Dear Everyone,

We all agree that candy canes aren't very good, correct? The flavor is just okay, and there is too much substance to them, at least for a mint. On top of that at some point in their consumption they become flat out messy. Sticky faces, sticky hands, or worse yet, sticky gloves. They just aren't worth it. I mean if you absolutely need that flavor in your life, which I highly doubt anyone does, just eat a starlight mint. I understand the holiday esthetic has a lot to do with this particular candy persevering, but some on. Enough is enough.

The reason for the above rant is because this tastes like someone brewed some coffee with the wrong proportions of grounds to water, and while it was still the temperature of the sun they melted a handful of candy canes into it. It's something that a dumb kid would do. Let's be honest here, it's something I would have done when I was a kid…€¦or you know in the past couple of weeks, just to see how it would work/taste. After that they duped some cocoa in it and way too much milk. The result is that this has a base of a very weak coffee with not enough chocolate in it to make it taste like a real mocha. The peppermint flavor just sits on top of everything like it owns the place. Lucky for us this jerk is only seasonal and he won't be mucking up our drinks for much longer. I mean sure it definitely has a Christmassy taste to it, but it just could have been done better.

Bolthouse products are normally better than average, but they haven't been doing that good of a job getting the recipes right for these seasonal flavors. Don't worry your regularly scheduled programs will be on soon.

I've been reading Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World and I've learned a lot about the history of pop, or soda, or whatever you want to call it. I find it very interesting, and it's a good read. While I have a love for your classic sodas, I would love to go back in time and make a change. I'm pretty sure that the world would be a better place if sugar had never been added to fizzy drinks.

As I sit here sipping on this can of Solixir I keep thinking to myself this is great. It has an excellent taste (white grape and lime mixed together to give it an unusual citrus taste), and there are only 13g of sugar in here that occurs naturally in the fruit juice used. The thing in that there is a little something in the back of my brain that tells me that there is something wrong. That thing is in fact that it is a fairly dry soda and it's “missing” sugar. Now, I only feel that way because my body has been programmed over the last 3+ decades to expect soda to be uber sweet. The thing is it doesn't need it. If I had started off associating a taste like this with what soda should be I would be completely disgusted with how sweet a “normal” pop is if I had one now for the first time.

On top of being a healthier soda, this also has a botanical blend added to it that helps with concentration, without the spike and crash that caffeine and other energy drink garbage has.

This is what I want. This is how things would be in a perfect world. People wouldn't be so overweight and overridden with diabetes (well at least to some extent).

Look, if an iced tea can even possibly be good past its expiration date, I'm fine with it. Those are just suggestions anyhow, right? Sure, this expired in April and here we are deep into December but honestly, how bad could it have gotten? There isn't anything in this drink that could really go bad. I suppose that could be a bad thing in itself if you think about it. Like that shot of a McDonald's cheeseburger every day for a month that looks just as good as the day it was purchased. Something that will never die and never tarnish is wrong in itself. We're supposed to age. We're supposed to get wrinkles. That's what our natural, genetic makeup is telling our bodies to do. Get hunchy, get grey, and get upset when people walk on your lawn.

This drink, old age and all, was good. I don't think that if I drank it in it's specifically allocated time it would have been any better or even different really. It tastes different than American lemon green teas. It's almost hard to place what makes it different but something here just tastes more right. It tastes like there is some actual tea in there. Sure, in the ingredients it's listed as "green tea extract" and "green tea flavor" but that's about all you can get out of green tea, right? Lemon juice concentrate is real lemon. Honey is honey. "Lemon flavor" is a bit sketch but it's lemon. Who cares? We know what it tastes like. This might be all of the above ingredients plus a hint or essence of something floral.

If I ever go to Taiwan, I will most certainly look for M. Bison, but after that search promptly grinds to a halt, I feel like I will have fun looking for drinks like this because this tastes right.

When buying a home, how many times in one day can you go to the hardware store? I have gone to Home Depot at least once a day, today twice, for the last week and a half. Caulk, wood, paint, primer, faucets, ceiling fans, wall sconces, and so on and so forth. It's a lot of work and a lot of money and a lot of time. Today I decided to treat myself a little bit.

Sure, I needed paintable caulk. Sure I did. Why wouldn't I? On my way to the first trip to the store, I decided to get something nice to drink for myself to pre-reward myself for an impending job well done. I saw this at the store and it stood out because I knew we hadn't done it. Sometimes I think we have done it all but then I leave my guard down, new stuff fills the shelves and it seems our job will never end. I bought it without thought and headed home for my double entendre "Caulkfest" of an afternoon with a father/son electrical duo.

This tea put me in a good place. Sure my hands were filled with caulk and plaster dust and general grime, but when I took sips of this drink it put all that in the back of my mind. This tea was a great middle ground between a sweetened and unsweetened tea. Sure, I know, once you add sugar, it's no longer an unsweetened tea, but it's lightly sweetened and nothing is masked by the sweetness of a sweetener. You can taste the bitterness of the oolong tea and although there is no actual honey in the drink, there is essence of honey that you can really taste. There is also essence of caramel, which, if you think about it, you can taste.

This is a wonderful addition to the great teas that Tazo makes for us. If you've got a long day of monotonous tasks ahead of you, maybe you should buy yourself a vacation drink like this.

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.

Chuck didn't like Christmas. It was always the time where everyone was very thoughtful and it made him feel like a pile of garbage. Everyone else was happy, buying gifts for each other and he just never wanted to participate in any of the festivities. He never was at a store and thought, "Oh, Karen would love this." He knew it was him and he could probably fix it if he just tried harder but he was in his thirties and if it didn't just happen by now, it never was going to.

This Christmas was no different. He went out on Christmas Eve and just bought everyone gift cards. He knew it's what people could use but not necessarily what they wanted, which also made him feel bad.

He went to his girlfriend's parent's house for Christmas and felt like he was just going through the motions. Everyone was open presents around him, smiling, and just shredding paper like it was suffocating the presents it was encasing. He just sat there and opened his, respectfully and to himself. Socks, ill-fitting sweater, videos in a format he can't use...same thing every year. All of a suddenly he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was his girlfriend's dad with a cup of tea. He was a cynical man himself and just gave Chuck a nod like he understood. He smelled it and it was rich with cinnamon. He took a sip and it was a very strong cup of tea but it was good. It was almost like a spicy, candy cinnamon but it wasn't sweet. There were some other spices in there that made it a pretty bold tea. It defiantly perked him up and allowed him to at least fake a smile as people opened their awful gifts from him.

A couple minutes later when the wrapping paper was all picked up and everyone was catching their breath, Chuck was sitting with a half full cup of tea thinking to himself that he couldn't finish it. It was good but it was just too much for him to choke down the rest of. It was too strong and sure he could have steeped it less but it really wasn't in there that long. He wished everyone happy holidays but was happy to just go home and go to sleep like the Grinch he knew he was and the old man that he knew he was becoming.

Let us start a petition to get lemons removed as the standard for flavoring water in restaurants. Lemons are overrated. They are low on the totem of citrus. I'm not exactly sure what is at the top; maybe blood oranges. Oh man, a nice slice of blood orange in your water would be fantastic. I am a realistic man though, and I know that's never going to happen right off the bat. Lets take baby steps and start off with limes. They are of close relation to the lemon; they even look the same, except green. I know they will still carry the same gross bacteria from improper storage and preparation, but at least it will taste a bit better.

If you're wondering what it would be like, because you don't understand how your imagination works, mix a packet of True Lime into a glass of water. It's pretty much the same thing as squeezing a slice of the actual fruit. Who needs imagination anyway?

There are trace amounts of cane sugar in this for some reason. I'm 99.9% sure the True Lemon doesn't have that, and I'm not exactly sure why it's in here. It doesn't taste sweet, but it gives me the illusion that this is the world's most watered down limeade. I just don't understand why it's necessary. Let the citrus do it's work, without assistance. It has to learn some how.

Ahh, Christmas Eve. 'Tis the time for me to wrap all the presents I bought in one day while the little buddy is away. Did I succeed? Ha! No. I am actually writing a review instead of wrapping presents. Will I catch gruff for it? Probably. Will this review write itself? Nope. You see the priority of things in my life. Review, then joy.

It's snowing here and this is a summer drink. Pomegranate lemon green tea: Summer drink. It might just be the lemon but if we're talking about season fruit, isn't pomegranate a fall fruit? I've got one in the kitchen but I bet it's going to be alright. Why? Because I'm no fruit connoisseur, that's why.

This is a good drink, even if I have to go out after the review and shovel. It, as most Made drinks do, have a good green tea bitterness. The pomegranate is there and just a titch of lemon that you can actually taste. I really have enjoyed Made and this is no different. Their green tea line is good because they've got a good base and everything else is just icing.

Why is orange drink necessary in this day and age? I mean Tang was important because it went to space, but normal people aren't traveling past the stratosphere. It's not like orange juice is expensive by any stretch of the imagination. Sure the cheaper stuff is made from concentrate and has added sugar at times, but it doesn't have as much sugar as any orange drink, nor is it as concentrated.

I would much rather have preferred a little bottle of the cheapest orange juice in the world to this. There is only 10% juice in here, and I feel like 20% of what's left is sugar. It's sugar water with a slight orange flavor to it. The flavor is actually more tangerine than orange too, but in a fake sort of way.

I can't even make it through ¼ of this bottle without getting annoyed that someone would purchase this over real juice. There wouldn't even be a price difference, unless you went for a higher caliber of juice.

Bleh. This is gross. I really like Sweet Leaf stuff. Even those strange mint ones. I was happy to see them integrated into stores locally because there were only select places that I could get them around me. This though, this blows. This is some of the worst diet iced tea I've ever had. It has single handedly soiled the good name of sweet tea and slapped the face of the people that worship it. It tastes like it's almost a decent sweet tea as a base. Ingredients are simple until you reach the devil that is sucralose. Filtered water, black tea, citric acid. That's the making of a good, long lasting tea.

You want to know what the best diet tea is? Unsweetened tea. This is swill. The sucralose absolutely ruins whatever integrity this tea could have had. Congratulations, murderer. You have struck again.

You want to know what the best diet tea is? Unsweetened tea. This is swill. The sucralose absolutely ruins whatever integrity this tea could have had. Congratulations, murderer. You have striken again.

This is my second go at Harmless Harvest's raw coconut water. When I tried it for the first time, it apparently had been mistreated, temperature wise, at some point in its travels and it had started to spoil/turn. Note to all of you reading out there, if you get a coconut water that fizzes when you open it, dump that little guy right down the drain. I assure you it will taste completely horrible.

Now that I have a bottle that is fresh, and whose molecular makeup hasn't changed, I'm ready to drink up. If you have ever spent far too long trying to open up a coconut you found on the beach with improper tools, then you will remember this taste from your payoff. There is no other way to describe this other than to say it tastes fresh. Over the years I have tasted dozens of different coconut waters and this is the finest I've drunk. It has a certain sweetness to it that is long in the processing the other companies use. It's a sweetness that is appreciated. You see most companies pasteurize their products by subjecting them to very high temperatures. In that process the flavor is changed and nutrients are destroyed. To keep things pure Harmless Harvest presses the coconuts with thousands of pounds in order to eliminate the bacteria that pasteurization kills off. The results are much tastier with higher health benefits. It's a win-win that you should become a part of.

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.

Take a look around. Do you see any other bottles of tea on the shelves with real friggin' lemons in it? No, not lemon flavoring, seasoning, or essence. A real slab of lemon right there in the bottle. Aside from that, you've got a black tea and that is sweetened with honey. Could you imagine a better combination? I am not going to run through the ingredients again. I will just leave it there on the table, all spread out. One, two, three and you can take a look and decide if you need anything else to make a wonderful iced tea.

Hey Steve, what do you want to call our new line of drinks? Steve's Sweet Styles? You do realize that is the dumbest name I have ever heard, right? Like, it's beyond bad Steve. Not in the better than bad it's good way; in the so bad I want to punch you right in your stupid hole that those words fell out of. Well fine, I will come up with something better. Juice Sparklers? No. Oh, I got it! Let's name it after what we do to make it! All we do is mix all the ingredients together in a basin, minus the fruit and then mash that all up on a screen above it to collect the precious juice. Let's just call it MASH. It's a good, simple, non-offensive name. I mean the way we get the juice out of those grapefruits it's pretty violent, but no one needs to know that, so the name won't conjure images of us putting all our weight onto cinderblocks and just mashing the daylights out of that citrus. The results do sure taste right nice though.

I didn't have faith in you when you wanted to use crystalline fructose and sucralose to sweeten it, but the way we mixed it all together, no one would ever be the wiser that this was a diet drink from the flavor. Well, I guess it's not too diet. There are still 25g of sugar in our 20oz bottles. That's much better than our competitors though, those guys use two to three times as much sugar as we do.

This is one fine pink grapefruit soda though. It tastes nice and crisp. It carries the sourness of the fruit nicely without making you pucker your lips. Also, kudos to you for calling it a “low calorie sparkling juice drink.” That makes it seem much fancier than calling it grapefruit pop.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in a post Harry Potter world. Both the book and movie franchises have come to their conclusion. As I write this it has been two and a half years since the final movie and they are trying times. Butterbeer has made its way into reality from the imagination of a British woman. While it may not be exactly what the author had in mind, a butterscotch flavored cream soda burst onto the scene and captivated the taste buds of dozens. Okay, hundreds, if not thousands. It was not quite for me, but it exists and that is an interesting thing. It was the first butterscotch soda I have ever tasted, and as a person, who dislikes the candy, I found it fairly enjoyable.

Dang! has put together a little variation here. Instead of using cream soda they went with root beer for their base. To be fair this may have existed long before the other soda, but since I have never come across it until now, in my find it's post-Potter. I must say that I enjoy this a whole lot more than the Flying Cauldron Butterbeer. The root beer flavoring tones down that of the butterscotch. Don't worry, both flavors are most definitely present, but neither of them overpowers the other. This is fairly creamy, smooth and delicious. The flavor starts briefly as a nice dark licorice heavy root beery that quickly fades to tones of butterscotch, but the best part is the aftertaste is a perfect medley of the two.

I am looking forward to someday coming across Dang's regular root beer, because that initial flavor gives me a lot of hope for it. As for this, well it's a memorable soda that I wouldn't drink all of the time, but it would make a nice little treat every once and a while. If you are a fiend for butterscotch, you should most definitely track some down. You won't be disappointed.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, especially when it's falsely claimed. I mean there is nothing terribly wrong with OKF's aloe drinks, but they don't really stand out from the pack. The size of the aloe chunks range from average to the smaller side, and the flavor tastes like most other brands aloe. To be king I would say that you would have to have excessively large chunks and use actual juice and not flavoring. You need mango puree, premium aloe vera and chunks the size of the Hope diamond if you want to be the head of the monarchy. This here is overly sweet, with a mango flavor that doesn't taste exactly right. Perhaps OKF could be the baron or a count. Oh I got it, OKF is the Aloe Vera Duke.

If diamonds are a girl's best friend than what would this be? Well let's find out together, shall we? Girls are taken care of. They have diamonds. Good call, girls. Who is left? Men, women, kids, and old people? Who would this be for? I think we can vote out old people because this is too sparkly for them. They like bland things like mashed potatoes with nothing on them and no extra spice. Women already have diamonds from when they were younger since not only are diamonds a girls best friend, but they are also forever so women, pick your diamonds with care since you are living with them.

Kids...I don't think you would be into this. It's sweet but diety sweet. Not much, but kids love sugar and corn syrup. Adults have come to accept it as a necessary evil. Kids? Off the list.

Who's left? Men. I am loosely affiliated with this group here. This is a manly, clear bottle with a sharp carbonation. It's a little diet but it's not labeled as such so you don't need to hand in your man card that you didn't have to do anything to get except either live past twenty eight or save someone from a burning building. The taste of this is like that of a grapefruit. A light grapefruit that you might put a little Splenda on instead of sugar to cut that gnarly sourness that comes with grapefruits.

There you have it men, women, children, and the elderly. You all have your stuff and now men have one more thing than they knew they had yesterday. Congratulations. Sure, with diamonds, girls up to women up to elderly women will pretty eternally win. This is just a diet drink that will go bad six months after you buy it and has a retail price quite lower than a fancy pants, princess cut, F class diamond.

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.

My ladyfriend works at Starbucks and come early fall the customers their lose their minds. People are constantly asking about their pumpkin spice lattes and then they will be available. It got so bad that I think it was actually released early this year. I've had them before and I think they taste decent enough, but I don't understand the power it has over people. It paints two images in my head; the first is that of zombies wanting nothing more out of life than sweet, sweet brains and the other is junkies wanting nothing more out of life than their sweet, sweet fix. All three things are sweet, sweet, so it's fitting.

This year Bolthouse Farms decided to release a limited edition seasonal line of beverages. The first one I saw hit the shelves was their take on the pumpkin spice latte. While I don't think this will have the same effect as the other does on the patrons of said coffee shop, it just may be enough to hold them over. I don't know why it would need to hold them over though, since they are both seasonal, and available at the same time.

In it's purest form this is a coffee beverage made with Arabica coffee. For me the problem is in the fact that there is way more milk in here than coffee. Yes, I know that's what a latte is, but I'm used to the soy variety, so this is a lot of milk for me to handle. So yeah, they take this coffee flavored milk and then add some spices and real pumpkin puree. I assure you that you can most definitely taste the pumpkin in this. There are a whole slew of pumpkin flavored products on the market these days, and most of them just taste like the spices that are used in a pumpkin pie. This taste more like the actual pumpkin, and it's interesting. As a side effect of that the amount of spices in here are lower than I would prefer, but you take what you can get in this crazy world of fancy beverages.

My final diagnosis is that if this contained more coffee, more spices and was soy based instead of primarily dairy based it would be one hell of a drink. Of course it would probably be a different drink entirely, but I know what the body wants and now so do you.