Soda Pop - 1421 Reviews

Before Shepard Fairey hit the streets with his Obey signs/graffiti those signs belonged to one of the greatest movies this world has ever known; They Live. It is John Carpenter's tale of a civilization in which the ruling class is actually aliens in disguise, and they use subliminal messages everywhere to control the populace. Not only it's it ridiculously entertaining, but it also may contain the longest fight scene of all times. The film stars former professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as a drifter who, with the help of a pair of sunglasses, discovers the true nature of the ruling class.

The most memorable line from the movie is “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.” Now you know the origin story of this soda. Someone at Rocket Fizz has great taste in movies, and somehow their legal team cleared the product and now we have it to enjoy. You know what? This might be the only bubblegum tasting soda that I have ever actually enjoyed, and that includes people's precious champagne colas, which are just gross. The flavor of this pop doesn't punch you in the face, like other sodas of this flavor, or say Mr. Piper might if you declined to wear the special sunglasses. Instead it mainly has a general soda flavor with a light, but nice bubblegum flavor. It actually just tastes like you're drinking a flavorless soda while chewing a big hunk of gum. I don't know if that sounds appealing, but if you keep looking at all those signs around you, I'm sure their hidden messages will get you drinking this by the case in no time. They live. We sleep.

Beach Slang are a punk/indie band from Philadelphia, PA. Jason recently went on tour with them and at their show at Sister in Albuquerque James, JP, Ed and Ruben did a guest review for Rocket Fizz's Peanut Butter Soda. Their first full length will be out on Polyvinyl this fall.

After nearly 20 years the world's questions have finally been answered. Nearly twenty years ago a commercial was aired where a teenager read off the contents of his fridge to his friends so they could choose a beverage; “OJ, purple stuff, soda, Sunny D.” The purpose of this was to show that kids preferred Sunny Delight over other beverages. We all know that is a fallacy, as the stuff is fake orange juice that is so syrupy. I don't know a person now who would accept a glass if it were presented to them. The mystery has always been what was the purple stuff? Was it grape juice? Kool Aid? Some other weird concoction? I now know that it was a product that was ahead of its time and the children in the ad simply did not know what to do with it. Purple Stuff was/is a calming, relaxation beverage.

Now call me old fashioned but when I think about relaxation, drinking a cola isn't the first thing to come to mind. Actually, carbonation and relaxation don't commonly fall into the same sentence. Finally the time came when I was freaking out about the house I am in the process of buying and I needed to just calm down or I was going to give myself an ulcer. I sat back, cracked open the can, took a deep breath and sipped away. I was surprised at how good it tasted. It had a very nice cola flavor and the cherry is also pleasant, but in a way that is almost like an energy drink. With each sip it starts off as a normal cherry cola but slowly shifts into a candied aftertaste. No part of the experience was gross or weird though. In addition to a pleasant flavor this also helped to slow my brain down a bit so I could continue with life and not be consumed about all of the little things I had to get done from the road in order to close on my house. I could make a dumb joke about that British army saying, but you've seen enough puns of that for a lifetime, so I'll leave you alone.

Sometimes you have to drive from LA to Salt Lake City in a day. In every case of that instance you end up stopping in the filth hole that is Las Vegas and spending way more time than you meant to. In such cases you may find yourself stopping at a hotel on the Utah border. For some reason the hotel has propane grills outside of the rooms, so you put the sodas you purchased earlier in the day at Galcos into the fridge to chill as you run across the street to pick up some veggie burgers from the grocery store. When you return you realize that the fridge isn't doing anything, so you get a bucket of ice and chill some of them and leave the rest in the fridge. After a night a hanging out and relaxing poolside with some quality sodas and grilled food, so retire to bed so you can get up early and finish the drive. As you're exiting the room in the morning you remember that you left some sodas in the fridge, when you go to grab them you discover that apparently the fridge did work, but more like a freezer and that the sodas have frozen and the caps blew right off the bottles due to the pressure. If it were a nice warm day you could have eaten it like a freezie pop, but it's fairly cold and it's also 8am and who wants a freezie that early in the morning, so into the trash it goes. You're sad that you lost an un-reviewed soda, but while you're in SLC you hit up a grocery store that just happens to have the exact soda you lost earlier in the day and you squeak with glee and return to your day with soda in hand.

Don't tell me you haven't had that exact same thing happen to you at least once in the past three months. It's the American tale as old as this country of ours. It's a rite of passage for children in our culture, and I am an idiot and should just stop writing this and just talk about the way this soda tastes. It's made with real peach juice, but it has a nice taste that rides the border of fruit and gummy candy. For other flavors I might find that gross, but it somehow works for peach. The usual quasi-alcoholic taste that Bundaberg sodas generally have isn't very strong in this flavor. Maybe it's just because the peach taste is so strong that it hides it. Australia is still killing it with their sodas.

Whenever I come across a company that is making a spiced apple soda I just want to tell them they needn't bother. Such a thing already exists in a fairly perfect form and it is made by Reeds. Even though I am an authority on such things, the companies would never listen, and their output always leaves something to be desired.

Natrona Bottling Company through their hat in the ring, and the results of course could not match up. This is a spiced apple soda, but it doesn't have the classic cider flavor to it that I had expected. Actually it's more spice than apple that that is just plain unfortunate. I want a nice mouthful of sweet, sparkling apple juice/cider and instead my taste buds are overrun with cinnamon and nutmeg with every swig. I have to admit that the amount of swigs wasn't very high, because there was so much spice that it wasn't all that enjoyable. I will now refer you to the first paragraph I wrote. Needn't have bothered.

Last summer at the Pride parade I stopped into a little shop that was on the route that I knew had an ever changing, but always decent soda selection. When I saw they had Cock …€˜n Bull ginger beer I instantly thought they had missed a great opportunity to move some product to the people celebrating right outside their doors. Seriously, just a small sign with the brands name and I bet they could have sold a few cases worth. They didn't realize what they had, and that was the last time I thought about Cock …€˜n Bull until I came across this new variety in a grocery store on the west coast. It's not often you come across a flavored ginger beer, so when you do, you take notice.

Cock …€˜n Bull may not be the craziest, strongest ginger beer on the market, but what they lack in heat they make up with flavor. It's more like an old fashioned ginger ale with a little burn to it that hits in the after taste. It's got a nice afterburner to it, like your favorite bowling alley arcade game. The cherry is nice and subtle, but it still adds a lot to the drink. It's like someone mixed a cherry Slurpee with a ginger beer, and that may sound gross to you, but I mean it in the most endearing way.

Look folks, Mike and I are born and raised in Buffalo, NY. Even though I haven't eaten meat in 18 years wing sauce still runs through my veins. I've eaten my fair share of vegetarian chicken wings all across this country of ours, and yes they are chicken wings, not Buffalo wings, and I am highly critical of the sauce places use. There is a very specific recipe here in Buffalo and if it's not right it can ruin the wings for me. I was fully expecting to be disappointed in this, but not to this extent. This tastes nothing like chicken wing sauce at all. It just tastes like a citrus soda that has some spice to it. It's almost orange. It's almost grapefruit. It tastes like there is a healthy scoop of capsicum in there as well. If you took all that unappealing mixture and then watered it down you would have this soda.

I was afraid that maybe I was being too critical of it, so I had my friend Ruben try it and all he said was “I absolutely hate this” and then walked out of the room. The verdict is in, this is gross, and not appropriately flavored at all.

From the name I thought this was going to be a heavily caffeinated version of cherry Pepsi. Then I saw that it had zero calories and I thought that it was just a rebranding of Diet Pepsi, since the D-word is the new four letter word. Well, it turns out that both were right. This is Pepsi's new diet soda that has about 3x as much caffeine as the old Diet Pepsi. Diet caffeine to the Max bro.
Seriously though, this isn't that bad. I enjoyed it much more than the old version. I don't know how much of a difference there is to the actual formula, but it tastes more cherry than diet, and that is a very good thing. It's a less syrupy Cherry Pepsi with a slight diet aftertaste. It was a pleasant surprise that I might actually visit again.

I was recently out on tour working for Beach Slang on their tour with Cursive. My responsibilities run the gambit, and one of them is selling merch. Now most bands have tip jars at the merch table that allude to the fact that the tips will be used for drugs and alcohol At our table I have a jar with a sign that reads “Tips for (Root) Beer.” It makes people laugh, and in the instance of our Salt Lake City show it struck up a conversation with a local who hipped me to the fact that Wasatch, a local brewery, made a fantastic root beer. I was told that a nearby grocery store sold it, so as soon as the show was over I hoofed it over to the store and purchased two bottles.

Now it's a well-known fact that Utah has a high Mormon population. It's also pretty widely known that there is a cap to the percentage of alcohol that can be in beer. The people I was on tour with all agreed that it was a terrible thing; the beer tasted different and you just got overly full and felt gross drinking it. Due to these facts I am surprised that there aren't more sodas coming out of the area. Also, speaking of Mormons, this root beer is named after Brigham Young, the second prophet of the religion. That's a whole bunch of weirdness to me. That would be like having a Jesus cola. Actually, I would drink that all day long. Someone get on that. I'm looking in your direction Danny and Real Soda.

Now the laws may forbid the sale of beer that people actually like, but they say nothing about delicious root beer and this is the result. The flavor is full and creamy. The use of honey is always celebrated in my book, and it's inclusion is duly noted by me. I wish it were a bit stronger, but my rule is if you're using honey, go big. Most people probably don't think the same way. Overall the ingredients blend together nicely and the notes of vanilla and wintergreen are distinguishable, and not lost as they are in a generic root beer mix.

At the end of the day two bottles, simply wasn't enough, especially since I was sharing in the van. It's a wonder none of us got sick with all the soda bottles we were passing around all tour. That little box on wheels must have been a germ factory.

The best way for me to describe this beverage is to have you perform a little experiment. Go to your local corner store and pick up a pack of Extra peppermint gum as well as a pack of either Hubba Bubba or Bubbaliscious strawberry gum (whichever one is still in business). Now jam a piece of each in your mouth and just start chomping away. Once it's good and masticated take a swig of some bubbly water. Oh, I didn't mention you'd need that at the store; well you better head back, in the name of science. It's a good thing you have a bunch of gum left. Okay, water acquired. Now chew up some more gum, equal pieces mint and strawberry, and then take a big sip of that recently purchased bubbly water. There, now you know what this soda tastes like. It's really weird at first, but once you become acclimated with the strange flavor combo, it's fairly enjoyable.

Is this cola? I don't think so. Is it sparkling? Yeah. Is it sweet? Kind of. You know what it is? Bitter. Those Italians, they love their bitter drinks. I'm not "America versus Italy-ing” this thing but they love their bitter drinks that we filthy American's love sweet. Does it mean there is more sugar? I can pretty safely say that is the case. Is this good, though? Hey, that's the million dollar question, right? Well, aside from the fact that I expected this to be sweet, it's not bad I guess. Reading the word "traditional" means that it's pretty assimilated to people's taste buds and it also means that the people who enjoy this have been enjoying it for years and don't want anyone messing around with their things.

So, back to the question at hand; is this good? It's not for me. It's probably going to break people's hearts to hear that. A global apology to those that love this drink. I just can't get over it. I need some sugar on my teeth. I know it's not a sweet drink but the flavor just isn't for me.

Tim Kasher is the front-man for both Cursive and The Good Life, as well as a solo artist. Jason was recently on tour with Cursive and Tim was kind enough to review Fitz's Coffee Cola for us.

Cursive just reissued a 10-year anniversary edition of their album "The Ugly Organ."
The Good Life has a new full length coming out this spring.
Tim also has a split 7" coming out with Chris Farren.

For a product that seemed to be a flop in the review world, Mountain Dew is still pushing hard with their Kick Start line. I guess it does help that they seem to have stopped pushing that idea that it was a morning beverage to replace your coffee. There is definitely a time in the day when it is too early to be drinking soda, so that being your main marketing scheme was just bound to fail. The thing is that when you take that aspect out of it (as they seem to have done), these sodas aren't terrible tasting. I think it was just the idea of waking up and downing a can of soda that was turning everyone off.

With these new flavors, the cans mention nothing of morning or breakfast, just that it will give you a hydrating boost; a much better attempt in my book. They are still soda that contains juice (only 10% but it's better than nothing). As an added bonus this new flavor also has coconut water in it. Overall it tastes like a new flavor of Mountain Dew, but a little smoother. It's pretty much their flagship flavor with a little pineapple and mango thrown in, and then they water it down a tiny bit with coconut water. I must say I enjoy it a lot more than the original.

The company has also decided to take the route of going half and half with sweeteners. While a lot of companies are mixing cane sugar and stevia for a lower calorie count, Mountain Dew went the cheaper (grosser) way of mixing high fructose corn syrup and sucralose. The diet flavor is pretty much masked, but it still pops out a little bit, and that I could do without.

Soda has existed since the 17th century. It's had a wild ride that started from flavoring naturally carbonated mineral waters, through infusing water with carbon dioxide bubbles to where we are today. It's an interesting history, but there is one part of it that I need explained to me; at what point did companies decide that people needed their sodas to be laden with so much sugar/sweeteners? They took a beverage that was once used for its health benefits (some probably imagined i.e. Moxie and soft brain) to a drink that has been linked to obesity and other health issues. Sure I enjoy a nice sweet soda, but if that wasn't what was fed to me as a kid I wouldn't miss the sugar and I think if I drank one now for the first time ever I would proclaim it to be far too sweet, and not be able to understand how people enjoyed it. All one needs is bubbles and flavor. Sure the sugar brings out the flavor a little more, but it only takes a little bit of it to do that. Dry knows this and used that practice in their soda making. This 12oz soda has 16g of sugar. A can of Coke of the same size has 39g. That is an insane difference. I would never say that this soda I'm drinking wasn't sweet; it's just not more sweetener than flavor. Also, the health difference is enormous.

The sugar content does make a big difference in the flavor as well. It has a real ginger flavor to it, and does not taste candied. The ginger flavor is actually fantastic, and this is what I want out of a ginger ale. It's not a ginger beer, but it's on that same road. Normally ginger ale always feels like it's on the access road that runs parallel to the highway that ginger beer travels. It's the highway of kings.

You know...black cherry typically sucks. Jay hates it. I don't really like it but I'll drink it. This is different, though. I don't know what's going on in here that's different but it's good. It could be that it's not as thick and/or syrupy but it actually tastes pretty good. In comparison to the rest of the black cherry pops out there, it's definitely the better of the bunch. It's got a good cherry taste brought to by dark sweet cherry extract as one of the primary ingredients so that sure helps. The part about good drinks that makes them good is that they include good ingredients and enough of them to set themselves apart from the otherwise garbage. This is not garbage. This is good. It's almost good enough for me to want another bottle but still...black cherry. You got a "4." Don't complain.

I honestly thought that I was coming around to diet drinks. I thought that I had become somewhat immune to the artificial/zero calorie gang; you know the guys who wear bandanas over their faces when they rob you of the flavor of a beverage. A lot of the time it doesn't bother me anymore. Perhaps it's like the bully who steals the same kids lunch money every day; at a certain point that kids body is just no longer going to expect lunch and learn to deal with the hunger. In this drink the sucralose is strong. It's strong enough to take away from the Tang-esque orange flavor that is obscured by it.

It's not completely overpowering and there is a definite faker orange flavor in here. I also give diet drinks a little bit of leeway because there are a ton of people out there who love them, and I can't disparage an entire genre of beverages when there is a learning curve. If you don't mind the diet flavor, this is a zero calorie beverage that is probably right up your alley. Me I'm gonna get a badge and hunt down that group of taste thieves.

Man, I'm so glad you talked me into going to that baseball game. I mean the game itself was just as boring as I expected it to be, but when that guy you brought got that foul ball to the face, man that made everything worthwhile. I mean I guess I feel bad for laughing so hard, but he really just wouldn't shut up and was being such a know-it-all. It just seemed like it was the universe telling him to shut up, just like everyone around us wanted to.

Oh man, he actually broke his jaw and had to get it wired shut? Now I really feel bad for laughing. You know what he did go on for about 40 minutes about how he loved a perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so let me make him one and you can drop it off. First you lightly toast the bread, then you spread peanut butter one piece and a generous amount of grape jelly on the other. Actually he did say about 20 times how he loves his grape jelly, so I better double up on it. Don't worry that it will be messy, he can't chew anyways so I'll throw it in a blender for him. Hmm, I don't know what would be the appropriate liquid to add to this. I guess grape soda will have to do. Now we blend.

This is actually kind of insane. It tastes like a grape soda, but then you get weird flashes of bread and light hints of peanut butter. The grape soda kept it's carbonation as well. That dude is going to love this if he's really into PB&J as much as he claims. Me, I think it's kind of gross after a sip or two. Oh, don't forget the crazy straw!

Welcome to Old town folks. We have our world renowned gunfight shows at the top of every hour from noon until 8pm. If seeing men in white hats shoot at men in black hats is what your heart desires, then there is no better place to you to be every sixty minutes. Don't be alarmed when the man falls from the roof after being shot. It's all an act and he lands on some hay bales that break most of his fall. Sure you hear a rib snap every once in a while, but he knows the danger he puts himself in for $10 an hour.

There's really not much around here other than the show. Our town is pretty small and you can see it all in fewer than 15 minutes. Might I suggest that you check out the shooting range while you wait for the show? For a quarter you can shoot our guns that make cans flip and someone play the piano. I'm not sure if they work with lasers, or just shots of air, but it's quite fun for about 3 minutes. The rest of your time you might as well saunter over to the saloon and get a nice cold one. I of course mean sarsaparilla, since this is a family establishment and we don't have a liquor license. I know all of you out there are hoping to drink a nice Sioux City sarsaparilla, but it's my duty to inform you that we only serve the Old Town Root Beer Company's version. I know it's not as good, but our owners are trying to scrape every nickel they can out of this “amusement park,” so they made their own soda. It's not too bad. It's not as strong as I like my sarsaparilla, then again they spell it “sarsparilla.” I don't know what's up with that. It tastes like someone took some of the good stuff and mixed it with an equal amount of standard root beer, then added a bit more vanilla. The result is that it's the creamiest sarsaparilla I've ever tasted. It's a nice change up, but the harshness and boldness is what I love about this flavor, and it's absent in here. Oh well, it's all we serve, so it's what you're going to get. Better nurse it for a while, we still have 34 more minutes until the next show.

Ah, familial holiday parties, what a better time to eat more garbage than you ever would on a normal day and also get a standard beverage review out of the way for Thirsty Dudes. Somewhere in the haze of cookies, pies and ice cream I found myself with this bottle of Schweppes.

Sometimes it boggles my mind when I realize we haven't reviewed a certain drink. As it turns out when we started this website we wanted to review the drinks that people might not be as familiar with, and now we have some catching up to do on the usual suspects. To me Schweppes is THE classic ginger ale. It's what was around when I was young and it's what I was given when I had a stomach ache. Side note to parents it's the ginger in old time ginger ale that soothed the stomach. In most modern ginger ales the amount of actual ginger included is minimal if it's there at all.

If you've ever had a ginger ale you can imagine how this tastes. It's a ginger beverage that contains very little ginger, so it has zero burn, but sometimes that is just what you're looking for. To me this is what all store brand ginger ales are based off of. It is superior to them, but it's that type of ginger ale. It's sweet, quasi ginger flavored sparkling water; exactly what you would expect from a “big soda” ginger ale.

I've been trying to figure out how to best describe the flavor of this soda. It has a specific taste that I just could not put my finger on, as hard as I might try. I decided to go back and read some reviews of other guarana flavored sodas that we have written, and none of them seemed quite right. In the past I have talked about how sodas of this nature taste like a fruitier version of kola champagne aka liquid bubble gum. Seeing as this doesn't completely gross me out and make me feel like I'm drinking a sweet shop, I kept reading. I finally came across a review where I compared guarana to pineapple flavored bubble gum, and I believe that is as accurate as I'm going to get. Luckily the gum flavor is pretty low. Actually, so is the pineapple. It's like someone took hints of those two flavors and mixed it in with a general fruitiness. They then took that concoction and mixed it with generic bubbly sugar water. The result is this soda.

The bottle says nothing about caffeine, but the guarana plant has one of the highest concentrations of caffeine found in nature, so I'm sure this thing will pack a punch that will wake unexpecting people right up. Me, I'm just going to have a couple of sips and see where things take me.