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.

Do I love my guts? I think so. I eat yogurt. That's the epitome of loving and taking care of your guts? I feel like living in Buffalo I do my fair share of loving my guts by eating rotten cheese in the form of bleu cheese. Is that enough? Yogurt and bleu cheese? It's not? I've got to do more?! What kind of time do you think I have? Oh, a packet of stuff I can mix into a bottle of water? Great.

Wait...you said this was flavorless. It tastes the way melting plastic smells. That is quite flavorful, actually. I filled up a sixteen ounce bottle and took three giant chugs to finish it. Now my mouth is cold. It tasted like it was numb when I tasted it. Now it's just strange like I just swished with Stevia. Why would I do that? Swishing with sugar or a sugar-like substitute? Do I hate my teeth? No. I take good care of those puppies like I do, or thought I did, of my guts.

I might be getting stronger or at least more resistant to the outside forces with each sip of this and there are nutritional values like a ton of vitamin C and D but is it worth it? Probably. All that bleu cheese might be clogging my blood vessels and pores.

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.

Jalapeno: A green pepper that is hot.
Citrus: A zesty, floral flavor that I cannot define without using the word of the fruit it comes from.
Margarita: A sour or citrus based alcoholic drink with tequila and salt as well as a strange classification of pizza.
This: Not really anything mentioned above.

This is spicy but my palate and I cannot decide whether it's the sparkles or jalapeno. It was a lot lighter in citrus than any of the other flavors they have. The margarita...I am not the best judge of what a margarita tastes like as I haven't had a drop of alcohol since 1998. I can tell you that it wasn't salty, though. This was just kind of confusing and weak. I love Polar but this probably took the backseat to whomever invented the allusive "Unicorn Kiss" that will probably be unfindable at this point. Trust me. We've contacted Polar who sent us this and said they don't have any more in stock. What an April Fools prank, taunting us with a fantastical beverage that will never exist again.

Without looking it up on the internet, someone tell me what percentage of American suffer from stomach/digestive issues. I'm not going to look it up but I'll throw a number out there. I'll say 72%. That's a lot of the population with problems, and those are problems that this beverage can help alleviate. This bottle is jam packed with probiotics, which are live bacteria and yeasts of the positive variety that do a bunch to make you feel better.

You grab this and think, “Oh good this is going to make my guts feel better.” Then you realize that it's an interactive drink and things are even better. You get to peel off the label from the top and then push all of the vitamins, minerals and probiotics that exist in powder form into the water waiting below. Then you shake it like a paint machine mixing up a gallon of paint that you bought to paint your fence, but it just sits there for far too long because you're procrastinating. Oh, is my real life seeping into this review? That will happen.

So this is fun, it is functional and on top of that it tastes good. I'm wary of apple cinnamon beverages that are not cider, because normally things just do not turn out the way you want them to. Karma has figured it out though. I don't know if it's because it stays in a powder form until right before you drink it, but this tastes so much like real cinnamon sprinkled onto dried apples that it's ridiculous. This is made with stevia as well as cane sugar, and I would have no idea that a zero calorie sweetener was in here if I hadn't read the label. It's mostly a light apple water with a heavy cinnamon overtone. It's great. I could see myself drinking this even if my guts didn't need the help that 72% of American need.

I think I speak for all people when I say that prickly pear is a wonderful fruit. Pears blow but add some spikes and thorns and nails and it flips it right around. Make a pear dangerous to eat and it makes it better than its soft, smooth brother. Or cousin. They're related but maybe just through marriage. It counts but barely.

This is wonderful. The green tea isn't powerful but you can taste a little bite. The prickly pear, though, she shines through with beams of light as bright as the G.D. sun. It's a soft flavored drink. Real sugar and a little bit of Stevia come together and really round this little guy out.

This rarely happens, but I finished the drink before I finished writing this review. I'm on the top of the third paragraph and it's gone. I've polished off twelve ounces in like 100 words. This is great. It's not terrible for you, either. At fifty calories per can, I'd easily take a tallboy of this any day of the week. You hear me, Steaz? Tallboys. I'm inventing the demand as I type. Everyone who reads my words is seeing it in my head wondering if it exists. Make it exist. Do the right thing, Steaz. Do the right thing.

Sparkling tea is a strange bird. We've done a couple of them but for the most part, they're just strange. Iced tea is a staple in my life so when you change it by adding sparkles, you're changing when my body expects.

Is this bad? No. It's not the best drink and it's pretty diet at times but you know what? It couldn't have been that bad because I drank the whole thing. I never made a "gross" face. That counts for them and not against them. You could taste the lemon. That's a point. You only sometimes get the diet taste and it's sucralose. That stuff stinks. Sparkling Ice can sometimes and somehow disguise it.

They keep sending us stuff and we keep drinking it. They're good to us. You know why this relationship works, though? They don't mind a couple mediocre reviews. I've always said that if I could have one drink for the rest of my life it would be unsweet tea. This is my favorite drink sharpened, sweetened, lemoned and on a diet. That's where the minuses come in. It's not bad. It's not for me. I drank the whole thing. It's not for me.

Summer is creeping up on us and the weather is finally starting to break. It's warm and sunny. Soon it will be downright hot and sweltering and all you will be able to think of is how you want to cool down and experience some refreshment. You will take a shower to cool down, and 30 seconds after you put fresh clothes on they will be soaked in sweat. Even your pets won't want to go anywhere near you. It will be gross and you will need relief.

We have talked in the past about how the ultimate refreshing soda is Mr. Q Cumber; a delicious sweet pop that tastes like fresh cucumbers. It's perfection in a tiny bottle. What Spindrift has done is make that soda but without any sugar and turn it into seltzer. It's just sparkling water and a little bit of cucumber juice. It may be the best seltzer I have ever tasted and that is saying a lot to dethrone Polar's vanilla. I can see myself drinking insane amounts of this over the summer and you should to so that they keep it in production. Don't let this disappear on me! I need it to make life worth living while I'm drowning in sweat.

I am not crazy about the name of this company. Purposefully misspelled words was such a 90's thing to do, and I honestly hoped that we were over it. I would expect something called Phyzix to be a Nu-Metal band and not an energy drink. They sound like they should be on a mix along with Korn, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park.

What I am crazy about is the taste of this drink. It tastes like a pina colada with some orange juice in it (maybe a little mango as well). Usually when drinks are labeled as Tropical they are just a general amalgamation of various citrus flavors. This actually tastes like something that should be drunk at a tropical location. It's sweetened with a mixture of crystalline fructose, erythritol and stevia. The cool crispness and normally unmistakable zero calorie sweetener flavors are somehow masked by the tropical flavor and that is a very good thing.

On top of that there is no taurine in here, so it doesn't have that expected chemical energy drink taste. The energy you get from this beverage comes from a blend of guarana, green tea, cha de bugre, ginseng, l-tyrosine, maca and yerba mate. I'm pretty sure that if this was all natural they would boast about it, but I don't see anything that isn't natural in the ingredients. This is a straight up pleasant beverage to sip, and I am willing to overlook their name choice for the quality of the product.

It's been a long time old friend. When we first met I was merely 10 years old and even though I didn't understand most of the jokes, I loved all things Ghostbusters. I don't remember if I saw the movie or the cartoon first (The Real Ghostbusters, not that other garbage one) and I don't care. All I need to know if that I was hooked. I was also hooked on “juice,” and when Hi-C combined both things it was a match made in heaven. Normally my mom would pack me a Ssips juice box in my lunch, but the times I could get her to splurge it was always for Ecto Cooler. I had no idea that this was actually a rebranding of their “Citrus Cooler” flavor and I still don't care. It was delicious and it had the cartoon version of Slimer on it. What 10 year old suburban white boy wouldn't love that?

Ecto Cooler was always such a specific flavor to me that as a youngster I could never quite put my finger on. It wasn't until the company yet again rebranded the flavor as “Shoutin' Orange Tangerine“ that I slapped my forehead and felt very dumb for not placing the flavor. At the time I had outgrown such drinks and with the lack of Slimer on the packaging it held little interest to someone in their early 20s. I later learned that in 2006 it was once again rebranded as “Crazy Citrus Cooler” and a year later it was completely discontinued.

There's something about your thirties that feeds off of nostalgia. I had never grown tired of the Ghostbusters movies and still watched them at least once a year. I longed for times when life was simpler and I missed things from my childhood that were no longer available. When we started thiersty Dudes, we named our “Trifecta” of discontinued drinks that we longed for. They were Crystal Pepsi, Orbits and or course Ecto Cooler. We bought a 14 years expired bottle of Orbits and it tasted like salad dressing. The other day a mysterious package showed up at my door and inside was a cardboard Muon Trap that contained Ecto Cooler. I knew it was returning to shelves along with the release of the new movie (which is the most hated movie that no one has seen yet), but I really have no recollection of giving anyone from Hi-C my address. It was a complete surprise and it made my day wonderful.

I'm sitting here now, sitting in the warm shining sun and I'm sipping on a juice box. If this were 25 years ago I would be sitting on a skateboard with my best friends planning what we would do when school ended for the summer in a few weeks. Instead I am taking a break between printing shirts and working on my deck. I wish I could say that I was talking about the deck of my skateboard, but I mean the deck of my house. I'm an adult with responsibilities, but for a few short minutes it's 1989 again and I'm drinking a tangerine/orange drink that I believe to be juice, but which only contains 10% juice. It's mostly citrus sugar water and I don't care. It tastes exactly like I remember and that's all that matters. If this drink were a new product now, I would care very little about it, but since it's something from my childhood I'm loving it. I'm not expecting this to stick around for very long. There will be a large nostalgia burst as soon as it hits shelves and then people will remember they are adults and these are the kinds of drinks you leave behind as you grow up. Who knows though? Maybe the new movie will resonate with a younger generation and they will eat (drink) it up. I may never buy it again, but I will smile every time I see it.

You know what we need? A new poster child for a specific demographic. Not since James Dean have we had a person who identifies a people. No we do. Rob Gronkowski is this generation's James Dean. Like it or not, he embodies all that is today's youth. I bet he wears a backwards baseball hat. I bet he fist bumps no less than fourteen times per day. You know what else? I bet he could beat the living tar out of me on his worst day. Rob Gronkowski could have non-stop diarrhea for a week and still whoop me. Rob Gronkowski could have lost a limb in a bar room brawl, be hopped up on painkillers and wear glasses with wildly poor prescriptions and still knock my block off.

That being said, his drink might be the best Monster I've had. Yeah, it tastes like what fruit would taste like if you wrapped it in quotes and was made exclusively from chemicals but hey, as far as taste is concerned, it's the best that Monster has to offer. Could I drink a whole bottle? No sir or ma'am. Could Rob Gronkowski drink one? Rob Gronkowski probably adds it to his Trix instead of milk. Rob Gronkowski probably wears it as cologne and pulls down more in one night than I have my entire life.

Rob Gronkowski. King among bro-men.

This is a beverage that I feel would be sold at some ridiculous restaurant in Brooklyn. You know how they have a place that only serves cereal; this would be served at a chocolate milk bar. This would also be a top shelf item at said establishment. The well drinks would be Nestle and Milo and things of that ilk. As you moved up there would be slightly fancier drinks that were make from almond or soy milk. That top shelf though, that is reserved for only the fanciest of chocolate milks, that that is exactly what this is.

I'm glad I didn't look up what reishi was before I drank this, because “divine” or not, knowing that this was made with mushrooms would have probably tainted my experience. Not knowing I fully enjoyed it though. The base of this is coconut milk and it's even sweetened with coconut sugar. Luckily it doesn't taste toasted, and its flavor sits in the background. The chocolate taste is out of control in here. It's like someone just melted a high grade chocolate bar into the coconut milk. It's certainly more chocolate that anything else, and I could ask for nothing more. Also, no matter how much I shook this up it still had little clumps of chocolate in it. That would have kind of grossed me out normally, but when I squished them with my tongue I was reminded that this isn't some garbage chocolate they were using and all was forgiven.

Those reishi mushrooms may be in here to strengthen the immune system, improve mental clarity and relaxation as well as promote healthy liver function, but you would never know by the taste. It's just one of the best chocolate “milks” that I have ever tasted and all the benefits are just a bonus on top of the flavor.

Now what would the name of this chocolate milk bar be? Well if they were all vegan and wanted to go with a Lemonheads theme they could call it “Udderless.” That seems a bit niche though, even for a chocolate milk bar in Brooklyn. I'm sure I will think of something better before our imaginary grand opening.