Chunky - 165 Reviews

With each sip I grow more uncertain as to whether I should review this or not. It's not the flavor. That is nice and pineappley as it should be. It tastes like it was squeezed right from the fruit, but somehow a lot of the acidity was lost. My concern is that this can has so many chunks of pineapple in it that I no longer know if I can refer to it as a drink. When the ratio of physical fruit to juice is tipped to the fruit side, is it still a drink? Is the juice instead a vehicle to keep the pineapple “fresh?” I like fruit chunks in my drink, but this is just out of control.

Alright, we're going out into the desert Three Amigos' style, except we want to be prepared. There will be no empty canteens and certainly none that are filled with sand. I mean the desert I speak of is actually just a local beach, but I want everything absolutely perfect for my YouTube recreation. Okay, everyone give me your canteens. My mom said I'm not allowed to come in the house wearing this “ridiculous” outfit as she put it. So I'll be filling them up with the hose. Does she not realize that this is the costume of my craft? Does she not know that I was born to reenact every movie Martin Short has ever starred in? Just wait until I'm internet famous, then she'll let me in the house to fill up my canteens! Well until then, hose water it is! Sorry they look old, they were my grandfathers from The War, I don't even know what war, so don't ask. Oh crap, I forgot I had some peach drink in here from when I went camping last summer. It doesn't smell spoiled, but that's just weird.

Ugh guys, I don't know if you want to actually use these. The combination of the hose water, the left over peach juice residue and the aloe I put on my sunburn I got from yesterday's shoot, this is a weird not-to-great drink. I guess the more you drink the better it gets, but it never really loses it's metallic hose water taste. Jimmy, that's racist saying that this taste like an Asian drink! Oh you mean it tastes exactly like an aloe drink you had on your trip to Singapore, except this doesn't have the chunks that that one had? Well I guess that's not racist, but I feel sorry that you paid for such a beverage.

Well everyone it looks like Little Neddy is not going to talk about how he filmed a movie about going to war, or mail planes. Let's move on to Innerspace. I have a cool little capsule I've been building in my shed.

It's been a while since I've had an aloe drink. Not because I haven't been in the mood for them, I really have. The reason I've been without them is we have reviewed most of the ones I have come across in the last few months. Then I found this wonderful chunky drink at an Asian supermarket.

Korea really knows their aloe drinks. This is delicious with a nice tart pomegranate taste. I wish it had more chunks of aloe, but you can't win them all. So I bow to you, all mighty Aloe Vera King.

You know in the movies where it will show a dog getting hurt and it will say in the credits, "No animals were harmed in the filming of this movie?" I would like to know how many strawberries we just slaughtered in the making of this drink. I think that this drink is nothing more than people trying to stuff an entire one of those clear, plastic containers of strawberries into this tiny, baby can.

This drink is chocked full of strawberries and tastes only like strawberries. For that reason, I can't fathom how they kept the price low. I mean strawberry juice is one thing but poorly pureed strawberry chunks is another. Without exaggeration, there are probably two whole strawberries in this drink at least. It's great. I've got no complaints. Keep 'em coming.

Welcome to Tea Shop 168 where we have 168 different flavors of tea. I know it's a bit overwhelming making your choice, but I'll let you in on a secret: 142 of the flavors are different blends of green tea that pretty much taste identical unless you went to school for teaology. I don't really believe that's a real major, but the owners assure me they are teaologists. They probably went to Evergreen in Olympia…€¦hippies.

I know 27 different varieties of tea can still be a bit much to choose from, so may I suggest you try our aloe vera green tea fusion? It's an interesting ride. Some say that it is just green tea with aloe chunks thrown in. Those people are just dumb. I know. I make the tea and I can assure you that there is also aloe vera juice in it. It is mostly green tea, but you can still definitely taste the aloe juice. It's strange having a slightly bitter aloe drink, and the chunks have a fairly different flavor from what you're probably used to, assuming that you have had aloe drinks before. Oh you haven't? Well aloe essentially tastes like a light white grape juice with a little something extra to it. It's delicious, and I can't sing it's praises enough.

So yeah, this is unusual and fun. It certainly isn't mind blowing, but when you're choosing either this or some tea infused with raw meat, it's the choice to make. Teaology…€¦What a joke. The owners just soak random foods in green tea and act like they are scientists. They don't even wear lab coats or goggles. Lamers.

ps. I just discovered that Tea Shop 168 is an actual tea shop with a physical stores all throughout Ontario. AS far as I know they do not have 142 different types of green tea. Also, I can only assume that they do have roast beef tea, as their website does not explicitly state that they do not. Don't forget your horseradish.

Get yourself a quart of fresh red raspberries, put them in a cheese cloth (one with a small rip in it) and just smash the hell out of them. Gather the juice and the few chunks that found their way through the hole into a cup. Fill the cup up the rest of the way with bubbly water and mix in a bit of sugar. What you will have created is essentially what is in this bottle. It's strange how much it tastes like raspberries. I know it's supposed to taste like them, but normally any fruit flavored pop doesn't actually taste like the fruit, and if it does you usually have to concentrate to find the flavor. This tastes exactly like you're eating raspberries, and the little mushy chunks do nothing but help it.

This is the first time I have ever said this about a soda, but I think it could do with a little bit more sugar. There is something about it that is just the tiniest bit off from making it absolutely perfect. I think a bit more sugar would balance things out and give it the little boost it needs to stand tall at the top of the soda pop pyramid.

Let it be known that I am not a huge fan of NYC. It's dirty, a good majority of the people are rude, and I hate the idea of being a faceless identity in a sea of people. Two things the city does have going for it are a nice variety of veggie food and great drink selections sat all the corner stores. It's been awhile since I have been overwhelmed by what beverages store carry, but the bodega in which I found this chia tea did just that. I spent way too long making my selections, and this came out one of the victors.

If I had come across this s year ago my mind would have been blown, but since then a couple other companies have emerged that have used chia seeds in their beverages. I'm not talking down on this drink, because it is something I really enjoyed. It has a good semi sweetened peach green tea flavor. That alone would make it a drink that I would keep my eyes open before, but on top of that the chia seeds give it a nice unusual texture. They also make it more beneficial health wise as they boost omega 3 and 6, fiber and calcium.

On a side note you have to love that the seeds are the first item on the ingredients list. There are literally more seeds in here than beverage. Ridiculous.

Ahh, the "other/weird" category of Thirsty Dudes. Most of the stuff isn't domestic so we have to travel and discover this stuff. This was quite the unexpected discovery, I must say.

I had a handful of people try this and here are some of the one sentence reviews that have been provided to me:

• It tastes like plastic.


• It tastes like grass.


• It tastes like pool water.


• I can't get past the texture.

I don't know what the flavor/ingredient of a"groud" and if I had to guess, I would fail. This drink is semi-gelatinous and really tastes like a goopy brown sugar drink. It's not at all offensive and is very smooth both in flavor and texture. It's not completely gross but I can understand how it is off-putting. It's a chunky drink and that is hard for people to take. It's not particularly great or even good. It's not bad, either. It's just kind of...there. It doesn't taste like much. Between that and the fact that most people just can't accept the texture, I can't give this a high rating. The texture caught me by surprise and I usually like stuff like this.

In the dizzying haze of strobe lights a giant of an old man's face flashes in and out of the darkness repeating the words, “Something's wrong.” Even though that horror occurred years ago in a bowling alley, the sight was fresh in my mind as I took a sip of this juice. One of the numerous ingredients in here that are not mango left a wrong flavor to this. As soon as it hits your tongue you are greeted with mango, but nearly instantly some rouge shadow pushes the great fruit out of the way and blocks the doorway to proper flavor. On top of that the pulp in this are little cubes of mango that don't have a long shelf life floating in juice and other delicacies. The way they squish in your mouth gives the illusion that they are rotting. Knowing that they are not does not help the voyage. SOS, this ship is going down.

Do you remember the Nestle Quik bunny, aka Quiky? From the 70s to the 90s he worked promoting the Nesquik powders used to flavor milk. He got all caught up in the glamour and in 2001 he hit rock bottom. The drugs, the interspecial relationships, he realized it was all to much for him and that he needed to walk away. Nestle hired a new rabbit (Nesquik) and most of the world never noticed the difference. Fame can do strange things to a bunny, and it takes a big rabbit to know when to extradite yourself from a situation.

Quiky spent a few years traveling the globe trying to find himself. He got clean, and adopted the vegan lifestyle. While visiting Taiwan he met up with the folks at Mong Lee Shang and he worked with them to create an incredible strawberry soymilk. It was essentially the old Nesquik strawberry powder from the 70s mixed in with soymilk, but it was a taste that Quiky had missed and he never thought he would have again. For some reason the company insisted on adding tapioca balls to the drink. Quiky didn't know why, but he had to admit that they added an element of fun to the drink and didn't really havea taste of their own.

Things were looking up for our bunny friend. He was set to appear as spokesperson for this new drink, and the company promised to keep it wholesome. Everything fell apart though when he found out that the drink actually contained caseinate (milk protein), and that it wasn't really vegan at all. Quiky felt like he had been duped and he walked out of the offices of Mong Lee Shang never to be heard from again.

Sometimes you date a girl who lives across the country and you go visit every other month. Sometimes things don't work out and you end up splitting up right before you leave from a visit. Sometimes your flight gets delayed and you turn around and said person is standing there asking if you want to get food. On top of that sometimes pizza and great soda can mend the relationship (for a couple more months at least).

Portland, OR's Hot Lips is a diamond in the rough. Well, not a diamond in a sea of bad food, as that city has obscene amounts of awesome veggie food (Vita Cafè I'm looking in your direction). It's a special place because it is a place where you can get a decent slice of pizza on the west coast. For the most part I don't even tough pizza past Wisconsin and even that is really pushing it. Hot Lips was great for its pizza, but even better for it's soda. They take local fruit and add sparkling water and a little cane sugar. If you've ever read Tom Robbins' “Still Life With Woodpecker” you know that blackberries run rampant in those parts. This is so simple and so wonderful. It tastes light lightly sugared blackberries, because that is exactly what it is. Why anyone would mess with a recipe like this boggles my mind. Okay, I understand that they want to save money, but they end up with a product that is not even close to this in quality, those big dummies.

I was always under the impression that this soda was only available in Portland, but my ladyfriend (of three years, not the previous ladyfriend which I mentioned above) found it in a health food store in North Carolina. I really hope Hot Lips expands their reach and takes over the country with their quality soda.

You would think that a drink that has little slimy chia seeds in it would have a lot to say about itself, but when I put my ear to this bottle all I hear is faint murmurs. The flavors in this line are tame at best. I guess there is nothing wrong with that. Some people want something that is only lightly flavored and this is a drink for them. Hell, I love lightly flavored unsweetened tea; it's one of my favorites. I just can't seem to get behind this. It's like you got a glass of water at a restaurant and they squeezed lemon slices instead of one, but instead of lemon it was equal amounts of strawberry and orange juice. That's about the extent of the flavor. If you take that and dump in a couple hundred chia seeds (that are essentially flavorless) you get this drink.

Summer is depressingly over. If you live where I live, you can essentially kiss the sun goodbye (great album name that is available with credit given to me) for the next six months. These are things we deal with on the East Coast. Oh it's bright and you still need sunglasses but you can't see the sun and need twelve jackets to fight the ice age that is northeast winters. It's fine. It's really no big deal.

Why do I bring up the sun and a paragraph of nothing before I review a drink? Well for two reasons mostly. Number one is that I'm trying to create a picture and a scene and number two is that we are terrible at writing drink reviews. You can't really say otherwise and if you do, well, thanks. You're too kind. Wrong, but kind. We're narrative masterminds but we are not product reviews.

So aloe is used to cure us from the sun's lashings upon our fair skin. Human skin was made for holding in our muscles, guts, and organs. "Guts" might be slang for organs so I might have just said the same thing twice but I didn't want to leave anyone out. Now that the sun isn't out we can't get burnt, the role of aloe turns from topical to internal usage. That's right. Aloe drinks are winter drinks to prep our skin from the inside out to prepare it for the emergence of the sun come April. What better way to do it that with the help of Aloic? It's not overly sweet, still has a ton of chunks, and that grapy taste that anyone who likes grape juice or has drank an aloe drink in the past loves. The sweetness part is the item that gets my love. That is a problem I have with a lot of aloe drinks is that they are too sweet. Good, but too sweet. This solves that problem in a delicious, chunky way.

I can feel my skin tightening and toughening up as I drink this. Every sip is one more day I don't have to wear sunscreen, a safari hat, and pants in the summer to protect me from that jerk sun. I appreciate all that you do what with annually burning my lawn and killing my flowers with your relentless rays, but sometimes you can be a real turd. Just tone it down a little bit. Go hide behind the clouds and read a nudie mag or something so we can stop fertilizing and melting.

Don't fear the chia. Embrace the chia. It's good for you. According to the label it's good for hydration, endurance, heart health, brainpower, and fun. The last is one of the most important ones because one bottle is not going to do much for the other ones. Having people try a drink with chunks in it is fun, I should know. I do it all the time.

If you don't know, no, you can't taste the seeds if you're just drinking it. If your mulling the drink around, you can taste it a little, but they're so small and slimy that it just makes the drink taste a little thicker. It's not at all gross, but it's enough to scare people away. Wimps.

It's not all good, though. This is "lemony," which is the point. Like if I squirted a lemon in your mouth flavor, not candied lemon. I didn't get a whole lot of blueberry, which is the "B Meyer" part of the flavor, whatever that is from. Even though it's not the number one sweetener, this drink has Stevia in it and, as Jay mentioned earlier, it's getting old. It's kind of overpowering because it mixes with the lemon leaving you with a kind of undesirable sour-tartness.

I do look forward to the other flavors. I just think that the lemon flavor melds poorly with everything else that's happening in this bottle.

Unlike most pear flavored drinks the taste of the fruit is not very strong in this drink. Actually the flavor is pretty mellow. I think it tastes more of honeysuckle than pear. By that I mean it tastes ever so slightly floral and sweet. The more I think about it the more mild and nondescript the flavor becomes. It's pleasant enough.

The seeds in this are smaller than those in the Mama Chia line. They still have that slimy coating that makes them go down smooth. They may be tinier, but they are very plentiful. This is a health conscious drink that has a bunch of benefits.

Part of me really thought that I was over aloe drinks. When I first discovered them a few years back (yes I am an explorer as well as a scientist) I couldn't get enough. I would buy the huge bottles and down them in one sitting, like some fat conquistador slob. I realized that the amount of sugar I was consuming was enough to give an elephant diabetes, so I “cooled my jets,” as the kids say. It's been awhile since I've had a bottle, and just like with most things, with time your feelings towards them fade. The refreshment that was once my love had become just another face in the crowd of thousands of drinks we've downed in the name of Thirsty Dudes.

Drinking this bottle was like renewing my wedding vows. One sip and I fell in love all over again. It's sweet, but it's more honey than cane sugar. Actually the whole bottle only has 16g of sugar, which is way lower than I expected. This is a perfect blend of the classic white grape-ish flavor of aloe mixed with pineapple. Both are present in their own ways and it's one hell of a ride of flavor.

Let's not forget about our friends the aloe chunks. It looked like there were a ton of them in the bottle, but when I was drinking it, it seemed like there were less than other companies use. Either way, they are still fun to drink and catch in your teeth.

Today I will make a vow to aloe that I will never again forever about how much I love you, and the enjoyment it brings to my life. I may stray to other drinks on a regular basis, but I will always come back to you when all is said and done.

Hotlips does it again. They have managed to make a delicious fruit soda that isn't sweetened with any sugar. I had to look at the ingredients three times just to be sure. And you know what? It tastes great. I'm not one to eat a pear normally, but this is delicious. It's really juicy and flavorful.

My only complaint (and this goes for all Hotlips sodas) is it's only lightly carbonated. I like my soda to be moderately fizzy, but you barely notice it here.

I pose to you a question: When Kurt Russell was escaping from New York, and later L.A. would he have had an easier time if this drink were on hand? Would it have given him the refreshment he needed in such dire situations? Would he have just been able to trade a bottle of this for the president? I can only imagine that pineapples and guavas would be like gold on a prison island. If you lived in an area that was cut off from the world for years and suddenly someone dangled those fruits in front of you, I think you would be surprised as to what you would do to procure it. The joke would be on you though if you traded something as precious at the president for a bottle of this. You see there are four main ingredients in this bottle: aloe vera, pineapple and guava (which are all incredibly delicious), but then you also have sea buckthorn berry. I've never actually had one before, or heard of it until now, but a quick internet search tells me they are extremely healthy an also extremely tart. My question is if they are so tart why does this drink taste like someone took a delicious tropical aloe drink and mixed in a little bit of vegetable soup? There is just this little flavor of soup that makes this whole thing really, really weird. It counters the tropical flavor, and once you realize what the taste reminds you of it's hard to concentrate on any of the other flavors. It's still enjoyable, but it's just a weird drink. Snake Plissken sure pulled a fast one on those cons. Now he just needs to get the president back to his glider.

Oh yeah, in case you didn't already realize it this drink also has chunks of aloe in it. I normally love them, but they kind of add to the vegetable soup scenario in here.

I'm going to make some enemies with this statement, but I don't care: I don't like cranberries. It's true, I've always hated cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and most cranberry juice/drinks I've had are just gross. That was until I had this soda.

Now I'm not saying "I LOVE CRANBERRY" now. I'm just saying that this is the best cranberry drink I've ever had. That being said, I'm still not crazy about it. It's nice that it's naturally sweetened (no real or fake sugar), and yet still tastes sweet. The cranberry taste is strong yet not overpowering like straight cranberry juice.

I currently have a sore throat and I was hoping that by drinking this it would help. I remembered last time I had a chia seed drink, it felt like it was massaging my throat as the slimy little things slid down. While it does indeed still do this, it didn't give the desired relief from pain that I was expecting.

Drinking this is weird because since there are so many seeds, you feel like you have to chew on them before swallowing. I have been trying for 5 minutes now and they just slide out from under my teeth anytime I try to chew. Now I'm thinking about all these seeds I'm ingesting and irrational worrying about that urban legend about swallowing seeds and plants growing inside you.

"We did an x-ray and we found a full size Chia Pet in your stomach". That would probably get me on the cover of Weekly World News, or at least #4 on a blog article titled "10 of the weirdest things found inside a person's stomach".

I was expecting this to have more of a mint taste. Maybe they forgot to mix it in, because all I taste is pomegranate. I love pomegranate, but I was excited to see what pomegranate mint would taste like. Maybe I should drop a 'wint-o-green' Lifesaver inside to see. Rats, I don't have any.