Caruso's - 5 Reviews

To me lemon is one of the most boring flavors on this planet. A lot of the time it tastes like cleaner, but even when they don't it is rare that it makes me want to acknowledge any sort of greatness. Lemon in water is not very appetizing to me. I don't know how that even got started, but haven't people seen the reports about how dirty they are? Grozzz. The general exception to the forgetableness of lemons is when you get a great lemonade on a nice hot day. That can really hit the spot.

I have never once had a lemon soda that made me want to stand up and force others to drink it because it was delicious. My pattern has not changed with this soda. I will happily admit that it's on the better side of lemon drinks, and may be the best lemon soda I've ever tasted, but that doesn't get it very far. It tastes like it's 75% generic soda and 25% really nice lemonade. It's not the best, but I wasn't expecting the best, and It's much better than I anticipated. So well done Caruso's…€¦.I guess.

Blood orange, the most metal of flavors, is quickly becoming a hackneyed flavor for me. It's like people are making it the "cooler orange" when it's really just a little bit different. Sweeter than citric. That's all. Does that make it cooler? I don't think so. You know what would make it cooler? If it came around in a dope leather jacket. That would make it different than all the other citric lemmings.

How does this fare? A little bit different than an orange pop. A little bit different than any old orange pop. This is fine. It's not going to win any awards but if you did something to make it different (leather jacket) it might be something special. For now it's just orange pop to someone that isn't familiar with the likes of Thirsty Dudes. At this point we've reached millions of people though. Right? Millions? Is my decimal in the right place. No? Tens? Oh come on! We're better than that. Jay! Tell them we're better than that.

Sometimes in life you just want a nice cold bottle of cream soda. When the vanilla hits your taste buds, sometimes it's just what you need. It's not often that I get these cravings, but when I do, it feels so good to have that itch scratched. When an descriptor is added to a soda flavor that you don't normally hear, it intrigues me. When I read “dark cream” my mind wandered to two places. A soda that is very intensely vanilla and secondly, and more probably a cream soda that is heavy on caramel. I didn't quite get either. Actually I'm not sure what exactly is making this cream soda dark. It's actually a little light on the vanilla and there is an aftertaste that I cannot place. That unknown flavor may actually be stronger than the vanilla. I find it distracting, but it could be one of those things that once someone tells me what it is, it will all make sense and I will enjoy it more. Right now, it's just not doing much for me.

The Caruros are a family that means business, just look at that photo. The man looks like he's a pleasant enough chap, who enjoys a good time, but his wife looks as if she doesn't take guff from anyone. It is because of this combination that they were able to achieve and uphold a level of quality in their sodas.

With this root beer they were not out to invent something new, they wanted to keep things tasting classic, and to make it in the same way. Many companies nowadays use “root beer extract” or some such thing to get a generic root beer taste. When companies do that their product suffers from mediocrity. The Carusos took their time perfecting a formula and then ran with it. It's full bodied with a nice wintergreen aftertaste. When I got closer to the bottom of the bottle it had a kind of woodsy flavor that reminds me a lot of the Sprecher sodas. This blows their root beer out of the water though.

Now go and wash up. It's dinnertime and you don't want to keep Mrs. Caruso waiting.

I always thought it was great when you would go to a diner and you could get Cherry Coke, but it wasn't made that way, they just added cherry syrup to the regular Coke. It always tasted better than the Cherry Coke you buy in bottles/cans.

Caruso's Legacy has taken this a step further, or actually backwards. When diners first began doing this they would use the juice from maraschino cherries to flavor the cola. Nowadays it's a cherry syrup that is manufactured expressly for this purpose, and it's not the same.

This bottle I hold in my hand is more like the original. A cola that is made with cane sugar instead of a gross syrup with maraschino cherry "juice." It tastes like something you would make for a little kid at a family party, and I am all for that. Someone in my family used to make "kiddie cocktails" which were just cherry juice and a random soda. I loved them then, and I love them now. I actually made one at my mom's birthday party a few weeks ago.

If you're a fan of Cherry Coke, put down the swill you're drinking and pick up one of these. You'll never look back.