United States - 4098 Reviews

At parties, everyone drinks. It's a thing that you just accept when you don't drink and socialize with people that do. You have to prepare by either being satisfied with tap water, which I am, or bringing something yourself. I chose the latter this time and brought yet another seasonal exclusive from Polar. This time, it was the toasted coconut creme.

Now they have been pretty good this season and I thought that this would be the same. Who wouldn't like a sparkling cream soda with coconut? Well initially I was not too hot on it. I took a sip and it tasted like I was drinking the somehow bottled scent of a Yankee Candle. I worked next to a Yankee Candle in my early twenties and know the smell all too well. Unlike my stint at that location, the sentient of this drink eventually disappeared and allowed me to enjoy a tamer, less waxy drink. It tasted like sparkling coconut water closer to an unsweetened Sparkling Ice or something but I didn't get a lot of creme. I have had Polar's vanilla and if I drank either again, I might be able to pinpoint it but for now, it was predominantly coconut.

If you have a love for candles, coconut, sparkling drinks or just don't like tap water at parties, this could be the drink for you. This is not my favorite of the season but it's certainly not a bad choice for this increasingly bitter cold winter.

Welcome to Old town folks. We have our world renowned gunfight shows at the top of every hour from noon until 8pm. If seeing men in white hats shoot at men in black hats is what your heart desires, then there is no better place to you to be every sixty minutes. Don't be alarmed when the man falls from the roof after being shot. It's all an act and he lands on some hay bales that break most of his fall. Sure you hear a rib snap every once in a while, but he knows the danger he puts himself in for $10 an hour.

There's really not much around here other than the show. Our town is pretty small and you can see it all in fewer than 15 minutes. Might I suggest that you check out the shooting range while you wait for the show? For a quarter you can shoot our guns that make cans flip and someone play the piano. I'm not sure if they work with lasers, or just shots of air, but it's quite fun for about 3 minutes. The rest of your time you might as well saunter over to the saloon and get a nice cold one. I of course mean sarsaparilla, since this is a family establishment and we don't have a liquor license. I know all of you out there are hoping to drink a nice Sioux City sarsaparilla, but it's my duty to inform you that we only serve the Old Town Root Beer Company's version. I know it's not as good, but our owners are trying to scrape every nickel they can out of this “amusement park,” so they made their own soda. It's not too bad. It's not as strong as I like my sarsaparilla, then again they spell it “sarsparilla.” I don't know what's up with that. It tastes like someone took some of the good stuff and mixed it with an equal amount of standard root beer, then added a bit more vanilla. The result is that it's the creamiest sarsaparilla I've ever tasted. It's a nice change up, but the harshness and boldness is what I love about this flavor, and it's absent in here. Oh well, it's all we serve, so it's what you're going to get. Better nurse it for a while, we still have 34 more minutes until the next show.

Ah, familial holiday parties, what a better time to eat more garbage than you ever would on a normal day and also get a standard beverage review out of the way for Thirsty Dudes. Somewhere in the haze of cookies, pies and ice cream I found myself with this bottle of Schweppes.

Sometimes it boggles my mind when I realize we haven't reviewed a certain drink. As it turns out when we started this website we wanted to review the drinks that people might not be as familiar with, and now we have some catching up to do on the usual suspects. To me Schweppes is THE classic ginger ale. It's what was around when I was young and it's what I was given when I had a stomach ache. Side note to parents it's the ginger in old time ginger ale that soothed the stomach. In most modern ginger ales the amount of actual ginger included is minimal if it's there at all.

If you've ever had a ginger ale you can imagine how this tastes. It's a ginger beverage that contains very little ginger, so it has zero burn, but sometimes that is just what you're looking for. To me this is what all store brand ginger ales are based off of. It is superior to them, but it's that type of ginger ale. It's sweet, quasi ginger flavored sparkling water; exactly what you would expect from a “big soda” ginger ale.

I've been trying to figure out how to best describe the flavor of this soda. It has a specific taste that I just could not put my finger on, as hard as I might try. I decided to go back and read some reviews of other guarana flavored sodas that we have written, and none of them seemed quite right. In the past I have talked about how sodas of this nature taste like a fruitier version of kola champagne aka liquid bubble gum. Seeing as this doesn't completely gross me out and make me feel like I'm drinking a sweet shop, I kept reading. I finally came across a review where I compared guarana to pineapple flavored bubble gum, and I believe that is as accurate as I'm going to get. Luckily the gum flavor is pretty low. Actually, so is the pineapple. It's like someone took hints of those two flavors and mixed it in with a general fruitiness. They then took that concoction and mixed it with generic bubbly sugar water. The result is this soda.

The bottle says nothing about caffeine, but the guarana plant has one of the highest concentrations of caffeine found in nature, so I'm sure this thing will pack a punch that will wake unexpecting people right up. Me, I'm just going to have a couple of sips and see where things take me.

Peach: Not my favorite fruit. It's got hair on it. You're supposed to eat that hair. That's called trichophagia and is not something we should endorse. I mean, look, a little hair never hurt anyone, right? Peaches are little hairs but a lot of little hairs add up and then all of a sudden you're munching on the world's largest ball of hair. I wonder if they have to shampoo that thing. Is it just an old, dry ball of hair? Peaches, right? Whatever, dude.

Since Purity Organic is so nice to both the general public and Thirsty Dudes, they have pre-juiced the peaches into a nice drink mixed with a sweet black tea. No hair. No fuzz. No muss. No fuss. All you're left with is a nice, lightly sweetened black tea with a nice hint of peach. What more could you ask for? It's de-haired, pre and adequately sweetened and all natural. Fantastic.

This little guy proved to be a minor conundrum for me. You see I generally drink the protein shakes we are sent after I work out. That is what I was originally told to do when I first started going to the gym, so it's what I always followed. With this it seemed like I should drink it beforehand. Who needs an energy boost after a workout? Get that in there beforehand to give yourself a little extra push and stretch your limits a bit. Being that this is the terrifying modern age, I took this question to Google and found out that there is actually an argument amongst professionals as to when is the best time to consume protein in the work out world. Some say after because it helps repair muscles, while others say before because it will give you extra strength during the workout. You know what? I'm not that serious about this whole thing. I go to the gym so that I don't become a fat, lazy slob like so many Americans who are approaching middle age. I'm not looking to get ripped, I just want to stay remotely healthy and work off some of these unnecessary Thirsty Dudes calories. Since there was no definitive answer I chose to go with before the gym for this round. Let me tell you I certainly got an energy rush from it. I worked out longer and harder than I normally do, and now I'm a gross sweaty mess in desperate need of a shower, but I forced myself to write this review first.

A lot of protein drinks are chalky, due to the whey protein, but this is nothing if not creamy. It's also thick, as if a milkshake was halfway thawed and you pounded it. Luckily no brain freeze accompanied this ingestion. I think the greatest thing that Monster pulled off with these is that it's incredibly chocolaty and it doesn't taste a thing like an energy drink. I think this may be the only beverage that includes taurine that I have tasted that doesn't make me question if I'm being poisoned or not with chemicals. Sure the use of sucralose along with the sugar gives it a bit of a diet taste, but that is something you come to expect and accept with protein drinks. If they were laden with sugar they would kind of defeat the purpose of the workout. The 16g of sugar in here is pushing it a bit as it is.

At the end of it all, this tasted fantastic and I'm still buzzing with energy after a fairly intense workout by my standards. Who'd have known that Monster had this in them?

I don't mean to be a jerk, but has anyone else noticed that the Sunshine State has been putting on a bit of weight? It just looks like it's getting a little paunchy in the middle. I blame it on the whole scene surrounding Orlando. That damn gluttonous mouse and his friends make bulging out the center of the state. There are so many people, who consume so much terrible food. Those same people always want to be on the go to make the most of their limited vacation time. What we have here is something of a cure all. It's the essence of Florida, in a diet, liquid form that gives the imbiber a boost of energy.

Unfortunately it is a bit heavy on the diet side of the flavor. This taste insanely like fresh orange juice, except it tastes like that very specific flavor has been made into a powder and then mixed with equal parts zero calorie sweeteners . It's insane how such a pure taste is there, but also ruined by the sweetener. I've come a long way in accepting these sweeteners, but in here it's still too much for me. I'm sure those who are die hard diet soda drinkers would be all about this, but the rest of society will surely be put off.

Oh, this is actually called Ultra Sunrise, and not Ultra Sunshine? Well, everything I said stands, it just makes a little less sense talking about Florida the way I did. It really does taste like that state's staple fruit though.

Ahh the seasonal flavors. They really churn them out over at Polar and do not disappoint. Cranberry and clementine are two great friends that play together nicely. Why haven't you other guys worked together like this? It's great. A little fruity and a little more fruity together make a nice sparkling treat. I must have really liked this because I intended on drinking this all day and killed it before lunch. You can taste everything and you want to because Polar managed to keep the integrity of both fruits.

Polar, thank you for this Christmas gift. I got you a sweater. A sweater without a receipt and with the tags detached. Sorry. I'm no good at holidays.

If you ever want to feel real dumb go into an establishment and order yourself a hot tea. You'll ask for green tea, but all they will have it black, but that is fine. They also offer cream with it. You normally drink your tea black or with soy/almond milk, but hey why not live on the edge. It will show up to where you are sitting, and the mug will be filled, as well as the tea pot on the tray. It's always such a nice touch when they leave you a tea pot isn't it. You add a little cream and stir it up. You let it sit for a minute to cool down, and then take a sip. This is the weakest tea you have ever tasted, you immediately think. You take a few more sips, annoyed, but oh well the show must go on. A few minutes later it gets a bit brighter and you notice there is a tea bag on your tray. A metaphorical palming of the face occurs and you just hope no one else noticed your stupidity. Yes, this was my past Friday night when I went to see Jen Kirkman at a comedy club (dumb two drink minimum).

My reason for telling this story is that the only way you can really mess up plain unsweetened black tea is by forgetting to actually ad the tea. Luckily for me the folks at Purity Organic are not the same sort of dummies as I am. This is exactly what you would expect. It's black tea that has been properly brewed with no sweetener added (or anything else for that matter). If this is what you want, you simply can't go wrong.

Billboards and most advertisements don't really sell anything to me. I don't want to sell my house fast or get a loan on a 1995 Ford Winstar. I don't want to go to the casino and I don't want to sue anyone for that time I slipped on ice. I don't have a DWI and I know that Geico can save 15% or more on my car insurance.

One thing that I didn't know is that this little guy exists. Custard shake. Sounds good right? Sounds rich. Let me tell you friend, your imagination isn't lying. This is good and it is rich. I can also very simply review this for you. Ready? This chocolate custard shake tastes like if you went to Wendy's, bought a Frosty, left it in the car so you could run into a store to buy a new pair of shoes, ran into that dude that you don't like that talks to you even though you get the feeling that he gets the feeling that you don't like him, returned to your car only to forget that you had a Frosty in it and it melted. You shrug because at the end of the day, it's still fantastic and drank it all the same. It's that good. Melted Frosty. Nailed it.

Strawberries, watermelon and lemons; if that isn't summer, I don't know what this is. Marinate a hot dog in it, get some grass clippings on your new shoes after you mow the lawn, stop wearing socks, wear shorts, celebrate America and talk about going to the beach but don't actually go. This drink has it all and wants you to take that exotic trip back in time to something called, "July." That's right. This is a slightly sour but mostly fruity taste of lemonade with watermelon and strawberries in it. This has to be the culmination of years and long nights because to have this trio together outside of some sort of special occasion must have cost some money. You think it was cheap to have the Rat Pack play together? Boy, you should think again. Those guys were lady killers and this is like the drink equivalent of Frank Sinatra, that black dude from Cannonball Run, and the other guy.

For you drinkers out there in the world, this is a classy way to use soda as a mixer. No longer will you have to bust out plastic bottle and aluminum cans of syrup heavy soda to mix with your liquors. Now you have a nice glass bottle of higher quality soda (or sparkling beverage for you fancy types) to mix with your adult beverages. To me everything about this bottle screams mixer, and it looks like it's not meant to be drunk on its own. Oh but it is.

This is a mixture of the extracts of Valencia and Pera oranges, tangerines, key limes as well as pumpkins and carrots (hey why not?). It's on the dryer side of things and isn't very sweet (14g of sugar per serving). The flavor is lighter than you would expect from a soda, and it has a citrus taste that is heavy on the orange. I personally can't taste the pumpkin or carrot, but I will assume that it would taste differently if they were excluded.

This is nice because it is dry and light. It's the kind of beverage that I could sip all night at a party and not feel terrible, emotionally and physically, for doing so. In fact I did just that Friday night. This is about as classy as I get folks. It's the antithesis of brands like Faygo. Those companies have their places and so does Q.

2014 is winding down, and if someone were to ask me as a professional imbiber of beverages to sum up the year I would have to say that these 365 days have been all about low/zero calorie sparkling waters. The past couple years have been owned by fake Vitamin Water, but man sparkling water is everywhere this year.

While I may not be the biggest fan of these drinks, I do appreciate their growth and that humans are taking more interest in what they ingest, particularly their sugar intake. Americans drink far too much soda, diet or not it's just too much. Since I've cut most of it out of my diet (minus reviews) I feel better and I dropped pounds pretty quickly. Now a lot of these sparkling water companies are just dumping some sucralose into flavored water and calling it a day, and their lack of effort is very noticeable. Skinny Girl (I still hate the name) takes things a bit further. They use fruit juice (albeit from concentrate), sweeten it with honey, cane sugar and sucralose (culminating in only 2g of sugar per bottle) and then add some vitamins and super fruits so your body is actually getting something beneficial from this drink. That's right they have combined the former champion with the reigning one, and they mingle oh so well.

This is made with grapefruit juice and it tastes like it. It's not an overly strong taste, but it's stronger than if you just left some grapefruit soak in water. It has a bit of a diet taste to it, but it's not bad at all. Arizona it's hard to stay mad at you for your dumb brand name, when you make it taste so good. Who needs garbage grapefruit pop that doesn't even taste like fruit when this is available with only the slightest fraction of calories?

Every time I got into a grocery store I like to spend a couple minutes going through the array of drinks. Usually they are the same as they were since the last time I was there. We've been doing this for a couple years now and after nearly 4100 drinks, it's hard to find things that we haven't reviewed. Sure, that is impressive in its own right but it's frustrating when you are trying to find something new.

This visit I found a couple things but this was the one that I selected for today. It's by Hint, a company that I have had good luck with in the past with a seasonal favorite, apple cider. It is, as all Hint's flavors are, subtle. It's got a pretty present aftertaste, though. It tastes like apple cider. The promise has been kept! I can say for certain that Hint delivers on their promise time and time again. I've been drinking this all day and I've got to say, I never stopped liking it.

It's not often that we get a lemon lime drink that actually tastes like it has lemons and limes in it. There's nothing wrong with your Sprites or your Sierra Mist or your 7-Ups but after drinking this it makes them almost seem like they aren't real. Now look, they might not be real but this tastes like something different. It tastes as if in the Polar plant they actually house lemons and limes.

This tastes like sparkling water that is flavored with lemons and limes. It's actually good; kind of sweet, but not terrible. It's nice and doesn't taste diet. I don't know how many of these Frost drinks we have left but I think I can honestly say that for a diet drink, these don't taste like diet.

Jay might not like it because of his distaste for lemon lime but I actually enjoyed it. A welcome addition to anyone's diet repertoire.

Two days in a row? Yeah, two lattes in two days. I don't know what I'm doing to myself. Whatever it is, someone hearing me complain about how jittery I am is inevitable. Let's move on to what happened when I ordered this drink.

Since no one knows how to do their job, of course there was an issue with ordering this item which was on their menu with giant banners and small banners and signs. Something about "Everyone who has been ordering the dark chocolate latte has been getting hot chocolate!" or "You're pressing the wrong button on the machine!" or something to that nature. I did get what I ordered and waited very patiently which the "barista" was very appreciative of. Here's what she lovingly put in it. She put in latte at the press of a button. Technology, right? No hand tapping or twisting or turning or any of that nonsense. Then she squeezed in some chocolate whip which they use(d) on their cold hot chocolate which was fantastic. Then it looked like they threw some chocolate chips but they weren't chocolate chips. They were chocolate covered rice balls and were awesome.

How was it? Well I can easily say that I will be buying it through this winter season. It was very good. Darker, more bitter with (c/k)rispies and a nice smoothness. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. Tim Horton would be proud.

I have been trying all day to try to figure out what type of person would eat a Pop tart while drinking this, as I did this morning. I think the answer is someone who hates themselves. Someone who hates their body, has given up counting calories, and forgotten the definition of the word fitness (at least for one meal).

Why would I say that? Pop Tarts are delicious but made for kids even though they're pretty awful for you and I feel guilty giving my kid Pop Tarts but sometimes there is no milk and we're out of alternatives. Append the fact that I'm pretty sure this is coffee that is held together by sugar because it is wildly, immensely, insanely sweet. It tastes more like caramel coffee than caramel mocha but it's not awful. If you can get past the fact that with each sip you have to sacrifice your least favorite toes and fingers, it's not bad. It still tastes like coffee and it's smooth and it tastes like what it's supposed to.

Dat sugar doe...

If I can borrow a line from the TV show "Review," Andrew Daly says, "Life. It's literally all we've got." Is that the case with Coke Life? It could be if you kind of like diet pop. Someone asked me what this was all about and I said, "It's a half diet pop.” It's like someone went halvsies on a Coke and a Diet Coke. That's almost how it tastes. Actually, it tastes more like a Mexican Coke and a Zevia cola were mixed together, since it's sweetened with both cane sugar and stevia.

At first you can get some of the stevia at the tail end of sips but after you start to drink it like it's not the last thing you'll ever drink, you lose some of that and it starts to blend together and taste like a slightly diet cola. At half the calories and half the diet taste, it's not a bad payoff. I have another one in the fridge and I will break it out sooner than later because it was good. We'll see how Pepsi True does whenever we can get our hands on that.

Growing up in the suburbs of Missouri there were two things that Little Jimmy hated more than anything. The first was hearing the different ways that people pronounced his state's name. It was completely infuriating to him that people cared so much to argue about it, especially since they all lived in the same state anyways. The second was that soda pop never really tasted like the flavors they claimed to be. Cherry? Orange? Grape? Those are fruits that have very specific flavors and the sodas that companies like Crush were putting out simply did not resemble those flavors, except in the most rudimentary way.

Once Jimmy was old enough to properly work with lab equipment and kitchen ware he went about creating his own sodas for him to enjoy. His carbonated refreshments were dead on with their flavors. He made sure the cherry tastes like cherry the orange like orange, and of course the grape like grape and not a syrupy mess. Once he had perfected the fruit flavors, he moved on to a bigger fish. The soda shoppe in his town served a caramel cream soda that was just awful. People loved it, but Jimmy had more refined tastes, and it tasted nothing like the caramel candies he would get from the five and dime. It just tasted like overly sweet, overly burnt sugar. A dumb description I know, but Jimmy is in fact a child.

I don't know exactly what Jimmy did to perfect his soda, but he spent weeks locked up in his house working at all hours that his mom didn't make him go to sleep or school. The final result ended up being a soda that did in fact taste exactly like a liquid version of caramel candy. It was creepy how much it tasted like it, with just the smallest cream soda undertone.

Jimmy never really drank more than that one bottle he originally made, because he quickly realized that it's not a flavor that he wanted to have in soda form. He loved the candy and would chew it all the time, but it was just too much as a soda. So he moved onto bigger and better flavors.

Black raspberry, the "goth" fruit. Black raspberry, the older, darker brother of raspberry never studies, smokes cigarettes and listens to Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly. He drives an old car that he painted black but the funny thing is that it was already black.

This brooding, trench coat wearing fruit matched with sparkles, a match no one thought that would work out, actually make a pretty nice couple. As long as it's cold, this drink is pretty good and not super diet. “As long as it's cold it's good (like black raspberry knows anything about being warm and comforting). When room temperature o'clock happens, it gets thick but we're not going to go there. When it's in its natural state, cold and filled with hatred for his father for no reason, it's actually nice. It's sharp and fruity and doesn't taste like something your mom would like. You know what I'm talking about.