Bundaberg - 7 Reviews

Did you know that there is a war going on in Australia? It's not the type of thing you would imagine, but it gets pretty rough. The native animals of the continent flat out hate each other and they will just tear into each other if presented the chance. It's a hatred as old as time, but in recent years they have somehow directed their pride into the soda flavors that are created by their national treasure Bundaberg. The koalas hold the rights to the burgundee creaming soda, wallabies run for the passion fruit, wombats fight for peachee, dingoes fight for root beer, and of course kangaroos are running the show with the most sought after soda of all; ginger beer. They are straight up like soccer hooligans out there in the outback. They just gang up on each other, fighting to prove that their soda is the best.

An underdog in this fight is the platypus. They tend to not get involved. Most people say it's because they would be destroyed by the bigger animals in the fight, but their venomous spike on their back heels can do quite a bit of damage. The truth is that the platypus knows that their soda, blood orange, may not be the best as it has a few flaws, but they love it all the same and they don't need anyone else knowing how great it is. They want it all for themselves. Their soda is made with actual blood orange juice from concentrate and not some weird chemical equivalent. You can taste that level of commitment in the soda. Sure it has a yeast brewed quasi alcoholic taste to it, but once you become acclimated to that it's a wonderful ride. Other animals on the island have been trying to draw out the platypus by making unfounded claims that their soda is no different than any store brand orange soda. The weird creatures that are filled with venom just sit back and laugh at this. They know their blood orange soda is so much more; It's much darker and flavorful. They just stay out of it all sipping on their soda while the rest of the animal population of Australia destroys itself. They may indeed someday inherit the nation.

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.

Australian favorite's Bundaberg gave guava soda a shot, but they just missed the mark. You see they make their soda the old fashioned way, by brewing it with yeast, and as a result it ended up tasting a bit too alcoholic for my liking. Now the creators of some of my favorite ginger beer are trying their hand at my second favorite fruit, passion fruit. With this one the bases were loaded and they didn't blow it with a lot of grandstanding. They took what simple ingredients they had, and hit that pitch right out of the park for a grand slam.

This is soda brewed the way it should be, with a less processed flavor that what most of us are used to. It tastes like carbonated passionfruit juice, with a little something extra from the yeast brew that just makes it perfect. It does border on the wine cooler flavor, but it stays to the proper side and not the alcoholic side that far too many people became acquainted with in the 80s.

I am thoroughly disappointed that I only had one bottle of this. It simply wasn't enough, and I'm already craving more. Is it wrong to book a rip halfway across the world just for soda? Oh wait, I could probably get more of this at a Cost Plus. I'll probably have to do that.

When Jay goes on tour, he comes home with some different drinks. If you stay in one place, things get stale. Jay knows that all too well so he's on tour a fair amount and, if I didn't know better, he spends as much time with the band as he does on the hunt for new drinks.

Now he just was in the United States but came across this little Australian tart. You know a drink that comes both in glass and with an awesome pull-tab is going to be good, so is it? Well, it's good and it's better than most but is it as good as I wanted to be? I don't think so. It is a nice, dark licorice filled root beer. That's for sure. What's wrong with it then? It's a little too sweet. Is it the molasses? Maybe. It almost tastes like a good root beer with something like a grape hard candy in it. That's not the worst thing but whatever that "candy" thing is in there, it knocks its great potential down a peg or two. Am I in the position to be assigning proper peg state? I like to think that I am. I would like to think that in turn someone out there is placing me on some ladder whether it be a skill ladder, sexual ladder, or something in between. We can all agree that those are the two extents of social ladders, right?

This was really supposed to be one of the greatest things to ever grace my taste buds. The Bundaberg flavors I've had in the past have been nothing short of greatness. On top of that it has been scientifically proven that guavas are one of the greatest fruits to even ripen on this planet of ours. Even better this was the third part of a gift that my great friend Terry brought back from a work trip to Australia. As you can tell from my wording everything was aligned for greatness. If there was a god then this had to be the greatest soda to ever be produced. Apparently Homer Simpson's flat tax plan was correct, there is no god.

While this is a soda made with actual guava juice, and it is carbonated just like their other flavors, the other flavors masked the fermented taste that the yeast used caused. Unfortunate for me fruit juice doesn't do as good of a job masking that flavor. It turns out that Bundaberg Guava Soda tastes like a wine cooler. My friends who drank loved this. They were all raving about it. To me it was a disappointment that I still enjoyed. It still tasted like guava juice, just a little fermented, the way that Fentimans fruit flavors do. I will give the company credit for making the soda the old fashioned way though.

If Fosters is Australian for Beer, then Bundaberg is Australian for soda. Before this all I had tried was their ginger beer, but it was one of the best I have ever tasted. When we got a bottle shipped to us, it really knocked my socks off. Truth be told I really thought the company only made the one flavor until our friend Terry brought us back a bottle of guava soda and this bottle of burgundee creaming soda. I wasn't exactly sure what this was going to be but my money was on red cream soda. I was partly right. It is a cream soda style beverage that is reddish in color, but it wasn't quite like the Canadian red cream soda I was used to. A quick look at the ingredients list showed me that this was actually red grape cream soda (made with actual grape juice). I would have never have thought to mix grape juice and cream soda, but what do I know I'm from Western New York. Apparently in Australia it is a traditional drink. As soon as I read the ingredients I could pick out the grape in the flavor that I originally thought was some sort of berry. It really is a spectacular drink. I drank about half of the bottle while Mike and I were hanging out earlier, and thanks to the twist cap, I was able to save the rest for later. I must say it somehow tasted even better when I went back for seconds.

With a drink this good I can only imagine that kangaroos carry them around in their pouches and the only way to get one is to box it for a bottle. Watch out, or you may find yourself disemboweled. No one likes to be disemboweled, just like no one in Australia wants to be solely associated with kangaroos. Don't worry folks, from here on out whenever I hear the word Australia I will instantly think of your fantastic sodas.

A friend of ours got this shipped over from Australia for us. I can't say how glad I am. This is one of the best ginger beers I've ever had. It doesn't have much of a burn, but it totally makes up for it in flavor. It's also carbonated with yeast, which is a nice change. It says to invert the bottle before opening to help mix in the pieces of ginger that are in it. You can see them when you hold it to the light, but they aren't big enough to notice while you drink it.
In addition it comes in a super rad bottle. The weird pull top cap is amazing. I like when beverages are fun like that.