United States - 4098 Reviews

Chocolate pop sounds like it would be a good idea right? Well it is rarely good. Having drunk a couple of them in my day, I can say that it's strange first, and "just alright" second. It's not bad but it feels like something that just shouldn't be. This, though. What would you think of if I gave you this? You've got not only chocolate but maple and everyone's clichè favorite food bacon in it. Now look. You've got to be some sort of madman to think this was going to be great. Are you a madman? I did not think so.

You taste the chocolate pop in this. It's not like a chocolate really. If there was, and there probably is, chocolate candy that isn't actually milk or dark chocolate, that is the chocolate that is used. Something about the way real chocolate melts is smooth and nice. This is sharp and sweet. You do not get bacon but you do get a bit of a salty chocolate. I really searched for it when I drank it. Jay did the same as you can see in the video below. It just tastes salty. The maple might be in the tail end of the drink when the salt and "chocolate" calms down.

All in all, it's not fantastic. Seems like a better gag-gift than an actual drink. They probably don't make too many of them so I'm sure they aren't losing their shirts at Real Soda putting everything they have into a really niche drink.

Want to see what Jay and I thought with the "help" of my jerk kid? Welp, here you are, friend:

Forgive me, for the only thing I can think of as I sip on this beverage is “Little Triggers” by Elvis Costello. It may not be the strongest track on This Year's Model, but that doesn't mean it isn't one hell of a song. The same thing could be said about this beverage. It's not the best energy drink, tea or juice I've ever had, but it's still extremely enjoyable.

I don't think I have ever disliked any beverage that has contained cherry juice. When the real thing is used it is so superior to anything that is just cherry flavored. Drinking this is like eating a huge bowl of fresh cherries while sipping on some lightly sweetened white tea on the back porch of a country home with a light breeze blowing the laundry on the line clean. Can you tell I've been stuck inside for too long?

You know what, maybe I was wrong before, maybe this beverage is even better than I thought. Every ingredient is in the exact right place with the exact right amount. The choice of using agave syrup and apple juice to sweeten it was the exact right choice. It gives it a very specific taste that is dead on. Sure there are other fruit juices in the mix, but they don't shine too much. Instead they are there to dull down the cherry a bit, as straight juice from that fruit can tend to be a little intense. The way it mingles with the other fruits in here just make it perfectly smooth.

It's called an energy drink, but don't be a fool and think it's anything like Monster, Red Bull or any of those types of companies. The energy in here comes from nature. It's the caffeine from the white tea and a little extra kick from some ginseng. It's not going to make you feel all crazy and give you the shakes. It will just keep you even with a little push to help you keep going. Little Miracles I think I love you. To bring it back to Costello, I will say something about “Miracle Man.” Now discuss which is better, This Year's Model or My Aim is True. There really is only one correct answer.

Quick, if you had to be one sort of insect, what would you be? A spider? Too much work my friend. You spend almost all of your life constructing intricate little webs that get destroyed in an instant by some unappreciative oaf of a human. Flies deal with a lot of poop, so they are out of the running. Caterpillars are just too creepy, if they are even considered insects. Ants might be cool; you get to have crazy strength, but a lot of your life is spent in search of food. If I had to choose number one with a bullet would be the bee. You are feared, your spit is sweet and you get to spend you days lackadaisically just flying around just smelling some flowers, hanging out in the sun. Now that is a life of leisure I could get down with.

Being a bee must take a lot of energy though. Flapping your winds that fast has to be exhausting at some point. It's a good thing bees know where to get the best natural energy. They just head down to the store and get themselves a can of EnerBee. Wait, that's only Bumble Bee Man from the Simpsons, but I like his style. People, myself included, drink far too many chemical energy drinks to help them get through their days. This here is organic and natural. Who needs all that artificial junk when you have green tea, yerba mate, ginseng and B vitamins to get the blood flowing? Also, there is royal jelly in here, which kind of creeps me out. It's what bees feed their larvae when they want to breed a new queen. It messes with genetics people! If I drink enough of this will I become royalty? Will I gain special bee powers? Only time will tell.

This tastes mostly like yerba mate, with a bit of green tea in it. It has a fairly strong lemon flavor, and you can really taste the honey in it. I think everything about it is perfect, with the exception of two things. I guess that doesn't make it perfect then, does it. First off, if you drink this when it's really cold it's better. Once it starts to warm up you can taste the stevia in it a lot more. I actually didn't even realize it was sweetened with the plant, until I was near the end and some time had passed from the initial crack of the can. Secondly, this whole lightly carbonated business is just weird. It's so light that I wasn't sure if there were bubbles in it at all, or if the flavor was just sharp. When it comes to carbonation I say go big or go home. This is a tea, it doesn't need bubbles. That's just this drinker's opinion though.

A lot of people don't pout stock in natural energy drinks, as they say they don't get the job done. I assure you this one had me bouncing off the walls when I drank it. It was as if I was bouncing from flower to flower, collecting the precious pollen for my queen.

Next to plain water, this might be the simplest drink ever. Also, it's pretty fantastic. Lastly, this drink single handedly lets me know why real maple syrup is like eight dollars an ounce. This is just maple water. If you tapped a tree, this is what would come out. Nothing else is in this, it's just one ingredient. "Maple sap" and that's it. It also tastes faintly of maple syrup. "Essence" if you will. Therefore, the fact that you have to boil this down to get dark, sweet maple syrup blows my mind. This I would absolutely drink again because it's nothing like what you would think. Like I said, it's only a hint of that delicious syrup. It holds back like a nice, Catholic girl with a killer body. You know she could kill you with one flutter of her eye but she decides to hide behind the book. That's why we have prostitutes and pure maple syrup, so we can get our fix immediately for a price.

I was hanging out the other night. You know just sitting around with some friends having a nice relaxing evening, when my friend Jay tosses me this drink and says it's for review on my blog. After several minutes of me berating him and telling him it's not a blog, it's a fully functional database that was coded by Mike and runs off of a database, I thanked Hova for the drink that he had made named after his chain of sports bars, which are in turn names after the baseball term for people who have gotten over 40 home runs and stolen bases in a single season. What, you're not close and personal friends with Jay Z? well I guess everyone can't be or else he would have no time to sit around listening to the new Morrissey album with me and discussing how it seems like he's just parodying himself at this point.

As far as the tea goes, I'm a fan. It's a slightly different take on an Arnold Palmer. It's black tea with a bunch of lemon in it (it doesn't taste like cleaner), but there is also a bit of citrus in there that reminds me of a mellower version of Sweet Leaf's Citrus Tea. It's on the sweeter side of teas, but the flavors involved lean towards that, so I have no qualms with it.

This isn't your typical iced tea in taste or experience. When you scan the bottle with your smart phone it unlocks a world of information about the clubs and sportsmen. I personally wasn't able to test it out, but that's what Jay tells me, and I'm not about to call him a liar. Maybe he's a bit of a no it all, but not a liar. Me? Oh, I'm the one who is the liar. The only time I saw Jay was at a football stadium in Washington DC. I was waiting for The Cure to play and he was on stage doing his thing. We were a field away from each other, but in that moment he placed all of that information into my brain.

It should be a crime against nature. It should be an ultimate evil. Artificial sugar combining with lemonade should be akin to the raising of the antichrist, but for some reason I don't mind it. Does that mean I've gone to the dark side? Do I need to start having rituals with some sort of sacrifice? Do I need to shave my head and grow a goatee? You know what? Why not?

This is a sparkling lemon drink that is in fact sweetened with sucralose, but it doesn't taste like poison and I don't feel like all humanity should be slaughtered because real sugar wasn't used in making lemonade. I still feel dirty that I enjoy this, but I'm not going to deny myself. Sure it tastes diet, but the lemon does a good job covering it up.

This is better than I ever could have imagined it to be, but at the same time it's not something I would crave. I would happily drink it if it were presented to me, but I wouldn't chug-a-lug all day long on the stuff, which is probably for the best.

I want so badly for the eldest male in the Harney clan to be named James, and for everyone to call him Jim. I also hope his sons are really only in their mid-twenties. My whole reasoning for this is that I am a child and I so badly want Mr. Harney to have been about 15/16 in 1987, when the classic film Earnest Goes to Camp came out. The only dumb reason I have for this is that every time I read Harney and Sons, all I can think of is Varney and Sons, and in case you don't know the actor who played the role of Ernest was named Jim Varney. You see I am a cruel man and I want to patriarchal head of the Harney clan to have been teased as a child because of his name. It's a rite of passage for teenage boys and I would hate for him to have missed it. If no one yelled “Hey Vern” at him, there is no hope for this world.

Okay, never mind that tangent I just went off on. It had absolutely nothing to do with the contents of this bottle. So let's move on to the important information. Harney & Sons make delicious beverages that I have enjoyed up to this point. When you take a solid company and introduce blackberry in to the mix, magic is bound to happen. This is a wonderful mixture of black tea, blackberry juice, hibiscus, and boysenberry juice. It all blends together into a beverage that anyone would long for on the long nights at camp. It's very sweet and fruity, actually it's a tad bit too sweet with 42g of sugar per bottle. It probably wouldn't taste overly sweet to most people, but I've been drinking unsweetened tea constantly this summer, so I've been noticing sweetness more.

My only real complaint here, and it's hardly a complaint, is that I wish the tea flavor was a bit stronger. The berry taste is a natural one, but it's still very in your face. If it were mellowed out a bit, that might take care of the sugar as well and this would be absolutely perfect.

Like many of us, from time to time you have probably found yourself wondering what exactly happened to the river of psychomagnotheric slime from Ghostbusters 2. Sure Vigo was using it as a power source, but after we was blasted back into the painting and drained of his powers, what happened to the slime?

Well the truth of the matter is that the slime was a bit of a problem for the city. As you know it fed off of emotions, and being such an angry city (at least while Lady Liberty herself isn't walking around blasting feel good tunes), it was only a matter of time before the city destroyed itself. Not wanting that to occur officials loaded it up into thousands of tanker trucks and shipped it off to Chicago, without them knowing. Hey, if a city is going to destroy itself it might as well be in the Midwest, right? A weird thing happened though, Chicago's love of food and sweets somehow changed the river of slime into a river of salted caramel, which can be seen on this bottle's label. Strange times indeed.

The Cicero company dips into this river from time to time when they want to make root beer. They put just a dab into each bottle and it flavors it right up. There's already caramel in a lot of darker sodas and the addition of the “slime” really amped it up. Luckily it's not overly salted. Wouldn't a really salty soda be the worst thing ever? Can you imagine your disappointment? There's a bit of salt in here, but it's not over the top. In reality this just makes me think of pretzels. Actually, I want some really bad. A bag of pretzels and a bottle of this would pair up for the perfect Midwest snack.

I'm not the world's biggest caramel guy, so I admit that I couldn't finish this entire bottle, but if you are a lover of that specific form of sugar, this has your name written all over it. Especially if your name is Vigo of Gozer.

Oh what a different world we live in when things are backwards. Lemon & lime soda is very boring and I don't know a single person whose first choice it would be. Switch those two around and you got something. The science behind this is that lemons are boring and don't actually taste very good, even though “big lemon” has been trying to convince the world otherwise for decades. Limes on the other hand aren't just unripe lemons; they are their own fruit with a wonderfully bold flavor. This energy drink is most definitely heavier on the green instead of the yellow, and the result is an energy drink that is quite enjoyable and the opposite of boring. It definitely has the candied chemical classic energy drink undertones, but the lime is right there in your face like a mojito, minus the mint. There is also some lemon in there, but it's finally taking the back seat it has always deserved, but whined so much that it got shotgun. Dive in folks, the water is fine.

We're a couple months out from "Apple Mania" but that doesn't mean that we can't still enjoy apples. I remember watching a video a couple months back where people were making "fizzy fruit" by soaking them in dry ice. Where do you get dry ice? Are only scientists and friends and family of scientists allowed to eat a fizzy apple? That's unfair.

Well, one scientist broke the silence and now we, the public, can enjoy (probably) what a sparkling apple tastes like. Sure, the only crispness is in the title, but that's cool. Don't worry about it. Drink an apple. Yeah, drink an apple. Eating apples is so two thousand and late. Yeah, I did it. What? It was fitting.

Apples are great. This, you know what? This isn't bad. It's no apple but it's more quenching. It doesn't taste diet. It doesn't taste like candy. It doesn't taste like a shoe, but then again, why would it? If you eat an apple that tastes like a shoe, I don't know the policy of your local grocer, but you should return that batch and maybe shop elsewhere. It's sweet like an apple. Tastes like an apple. Great work, guys. You captured apples and fizzed up that essence. Yeah, sure, sparkling apple juice exists, already. This is more like a real apple.

Just churning it out, just churning out garbage. Some companies use high quality ingredients handpicked from local gardens. Those people are not these people. These people...these people. These people are making carbonated poison as far as I'm concerned. Look, it's not that bad. I mean, it's bad, don't get me wrong.

This has that strange, sharpness that you don't want in anything you ingest. I mean, there aren't any great fruit punches around but this is worse than your average bear and fruit punch. Fruity? Yep. Not anything you should find yourself drinking.

You've finally gone and done it; you beat life. It was the hardest game you've ever played, but you did it. You went to school. You had a family. You bought a house. You became a grandparent. You retired. You took up hobbies. All of your kids had relatively good lies, as did their children. Then you found yourself slipping off this mortal coil in relative peace, happy with the way everything went. Sure there were a few things you would have liked to have tried differently to see how they would turn out, but you know like everyone says “you only live once.”

Friend do I have news for you. All of those people were lying to you. You can live forever in unlimited timelines. You can make every decision however you like, and if you're unhappy with it, go back and try again…€¦that is if you were smart enough to down at least one shot of God Mode while you still walked the mortal realm. Science has come a long way my friends. It's had its setbacks, but then everything fell into place once those who bear the white coats realized that god is a jerk and this is all just a game. After that it was a simple mixing of some ingredients and voila, infinite health and infinite life. You're in charge.

To make matters even better, the shot tastes delicious. They decided to mask all of the important stuff in a blueberry green tea. Sure it has some stevia in it that gives it a bit of a cool diet taste, but overall it tastes like tea. It's the kind of thing you would happily drink a full glass of, and that is not common in shot beverages.

So there you have it. You can essentially become a god amongst men and do whatever you want: your life, your rules. I would be a little careful though. There are some batches that got mixed up with another mixture they were working on, so you either can do whatever you want, consequences be damned, or it will just help with cognitive function, focus, visual perception, stamina, problem solving ability, reaction time and just give you some energy that helps while playing video games.

Hey buddy, even though you look completely worn out, why don't you pop on over to the fuse box and open it up and see if you can figure out why the lights are working? I'm just kidding you brother, I just have the switch turned off. I'm trying to toughen up my eyes by reading in the dark. With the appending apocalypse you gotta be ready and you can bet your sweet ass that within two years electricity won't exist. I don't want to be that fool that can't read anything in the dark when that comes to pass. Seriously though check out the fuse box and get yourself one. Oh I'm sorry, I call my fridge the fuse box, because m I don't want to be that fool that can't read anything in the dark when that comes to pass. Seriously though check out the fuse box and get yourself one. Oh I'm sorry, I call my fridge the fuse box, because my mom keeps it stocked with Fuze drinks. She's been raggin' me about how I need to lose weight so she buys me the low calorie “Slenderize” ones. I don't know what she's talking about. These three bills will help me to stay alive at the end of the world. While all you skinny folks are withering away I'll be eating my own fat and prospering.

Oh man, you should have grabbed the blueberry raspberry one. It's actually got a bunch of juices in it. Okay it's mostly apple juice, but there are a bunch of other fruit and vegetable juices in it, even though they make up less than .5% of the ingredients. It tastes like a berry drink that is heavy on the blueberries, but the sucralose in it gives it a weird taste. It doesn't taste overly diet, but it's done something to the juice that makes it taste a bit off. Everything mixed together gives you a bunch of vitamins and minerals. It's pretty rad. I know my mom just thinks I'm fat, so she buys it because of the low sugar content ,but all that Super Citrimax and Chromium in my system is really going to come in handy when the world…€¦well you know where this is going. Prepare yourself brother!

Blueberry lemonade is something I have never had in real life. I was at a wedding in Massachusetts where some kid wore a kimono and no one said anything and made my own cherry lemonade which was great. I mulled it myself. I don't mess around. Blueberry lemonade seems easier since there are plenty of blueberries around and lemonade isn't hard to come by. Problem is, if I made it myself, it would be better than this. "Audacious!" you say? Well perhaps but it would be closer to the model of blueberry lemonade since there would be no mucking about with artificial sweeteners, preservatives and the like. Mash up some blueberries and put it into some water with lemon juice and sugar and you've got it. This is pulpless and not sour. It just "tastes like" blueberry lemonade like when markers "smell" like fruit but when you take a small nibble, you've discovered that you have discovered that it's a very one dimensional impression.

What this lacks is what makes lemonade great and that's pulp, bite, attitude and clean ingredients. The Reb A gives it a bit of an unwarranted bitterness that just tastes like lies. This isn't bad but it's like taking a girl home at the end of a long night that is wearing a lot of makeup and you know that when she inevitably stays the night and wakes up, your pillow is going to look like a towel behind the Chanel counter at your local department store and your face will be as red as her lips were the night before with regret and self-embarrassment.

Call me old fashioned but long days can only be cured by sitting on a porch stoop drinking root beer. Early mornings with not enough sleep followed by staying late at work and who knows what the rest of the day holds? Probably a handful of garbage. You deserve something nice. A treat. A root beer.

What's better than root beer? Root beer that has honey in it. What better with root beer with honey in it? Root beer with honey and licorice. Since this root beer doesn't have that, and beggars cannot be choosers, honey it is. It's probably a difficult task to keep the smooth taste of honey and the bite of root beer but they've done it. That's why they're in the root beer major league. They have hats. Nice, embroidered hats. As if there were any doubts. What? Did you think they were silk screened? Please. They embroider everything when you get to the pros. Everything.

This soda has put me to taste philosophically. Is it a great cola whose quality has been lessened by the use of stevia as a sweetener, or is it a mediocre soda and the only reason I think it's good is because it is better than most diet sodas. What came first the stevia or the egg?

After far too much pondering I am going to go with a little of both. I think that without the added stevia this could have been an exceptional cola. It has some complexities in the flavor that make it stand out from your Coke and Pepsis of the world. At the same time, the stevia brings it down a couple of pegs, but it still is my favorite diet cola I've ever had. To be fair it does combine cane sugar with stevia, and has 15g of sugar, but that's less than half of a normal can of pop.

Whatever science proclaims to be the true answer, I enjoyed whatever it was in this can and I had no guilt while doing so. That's gotta mean something in life.

What do you mean you are exhausted? It's only noon, and you are a 12-year-old on summer vacation; you're not allowed to be tired. I understand it's hot and humid, but back in my day we didn't let a second of this glorious freedom go to waste. Even when it was pouring rain we were out sliding in the mud. Now don't get any muddy ideas, I've already done the laundry and I don't want to have to do another load for your gunky summer clothes. You know what I blame TV and those video games you're always playing. I might just make a house rule that video games can only be played during the winter months in the house; maybe it will be when it's below a certain temperature. I know what you're thinking turning the air conditioner up all the way won't help your cause. We're going by the temperature on the news.

Seriously though, go outside, have adventures, maybe get into a little trouble (a very little trouble). You should be living for these 2.5 months every year. Fine you're tired I get it. You know what, if you mention this to your mother you're grounded for a month, and by that I mean you will be doing all the gardening this summer with no TV, no video games and no cell phone. I know you kids play games on your phones. Okay here it is. I picked a couple of these up at 711. They are a limited edition summer version of Red Bull. I know kids shouldn't be drinking these, but you know what, the memories of an exciting childhood summer are more important than any negative effects this could have.

You know how normal Red Bull tastes like liquid Wonka candy? Well this is a grapefruit version of that. It's like someone took a bottle of Squirt and added that candy element to it. I know that as an adult I'm not supposed to like super sweet things like this, but I absolutely love it. To be honest I have a case of the stuff hidden in the fridge in the garage behind that beer your uncle brought over for the Christmas party that I will never drink, but you probably will sneak when you get a little older. The joke will be on you though, because by then they will be old and gross. Seriously though, son this stuff is great. After you drink this one, ignore everything I said, and never drink another one until you're away at college. For now chug-a-lug apple of my eye and get out there and explore the woods a couple streets over. I heard some kids found an ear over there last week. Think how cool the kids at school would think you were if you found an ear over summer vacation! If they only found one that means there's it's pair just waiting to be found.

Oh that summer heat. James just couldn't deal with it. His 1988 Honda Accord was once nice but now is held together with hope and rust. He is a traveling salesman whose sales of motor homes on an island aren't what they used to be. He was once the best salesman on the west of the island but it seems that everyone had already bought one and there was no one left. He looked back fondly of the days where he bought that Accord in cash and had enough for a steak dinner that night. Now it's nothing but pasta and rice. Why was he still there? There were plenty of other jobs he could do and make enough to at least get him out of the rut that he was in.

One hot and humid summer day he had to take a stop from going in between towns. He stopped at a gas station to get something to drink and they were stocked with ice cold pop. He saw the orange and his hand just grabbed it. It was like the kid in him made him reach out and take it. To be a child on the island was a simpler time. All you had to do was go to school and then come home and the rest of the day was yours. No responsibility. No tasks. Nothing. You could just hang out with your friends and drink pop on the way to go to the movies and then get ice cream. As an adult, though, James was plagued with things like payments for his child's braces, water bills, and lawn mowing. He needed to mentally get back to what it was like to be a kid. One sip and he remembered it all. He sat down on a bench outside the station and drank almost the whole bottle. It tasted like simple, basic, everyday orange pop. It's what he would drink on hot summer days while sitting around with his friends not doing much of anything.

Just then his phone rang and it was Doctor Clemens asking him to sell him a new motor home. Today would be James' day at last. His day in the blistering sun.

Yeah yeah yeah, raspberry tea I get it. The stuff is everywhere. It's possibly more prevalent than unflavored tea in most gas stations/convenient stores. Why should we care about yet another raspberry tea that's available? Oh, maybe because Joe Tea is a hell of a company who not only uses cane sugar to sweeten their beverages, but who also uses real tea and actual fruit? I think that is more than enough reason in this age of garbage drinks in which we life.

This is great. Period. End of story. Everything that you liked about raspberry tea just got better. It's like someone took a tall boy of Arizona and switched out the ingredients with superior ones. First of all it actually tastes like raspberries and not a proximity that is just flavored syrup. Secondly you can still taste the tea underneath the fruit. That is something that doesn't happen often these days. I do wish the tea taste was a bit stronger here, but I don't have a huge problem with it. This is nothing like the sugar water you have been told was tea your whole life. This is real, or at least a lot closer to reality.

If us here at Thirsty Dudes are anything we are men of the sea. The crashing waves and the salty air are all we know of life. With the ocean breeze in our hair we point our bow towards whatever fancy we have at the time. Wait no, that's not us at all. The ocean is a terrifying place that holds many creatures that mankind will probably never know of. I'm actually shocked that I even knew what a bow was. Mike and I are content to sit on the shoreline, stare out at the ships on the horizon and sip on some root beer. I mean I do have an anchor tattoo, but I never claimed that I wasn't a hypocrite. I also never complained about double negatives.

While we may be full of lies, one thing that is a truth is that we have dreams of creating (more like having someone make for us) a hybrid of root beer and ginger beer. We've proposed it to several companies, but they didn't seem very interested. They are all fools. How perfect would a nice dark, woody root beer be with the kick of some hot ginger beer? I'm sure ratios would have to be very specific to keep the flavors in line, but that is what folks in lab coats are for.

When I came across this Anchor Ginger Root Beer, I thought that perhaps my prayers had been answered. The sea is an unknown place (for the most part) and so is this beverage. It could hold wonderful secrets or disastrous monsters. You have no idea how many creatures I find in bottles of sodas; at least most of them are vaguely indifferent to me.

While this was not the soda of my dreams, it is almost there. Really the only thing that is missing is the heat. There is no burn at all in this bottle. It's more of a ginger ale root beer instead of the ginger beer root beer that I so desperately wanted. I will happily take what I am given though. This really tastes like someone made a batch of ginger ale the correct way, with real ginger, and mixed it with a creamy root beer. It has a nice classic root beer taste that is on the darker side of the spectrum that ends with a strong vanilla after taste. The ginger is the majority shareholder in the beginning of each sip, but the vanilla in the root beer is all you are left with seconds after you swallow.

I am a big fan of this, and I hope to come across it again in my travels. I can use it to help me get by until I can talk a company into perfecting my vision. Maybe I should just try combining sodas myself to see how it turns out. I mean that has to end well…€¦right?