I'm on tour right now and the band I'm with just played at Slo Brew in San Luis Obispo, CA with Titus Andronicus. People got us excited about this venue because it's also a restaurant and they feed all bands that play here. All the band members were asked what they wanted but they didn't think to ask me, the merch guy.

Then my good friend Max Gregor came to the rescue and bought me a slice of pizza and this huge bottle of root beer. I was totally surprised and it made my night. The pizza was as good as I was going to get in California, but the root beer was pretty decent. It's a local brewing company and you can tell this isn't their first batch of root beer. It has a nice sweetness, but not too sweet. It's a very "safe" root beer and would be a good introductory to someone new to root beer outside of Barqs and Dad's.

Sometimes you decide that you're going to hike an 18 mile creek. You decide to do it in parts. Before you know it summer is almost over and you still have a bit of it you haven't explored. So you go out and hike it on an unseasonably nice day. The thing is that the area you have left to hike is much longer than you had anticipated. Eventually you get to where the creek ends on the map, and you find a pretty neat waterfall. Being the scientist you are you deduce that the water must be coming from somewhere so you climb up, almost falling numerous times. At the top you see that the creek goes on even further than you had thought. Being the dummy that you are you forgot your water in the car. You decide you reached your goal and your dehydrated and fed up with walking on uneven rocks, so you make your way through the woods to the road. The road back to your car is long (over four miles) and there are no stores on the way. You feel like you're going to die, and have convinced yourself that you need to go up to a house and knock to ask for a glass of water. At that moment you catch the scent of grapes in the air. Across the street there are rows and rows of grape vines, so you go steal a few handfuls, and hydrate yourself with their sour juice. The thing is you eat too many, and it starts to corrode your tongue. Eventually you make it back to the car, and of course your water is too hot to be refreshing, so you hightail it to a 711 and pick yourself up a bottle of lemonade.

Summer may be ending, but it's still hot for the time being, so why not sneak in one last bottle of the official beverage of the season? Snapple did it right with their Lemon Daze line. It has a ton of sugar in it, but that is the way lemonade is supposed to be. It's made with real lemon juice and it has a nice tartness to it. Unfortunately that tartness felt like hell on my grape corroded tongue, but I still enjoyed the drink. It cooled me down and refreshed me just the way I needed it to. Oh I also drank like a gallon of water, but it didn't taste nearly as appropriate as this. Oh, I seem to have slipped into the first person. That's just poor writing, but that's what you get with Thirsty Dudes.

You know that a drink cannot surpass "three bottles" when with every sip you wonder if it has gone bad. I am half way through this bottle and, as aforementioned, I don't know if it's going to kill me or not. It could be the maple syrup that my palate is not used to but it's not like anything that I'm used to.

The strawberry though...that is real. It tastes like someone took an iced tea sweetened with maple syrup and just squished some strawberries into it. It tastes natural. I can honor that part of it. The maple syrup part of it...that's just odd. Call me an "ignorant American" Canada, but this kind of makes it taste funny.

Maple syrup. You're great on pancakes. Stick to pancakes. You're good on that.

Herman the local meteorologist was very concerned about two things. The first and foremost is the weather and atmospheric conditions. It is his livelihood. It helped him put his kids through college, buy that eight series Bimmer he's always wanted, put a roof over their heads and food on the table. He is constantly studying weather patterns to try to be on top of his game and be the best at predicting what's going to happen so the people of his fair city don't get caught in surprise thunderstorms or bundle up for perfectly clear and warm days.

The second is pure, unaltered food. He proudly condones the raw food diet, eats a lot of nuts and seeds as snacks, and will never order meat prepared any other way except raw. He likes his cheese stinky and his juice pulpy. The later of which on one particular day would merge his two loves together to form one super products for Herman.

Herman went into an Asian grocery store as he did most days to pick up things like bok choy, durian, and fish. He was about to walk out and saw a new orange drink. He picked it up to see what was in it and one of the ingredients was called "white cloudy." In addition, it was also bottled with pulp. He decided to bring it to his office and give it a try while watching the doppler radar for inconsistencies.

He sat down and opened the can and was blown away. It was the pulpiest drink he had ever drank and whatever white cloudy was, it was like the white, fluffy clouds of the heavens opened up and gave him this drink. It tasted like a tremendously pulpy orange juice that was perhaps a little sweeter than regular orange juice.

That day he was so excited he stayed late at work, did research on a tornado, and stopped to get another can at the store on his way home. He had truly found a drink made for meteorologists with a special ingredient tailored for them.

Hey Gus, as we have learned through the last couple of years you have some very good fruit sodas, but as soon as you venture into the world of “brown” pop that all goes out the window. You have found your niche in the soda world, and there is no need to be greedy and make every flavor. Stick with the fruits and you will have a prosperous future.

Speaking of which, I recently had a bottle of your Star Ruby Grapefruit, and I must say kudos. No, not those fake granola bar treats from the 90s, I mean job well done. As a fan of grapefruit, and pop of the flavor, I will admit that a lot of the time the “big” brands take it a bit too far. The vision of the fruit is lost. You stayed pretty true. You took some grapefruit juice, cut it minimally with orange juice to get rid of that overly bitter edge, then added some sparkling water and a bit of cane sugar. 22g out of 12oz isn't bad at all. It is nearly half of what is in a can of Coke, or more fittingly Squirt. The end result is a soda that actually tastes like pink grapefruit, but doesn't give you that sour face look.

Gus, you're a good guy, and you have a great little company going. I just wish the world would realize what I have so this could be more readily available.

Body Armor is back with a couple new flavors and a few old ones reworked a little. The release of the new “mixed berry” flavor is an update to their Raspberry, Blueberry Goji beverage. The packaging is basically the same as the old version, and the flavor isn't that far off as well. It tastes of many berries, antioxidants and coconut water, which is good because that is exactly what it is.

It's nice that there are so many options out there in a world that for years was Gatorade or nothing. I would say that 8 out of 10 times I would choose this over a classic sports drink. As an added bonus to the flavor with each bottle you get 2.5 times the electrolytes as a bottle of Gatorade and 2 times the vitamins that are in Vitamin Water. You're getting flavor and more functionality. It looks like this is a win-win.

The tropics must have been going through a storm when this drink was made. You know the type that I'm referring to, the kind that blows garbage all over your lawn. You always say you're going to cut down those hedges because all they do is collect garbage and take up your limited front yard but every time you go in the shed to get a saw, you remember that you don't want neighbor dogs defecating on your yard. Well that garbage filled yard is like what this drink taste like: a diet tropical garbage citrus storm.

Right off the bat the Stevia is bastardizing whatever is in this bottle so I cannot get a good read of any flavors without being rudely interrupted by your highness. There might be a mango or a pineapple in here but I wouldn't know because, much like Adam Levine's number one biggest and fattest fan pushing her way up to the front of the crowd, Stevia is shoving it's way all over your poor taste buds.

Sometimes you wonder why drinks are on sale and then you drink things like this and realize why. Questions and answers wrapped into one cheap, 473ml bottle of diet sweetener.

Oh look, a lantern. It would be awesome if this was a...woah, it is a magic lantern. What's up, genie? Herb? Your name is Herb? Cool. I thought it would be something more, I don't know, majestic, but Herb is fine. Oh, oh, really? I get three wishes? This is awesome. I wish it were brighter in here so I could get around. I don't know how I got to this section of the castle. I was just checking my text messages and emails and walking aimlessly and ended up here. Oh...what the...that was a wish? I guess I did say, "I wish it was brighter." That one is on me, herb.

You know what? I'm thirsty. Could I have something to drink? No, what kind of a genie, oh, I get it. "I wish I could get something to drink. Woah. Do you have unlimited glitter? That's pretty cool. You'd be a hit in an art school. People would lay down some lines of glue and then all the kids would say, "I wish we had glitter!" and you would do your magic and art would happen.

Oh, you know what? I don't drink alcohol. Could I swap this with a non-alcoholic drink? What? I have to wish it? I have to say, "I wish this was non-alcoholic" for you to do it. That's...no...wait...come on! I just blew three wishes on light and one drink that I didn't want and one that I did want? This better be one heck of a drink, Herb. Ugh, what is this? You just took the alcohol out and left whatever else was in there? This is really bad. It's got a split second of candy sour apple and then it's just overwhelmingly terrible almost alcoholic tasting. It's kind of bitter like they might have used bad apples. Herb. Did you poison me? You didn't? Man, I wish you did. Wait...no!!!! Oh, I wasted my wishes. Now I'm kind of glad I wasted those because I would have just killed myself. Suicide by genie. That would be something. Thanks, Herb. Can you tell me how to get out of this castle? No? Alright, Herb. Thanks, I guess.

Everyone knows that koalas sit around in trees all day tripping their balls off from the eucalyptus leaves they eat. Guess what, everyone is wrong. While eucalyptus is a staple in the animals diet it does not have any mind-altering effects on them. They are just lazy animals, which don't eat a proper diet to keep moving throughout the day. Perhaps if they had more of a high-energy diet they would be swinging from the trees like a bunch of monkeys.

In my mind this beverage was whipped up in a lab to get these little guys moving. I'm not sure if there is caffeine in here, like most colas, but I have to believe that lemon and elderberry juice along with agave syrup would have to give them a little more pep than a couple of quasi toxic leaves. Speaking of which, why is there fruit juice in this cola? I actually don't know how this actually tastes like cola with the ingredients that are in it, but it does. It's a slightly fruity cola that has a much different sweetness than most people are used to. I fully support the use of agave to sweeten sodas, but it does have a drawback. When it is used in “brown” pop they never taste as dark as you would want them to. It's something I can overlook though as this gives a new twist to a classic beverage.

I should start by saying that what I wanted to drink today and review was a milk tea that Jay and I picked up with Editor Dan on some random trip to Toronto. What in the world were we doing there? Nothing? Just getting drinks? There had to be a reason why we went. Well anyway, that was last year and that milk tea expired in January of this year. Yes, January. We are now in September and this drink, containing milk, expired eight months ago. I thought it best to play it save, chalk it up as a loss, and drink something a little safer.

Which brings us to this drink. Once again, the lovable and beardable Editor Dan bought us a handful of drinks, this being one. I am an enormous fan of the Hint, Ayala, and infused waters. This, though, was different. What was different? Well, if you couldn't guess, it was carbonated. If you have ever drank a sparkling water, AKA "seltzer" you know that there is a strange almost bitterness to it. This contained that oddity. It's strange that if you add carbonation to regular water it tastes like you've carbonated water that has been sitting in a cup for a week at room temperature. This tastes like regular old seltzer water with watermelon flavoring. It's not as strong as say a Polar or Seagram's seltzer, which makes it "worse." "Worse" is a relative term but it's simply not as good.

If you're going to want infused water, get a regular Hint because they are pretty wonderful. If you want a sparkling Hint, stop wanting that and just get real seltzer water.

You know that classic picture of the evolution of man? All I can picture is an updated version of it that depicts protein drinks. It starts off with just gross clumps of straight whey protein. Then it goes onto gross protein powder from the 80's. There are several different shots of various protein drinks that have risen to fame in the past decade or so. Then there is Muscle Milk. It stands tall, like the fully evolved man Darwin spoke of. To the left of that there is a smaller carton, but it is in an omnipotent glow. It is a carton of Evolve. Now that is advertising people. We should be getting paid to come up with this stuff. Instead I have a cat “ice gilling” me because I'm not letting him drink any of my beverage.

Evolve is based on the Muscle Milk formula, except that it is all-natural. It's sweetened with stevia and monk fruit, as well as cane sugar. Surprisingly you can only faintly taste the other sweeteners, and I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read the carton. On top of all that it is gluten free, so all of you out there who suddenly suffer from wheat gluten allergies (something that I'm pretty sure didn't exist a decade ago, all hail the modern world and the way it mutates us) can have at it. Seriously, have at it. It's pretty tasty, and you look like you could do with a protein boost.

While I was visiting our local Co-Op here in Buffalo I ran into a friend who works there. He told me they just got in some weird carbonated coconut water. Of course my response was, “Ugh, that sounds terrible. Of course I'll buy it.” As I was cashing out my mind kept reeling about how it's ridiculous the amount of things that get carbonated. How could carbonated coconut water be refreshing? I know in Europe people drink carbonated water everywhere. Seriously, they give bands carbonated water on stage. I asked for still water and I was looked at as I was out of my mind. It's not refreshing at all.

Okay, so the point of all of this was I walked outside and cracked this can open to be pleasantly surprised that it was not carbonated; it was just a clever name. You know, H2O is water, so C2O is coconut water. I feel I could have easily figured that out by reading the can, but I took my friend's word.

I feared gross bubbly coconut garbage, but what I was delivered was a quite tasty, still coconut water. The only ingredient is 100% pure coconut water, so there's really not much room for it to go astray. On a side note can we all agree that plain coconut water is much better than the flavored varieties? They always end up tasting chalky and kind of wrong.

Mojitos aren't just for the Mexican or the lovers of Mexican food anymore! Was it ever that way? I rarely see people drink let alone drink mojitos. I like the idea of mint in a drink but there is an awful lot of mint in a mojito. People sit there and stab away at the mint and hope that they didn't just pay twelve dollars for ice and mint. Before we go any further, I know mojitos have lime and not lemon, but this very closely resembles that of a mojito so I'm going to push forward with it as is.

This is actually pretty refreshing drink. Light but adequate mint and equal parts lemon meet in the middle, shake hands like they sold each other a car at a very reasonable price, and do so very maturely. This does taste a bit like a watered down and for some reason minty lemonade but it's far enough away from it that I shouldn't bother mentioning it. It's just too bad that keyboards don't come with some sort of key that I could go back and erase. I mean, typewriters had it. Seems like an odd thing to forget after all these years.

Summer? Yes but for a limited time. If you can, find this, enjoy the sun, and try to surf. Even if you can get up for a couple seconds, that's enough to get the itch, right?

It as if nature knew I had bought this cider because it decided to drop the temperature twenty five degrees. All of a sudden, I want to just walk around wearing a hoodie with headphones on and not acknowledge anyone or anything, as I enjoy doing because I can be a bit of an introvert and sometimes enjoy when people think I'm just creeping around. I'm not, I just want everyone to leave me the hell alone for a little bit. If those same people knew that I was thinking of things like apple cider, they would probably be alright with me lurking around the city.

I rarely eat candy apples and eat caramel apples even less. Why? Well, a beard does not mesh well with a ball of sticky candy, for one. For two, they are impossible to eat on their own. I thought that if I got this I could drink the fall up in an old coffee cup. Was I right? Sure, if you are concerned about drinking all that fall has to offer and, even in your imagination are concerned about your weight.

This initially tastes very strong. The first two or three sips really taking some getting used to as this cat is a sweet treat if I have ever had one. Subsequent sips are a mix between a pretty good rendering of a liquid caramel apple and a rendering of a liquid caramel apple of your gluttonously and stupidly dipped your caramel apple into aspartame. Ahh, yes. The ingredient that we all loved in the early nineties but now venomously despise is back and hiding in our caramel apple drinks. The sweetener is very strong but the flavor of the cider is pretty good and close to it's model so I can only penalize it so much. It tugs me in both directions so much that I can only cop out and give it a three and wonder how long it's going to take me to get through the other seventeen K-Cups. Dilemma.

When I was in grade school I would wake up in the morning, eat a bowl of cereal, get ready for school and then pack my lunch. It was generally a ham sandwich with mustard, a juice box and a pack fruit snacks. When that was done I would make myself a beverage while I waited for the bus, which picked me up in front of my house. I was convinced that the weirder the stuff I drank the better off I would be. I would mix every beverage in the fridge and just down it. This included adding milk to everything, which as every scientist knows leads to curdling. That is what this drink reminds me of; adding a little milk to orange juice. The flavors separate from each other and the orange juice ends up not tasting like itself anymore. This isn't as gross as that, but since the ingredients are only coconut water and orange juice, I am left wondering what happened to the orange flavor. I'm guessing when they juiced it up the peel got into the mix. It tastes bitter, and neither coconut water, nor orange juice should taste that way. I think I fared better with my prepubescent cocktail mixtures.

Remember when you were a kid and you would drop something, like ice cream on the street, and the next day you would walk down that very street and there would be a seemingly infinite amount of ants on it? I feel like if you spilled some of this on the ground, ants would come from all corners of the earth. Anyone who has a dog knows that you could be anywhere in the house and if you as much as touch a receptacle with food in it, the dog is right there, faithfully by your feet. Fruitopia is like that to ants.

Doing my most careful attempt at not spilling any in fear that ants would inhabit my body as a home for themselves, I drank this perhaps faster than I needed to. It was good, though, so it wasn't like I had to choke it down. It was, quite literally, a strawberry juice with passion fruit in it. Not an inventive review, I know, but there are no clever branding techniques or misinterpreted messages. Strawberries and passion fruit: Done and done. Check and check.

I finished the can at night and did an attempt to take a picture on a building ledge but was unsatisfied so I left it in my car to take a picture of today with the fear that I would open my door and a frightening mass of ants would just fall out like the world's most awful prank.

The long of it:
Order yourself a nice key lime pie to go. Then take a pit stop to Gotham and get yourself a scoop of that toxic sludge that transformed the Joker in Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Blend that together with your pie, and then set up some bunsen burners and a little torch to evaporate any liquid that might be left in the concoction you made. Take the crust that is left and crush it up into a fine powder to add to your drinks when you want to pretend that you will sleep.

The short(er) of it:
This tastes like liquid key lime pie that someone spilled toxic waste on, and it didn't work for me. I got home around 2am and immediately took this to ensure I would be able to fall asleep quickly (I know it says to drink a half hour before sleep). Come six am I was still awake. Gross and ineffective.

Does anyone else have second thoughts about drinking a beverage that pops when you twist off the cap and an eerie smoke pours out of the opening? I feel like I should be wearing a has mat suit with some thick gloves that you can handle uranium with. Essentially it makes me feel like this beverage should not exist outside of some lab somewhere.

Being as I am a scientist, specifically one with a degree in drinkology (no , not like some pretentious mixologist, I had to spend eight years in college to get my degree), I through caution of radioactivity to the wind an dove in head first. By that I mean I took a small tentative sip. I can safely say that this does not taste nuclear, and I have no fear of my pee coming out glowing later.

The strange thing about this beverage is that it is made with real orange juice (it's the second ingredient, but it's only 3% of the whole), yet it still tastes like Tang. Have they ever thought of marketing this as an energy drink for astronauts? I imagine that is exactly what space explorers do not need though. They're stuck up in orbit for months at a time with, what I expect is little to do for a good portion of their days. Why would they want to be all hopped up on energy drinks? I think I would like to sleep through as much as that experience as possible. So yeah, nix that idea.

As part of the recovery line this beverage is meant to give you energy as well as hydrate you. Think of it as Rockstar meets Gatorade with sexy results!!! Wait, that's not right. There is nothing sexy about this. It tastes like Gatorade made a Tang flavor and then they added a bit of an energy compound to it. It doesn't taste too much like chemicals, but it's there around the edges. Actually it's there in a way that makes it taste vaguely diet, even though it's sweetened with sucrose.

On a side note, while I do like the idea that it is in a resealable can, I have to say that about a third of the sips I took resulted in some sort of splash back that got on my clothes. Either they need to work on the design a bit, or I need to learn how to drink properly.

I walked into the beer merchant in my city knowing full well that they have a decent selection of non-alcoholic drinks. Someone mentioned to me previously that they had the Lester's Fixins chicken wing pop but they didn't tell me that they had a couple different ones there. I thought, you know what? I'm going to share this with my good friend Lauren and maybe some kids. I'll get something kid friendly and perhaps more interesting. Welp, I'm the fool because this was completely and utterly disgusting.

Travel back in time to when you were around four and your parents bought you a new cooking set with fake food in it. Remember when you could get plastic food that actually smelled vaguely like what it was supposed to be? Well be a four year old idiot and make and eat a plastic piece of jelly and you've got this drink. It tasted like melon flavored plastic, nothing like what it should have tasted like. No peanut butter, and not strawberry or grape jelly either. Oh you know that old American lunch staple of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no peanut butter and melon jelly served in and around a plastic plate that you just eat the whole thing of like this is your first time eating a piece of Cinn-a-burst gum and you heard you can eat the wrapper, too. Exception being that Cinn-a-burst was fantastic gum and this pop sucked more than my fantastic Dyson vacuum and that thing truly never clogs. It just keeps sucking just like this crappy pop.

Companies send us a decent amount of products for review. When we got an email from a gentleman in our fair city that wanted to meet up so he could give us some samples of a beverage we had not tasted we were shocked that there was a product in Buffalo that we didn't know about. When we met up with him, we discovered that he was a part of the elaborate sales team for Vemma. He gave us the samples and then launched into a presentation to get us to become part of his team. It was unexpected, but we weren't upset by it. The man was just trying to secure a more comfortable station in life. We politely declined, as we are clearly not salesmen of any sort, and made our way to our second meeting of the day (a meeting of friends at a delicious Indian restaurant).

Somewhere during the speech we were given a little factoid jumped out at me, “the orange can tastes like Flintstones vitamins.” That is a statement that will always get my attention. As a child I probably nearly overdosed on vitamins a handful of times because I loved how they tasted and I would just keep eating them. Luckily for me my love of drinking fluids had already bloomed by that time, so the vitamins were diluted and quickly flushed out of my system.

Today I was finally in need of a little boost so I decided to take a one-way train to Children's Vitaminburg. That sounds way creepier than I meant it to. Anyways, I think a cow had wandered onto the tracks because I was certainly detoured to a different town, a town where childish things are put aside and people take grown up vitamins. Not for a second in drinking this did the taste of children's vitamins pass my lips. The base of this drink is mangosteen, which is great because it doesn't taste like a typical candied energy drink. It tastes of fruit and unfortunately the bad kind of vitamins. Their flavor is not as strong as I portray them to be, but it's still there. If this had a normal energy drink base with that added, it would be absolutely horrible, but the mangosteen course corrects it a bit. Also, even though I gently shook it, as recommended, the last gulp of the can was very chalky, and nothing that you want in your mouth.

This energy drink has its ups and it's downs. I was on the fence as to give it a two or a three bottle rating, but I decided that since it was an energy drink that didn't taste like it was made by the Wonka corporation I should give it the benefit of the doubt and so three it is.