Mexico - 45 Reviews

Franklin really should have been paying more attention to his travel agent when she explained the dangers of wandering outside of the tourist areas of Mexico. When she started going into her spiel of things to avoid his mind began to wander to all of the rad things he was going to do while down south of the border. He assumed she was just going to talk about not drinking the water, and he was no dummy, he knew all about that. Franklin had also watched enough television to know all about bribing the Tijuana. He was all set. Now the only thing left to do was envision trading small children sticks of gum for tours of secret wondrous locations. As I said Franklin had watched a lot of TV and he knew how things worked, or so he thought. It's now three months later and he has been tied up in some cellar beneath what he thought was a corner store. With the bag over his head he could no longer keep track of the days, but he's pretty sure he's been down there for at least a week.

Oh Franklin, where did you go wrong? Oh yeah it was that like always you didn't listen to those who knew more than you. You strayed away from the path set out for those who want to safely visit the country of Mexico, because of that insatiable thirst of yours. You saw an old faded sign on the side of a building for Barrilitos soda. You knew it was an authentic local pop, and you really wanted to try your hand at a bottle of the pineapple. You sauntered into what you thought was a store, but which turned out to be an outpost for a drug cartel and here you are in a dirty basement with no food or water, and a bag over your head. Sharon must be worried sick, but you do always find a way out of these situations. We have faith in you.

Oh yeah, I know you've been holding onto the idea that as soon as you get out you're going to celebrate with a bottle of pineapple Barrilitos. I hate to be the one to have to break this to you, but you are in for a disappointment. I know you've built up the flavor in your mind into something incredible, but it's really a sub par soda. It tastes remotely like pineapple candy on the first couple of sips, but the more you drink, the less it tastes anything like pineapple. The more you imbibe the more it just tastes like a nameless citrus soda that isn't very good. I suggest you get yourself a Jarritos instead. Please, please listen to your travel agent next time that is if there is a next time.

For the quantity of peaches that I have consumed in my life I am shocked that I have not had more of its less fuzzy cousin the apricot. Truth be told I think I may have consumed maybe three whole apricots during my time on this planet. I have eaten it by the ton in its dried form though. The reason for that is because my mom would always buy a bag from the bulk section for some reason. Dried apples or pineapples would have been my go-to, but she always chose the apricot.

This is 27% juice and all of it is apricot. A lot of companies cut their juice with apple fluid, but Jumex keeps it strong with pure apricot. Well, at least the 27% of it that is actually juice and not water or sweetener. Even thought 73% of what is contained in this can is not apricot based, it sure tastes like it is. If you're a fan of apricots and you don't mind juice that is mostly not juice then give this a shot.

I've drunk a lot of peach juices and nectars in my day. For a while I was obsessed with Looza peach nectar. Then I got sick of paying $5 for a bottle of it, and switched over to the Goya version. It wasn't quite as good, but it still got the job done. Throughout the history of Thirsty Dudes I seem to always end up with the peach flavored drinks, and I'm not complaining.

The Sonrisa peach nectar is not as thick as the previously mentioned brands, but it's nothing to scoff at. Sure it has HFCS in it as a sweetener, but it comes after the juice on the ingredients list. That is saying something in this day and age. It's very sweet, a little sweeter than I prefer, but the peach taste makes up for it. Anyone who has downed more than a couple of whole peaches in their life can tell you that different parts of the peach have different flavors. Sonrisa concentrated on the “flesh” of the peach that comes in contact with the pit. In an actual peach that area is a bit tougher, with some rough spots, but the flavor is very specific. If there wasn't a sweetener added to this I think the taste would be dead on. Adding the sweetener just made it more enjoyable.

Dear Mexico,

It's nice to know that you and I have finally met. I have wanted to visit you for a long time. I would say that as long as I've known that tacos come from you I have wanted to visit your arid region. I don't mean that in a sexual way, and if this pen were erasable, I would have taken care of that potential double entendre. Since it is essentially written in stone, you're going to have to live with it knowing that I did not mean it.

Moving on, your locale was wonderful. If I was in the market for a 70's Volkswagen Beetle or a 90's Jeep Wrangler, I know that if I can't find one in these United States, I can always go to your area and find a trillion. I did not have a lot of time to spend on your shores and for that reason, I missed out on picking up some of your homegrown Barrilitos. You keep things simple there. Here in the states there is all sorts of marinating, saturating, and other food and drink related activities that happen that take up all our free time. You make a product like Barrilitos and take a siesta. I am envious of your "laid back" lifestyle. This drink just tastes like carbonated apple juice. Apple juice is great. Pop is great. Putting them both together is great. Tacos are the best food ever and everything can basically be taken out of can and dumped onto a tortilla; that is if you are alright with everything being cold.

In closing. I already miss you. I didn't know it got as cold as it did when we were together, but that's because I am geographically retarded and don't know what happens south of Buffalo in terms of weather patterns and no, I don't mean South Buffalo. I know what happens there and it's nothing good, I can assure you that. I hope you are having a great time without me and I know one day we will be together drinking nice glass bottles of Coke and Barrilitos.

Sincerely,
Mike Literman

I've never had guanabana before. I was expecting it to be very bitter, very bland, or like guava (solely because they start with the same first two letters). Reality has it that it tastes like none of the above. I think it tastes like a smooth fake strawberry with a little bit of passionfruit in the mix. My ladyfriend thinks it tastes like melon. She is wrong. Dead wrong. Maybe I'm, just being a jerk. It's pretty thick, but it is a nectar and does have corn syrup in it.

Guanabana is also known as soursop, I just discovered. I searched our page and Mike also thought that it tasted kind of like passionfruit. Looks like great (and stupid) minds think alike. Since I thought this was going to be something on the grosser side of the taste spectrum, it was a nice pleasant surprise.

No one? No one has a bottle opener? The ones in this gift shop in Mexico don't work for some reason. One would assume that a drink and bottle made in the same country would expect compatible. Now I'm walking around Cozumel with a bottle of chocolate milk looking like a jerk. Looking like a dude, with a giant beard, whom is nearly thirty carrying around an unopened bottle of chocolate milk. I hope people don't think I'm trying to lure in little unsuspecting Mexican kids to work on some American sweat camp.

Oh sir, please. You've got to help me. Do you...you do?! Thank you so much. Finally I can drink this...mediocre chocolate milk. I looked all around Mexico only to be proven correct in my assumption that this was going to taste like watery chocolate milk. Great. A dollar well spent for some is a dollar wasted for others. I wish I had more time here so that I could make up for this, but alas, my ship is sailing and I'm exhausted from haggling, poorly, for authentic sugar skulls.

Strawberries are good but for some reason I don't like eating the fruit. Bananas are bad and I don't eat them and do whatever I can to not ingest them. This is a cross between two fighting flavors that I don't ingest in solid form.

Now I've got this drink that has put good versus bad in one brightly colored can. I knew it had both things in it and I was fully prepared to ingest both at the same time. Down the hatch...and...delicious. I can't give you a percentage, ratio, bar graph, pie chart, or whatever other type of graph that you might want, but it was good. Everything disguised each other so it was like a different fruit all together. Stranana. It was nicely thick, like one would want and desire. It was very fruity and I would get it again.

It's been a long drive, but now you've reach your destination. 11 hours on the road is a long time. It seems even longer when it's been pouring rain for half of it. You get to the house, but no one is home. Luckily you have a key on your enormous janitor-esque key ring. You let yourself in plop down on the couch to just relax. You suddenly realize that you are starving. Problem is it's pouring out so you can't walk anywhere, and you got a bitchin' parking spot that you really don't want to give up. Looks like it's toast with peanut butter yet again. This time you decide to spice it up by sipping on a can of mango nectar during your meal. The food is as decent as you would expect. You went for the honey roasted peanut butter, and boy are and boy are you glad you did. The juice on the other hand, not so great and you wish you had chosen more wisely. It tastes like mangoes alright, but old ones that have begun to slightly spoil. It has that borderline smoky flavor to it that acidic things that are on the verge of going bad get. It's also more of a thinned out syrup than a nectar. What can you do though give up that parking spot? I think not. You'll suffer through that slightly less than mediocre juice, and you'll live another day to complain about it via the internet.

While stuck in a desert, you reach your hand in your pocket. You pull out a pocket full of sand. You don't know what you should have expected. You've been out here with your camel for going on four days. Four long, hot, sweaty, sandy days. You have already lost ten pounds putting yourself at your "target weight" but it doesn't really matter because working out is what you wanted to do to lose the weight, not starve yourself. Sure, you ate that bird, but it wasn't great and you didn't have the proper spices and herbs to really make it a nice meal. You look at your camel and you see a rib eye steak with your camel's head in the hole, like in cartoons. You would never eat Jerome, but you would think about it, a lot.

You just endlessly climb hills of sand only to uncover more hills of sand. All of a sudden, you reach the peak of another sand hill and look down to see someone else. "Help!" you exclaim as you tumble and slide down the side of the hill. On closer inspection, that dude is fat. He tells you that he is just looking for a nice, flat place for a picnic for one. You walk with him, confused as to why someone would travel all this way for a picnic for yourself when you know for a fact that the country you are in has picnic tables and out here blows. The fat man sits down, lays out a blanket, takes out a three tier candlestick, four sandwiches, two bottles of Jarritos lime pop, a box of Nutter Butters, and half a watermelon. He takes several bites out of the first sandwich and looks at you, looking like garbage, and he says that you may sit down and join him. You sit; grab a sandwich, slice of watermelon, and bottle of pop. Why no Nutter Butters? Because it's 122 degrees in the desert and that chocolate has long melted.

You take a sip of the pop and are almost instantly relieved. All those days in the desert were erased and your camel finally doesn't look like a piece of meat anymore. Good old Jerome. You've have lime pop before, but this is so subtle, that it's actually quenching and not overly sour or bold like you were frightened it would have been. Just because you were starving, doesn't mean that you don't have taste buds.

You finish up, help the man clean up, and he offers to walk you back to the city. You walk over one hill and notice that you've just been going around in circles for four days. You feel stupid but now you can feel good about losing all that weight and having a sensible lunch.

I love when I go into what appears to be a run down corner store and it ends up being a beverage Mecca. At first I walked in and saw one lone cooler filled with the usual suspects of crappy soda. Then I noticed they inexplicably had five rows of Hansen's pomegranate. Strange. I turned the corner and the store opened up fairly large with two full walls of coolers. Excellent.

They had the largest selection of Jarritos I had ever seen. Who can say no to pineapple? Not me, that's who. Unfortunately it wasn't a strong flavor. It had a general sweet soda flavor with a hint of pineapple citrus flavor. I like my pineapple strong and Jarritos didn't follow through for me. Shame on you!

Coca-cola the way it should be, made with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I don't know if it's the free fancy hotel room I'm sitting it while drinking it (due to being bumped from a flight), but this is one of the best bottles of normal cola I've had in a while. It's smooth, delicious, and lacks the burn that most colas have. Mexican Coca-Cola for the win!

I was told about Jarritos cola several months ago. Ever since I heard about its existence, I have looked for it in every taco and burrito establishment. Sadly, I couldn't find in anywhere. When I went to Pop Culture, I was really excited to see it in the cooler. Finally, I could taste what everyone has been raving about!

I must say, this definitely deserved the hype! It is a really good cola, and has a nice cola bite to it without the syrup taste HFCS gives other colas. It's not as refreshing as other Jarritos flavors (obviously), and I was unable to give it the burrito test. But unlike other Jarritos flavors, this stands on its own without a burrito. If I could find this more often, I'd drink this over Pepsi/Coca Cola any day.

Look, I'm not a resort guy. I got in a tiff with my girlfriend about going to Mexico and staying on a resort. What's the fun in that? If I go to a foreign land, I want to go to that foreign land. I want to eat what they eat, see what they see, and do what they do. What fun is going to a new place if you only get some faux luxury? No nitty-gritty. Slavery-esque waiting on you hand and foot is probably great for some people but what's more fun, getting waited on or getting dirty in the streets with the people. I want to eat real tacos and I don't want sushi if I go to Mexico. Who goes to Mexico and gets sushi? You go to Mexico to get tacos, and boss sugar skulls with your name on them, and delicious indigenous Jarritos pop.

I am not grapefruit's number one fan, let it be known, but maybe it's just because I don't like raw grapefruit and Squirt isn't the greatest. After trying DG's Ting, I might be a convert. This was very refreshing. It was very citric to start. Not too grapefruit until the very end where you get a nice zap of it. It's good. Chuggable good. I know that's a poor classification of drink, but honestly, some drinks are sipping drinks and some are not. This is anything you want it to be. Your dream drink, if you will.

If I went to Mexico, you know darn well that I would learn more Spanish than I ever learned in all my years of taking a foreign language in both high school and college. I would hope that after a while, they would see my love for burritos and welcome me in with open arms.

I tried something new with this bottle of Jarritos. I didn't drink it while eating a burrito. I did this because I don't have any burritos at the moment. I also wanted to find out if my theory is true about burritos and Jarritos being a perfect match.

Well I think my theory was correct. It may be because I don't like strawberries that much, or don't usually go crazy over strawberry flavored drinks, but I'm going to blame it on the lack of burrito that I'm not that into this soda. It smells, and tastes, like strawberry, and it's really light and fruity with the perfect amount of sweetness. But something is missing, and that something is a burrito.

Lesson learned.

Once again, my theory has been proven true. Burritos + Jarritos= perfect combination. This one was enjoyed at Don Pancho Taquería with a delicious veggie burrito. I love how flavorful this soda was. When they say mango flavor, they mean it! It was definitely the best mango soda I've ever had. It was sweet and refreshing. What more could you ask for a drink with a burrito?

It should be a law that Jarritos and burritos should be consumed together, because they compliment each other so well. I had a delicious (and giant) soy curl burrito with habanero sauce from Los Gorditos while drinking this. It helped extinguish the spicy burrito very well.

I ordered this flavor because I had never seen it before. I also made an ass out of myself when I asked for it because I didn't know it wasn't pronounced like the country. After doing some research, I now know Jamaica (pronounced ha-mayka) is made from a mixture of hibiscus flower and fruit juices. It had a really good sweet flavor to it. It was hard to decipher the flavors though the burning in my mouth, but it had a great cranberry and ginger aftertaste. I'm really excited to try this drink again when my mouth isn't on fire from an awesome burrito.

This is my second go at a tamarind drink. I have to say I'm not really a fan. After a quick internet search I learned that it's used in the following; pickling, jam, worcestershire sauce, chutney and as a natural laxative. It's pretty all over the map. It's been described as a sweet and sour taste. I think it's a plant that just doesn't know what it wants to do with its life. I can't think of anything to compare it to. Unfortunately this is the first Jarritos drink that I just can't get in to.

Oh Mexican Pepsi, how I wish your American brother/sister was just like you. While there is nothing special about the taste of this cola, it's classic! And the use of sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup makes it so much better. While it's nice that Pepsi Throwback is fairly easy to find, there's no doubt that this is much better. I have never met anyone who prefers Pepsi with HFCS over real sugar. Plus, drinking Pepsi out of a glass bottle reminds me of my childhood when my grandparents used to buy the tall glass bottles of Pepsi.

It's like there was a peach party arranged, but too many people showed up. As a result they had to cut the peach supply (you know like the do with cocaine in the moving pictures). Now there is enough for everyone, but what they get is a peachy beverage, but it doesn't get them as high in flavor town as the pure version would.

Am I alone in thinking that when things are described as being nectar that it means the drink will have a thicker consistency? Juice is thinner and watery, as if the juice has been squeezed from the fruit. Nectar is thicker, as if the fruit was pureed. That is the way my mind works. Jumex apparently does not agree with my train of thought. To me this is a juice, plain and simple. There is nothing wrong with that. I enjoy it quite a bit. It's a nice sugary guava treat. Can you really ever go wrong with guava? I certainly don't think so.