Australia - 18 Reviews

I just got home from spending over two weeks in Australia. The only thing I want to talk about are the animal sanctuaries. We went to one in Perth and I spent hours there hanging out with all of the weirdest critters. I held a koala, for an unusually long time as the attendant just walked into a building. No complaints there. I also hung out with what I can only assume equaled a million kangaroos and wallabies. They are so damn docile there and just want to hang out and eat the food you give them all day. I was more than happy to comply. There were also so many rad birds. I booped a dingo on the nose and he loved it. It was all so great that two days later I dished out the money to go to another one and repeat my experience. Life was great. I would have gone every day if I had the chance. I would have also followed up each trip with a bottle of this amazing juice.

This was probably mostly apple juice, but the guava tastes so strong that it took over the beverage. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. The only thing that could have made it better would have been if it was fresh squeezed. If that was an option I never would have flown home. I would have lived a homeless existence in a foreign country just to be able to get that juice on a regular basis.

Why hasn't guava been the hot fruit of the season yet in the States? It's a superior fruit, but it's not commonly used to flavor things. I don't think I've ever seen a fresh one in a store. America rectify this mistake and make my taste buds as happy as Australia did.

I keep hearing how great Nudie juices are. the thing is that every time I pick one up I see that it has banana in it, which means I might as well put my money directly in the trash because that is where that juice belongs. Man, bananas are one of the worst.
Luckily I stumbled upon this one which is trash free. People were right, it's completely delicious. It's mostly carrot and orange, which sounds odd when you first think about it, but it's one hell of a combo. Add a little apple juice to it for sweetness and a dash of ginger for a kick and you have a juice to write home about. This is 100% pure juice with no added sweeteners and I could drink it all day long, or at least until I got a gnarly stomach ache. It would be such a tasty pain though.

Sometimes you find yourself in Australia and you don't want to sit around the house you're staying at, so you go for a walk. After a bit you look at a map on your phone and discover you're near the beach, so you decide to walk there. After awhile you realize it's a lot further than you thought, but you've already gone so far that you simply can't turn back. Man are you thirsty though, so you stop at the only open gas station that you pass and all drinks are like $4 each. You curse Australia for being great, but so expensive (except cake for some reason). You end up with a hole in your wallet and a can of creaming soda in your hand.

This is something different than red cream soda or soda mouse as it is known in Canada. It's fruitier with a little something extra. In fact creaming soda doesn't taste like cream soda much at all. It's still good, but it's a different beast. It also gives you the boost you need to make it to the beach and back, completing your 20km+ walk like the dummy you are.

Australia is a strangely biased place. Everywhere I go cans of coke are $3.50 or more. While Pepsi products range from the $1.50 to $3 range. I mean I'm not going to argue with them Coke products are generally better, but it still seems crazy that there is such a price difference. I kept seeing this along with the Pepsi products in gas stations and meant to pick it up since we don't have it back home. I'm not a huge fan of 7Up so I continuously skipped it (mostly for water in an attempt to pretend-consume healthy foods).

Suddenly I have found myself with one being placed in my hands at a show. It is much better than I anticipated. It's straight up carbonated lemonade, including 5% lemon juice. Sure it's overly sweet and sodalike but it's better than any lemon lime I've ever had.

To be fair if this was in the US it would be garbage because instead of bring sweetened by real sugar there would be high fructose corn syrup in it and it would be a thick, syrupy mess.

I've been in Australia for about two weeks now. Let me tell you, eating vegetarian and avoiding eggs and cheese is not an easy task here. As a result I've spent my fair share of time at grocery stores cobbling together meals that I don't need to cook. I kept seeing 4-packs of this ginger beer, but I've been trying to limit my soda intake so I was hoping I would come across single cans in a gas station. It didn't happen, but I did find a 4-packs today on sale for less than a single bottle of Bundaberg is, so I grabbed it to share.

This is fantastic. I wasn't quite sure how the guarana would mingle with the ginger, but they got "right chatty" as I'm sure someone around here would say. As it turns out they combine into something great. The result really reminds me of Skeleteens sodas from the 90s (Brain Wash/Love Potion 69).
The ginger doesn't have a typical burn. It's transformed into something new. It tastes intense and almost hurts your throat to drink it. I mean that in a very positive way. So much for limiting my soda and sharing. My mom is going to be so disappointed in me.

I'm in Australia. I really have no idea what I did right in my life to get here. I've spent more than 20 years playing in bands and making friends through music. Now people who live 7 hours away from me have dragged me halfway across the globe to the place that is the furthest away from home I could possibly be and still be on Earth. Sometimes life is pretty great.

My main objectives for this trip were to hang out with koalas/ kangaroos and drink a buttload of ginger beer. The second half of my plans started earlier than I expected when my 30+ hours of travel was filled with flight attendants serving me as much Bundaberg as I could fit into my digestive system. Now I'm at a house show in Perth (because where else would I be?) And a new friend handed me this unfamiliar can of ginger beer. My friends know what I like.

This is made by the Coca-Cola company and it tastes like it. It's quite good, but it feels like a safe version of ginger beer. The kind an older relative would keep in the fridge and serve to the kids. It's ginger beer with training wheels. It's a bit lighter tasting than what I'm used to, with a more subdued burn. It's a bit smooth and tastes like a strong ginger beer was mixed with plain soda water. I would say it lives in the gaps between ginger ale and beer. It's also pretty sweet, coming in at 47g of sugar pee serving.

Like I said it is enjoyable, but in a country where Bundaberg is king and can be found all over the place, I doubt I will pick up another can.

I knew I was in for a wild ride when I didn't even have this cap completely off and I was blasted in the face by the familiar sent of anise/licorice. How is it that I hate black licorice/black jelly beans more than I have hated almost anything in this world, yet I kind of dig that flavor when it's in beverage form? Sure this tastes a bit like carbonated Nyquil, but it's still somehow pretty great.

There really isn't anything about this that would make me think sarsaparilla if I blind taste tested it. I would just assume it was supposed to be an anise soda, because that's all I'm getting. Perhaps sarsaparilla is something different in Australia, where this drink comes from.

This bottle is only 9.3oz, but I think it would be perfect at half that size. I really enjoy it, but it gets to be a bit too much for me at about the half way point. I really hope I stumble across this companies other flavors though, because I anticipate great things from them.

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.

There's nothing like drinking something and having no words to describe it other than an action. If that action was something like an overly dramatic slumping in your chair that would mean that it was a good drink. If you took a sip and gagged or spit it back out, that would be a bad drink. So what was this? Well this one was the most insulting of all.

The packaging on this was great. It's a can with a built in flip-top. Finally. I'm sure it's a little more expensive but a smart decision. No longer do I have to dump half full cans of drinks or drink flat pop. That or have to spend hard earned money on after market bottle toppers. We're not all made of money, people.

So what instinctive emotion and action did this evoke? A shrug. An effortless, emotionless shrug. Why? It's just mineral water. Just. Just mineral water. Tasteless, flavorless, so on and so forth. Do you like mineral water? Cool. I found one for you.

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.

Terry worked as a heating and cooling repairman for 13 years of his life. He drove his van around Western New York fixing people's stoves, fridges and air conditioners. Most days he didn't hate his job, but there wasn't much room for advancement. He did love driving around a lot though. Then one day he was fixing a guy's air conditioner and he got to talking to him. You see Terry loved fixing things, and he liked to explain it as well. The man was so impressed with his passion that he offered him a job at his company. He would make more money and promotions were a possibility. Terry knew he would miss his driving around and didn't like the idea of being stuck in one play all day, but the money was nice and he needed a change. He took to the job like a fish to water. He took a couple of trips to other states to fix some industrial units, and getting away was nice. Then one day he got asked if he would be willing to go to Australia for a week for the job. Not being a dummy he jumped at the chance. So within six months this fine man went from working a quasi dead end job to working for a growing company and being sent around the world doing work that he found interesting. It's times like these that I am incredibly proud of my friends. It's also times like these when I am thankful that I have friends who travel around the globe and bring me back gifts of drinks.

This is a bottle of Australian sarsaparilla that was purchased at a roadside fruit stand in said country. (As a side note, if you don't take advantage of roadside fruit stands when you are traveling then you are a fool.) I expected this to be a very strong sarsaparilla for some reason, but it's not and I'm okay with that. It has a very classic soda flavor to it. I could see this being served in a 50's soda shop with a couple sharing a bottle with two straws. It starts off as just a generic old time soda flavor but when you swallow it has a strong sarsaparilla aftertaste. It's not what I was looking for but it's a soda that has its place and I can respect and enjoy that. I do with the licorice flavor was a bit stronger in this. Then it would be superb.

Oddly enough this is made by the Fosters Beer company. I don't know why I find that weird, but I definitely do. Also the tagline on the bottle is “Refreshingly Tasmanian.” Now that I find charming.

Dear Jason Draper of the Thirsty Dudes,
This is a ginger beer for you. Do you want to know why? It is because it tastes like ginger. You love ginger. I have seen you put it on tacos on multiple occasions. Is it a sickness? Possibly. Is it an obsession? Probably more so. I know you are crazy about the stuff and for that, I'm sorry. I drank this expecting the spice that I feel I deserve.

Jay, we have been friends for a long time. We have lived together, "spent time" with the same girl, and written many songs about barbecues. I know you and I know your taste buds and I know you would have given this at least a four. You love the earthy qualities of ginger and you love the sting. We love the sting. We love our ginger beer hot. This is a medium burn. Less than a Blenheim but more than a ginger ale. Less than a Goya but more than a...water...

In closing, Jay. I am sorry that I drank this and didn't have the hindsight to give it to you. If I find one again, I will buy it for you.

Lovingly,
Mike.

PS: Tacos tonight?

I have had some stomach thing. I am not a doctor so I cannot tell you what it is, but after every time I eat, I feel like garbage. I can't eat as much and I need to sit and be quiet or else... I don't know, I feel more sick.

Since only the rich can afford health insurance compounded with the fact that I won't take medicine, I had to take matters into my own hands.

Scouring through my stock, I remembered that I had a hot ginger ale. As we all know, the hotter the ginger ale is, the more natural and good for you it is. I threw this cat in the fridge for a bit, took it out, cracked it open, and took a sip. Hello cured stomach ailments, here we come. Then we had a little bit of a problem. You see, when I read, "hot" I expect HOT. This was more of a sting.

Now, "hot" is a relative term. I am quite accustomed to hot flavors, so although this may be on the lower levels of the ginger beer ladder, it could be too much for, say, a wimp.

Flavor-wise, it's not bad. It has a genuine, earthy ginger flavor that doesn't linger on your tongue. All of the flavors of actual ginger are apparent and the sweetness isn't overpowering.

The Thirsty Dudes crew had to go to Canada to get this Australian treat, even though it says on the bottle that it's available in the US. It was good, but I don't think it's worth a special trip anywhere to try and find.

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.