Zico - 7 Reviews

There is a battle in this bottle. It is a fierce battle like a 1993 WWF Royal Rumble. Folding chairs? Check. Eye gouging a'plenty. Why is there fighting? You've got coconut doing its chalky duty and the coffee latte doing its thing. As long as the bottle stays cold, latte wins and it's drinkable and pretty enjoyable, actually.

For a coconut drink, my well-documented not-favorite drink, I thoroughly enjoyed this. As a matter of fact, my buddy Dan and I nearly finished the whole bottle very quickly. Back and forth: a sip for me, a sip for you. We were waiting for the time where coconut reared its dominant head and started to taste like drinkable bleach. We rushed through it and it was great. You did it again, Zico. Now mix this and the chocolate and make a mocha. I want royalties on that idea. I'm serious. This review is time stamped. If you come out with it after this I have record that I came up with the idea first. Just send me a case when it comes out and we can go from there.

After riding my bike around on a nice pseudo spring day I worked myself into a Zen-like state. To be fair being out in the sun for a while after a few months of winter (mild or not) will do that to a person. I decided to celebrate my brief inner peace with a bottle of Zico Tao Mango coconut water. I've really come a long way in enjoying these beverages over the past two years. From hatred, to passable, and now they are just enjoyable. Apparently to the fine folks at Zico Tao is a pseudonym for cinnamon. This tastes like cinnamon and mango (and of course coconut water). It was an unexpected flavor to have wash over my tongue, but it is enjoyable. The ingredients say nothing about it containing cinnamon, but maybe that falls under the "natural flavors." I would have never thought of mixing mango and cinnamon, but Zico must have gotten my message I wrote yesterday about companies halting their production of peach mango drinks. See you can think outside of the box and have great results. My girlfriend says it tastes like tanning oil, but what does she know? She's surely not a scientist.

I had high hopes for this drink. Zico has had a good track record so far and made us Thirsty Dudes give coconut water another shot. On top of that, pomegranate is one of my favorite fruits. Both are fairly tropical so I figured this would be a good combo, right?

Meh. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a bad combo, but it's not amazing. This has more of a coconut water flavor, but not a whole lot pomegranate (or berry) flavor to it. There is a slight fruit after taste, but not as much as I would have hoped. This is still one of the best coconut waters I've had, but when something is flavored I assume it's going to be a strong flavor and not just a hint.

It's been months now since the Robbins family got stranded on the desert island (yes there is only one on the face of this planet). Margie, the mother of the group, has created an ingenious system where she boils the seawater with a plastic tarp over it so that the water evaporated away from the salt and the steam traveled down the tarp into a separate container to make it drinkable. While she insured their survival with her scientific skills, all they had to drink was bland, slightly salty water. Their thoughts constantly floated to the idea of fancy sodas, even a jug of ghetto tea would be a dream come true. Alas, all they have is mom's water.

Then one day the kids were out on my beach. Sally, the daughter, was leaning against a tree reading the autobiography of Steve Guttenberg, because it's the only book they have on the island. Bobby was bored, as young boys on desert islands tend to be so he decided to torment Sally. He started off with a rousing game of repeating everything Sally said, but as she was reading that didn't really work. Then he switched over to "I'm not touching you." Unfortunately Sally was so engrossed in a chapter about Three Men and a Little Lady that she didn't even notice. Finally as an act of desperation he started shaking the tree violently to get some sort of reaction out of her. She glanced up annoyed, and just as Bobby was about to celebrate a coconut fell from the tree and cracked him right in the skull. That of course set Sally into a fit of giggles until she noticed that the coconut had cracked open and a liquid was dribbling out. She put some on her finger and tasted it. It was kind of sweet, and very tasty. She pried the coconut open a little more and drank the juice that was inside. It wasn't the best thing she ever had, but it sure beat mom's water. Once Bobby woke up they fashioned him a helmet and had him shake trees all the livelong day so they could have fresh coconut water.

I'm no longer going to talk about my past feelings on coconut water. I have been converted and this is one of the best bottles I've had yet. If you're hot and parched, crack open an ice cold bottle and enjoy the summer.

My first time I ever had coconut water was in Toronto. Me and a bunch of friends drove up there for a hardcore show and were walking down Spadina toward 50 Toppings Guy (a 24 hour hot dog vendor that serves veggie dogs and has over 50 toppings to put on them). A big area of Spadina is Asian markets and one of them was selling young coconuts with straws on the street. A bunch of my friends bought one, but I had my mind set on having an orange pop with my two veggie dogs. Being the curious person I am, I tried some and thought it was so gross. I avoided coconut water like the plague after that.

Jump to today, where I just got home from a show. I've had this bottle chilling in the fridge all day, waiting for me to come home. I will admit, the first couple sips brought back unpleasant memories. Once I pushed past those, I began to really enjoy this drink. It's a really smooth coconut taste. I was expecting it to have a strong lime taste, but it is subtler than I expected. I would have never thought lime and coconut would go together. On second thought, I do remember hearing the Harry Nilsson song "Coconut" growing up which has the lyrics "She put the lime in the coconut, she drank them both up". Music teaches us so much.

All of my life I have thought of coconuts as the vilest of fruits. I straight up hated it and anything that it was in. I feel like a lot of food, especially desserts were ruined for me. Mounds and Almond Joys? No Thanks!

When coconut water started to become popular I didn't understand it. None of us at Thirsty Dudes were a fan of coconut, so we kind of ignored it existence. Normally we try to give objective reviews to drinks that we know we won't like because of our personal tastes, but with coconut water we didn't think we'd be able to down enough of the bottle to even do that. A while back I got a carton of a fruit enhanced version of it. It tasted like it was curdling. So gross. Now thanks to Zico I know what my problem was. I drank it at room temperature. Coconut water is made to be drank ice cold and when it is it is actually kind of awesome.

Even ice cold it still has a remote chalky taste to it, but nothing terrible. It is crisp and refreshing. The pineapple in this isn't very strong. It's more of a general tropical citrus flavor.

Coconut water will never be one of my favorites, but I can now appreciate it for what it is. Just remember to drink it as cold as possible, or it could be completely gross.

Let me tell you right off the bat. Thirsty Dudes, as a whole, are not crazy about coconut water. It's nothing against manufacturers, it's just that we drank a handful of them and we just never had one that we liked. Recently Zico contacted us out of the blue and stepped up to the plate. They said that they had chocolate coconut water that we might be interested in. I took the challenge today. Here's how it went.

I knew that I didn't want to drink it lukewarm so I threw that cat in the fridge for a couple hours. That was problem number one is that warm coconut water is more creamy than refreshing. I had a nice, crisp, fresh bottle and I cracked it open and took a sip. It was great. Finally, an entire new category of drinks has emerged for the taking. The chocolate taste was good. It has a good chocolate smell almost like chocolate ice cream. It tasted like really smooth chocolate milk. Initially, I could not taste the coconut, which is great because I didn't go into this liking coconut water. As the temperature dropped, I could start to taste it, but it was subtle enough for me to get used to it.

Zico, you've done it. You've converted me. Congrats.