Nantucket Nectars - 7 Reviews

This may be made from a concentrate with added sugar, but I'm going to give this little guy a break from my dumb rules because it's great. It's largely a sweetened orange juice, but it has these wonderful sunbeams of pineapple an guava that shine through the cloudiness and light up your taste buds.
Obviously I wish there was more of a guava flavor to it, as I am a guava junky. I could be handed a freshly squeezed glass of juice that was wholly guava and I would still wish I had more of that particular flavor. I will take what I am given though and I will happily drink it again and again.

One of the worst things I have ever drunk before was an Asian plum juice. I assure you it tasted like no plum I have ever eaten. I was later told that in Asia prunes are referred to as plums. I thought, “well that explains that,” but then I remembered that it didn't even taste like liquid prunes. It tasted like moldy wood and meat aka the absolute worst.

It's good to see that the fine people in Nantucket know what plums really are and how to juice them. I do have to point out that this is mostly water and pear juice so the plum flavor isn't the strongest, but it is still quite nice, albeit a little sweeter than I would prefer. It really should be called a plum-pear juice though.

My mind has gone off on a tangent. All I can think about now is a 100% plum juice. There would be nothing else in the bottle except the liquid that was squeezed out of what I imagine would be several dozen plums. I think taking a sip of that would be a little slice of heaven. Can you imagine that? Oh man, it would be so tart, yet sweet in just the right ways. I'm sure some cold pressed juice company will end up making it and charge $15 a bottle for it. I'm definitely one of the suckers who would pay it too.

The year was 2000. Y2K had come and gone without a sound, Bill Clinton was still president, and I had just graduated from high school. After graduation, I moved into a house in Buffalo just around the corner from the coffee shop Stimulance. This coffee shop would quickly become a place I went to a lot. From getting a bagel with cream cheese in the morning, to evenings drinking Snicker-chinos (a delicious coffee drink that tasted like a burnt Snickers bar). Lets not forget their classic weekly open mic nights. Oh memories...

So why am I talking about this coffee shop that has long since closed? Well it was the first place I ever bought a bottle of Nantucket Nectars from. It was a bottle of their lemonade and I was instantly hooked. This bottle is their half and half (half lemonade, half iced tea) and it's just as good as the solo lemonade flavor. A lot of companies get the ratio all wrong, but those folks in Nantucket know what they're doing.

I'm tagging along with my friends, Night Birds, playing the role of "merch dude." Our first stop was Cleveland, OH. We went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was surprisingly rad. I got to see Ian Curtis' lyric sheets, a bill The Replacements got for damaging a hotel room, the original Riot Grrrl zine, some rad Nirvana stuff and a bunch more. I nerded out a bit. I also worked up one heck of a thirst. Only juice could save the day.

Cleveland is hardly a coastal town, but how can you say no to Nantucket Nectars with its all-natural juice goodness? It's pretty readily available everywhere, so I don't know why I don't drink it more. This is a perfect blend of pomegranate and pear. Both are obviously present, but the strength of their flavors keep each other in check and subdued. It's incredibly refreshing. Just the way I needed it to be.

It is over 60 degrees today in Portland and it feels great! The things I love about warm weather are all the delicious cool drinks there are for me to drink to help 'beat the heat'. One of my favorites is lemonade. Now I have had my fair share of lemonades over the years, and Natucket Nectar ranks up near the top. It had been a few years since I had drank a bottle so finding this at the Alberta Co-op today was a treat.

If I had to describe this in three words, it would be 'smooth, tart, and refreshing.' I can't find anything wrong with this. It's the perfect summer time lemonade. The lemon tart is perfect too, not over or underwhelming. Just perfect.

There's cranberry juice and there is this cranberry juice. A lot of cranberry juices are too sweet or too tart or too...something. Some of them are so sugary that you can't tell what fruit comprises the juice you're drinking. I understand that the cranberry, or cranius-berrious, is very bitter in its core state and needs some sugar to balance it out. I don't know how someone ate a cranberry and said, "You know Carl? I don't feel bad one iota about dating Karl's ex-wife. They've been broken up for three years and if he can't get over it, that's his problem. Carla and I are in love and there ain't nothing anyone can do about it. Also, do you think that these raw cranberries need sugar? They're very tart and I don't think we can use them for anything."

This is a nice balance and since it's real sugar, you can taste how cranberries were supposed to be tasted, in some of its bitter glory. It's equally delicious whether you're chugging it like some frat dude in a 1980's John Hughes movie, or sipping it like a prep school kid in a 1980's John Hughes movie.

I would like to try to eat a cranberry as-is. I know I could spend something outlandish like $18.99 and get a 2oz. bottle of pure cranberry juice, but what do I look like a guy that has a urinary tract infection? Nope. Clean as a whistle.

Nantucket Nectars sure knows how to make a quality juice. After drinking so much garbage that's out there it's nice to find a juice that actually tastes like the fruit it's named after. It tastes like someone dumped some mango puree into a glass of orange juice.
It's the way that I want my morning juice to taste.