Drink this in. I received a case of Just Chill in the mail. I excitedly put a couple in the fridge to cool down and then went about my day. The next morning I am woken up by my ladyfriend who is crying hysterically because she fell down the stairs. I somehow assumed the role of decent boyfriend and jumped to make sure that she was not seriously hurt. I mean I'm not a monster, but after discovering that no real harm had been done I could see myself going back to sleep. I did not play the part of the jerk that day and I consoled her, as she was really shook up. She was pretty worked up, as any normal human being would be after tumbling down a full set of stairs at 7am. I really, really wanted to have her drink one of these to help calm her nerves, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind I instantly knew that if I uttered the phrase, “You should drink a Just Chill” all she would hear is the word chill and assume I was telling her she needed to chill out. In hindsight I should have just gone and grabbed her a can, but it was early and I am part monster, and the warm bed won out. Eventually she calmed down and went to work and I did the same. It's a longwinded story, but the fact is that these drinks do what they are supposed to and it actually would have been appropriate for her to drink one at that time. I feared getting stabbed so I didn't' bring it up. No one likes to be stabbed.

In addition to their functionality these drinks really do taste great. They do the whole mixture of sugar (crystalline fructose) and stevia thing to keep calories low, but retain a decent taste. I don't know how they do it, but I would never guess that stevia was involved at all just by the flavor. I have not ruled out sorcery. Rio Berry is light, but realistically fruity. I appreciate a beverage that actually tastes like berries and not artificial garbage that we are told taste like fruit.

As if seltzer isn't "for adults" enough, here is one that tastes like you're eating an orange you dropped in the woods and let it sit and marinate in the bark of a thousand trees. Is that bad? Not if you like the great outdoors. That goes for the place or the movie in no particular. It's good. It's sparkling and at the end is bitter but in the beginning, it's got a nice, orangey flavor. It does turn quickly but you've got to "man up" quickly because it's going to get tough soon; sooner than you probably thought; sooner than you probably wanted. If you wanted it to stay calm forever, you have the wrong drink because this is a drink for people with some hair on their chest. Male or female it doesn't matter this drink is indiscriminately put hair on your chest and on your knuckles. The type of person that knows how to use a saw and uses a saw regularly, that's who this is for. You know, the type of person that doesn't use conditioner but lets the dust from hay and sawdust "take care of it." Is this you? Are you this? If so, you've got a drink waiting for you at the top of a pile of gravel you have to shovel out for no particular reason which you will do with glee.

Yes, it is January. Yes, it is cold and snowy. Yes, it is the time of year when people get sick. No, Voodoo Donuts no longer serves donuts that have cough syrup mixed in with the jelly. Yes, I think that is a great idea if not abused. Finally, no, I do not want my cherry soda to taste like cold medicine.

I often wonder if I would find such distaste in this version of cherry flavoring if it wasn't for medicine. Has it always been a gross flavor, or has it become tainted in our minds because we associate it with being sick. I guess it doesn't really matter because with every sip of this I feel like I should be swaddled in blankets blowing my nose.

There is a wide variety of flavors that have been called cherry in the world. Most cherry sodas gravitate towards one of those extremes. Baumeister tried to take things in a different direction and while I think that is great they took a wrong turn and ended up at Medicinal Blvd. We're looking for Fruit St here people. How hard is it to have a soda taste like the actual fruit it is named after?

We live in a world where there is a bear in New Jersey that just walks around erect on its hind legs all of the time. It's not someone in a costume; it's just the coolest bear ever. It's just a matter of time until more bears adopt this mode of conveyance and that will most certainly lead to bears riding skateboards, as seen on this can. This portrayal of our furry friend is the peak coolness that any bear could hope to achieve. It makes sense that it should adorn the can of one of the best ginger beers I have tasted in a long time.

Now I love a good burn in my ginger beer, which you may know as I never shut up about it. This soda has somehow surpassed that love of mine. There is definitely some heat to this drink, but it's more on the mild side and it does not overpower the actual delicious flavor of this soda. There is a ridiculous amount of ginger flavor in here with some burn at the end. It's very, very good and the kicker is that this is “cheap” soda in Scotland. The cans are like 40p each. If I lived there it wouldn't just be the deep fried everything that would make me fat.

I'm deep in the forest. The forest is actually a swamp. The swamp is actually made up of soda. I want to enjoy this experience and get lost in it all, but there is a problem. The problem is monk fruit. I don't know how it actually grows, but for the sake of this review it is covering the surface of the swamp a la cranberries. This is causing a problem because for the life of me I can't get past the monk fruit to figure out if this is a cherry cola, or just a plain ole' cherry soda. I'm pretty sure it's cherry cola, but nothing on the cane denotes that. I'm not sure if it's the taste of the monk fruit that is giving it a quasi-taste of cola, or if that flavor is distracting from the pure cola taste. This soda is floating in some weird dream state limbo where it doesn't know what it wants to be. I can't say that I really enjoyed it, but at the same time I also did not dislike it. It is low in sugar, thus low in calories, which more likely than not is going to put it at some sort of disadvantage taste wise. I really just want to know what the flavor is supposed to be. I feel like that would make it easier to form a more solid opinion.

Getting older is a strange thing. Your priorities change, well sometimes, and even your tastes evolve. Less than 10 years ago I was an adult by any cultures standards. I was 26, I lived in an apartment, I supported myself and I did what I wanted. It just happens that what I apparently wanted to do was drink obscene amounts of iced tea. The thing is that what I was drinking was more sugar water than tea, and the fact that I am not obese with some disease and shocking. On an average day I would say I drank more Arizona tall boys than I am comfortable admitting. Those days are long gone though. I would have to struggle to get through one full can of Arizona at this point, and my drink of choice is unsweetened iced tea that I brew at home.

Bigelow understands this and believes that it's ”about time tea drinkers had that home brewed tea experience in a bottle.” Now I always assumed that Arizona and Bigelow were connected in some way because of their similar bottles, but the 5 seconds of research I just did provided me with no info to back that up. Whether they are or not, doesn't matter, but this bottle of tea is definitely far closer to what I brew at home than a tallboy of Arizona. This actually tastes like tea and not the sugary goodness that youth craves. There is about half the amount of sugar in this that what I used to drink. It kind of tastes like what sweet tea would be if you made it with green tea (and a little less sugar). It's nice to still have a touch of the bitterness from the tea. The mango and lychee flavors are both there and identifiable, with the lychee being the stronger of the two, but neither of them take away from the green tea taste and pair nicely with it.

I wish I would have jut accepted beverages like this as superior when I was younger. It would have saved me from a lot of dumb calorie consumption.

Just Chill has been good to us. They have sent us samples several times, and when they have they have sent a lot of them and we appreciate that. Here at Thirsty Dudes we are not to be bought though, just ask Mountain Dew about the time they sent us a care package with the samples of their Kickstart line before they hit the market. The same can be seen in our first Just Chill review. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. It was a perfectly serviceable middle of the road beverage and because of that it got a 3/5 bottle rating.
I'm pretty sure they accidently sent our samples to us twice because I got two identical packages with a whole lot of beverages in each. It's no secret that I am a sucker for ginger flavored drinks, but the mountain of cans staring at me that clearly state that they are zero calories had me a bit standoffish. I can handle stevia and in moderation it's just fine, but thinking of so many ounces of it just waiting for me was intimidating. I let a can chill (get it) in the fridge for a while and then cracked it open for a nice relaxing night on the couch with a movie.

There are two important things to acknowledge at this point.

First, this is a relaxation beverage, but it did not put me to sleep and that is the way I feel these things should work. I have no doubt that has I went to bed shortly after drinking this I would have been fast asleep in no time at all, but I appreciate that it allows me to stay awake in a calmer state. I've had a handful of other drinks of this variety and most of them just make me sleepy. This one still allowed me to function and that is great.

Second, ginger reigns supreme. Zero calorie sweeteners are no match for a healthy dose of ginger. Think of the perfect ginger ale, with just a hint of a burn, and then up the ginger flavor a bit more and you have this drink. If I were to place a wager I would put my money on 95% of the stevia flavor is masked by the ginger. Only the faintest hint of it remains.

You may not be able to buy our opinions at Thirsty Dudes, but I am very grateful to have a stack of these on hand to drink at my leisure.

It seems to be a trend these days to be healthier. It may just be the best trend of all time. Everywhere I look healthier food options are popping up, including many drink companies making lower calorie beverages and presenting them in a “cool” way and not labeling them as diet. In the past diet drinks were pretty much marketed towards housewives. Now they are attempting to make them more attractive to the general population. Jones is doing so with their “Stripped “ line. The typeface they use looks as though it should say something along the lines of “extreme.” That's what the kids want I guess.

Another change these days is that in the past a single sweetener, such as sucralose or aspartame, would be used and I'm fairly certain we are all familiar with that diet death taste they would leave behind. A few years ago stevia started to get popular. It was more palatable, but still had a very distinct taste that it added to whatever it sweetened. At some point in the recent history of the world someone realized that no matter how diet drinks were marketed if they tasted more like the sweetener than the flavor of the drink, they weren't going to change many minds. This genius decided that while most people wouldn't drink zero calorie beverages, lower calorie was better than nothing, so they proposed using stevia as well as lower quantities of cane sugar. The result was beverages that I can drink without feeling like I need to run a mile to work off the calories.

The orange and mango flavor in this soda may be on the lighter side of the spectrum, but they are still stronger than whatever diet taste that is barely noticeable. It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. As a nation we embrace sugar far too much. I know I just crave it sometimes, but this is helping move us to a place where we don't need as much of a fix. It's to soda what methadone is to heroin. Junkies, all of us.

Up until this point Rocky Mountain Soda Co has had a consistently great record here on Thirsty Dudes. They have put their own twist on some standard sodas, and their use of beet sugar is commendable. Unfortunately this flavor falls short. I've enjoyed other elderberry beverages that I have tried, but this just misses the mark. Perhaps the deer, or elk, on the label licked the berries a bit, and perhaps those same animals have saliva that tastes like Orajel, but without the numbing factor. The taste of this falls somewhere between fruity and floral, but with a medicinal twist. I don't get it. I expected to love this, but it's just not happening.

I am by no means an expert of this topic, but I always thought bitters were little bottles of distilled flavoring that you added to alcoholic drinks. I guess that could be what this is, but I was under the impression that they were along the lines of a concentrate and that you added a very minimal amount to reach the desired taste. Of course, as always, I make up my mind just on an idea and I don't finish reading the rest of the bottle before my brain decides what to expect. Before I even took a sip I was convinced that his was not going to be what my mind thought it should be. I was ready to write it off instantly. Then I took a sip and read the rest of the bottle and found out that this is tonic water with a dash of grapefruit mint mixed in. So it looks like my beliefs were correct and also that I should not be writing drink reviews because I don't always have an open mind.

This is exactly what is says it is, and it does not lie about it being bitter. In most drinks that are grapefruit flavored one would expect the flavor to come from grapefruit juice. In here it tastes most like the rind was used, which makes it very bitter, but not unenjoyable. Also, the mint is there more as a cooling factor than as an actual mint taste. In a world where people generally go overboard with mint, this is something that I can truly appreciate.

I may have finally grown up this year and accepted the greatness of seltzer water, but I'm not quite ready to fully embrace tonic with bitters. Give me another couple of years and we'll talk again.

You might think this was a good idea if you're one of those dudes who makes pant tents for bacon but if you are a regular person, this is vile. Woah. This is gross. It smells like salt and smoke flavoring and "regular" hot chocolate. When you taste it, you thank your lucky stars that it doesn't taste as bad as it smells. It smells like fake bacon and tastes like fake smoke and has entirely too much salty saltiness.

This is a bad idea that went too far. Reign it in, Aspen.

I have not had strawberry milk since I was like fourteen. My friend Ian and I were sitting in his kitchen and drinking it and calling it "cow blood." Pretty morbid now that I think about it but we were fourteen. What did we know? Neither one of us had touched a boob. What else is there? We never drank. We didn't smoke. We just hung out all the time and played football in people's yards and hockey in people's driveways. We just hung out. We were all we knew and we were fine.

What we should have known was that this strawberry milk is complete garbage. Man. Now I know why I haven't had this stuff in like twenty years. It sucks. It tastes like candy strawberries but something about it still being milk makes me sick to my stomach. This is almost most certainly a "me" review and an opinion so don't get mad at me but I did not like this one bit. I don't really remember liking it back then which is probably why I haven't had any desire whatsoever to buy it.

Not for me. Ian, I'm telling you this now and I'm retroactively telling you this in 1994, I don't and never did like strawberry milk.

Up until I discovered the Just line of pop, the only thing I knew about Canadian sodas was Pop Shoppe, and while they are decent, they are fairly standard. There is nothing standard about Just. They take flavors that you would never imagine meeting in soda and combine them into greatness. When in your life have you ever thought about peach and habanero meeting, except for possibly in a salsa? I'm going to guess that your response is, “Never.” To be fair if I was told that my mean would consist of a pairing of those two foods, I would just assume it was fancy pants cuisine that came in too small of portions that I would not really enjoy. In here though, in here it is fantastic.

The peach actually brought along some friends named apple, pear, pineapple and lemon. Together they forma sort of fruit punch troop in while peach in the ring leader. He's the one who is in charge and your taste buds know it as soon as they meet. The habanero is there all by it's lonesome and it waits in the shadows of the aftertaste. You could swish a gulp of this around your mouth for hours and never detect the pepper, but as soon as you swallow your breath brings the flavor and the heat out. It's similar to the burn from ginger beer, but with a little bit of a different taste.

I would love to have bottles of this on deck for when I get sick this winter. Drinking a bottle would clear my sinuses right out, and do so with flavor and taste. I need to make my way back up to Canada and pick up the other flavors that this wonderful company puts out.

Melba loves that sugar, man. She adds it to everything. If the recipe called for eight ounces, she puts in ten. It's healthy. It's energy. In doing so, this is one sweet treat, dude. I shared this with people and this was too much. Way too much. It might taste like cherry and I suppose there could have been an element of "cream" in there but cherry cream soda this is not. Cherry cream soda does come at your teeth like a thousand minuscule jackhammers. I could feel my dentist getting richer as I drank this. Was it good? Eh. It wasn't her finest. It was alright. Melba, you're alright in my book but you might want to keep an eye on your fat grandkids before they get "the sugar."

Back to the classic taste of energy drinks where one dumb nerd just throws a package of packs of (American) Smarties into, I don't know, like a generic fruit punch. It's not terrible and it's better than "the old days" of energy drinks. Is it because it's organic? Probably not. It's probably better ingredients so, yeah, in hindsight; it probably is because it's organic. It's not terrible but it's kind of pretty standard tasting. As far as energy drinks go, this does taste "original" in the sense that it tastes like all of the other "original" energy drinks out there.

I can also say that this is better than both of the other versions of Dark Dog's stuff. Jay liked them. Good thing he reviewed them. This is good, though. I enjoyed it and I didn't get "the shakes" which I appreciate because I am trying to work and can't with "the shakes." Keep it original, Dark Dog.

Here is a brief story of me buying a handful of 2B flavors. I was somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the Midwest. I was as central as one can be. We had a ridiculously long drive to get to a show and we stopped in a town to eat, which to the best of my searching had nothing quick that was suitable for vegetarians except for French fries, onion rings and ice cream. I'm no fool and knew that on such an empty stomach that anything deep fried would destroy my stomach, so I of course got ice cream like a champ. In said horrible town we stopped to get gas as well and I found these cans in the cooler. I grabbed this vanilla one, and let the others be. Then as I approached the counter as say a mixed case of them for 50 cents each. In the cooler they were listed as $1.89 or something like that, so I grabbed the other flavors, because a deal is a deal and I have a duty to report to you, our readers. When the woman rung me out the vanilla rang up as full price. When I questioned her, so said only the room temperature ones were on sale. Does that make sense to anyone? They are the same product. They obviously paid the same amount for them. Also, the cooler is running the same amount whether they are in it or not, so it's not costing them any more money. I swapped my cold one out for a counter one, paid the woman and off we went. There's no real point to that other than me pointing out that if you're not in a bigger city the Midwest is a weird place.

Now, on to the soda; the entire shtick of this company is that they use monk fruit in combination with cane sugar to lower the sugar content by 80%. I've had too many diet drinks lately and have been putting this off because of it. I have to admit it's not bad. It has a little strange aftertaste from the monk fruit, but the “diet” flavor is not there. This is one of the strongest vanilla beverages I have ever come across. I'm venturing a guess that a good portion of the population has snuck a taste out of a bottle of extract of vanilla at some point in their childhood, with horrible results. It just smells so good, but it should never be tasted in that form. This tastes like a healthy dose of that was put into a generic soda water. It's kind of strange because overall it's a fairly light beverage, but the vanilla is so strong that you expect it to be creamy. It's a light, diet cream soda that doesn't' taste overly diet. It wouldn't be a go-to for me, but it falls under the category of I would happily drink it if it were served to me.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, and by Circle K I mean this bottle of carbonated tea. I've had a handful of tea sodas in my days on this planet and to be honest I don't know if any of the flavored ones have really impressed me. Give me a straight up sparkling black, green, white, or yerba mate tea and I'll be all over it, but something gets lost in the translation when you mix carbon dioxide, tea and fruit flavors. Something especially seems wrong when a zero calorie sweetener is brought into the mix. Look, I've made my peace with stevia. I don't love it, but I know it has its place and I've even been known to enjoy it in some drinks. In this bottle of Sotea it's blended with real sugar, so it should be actually decent, but it mixes with the peach flavor in a way that just makes the whole thing taste artificial. The ingredients say nothing about the peach juice, but “natural flavors” is listed, so I'm assuming it has something to do with an actual peach, but it just doesn't taste authentic. I was excited to try this line when I came across it, but it really is just not for me and my taste buds.

I can just imagine Christian groups being up in arms over this beverage. I envision picket lines and protestors screaming about how this beverage is luring the youth of America on a dark path; that they will become possessed by the devil if they drink it. Then someone will calmly explain to them that “diablo” is devil and “diabolo” is actually a prop for juggling and has nothing to do with the dark lord. As I've said in the past one letter can make a huge difference. For some reason the protestors will think that they already took things too far and won't believe the facts presented to them. It would be nice publicity for the company, so maybe that will actually happen and it will help them out.

In other worlds Diabolo is apparently a beverage that you can get in French cafes. They are fruity sparkling sodas and that is exactly what we have here. The twist with this company is that their products are low in calories and blend cane sugar, erythritol and stevia to sweeten their beverages. I'm not sure if it is this flavor in particular, but as soon as I took one sip my mind began to compare it to Clearly Canadian. It's very light and fruity. Unfortunately the diet taste can be a bit strong, but the dragon fruit and plum are flavors that it blends with nicely.

This is a nice alternative to the sodas that the American public is used to. It's a different beast that is not as horrible for you. Even compared to other diet sodas this feels lighter and not as thick. It definitely makes sense that it is the type of beverage that is popular in European cafes.

Here we have a company who understands how to do low calorie beverages. Perhaps it's just me but when I'm looking to lower my sugar/calorie intake, just reducing the amount of sweetener is a perfect solution. I don't need a beverage that is “fake sweet.” Sure zero calorie sweeteners can lower the amount of calories until they are non-existent, but they also have a very specific overpowering flavor to them that can ruin nearly any drink that they inhabit. In most cases you can taste the sweetener more than you can taste the actual flavor. Dark Dog still uses cane sugar, in conjunction with coconut sugar, but lowers the quantity to give you an energy drink that has 50 calories from 11g of sugar, yet you can also taste the flavor of the beverage with no distractions.

The caffeine in this drink comes from the trifecta of green tea, yerba mate, and guarana. Unlike the sweeteners used those flavors are very prevalent in the taste. This is essentially a sparkling tea drink with vitamins and a splash of juice added. The combination of elderberry, acerola, cranberry and lemon juice is very minimal and you can only detect hints of it when you take a sip. There is a vague fruitiness floating around the tea flavor.

If this can didn't state that it was only 50 calories I would never guess that it was a low calorie beverage. It still has just enough sweetness without loading you up with buttloads of sugar. Yes, that would be cubic buttloads the only official unit of measurement at Thirsty Dudes.

Mexican hot chocolate; one of those items on a menu that I cannot not buy. I've spent money on Mexican hot chocolate that I would be skeptical about buying an actual meal. You know the phrase, "If you have to know, you can't afford it." That does not apply for Mexican hot chocolate.

I spent around $12 on two boxes of this anticipating the spicy hotness of chili and cinnamon. I was let down. Why? This hot cocoa is chililess. Sans-chili. Unspicy. If you ordered this at an Indian restaurant and they asked you how spicy do you want this, you would say, "No spice."

Sure there is an adorable grandma on the box. I do not believe for a second that she made this for you or me. She would have made it with some zip. She would have made it the way they made it in the "old country." It's fine, though. It's got a little cinnamon and might be less chocolatey than a hot chocolate that you're used to. More milky with a cinnamon taste with a medium to light amount of chocolate. It's good. Not spicy but good.

I just realized that this whole time I made a mistake. I like "Aztec Hot Chocolate" not "Mexican Hot Chocolate." And you consider me a professional. I suck.