Sprite - 2 Reviews

Back in March I heard about this new limited edition Sprite flavor, but search as I might I could not find it around Buffalo at all. In fact, due to its limited nature I thought that I had missed my opportunity all together. So much time had gone by with no luck that I had given up. Next thing I know it's September and I somehow found myself in a liquor store in Lansing, MI looking through a cooler and you know who's soda catches my eye. I'll admit it, I squealed in public over a flavor of Sprite. I'm not proud of it, or the looks that a 36 year old man receives when making such a noise in a liquor store full of the downtrodden of all places, but I like to be open and honest you all of you. I don't get excited often, but when I do it's about the dumbest things.

I only know one thing about LaBron James, and that is that he is a basketball player. I don't know what position he plays. I don't know what team he plays for. He could walk up to me and punch me in my dumb face for taking so long to find and review his soda and I would have no idea who just socked me in the nose. I did learn something new about him today though; he knows how to take a boring soda like Sprite and make it interesting. I'm guessing he really had nothing to do with the development of the flavor, but it's still a step up from the original. Basically this is Sprite with cherry and orange mixed in. To me it tastes a bit like a Shirley Temple that you would get at a bowling alley (I don't know if they can legally serve them anywhere else). There is also part of it that tastes like what Mike calls the “Laser Tag Special” aka hitting all of the flavors on a fountain machine. It's sweet but it's tasty. I can't see myself drinking it very often, but I can see many other people downing it by the 2 liter.

I wonder if it's possible that Mr. James will Google his name, read this review and somehow learn more about me than I do about him. I'm certainly not going to look into his life, but he's welcome to take a glance at mine.

Our contact at the Buffalo Coca Cola plant told us this was coming out, and while I had seen the 2lt bottles of it in the grocer store I was keeping my eyes open for smaller bottles, or cans, but alas I did not find them. As a result I'm sitting here with way more pop than I actually need, telling myself that I should just drop the leftovers off with my upstairs neighbor.

Was I shocked to learn that we had not reviewed normal Sprite when I looked through our database? Not at all. You see when we started Thirsty Dudes a few years ago we made a conscious decision to put big soda on the back burner. We figured it was the kind of thing that we would be served at a family party, so there was no rush to go out and purchase it for review. The problem with that logic is that never in a million years would I choose a lemon lime soda over anything else at any point in my life. Lemon lime is perfectly fine, but it's boring, and I don't get enough enjoyment out of it to justify the sugar intake. So here we are with our first Sprite review and it's for their new cranberry variant, which I read was going to be limited to the holiday season.

While I am not a huge fan of lemon lime, I will give Sprite props for not going overboard with the cranberry flavor in this. It could easily have overtaken the entire taste of this drink. At its core this is still mainly a lemon lime soda with a little cranberry flavor added as an afterthought. The added flavor is very light and it stays true to the brands respected flavor. This is all I could ever hope that a cranberry Sprite would taste like.