Soda Pop - 1421 Reviews

Canada gets the worst rap ever. As a country it is the butt of probably 37% of the worlds jokes. I'm not kidding polls were taken pie charts were made up. This is serious business. I love Canada. I would love to move to Toronto, and I even looked into it at one point, but it wasn't in the cards. I've never had anything but a good time while I'm in the Great White North, and seeing as it's less than 10 minutes from my house, I'm there a good deal. I actually have plans to go to Toronto twice this week. With all of my love for our northern neighbor I never expected an outstanding ginger ale to be one of its exports. I always associate ginger ale with Wisconsin (another incredible place). It's probably because of Vernors. That's made in WI right? Either way this is pretty incredible. It stands high above nearly all other ginger based beverages I have tried. It's full flavored with just the slightest bit of burn. I mean this is a ginger ale and not a beer, so it shouldn't burn too much. It's not overly sweet and it's perfectly carbonated. I will surely look to grab some more of this on one of my Toronto trips.

I salute you Canada for your plentiful maple trees, your noble beavers, your abundance of veggie food and now for your wonderful ginger ale.

It scares me to push the marble down on bottles of Ramune. It always feels like I'm going to break it. Then the moment it finally gives, I get scared that the soda is going to bubble up and start spilling out of the cap. To try and prevent this, I keep the plastic plunger in the top until the fizzing dies down. There is a process to this.

Once again, we have a company that doesn't put the flavor of the drink on the label. Hawaiian Blue? Really? What does that even mean? I'll let it pass Ramune because this is actually kind of tasty. Like most Ramune I've had so far, I can't really distinguish a strong flavor. I feel weird writing this, but it really tastes like "blue soda". It's lightly sweetened, and doesn't have the usual syrup flavor that HFCS gives drinks. I keep getting suckered into buying Ramune because of the cool shaped bottle, but I'm always left unsatisfied after drinking it.

There is a lot riding on this review. Up until now, Virgil's has a nearly perfect record (with the exception of a 4 bottle review for their black cherry cream soda.) Virgil's has stepped into dangerous territory: diet soda. For the most part, diet soda and us do not usually go well together (except for a couple exceptions like the Thomas Kemper Diet Cola). I was really scared to buy this because I didn't want my opinion of Virgil's being one of the best soda companies to be tainted. But in the name of Thirsty Dudes everywhere, I have to.

Unlike most diet soda's that are usually sweetened with sucralose or aspartame, this is sweetened with stevia. I was hoping this would make it more tolerable. Sadly, it did not. I was really hoping the delicious and complex flavors of Virgil's root beer would overcome the gross chemical taste, but it failed to do so. The classic Virgil's taste is there for the first second of the sip, but then is washed away with a wave of dish soap water. Literally, if someone else had opened this bottle for me, I would be suspecting them of putting dish soap in it. It's pretty vile.

I'm sorry to have to give you a bad review Virgil's, but this is not good at all. I picked up a couple of the other "zero" flavors and I'm not that excited to try them anymore. Please stick to making your amazing non-diet sodas.

I've had clear cream soda. I've had brownish cream soda. I've had pink cream soda. Until now, I had never had a blue cream soda. This reminds me a lot of soda mousse. It is almost like a cream soda candy, I love it. The blue color is making me think it tastes like the blue bubblegum, but it really doesn't. I really hope there are other blue cream sodas out there, because just like white birch beer, it's a great version of a classic drink.

Tommyknocker soda has no affiliation with the Stephen King novel/movie of the same name. The bottle tells us that Tommyknockers are mischievous elves that came to Colorado in 1859 for the gold rush. They apparently guided miners to the "motherlode." The bearded fellow on the label doesn't look like any elf I've ever seen in the moving pictures or storybooks. He looks more like a dwarf. I expect that just out of view of the picture there is a giant hammer laying around. I mean how else is he going to break all of those giant rocks to find gold. I wonder how much wax from that candle on his helmet he has to pick out of his beard. It's a pretty glorious beard and it would be hella annoying to have to pick wax out of something so majestic.

This is a dessert soda if I've ever had one. You have yourself a nice big meal and then you sit out on your porch as dusk sets in taking sips off of a bottle. That's exactly how I spent my evening. Porch sitting with my cats and a bottle of almond creme. I bet it wouldn't go very well with a meal, but after dinner is done it's just wonderful. It's slightly heavier on the vanilla than the almond, but I think straight up almond might have been too much. These so called elves have gotten the proper proportion down.

I have been searching for this for a long, long time. No lie, like close to 15 years. I always hoped to stumble upon it in some random store while traveling around. I eventually found a handful of places online where you could order "rare" sodas, but they were always out of stock of the blue Brain Wash. I was certain that this drink had gone the way of Crystal Pepsi, Orbits, and Ecto Cooler. On a recent trip to Soda Pop Central up in Canada I was shocked to find a bunch of bottles of it. I grabbed a couple (along with four assorted cases) and hit the road giddy as a small child.

Like many things in life, when you search for it for long enough you build up these absolutely crazy expectations for it. Once I'd get my hands on a bottle that "no woman person in the history of the world is having drinking better sex soda than the sex soda you are having drinking with Ian Brainwash... in my head. That was the worst paraphrase in the history of this site, for the record. As it turns out it's still decent, but it did not live up to the holiness I had built up in my head. It tastes like liquid Smarties mixed with some low-grade chemical acid. I blame the burning acid burning to the jalapeno oil that is listed in the ingredients. I am a glutton for drinks that have a burn to them (I drank a bottle of Prometheus Springs' Lemon Ginger earlier in the day) so I really enjoyed that aspect of the soda.

It also stains everything it comes in contact with blue. I'm not just talking like how Blow Pops stain your tongue blue. After I drank the bottle I looked in the mirror and my tongue appeared to have a thick layer of bright teal paint on it. It was completely solid looking. This drink did a better job painting my tongue than I did painting the walls of my bedroom.

Here is a final thought for you. I now believe that I could not find bottles of this anywhere because Mr. Brainwash of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" fame purchased all that he could find. He then pounded the lot of them and that is how he became insane. I think there's a documentary specifically about that. Seriously, it's streaming on Netflix right now.

I have a love/hate relationship with grapefruit. I really don't like it in fruit form. I have eaten pieces of grapefruit, but have never consumed a whole one. Even the pieces I ate, I didn't enjoy that much. Drinks and candy flavored like grapefruit, that's another story. I absolutely love them! Which is why I was drawn to this bottle. Also, the word "new" on a bottle is an exciting thing for us to see.

I honestly wasn't expecting much out of this, seeing as it looks like a generic citrus soda bottled by the folks at Pepsi. It's a little lighter tasting than Squirt, but it's nothing special. I'm holding out for a citrus/grapefruit soda that is really tart.

Ladies, gentlemen, councilmen, Mr. President, your highness, or whoever it is that makes any sort of decision for the country of Austria. We have a dilemma on our hands. Our country has found itself without a national drink. Yes general I know we consume way more Coca-Cola than we really should, but let's face it Coke is everywhere. There's really nothing about it that shouts Austria. No headmaster. Bundaberg Ginger Beer simply will not work, as it's made in Australia, not Austria. Do you even know what country you live in? Seriously. We need something unique. Something that people can't get in any little market over in Germany. I'm sick of them stealing the spotlight. I want to have something that will make us shine brighter! Hey, what was it that Archduke Ferdinand was always drinking before his untimely demise? Alma matter? Alms to the poor? No, that's not it. Oh yes Almdudler! All in Favor? Anyone opposed? There we have it from here on our Almdudler will now be the national drink of Austria!

When you're dealing with a beverage that makes a claim of being the national drink of anything you get some crazy ideas of what it might taste like. Especially when it's called "Krauterlimonade," which my friend Nina says translates to "cabbage lemonade." I really don't know what I expected it to taste like. So many different ideas entered my mind. Not many of them seemed appealing. After I drank it I did some research and found out that Nina would have been correct in her translation if it weren't for that little "er." Those two little letters change the definition to "small-timer." I still don't know what that has to do with this drink.

As the drink first hit my taste buds I thought it was going to be a ginger ale, but that thought quickly faded. I thought I detected some apple, like in an apple malt soda, but I wasn't exactly sure. As the previously mentioned Nina put it "This tastes like nothing more than water does." It tastes sweet, but the sweetness passes soon. I Wikied it to discover that it's a mix of apple and grape flavors. If that's what it is then Austria has some pretty weak fruit on its hands.

The fact that it doesn't really taste like much of anything is actually extremely appealing. I've just about finished this bottle, and I already find myself bummed that I don't have any more after this. It's something that I really, really enjoy. On top of the strange awesome lack of flavor this also has a nice unique bottle.

I have a romantic interest in the state of Wisconsin. Not a person that resides in the state, but with the actual state itself. It's a different world up there, full of amazing people. Every time I've been there on tour it's been nothing but good times. Okay there was that one time when fake Nazis smashed some of our records and my friend pulled a knife on them, but other then that, bright blue skies. It all started when I was in high school and Kevyn and I played Madden football on Playstation. I was always the Packers, or the Pack, for no real reason. It was my go to team, and it instilled a pride in the state of WI for me. On the first tour that took me to this magical state the obscenity of everyone's fascination with Brett Favre was out of control. The news had a nightly segment where they just showed a random picture of him. Hysterical. The night we were there it was him on a riding lawn mower. That started jokes of tattoos of him on the lawnmower wearing a cheese head and holding a beer in one hand and a brat in the other. Now that's comedy. Wisconsin is also home to Woodman's Food Markets. It's the only grocery store I've ever been to that even comes close to the greatness that is Wegmans.

Now that you know my love of Wisconsin you why I picked up this bottle of soda. It's "A Wisconsin Tradition." I don't know what oranges have to do with the northern mid-west, but I'm not going to argue. It's not the world's greatest orange soda, as it doesn't exactly taste like an orange, but it does stand above your everyday Crush, Sunkist or Fanta. It's sweet and smooth. No harshness at all. It's as if someone removed the vanilla from a cream soda, but the smoothness remained. Wisconsin don't ever change. You are a gem.

As far as I'm concerned as of today winter is finally over in Buffalo. It was 50 degrees and sunny. Not a cloud in the sky. To celebrate I went on my first decent bike ride of the year. I was planning on just doing a little ride, but every time I reached a destination I decided to keep going. By the time I had listened to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane was coming to an end 14 miles had passed and I was at my front door. From here on out I will solely use David Bowie albums to measure distance. It's the new science. Can you feel it on the horizon?

Before I left on this little adventure I decided it was as good a time as any to try out a Celsius drink aka "Your ultimate fitness partner." It's a mostly natural drink that promises to burn calories, reduce body fat, build lean muscle and give you lasting energy. By the end of my ride I was toned and semi-ripped like Michelangelo's sculpture of David. I'm talking like busting out of my shirt muscular. I'm a scientist, so I cannot tell a lie. That's part of the scientific oath right? I know I had you all convinced that I now look like Mr. Universe era Arnold Schwarzenegger, but truth be told I still look like a semi-dumpy 30 year old from Buffalo. I did have a decent amount of energy on the ride, and I feel way better than I expected to after not really riding in the past 5-6 months (yes our stupid winter can really last that long). So the drink has that going for it.

As for the flavor of it, when I took my first sip I was shocked at how good of a ginger ale taste it had. Within half a second I changed my mind as the diet hell of sucralose set in. Bear in mind that I have no tongue for diet drinks. I know there is a whole world of people out there that don't mind them. If you are one of those people and you're trying to lose weight, or put on some muscle, give this a chance. I think you will be pleasantly pleased with this ginger ale.

What is up with all of these political sodas? Leninade, Not See Kola, and now Red Cola. I had no idea that soda was such a strong propaganda tool. Imagine political leaders standing at the podium, giving their speeches. Instead of emphasizing with a fist, or a thumb gesture, the one in power shakes a bottle of soda. As the speech reaches its crescendo the bottle is opened and the built up carbonation sprays everywhere as cheers explode from the crowd.

It's has a pretty normal cola flavor with a bit of a burn to it. I didn't realize it at first, but the further I got into the bottle the more I felt it in my gut. I expected it to be a cherry cola from the name. You know a little wacky word play, but nope just straight up cola that has a red coloring to it.

I still don't really know what cola has to do with communism, but hey if it helps our proletariat brothers who am I to argue.

Often and typically, when we Thirsty Dudes go to a grocery store, we skip by the "in house" brand drinks. It's not that they're bad. It's just that they are terribly similar and not too impressive.

Jay and I recently got back from a camping expedition, which many of this week's reviews will probably reference. While taking five from camping, we went to town and stopped at a local supermarket. There, Jay found this white birch beer. I bought it along with marshmallows and Tums for Jay's aching belly and we hit the road. When we got back to the cabin, I cracked that bad boy open, took a sip and pondered while the rest of the team took sips. It had a light birch beer taste off the bat then was followed by a cream soda taste and then at the end was a candy-like root beer taste. Yes, it was sweet. No, it was not naturally sweetened. It was still good at you can find that Sure Fine pretty easily around here. Keep an eye out and give it a shot.

The only thing, soda wise, I don't like about the Northwest is the lack of birch beer. It's nowhere to be found. Luckily the good folks of Hosmer Mountain sent me this bottle to satisfy my birch beer craving. I have come to love white birch beer more than other varieties of birch beer. It has a much lighter and cleaner taste. I love the 'birch' flavor in this bottle. It's the perfect sweetness and taste. I just found my favorite birch beer.

Danny at Real Soda knows how to make a quality frothy beverage. This is a top-notch birch beer with a nice amount of bite to it. For those not familiar with birch beer it is similar to root beer, but with a slightly different twist. It has a woodsier taste to it. The label design leaves something to be desired, but really that doesn't matter when you have a quality soda like this. I wish I had more to say, but I'm off to go see Off! play. Keith Morris here I come.

Coca-cola the way it should be, made with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I don't know if it's the free fancy hotel room I'm sitting it while drinking it (due to being bumped from a flight), but this is one of the best bottles of normal cola I've had in a while. It's smooth, delicious, and lacks the burn that most colas have. Mexican Coca-Cola for the win!

I had really high hopes for this, I really did. Small soda companies usually make normal soda flavors a little more interesting. This was not the case this time. I don't know if this was the worst orange soda I've ever had, but it was far from the best. It tastes like someone started filling your cup with lemon-lime soda and then realized you asked for orange soda. Instead of dumping it out, they just mixed the orange soda with the lemon-lime. It gives it almost a bitter orange flavor. This might be delicious to some people, but I didn't like it at all.

The name doesn't lie. This truly is "Awesome Root Beer." It's nice and creamy. Smooth like. It's also not crazily carbonated, which is a nice change of pace.

My only real question is, why does it say "Cane Sugar or High Fructose Corn Sweetener"? Do they really vary their recipe from batch to batch? I'm 99% certain I have a cane sugar version here.

I also love the label. It looks like it was drawn with colored pencils, which holds a certain charm for me. It also brings about the conversations of all time top five desert islands (fill in the blank). You know, these conversations that nerds like myself have all the time. Typically they are about records or books. I'm going to compile my desert island list of root beers in no particular order: Virgil's Special Edition Bavarian Nutmeg, Weeping Radish, Gale's, Margo's Bark, and Sparky's. I know I will probably change this eventually, but as of now that's it right there.

Half and half, huh? Half and half of what, I ask you? White? What's white? Mountain Dew White Out, albinos, white chalk? What is this? It tastes like a lemon, lime, grapefruit mixture, but with "natural and artificial" flavors as the ingredient. What's a boy to think? It's sweet and so sour. Like eating a lemon and a lime in hopes that the combination will just magically/stupidly create 7Up. If you haven't done it already, don't bother. It doesn't work. What is this?! It's good, but it is strange. There are little, sour tweaks that make it feel like you're taking a drill bit to your jawbone. No, not your pompous bluetooth headset. I'm talking about your actual, physical jawbone. It's like someone took 7Up, Squirt, and a handful of Smartie powder and called it a drink.

If you're in New Hampshire, find it. It's a strange guy and a stranger named company.

Growing up in Buffalo, going to Canada was no big deal at all. It was closer than most suburbs and all you needed was a photo ID to get in the country. On one of my first trips there, I came across a bottle of pink cream soda. I love cream soda, so it really intrigued me. After the first sip, I fell in love immediately. It became a staple for every trip to Canada after that (as well as 'all dressed' flavored chips and Coffee Crisp (before I was vegan)).

It had been far too long since I had a bottle of soda mousse. It is impossible to find in the states, and Portland is not conveniently located 20 minutes from the border. Two weeks ago as I was planning to come to the Chicago Zine Fest, my friend Amy Leigh from Toronto asked if I wanted her to bring me anything from the Great White North. I took her up on the offer and requested a bag of all dressed chips and a bottle of soda mousse. Not only did she deliver on her offer, she brought two of each! I couldn't dream up a better friend.

The taste is just as I remembered it, truly amazing. It's not the creamiest cream soda, but it's really smooth and delicious. My mind is trying to play tricks on me and think that it has a hint of strawberry flavor, but I think it's just due to the pink color. Maybe it's a good thing that I can't buy this at any store, because it's a wonderful treat every few years.

Today a bunch of us met up at a friend's house to get some plans made for a trip to Hawaii we're taking next month. We were surprisingly productive and got a nice little outline of an itinerary put together. We are insanely cheesy, so we ordered Hawaiian pizza and had some of this soda. It's actually made right on the island of Hawaii that we're going to be visiting. Now that's pretty rad. I was wondering if I would be able to find any new drinks for Thirsty Dudes on that trip. I didn't realize this was from Kauai until I read the bottle today. I'm sure I'm going to be able to grab some other rad flavors there.

Let's start with the scent of this. It smells like a melted freezie pop. I feel like I use that analogy a lot on here, but it's something I can't escape. The flavor is similar to the smell, but it's not harsh at all. I can't say that for freezie pops. When those things warm up they are like sulfuric acid on your throat. This has a general sweet tropical flavor to it. There's a little mango in there, but I had expected more from it. I still enjoyed it and it went well with my pizza. What doesn't go well with pizza though?