very specific niche, and as I said it just was not delivered.

For starters there is not a lick of pineapple anywhere to be seen in here. It's all sugar, pears and apples and that's pretty much what the base of it is like. On top of that is the vaguest of pineapple flavors that I wouldn't ever be able to place is I wasn't looking for it. The addition of sucralose along with the high fructose corn syrup does not help a thing, especially since it still contains 48g of sugar.

As I said I am completely unhappy and I would like a refund. Oh, you'll reimburse the fifty cents it cost to my account. Well thank you. I'm sure the time it took me to contact you about this is worth more than the amount reimbursed, but it's the principle of it all.

Apparently this town's club is not very selective about it's members. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Everyone is welcome, which results in nothing terrible, but at the same time nothing is stupendous. This is a complete middle of the road cola. It tastes like store brand. Even though it's in a glass bottle, it's still sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. It's not quite Coke, it's not quite Pepsi, but it's that middle ground that you all know and enjoy, at least somewhat.

It's been a few years since I've had a Frostie root beer. It's not like Old Man Winter on the bottle and I had a falling out or anything, it's just not readily available in Buffalo, and while I'm traveling I'm always looking for something new. Cut to me entering the Village Beer Merchant in Buffalo with a friend and I see this little guy peaking out of the cooler. Interest piqued.

From the picture on the bottle this would appear to be root beer float flavored. While that sounded interesting, it also seemed a little gross. I don't want dairy in my sealed soda. Lucky for everyone involved it's more of a root beer …€“ cream soda hybrid that is very heavy on the cream soda side of things. It tastes like vanilla extract rather than vanilla ice cream, and the results are excellent. I would actually say this is 70% cream soda and 30% root beer. Keep that in mind because if you go into this wanting a strong root beer you will be sorely disappointed.

Now there are two different versions of their regular root beer the cane sugar one and the HFCS one. It's not shocking that the cane sugar one is superior in every way. This unfortunately is sweetened with corn syrup, so it's a bit on the thicker side. I can only hope that I come across a cane sugar version some day and fall in love even more.

“Finally,” I thought to myself, “the drink gods have listened to me and made a melon flavored energy drink.” You see melon can be one of the best tasting flavors for a drink to have when done correctly. I admit, it's rare that I eat actual melons, but I love the flavor when it's added to things. Unfortunately for me it must have been some sort of trickster god that created this beverage because I was pumped up (would it be watermelon, cantaloupe, or maybe honey dew since the accents on the can are green) and then was delivered a bubbly liquid that tastes absolutely nothing like any melon I've ever tasted. This is just carbonated sugar water. It doesn't even have the classic energy drink taste hiding below the surface. If I had to compare it to something I would say that it was like a lemon lime soda with even less flavor.

The can says, “DNA is science. Science is the driving force behind man's search for maximum performance. Everyone's DNA is unique. Be unique.” I guess they ended up being unique in that it doesn't taste like any other energy drinks out there. Unfortunately they have made me question science and it didn't even give me much energy. I was still spacing out a little on my drive to Chicago. This is just dumb.

Our contact at the Buffalo Coca Cola plant told us this was coming out, and while I had seen the 2lt bottles of it in the grocer store I was keeping my eyes open for smaller bottles, or cans, but alas I did not find them. As a result I'm sitting here with way more pop than I actually need, telling myself that I should just drop the leftovers off with my upstairs neighbor.

Was I shocked to learn that we had not reviewed normal Sprite when I looked through our database? Not at all. You see when we started Thirsty Dudes a few years ago we made a conscious decision to put big soda on the back burner. We figured it was the kind of thing that we would be served at a family party, so there was no rush to go out and purchase it for review. The problem with that logic is that never in a million years would I choose a lemon lime soda over anything else at any point in my life. Lemon lime is perfectly fine, but it's boring, and I don't get enough enjoyment out of it to justify the sugar intake. So here we are with our first Sprite review and it's for their new cranberry variant, which I read was going to be limited to the holiday season.

While I am not a huge fan of lemon lime, I will give Sprite props for not going overboard with the cranberry flavor in this. It could easily have overtaken the entire taste of this drink. At its core this is still mainly a lemon lime soda with a little cranberry flavor added as an afterthought. The added flavor is very light and it stays true to the brands respected flavor. This is all I could ever hope that a cranberry Sprite would taste like.

“Underachiever and proud of it,” was once the motto of a yellow, eight fingered juvenile delinquent from an unspecified location in America. It's also basically the slacker generation's war cry. “The previous generations screwed everything up for us, so we're not going to do anything to try and fix it. We're just going to have as much of a good time as we can.” While I endorse people having a good time, not trying is just a cop out.

I feel like Jumex has a little bit of Bart in them. This drink had such potential. Strawberry nectar sounds like a summers dream come true. I would want to bath in it and then drink my disgusting bath water post soak. Ick. Pretend I didn't say that. That will never actually be true. So yeah, this could have been the drink that would bring an end to war an famine. Jumex decided to say “Ehhh” and watered it down and added HFCS to unnecessarily sweeten it. There is a base of delicious strawberry puree in here, but the corn syrup makes it even thicker than it would normally be and gives it a weird tang. The water does what water does best and blands it out. Shame on you Jumex.