United States - 4098 Reviews

What we have here is a subject that is more than just a sweetened lemon tea, but at the same time it is not quite a half and half, or Arnold Palmer if you will. Argo walks the line, and they do it with the perfect grace of a Flying Grayson. While their balance is impeccable, the true majesty of this iced tea is the restraint they have showed. Up until this liquid hit my lips I had never tasted a beverage that was lightly flavored with acai. When they superfruit is involved it has always been all or nothing, and let me tell you it has one strong flavor. Argo held back with the acai. It's definitely in there, but it's more of a general flavor that let's everything else shine as well. As soon as you take a sip it is obvious that the base of this is white tea that has nicely been blended with lemon juice as previously mentioned. The treat for me is that you can taste the cane sugar in it, even though the drink is not overly laden with it (less than 25g in the bottle).

Acai is not a flavor that I normally reach for. I'm actually not a very large fan of it, but Argo Tea has found a way to use it in tandem with other ingredients and make it delicious. It has assumed a roll as part of a democratic team, instead of the vicious dictator that it normally rules as.

Take a look around. Do you see any other bottles of tea on the shelves with real friggin' lemons in it? No, not lemon flavoring, seasoning, or essence. A real slab of lemon right there in the bottle. Aside from that, you've got a black tea and that is sweetened with honey. Could you imagine a better combination? I am not going to run through the ingredients again. I will just leave it there on the table, all spread out. One, two, three and you can take a look and decide if you need anything else to make a wonderful iced tea.

Hey Steve, what do you want to call our new line of drinks? Steve's Sweet Styles? You do realize that is the dumbest name I have ever heard, right? Like, it's beyond bad Steve. Not in the better than bad it's good way; in the so bad I want to punch you right in your stupid hole that those words fell out of. Well fine, I will come up with something better. Juice Sparklers? No. Oh, I got it! Let's name it after what we do to make it! All we do is mix all the ingredients together in a basin, minus the fruit and then mash that all up on a screen above it to collect the precious juice. Let's just call it MASH. It's a good, simple, non-offensive name. I mean the way we get the juice out of those grapefruits it's pretty violent, but no one needs to know that, so the name won't conjure images of us putting all our weight onto cinderblocks and just mashing the daylights out of that citrus. The results do sure taste right nice though.

I didn't have faith in you when you wanted to use crystalline fructose and sucralose to sweeten it, but the way we mixed it all together, no one would ever be the wiser that this was a diet drink from the flavor. Well, I guess it's not too diet. There are still 25g of sugar in our 20oz bottles. That's much better than our competitors though, those guys use two to three times as much sugar as we do.

This is one fine pink grapefruit soda though. It tastes nice and crisp. It carries the sourness of the fruit nicely without making you pucker your lips. Also, kudos to you for calling it a “low calorie sparkling juice drink.” That makes it seem much fancier than calling it grapefruit pop.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in a post Harry Potter world. Both the book and movie franchises have come to their conclusion. As I write this it has been two and a half years since the final movie and they are trying times. Butterbeer has made its way into reality from the imagination of a British woman. While it may not be exactly what the author had in mind, a butterscotch flavored cream soda burst onto the scene and captivated the taste buds of dozens. Okay, hundreds, if not thousands. It was not quite for me, but it exists and that is an interesting thing. It was the first butterscotch soda I have ever tasted, and as a person, who dislikes the candy, I found it fairly enjoyable.

Dang! has put together a little variation here. Instead of using cream soda they went with root beer for their base. To be fair this may have existed long before the other soda, but since I have never come across it until now, in my find it's post-Potter. I must say that I enjoy this a whole lot more than the Flying Cauldron Butterbeer. The root beer flavoring tones down that of the butterscotch. Don't worry, both flavors are most definitely present, but neither of them overpowers the other. This is fairly creamy, smooth and delicious. The flavor starts briefly as a nice dark licorice heavy root beery that quickly fades to tones of butterscotch, but the best part is the aftertaste is a perfect medley of the two.

I am looking forward to someday coming across Dang's regular root beer, because that initial flavor gives me a lot of hope for it. As for this, well it's a memorable soda that I wouldn't drink all of the time, but it would make a nice little treat every once and a while. If you are a fiend for butterscotch, you should most definitely track some down. You won't be disappointed.

If diamonds are a girl's best friend than what would this be? Well let's find out together, shall we? Girls are taken care of. They have diamonds. Good call, girls. Who is left? Men, women, kids, and old people? Who would this be for? I think we can vote out old people because this is too sparkly for them. They like bland things like mashed potatoes with nothing on them and no extra spice. Women already have diamonds from when they were younger since not only are diamonds a girls best friend, but they are also forever so women, pick your diamonds with care since you are living with them.

Kids...I don't think you would be into this. It's sweet but diety sweet. Not much, but kids love sugar and corn syrup. Adults have come to accept it as a necessary evil. Kids? Off the list.

Who's left? Men. I am loosely affiliated with this group here. This is a manly, clear bottle with a sharp carbonation. It's a little diet but it's not labeled as such so you don't need to hand in your man card that you didn't have to do anything to get except either live past twenty eight or save someone from a burning building. The taste of this is like that of a grapefruit. A light grapefruit that you might put a little Splenda on instead of sugar to cut that gnarly sourness that comes with grapefruits.

There you have it men, women, children, and the elderly. You all have your stuff and now men have one more thing than they knew they had yesterday. Congratulations. Sure, with diamonds, girls up to women up to elderly women will pretty eternally win. This is just a diet drink that will go bad six months after you buy it and has a retail price quite lower than a fancy pants, princess cut, F class diamond.

In the era of the diet obsessed 80's Crystal Light reined supreme. For those of you who don't know it was/is a flavored, artificially sweetened powder that you would mix in with water to make your very own “healthy” drink at home. While they have come a long way in recent years, the original flavors tasted like poison to me. It was just one big pile of diet grossness.

The True company is following in the same footsteps, except they decided to make their product from 100% natural ingredients. Instead of sweetening them with aspartame or sucralose they opted for stevia. While that has made a world of a difference with their other drinks, I don't think this lemonade ever stood a chance. Lemonade by definition is sugar sweetened lemon juice and water. If you deviate from that at all things start falling apart. The flavor of the stevia is far too overpowering in this to an extent that it's a little hard to make out the lemon flavor. Instead of tasting like lemonade it ends up resembling a creation that was brought to life by some cheap skate teenager at a local Dennys. I've been there before, in my formative years. You order a water with lemon and then put sweetener in it to create your own dull version of lemonade. The problem is this particular restaurant had stevia packets instead of sugar and everything just went wrong.

My ladyfriend works at Starbucks and come early fall the customers their lose their minds. People are constantly asking about their pumpkin spice lattes and then they will be available. It got so bad that I think it was actually released early this year. I've had them before and I think they taste decent enough, but I don't understand the power it has over people. It paints two images in my head; the first is that of zombies wanting nothing more out of life than sweet, sweet brains and the other is junkies wanting nothing more out of life than their sweet, sweet fix. All three things are sweet, sweet, so it's fitting.

This year Bolthouse Farms decided to release a limited edition seasonal line of beverages. The first one I saw hit the shelves was their take on the pumpkin spice latte. While I don't think this will have the same effect as the other does on the patrons of said coffee shop, it just may be enough to hold them over. I don't know why it would need to hold them over though, since they are both seasonal, and available at the same time.

In it's purest form this is a coffee beverage made with Arabica coffee. For me the problem is in the fact that there is way more milk in here than coffee. Yes, I know that's what a latte is, but I'm used to the soy variety, so this is a lot of milk for me to handle. So yeah, they take this coffee flavored milk and then add some spices and real pumpkin puree. I assure you that you can most definitely taste the pumpkin in this. There are a whole slew of pumpkin flavored products on the market these days, and most of them just taste like the spices that are used in a pumpkin pie. This taste more like the actual pumpkin, and it's interesting. As a side effect of that the amount of spices in here are lower than I would prefer, but you take what you can get in this crazy world of fancy beverages.

My final diagnosis is that if this contained more coffee, more spices and was soy based instead of primarily dairy based it would be one hell of a drink. Of course it would probably be a different drink entirely, but I know what the body wants and now so do you.

It is always a treat in my travels when I come across small local breweries that make their own soda. I had never heard of Schmohz Brewery until I came across this root beer in a small coffee shop in downtown Flint, MI. The home of the brewery is actually Grand Rapids, but it found it's way a short distance to Flint, which might I say has come quite a ways since I last visited there a decade ago. Back then the city was a ghost town, and everything seemed to be falling into ruins. This time there were some businesses that seemed to be thriving and things looked like they were on the up and up. Good job Rust Belt, let's keep reviving these cities.

Okay, enough about economic downfall and rejuvenation. We're here to talk about root beer so let's get down to brass tax. This root beer starts off fairly light in your mouth. It seemed like the ratios of the other ingredients to water were a bit off. Once I took a couple of sips I realized that while it's in your mouth it tastes a bit weak, but once you swallow it has a nice dark aftertaste. This doesn't taste like your run of the mill “classic” root beer. It's a but darker and you can tell it's microbrewed. There is nothing overly strong about the flavor. It's certainly there, but it's something you have to kind of sit and ponder over as it's not on the nose like most root beers.

Sugar and “More Sugar” are both listed in the ingredients, so I was expecting this to be overly sweet, but it's not at all. It has an average, and possibly even a little low level sweetness going on.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge that a portion of the proceeds of this soda are donated to Sammi Rae of Hope, which is an organization that helps families who are suffering with the possible loss of a family member that can result in high medical bills. Sammi Rae helps those families to not lose their homes. Sounds like a great organization to me, and it's more than enough reason to take a chance on this pop if you ever find yourself in Michigan.

You have no idea how much I wish I liked bananas. They are cheap, healthy and portable. Unfortunately they also taste absolutely disgusting to me. We're talking top 5 grossest foods to my mouth. The thing is that here at Thirsty Dudes we have an obligation to our readers (or accidental perusers if you will) to drink and review any and all non-alcoholic beverages that cross our paths. I don't remember exactly where I found this drink, because it's been sitting on my shelf for a few months, but I can assure you that it caused an audible “ugh' when I saw it.

Lucky for me I had some friends over last night and one of them loves bananas. I offered him this soda and he happily accepted. I took two quick sips to confirm that this tasted exactly like it did in my head and I was satisfied with my presumptions. This, my readers, tastes like a sweet soda water that has had banana Runts melted into it. Of course it does not resemble anything close to the actual fruit. It's sweet. It's strong. It's liquid candy. I want nothing to do with it, but others seemed to enjoy it. A middle of the road three bottles it is.

Jeff had a filthy mouth. He didn't swear but he also didn't brush his teeth regularly. His dentist asked him how he was going to meet new people with a mouth that looked like old cheese. He said that he just didn't have time for it and he didn't care. He said that when his teeth fell out, he was just going to get fake ones and not need to brush them. His dentist told him that is not how it worked and that he still had to brush fake teeth. He assured her that he read online that someone was trying to invent antibacterial fake teeth and the dentist was wrong.

His dentist thanked him for finally coming in and attempted to sway him out of his bad habits. Jeff had won a trip to the dentist in the world's worst bachelor party prize and decided he should not waste it. His dentist was sweating trying to clean the trash dump that his mouth had become. An hour and a half of cleaning, drilling, filling, patching, and bridging later, it was time for fluoride. The dentist asked if he wanted to drink some new Hint drink that the office was trying to push as an alternative to pop. Jeff thought he would try it. He liked it but it had a bit of a familiar taste that he couldn't place. It tasted a little like a floral honeydew. He thought that it was a good alternative to water, which he felt was disgusting. His dentist gave him a fluoride rinse and he spit it right out in the sink. He said, "That was it!" at the top of his lungs. The dentist didn't know what he was talking about. Jeff exclaimed that the hint tasted like fluoride and the dentist took a sip and sadly agreed. Jeff did a proper rinse and had had as clean a bill of health as you can for not being to a dentist in over a decade.

Steaz has their heart in the right place, and for years they have been working at creating perfect harmony between soda and green tea. Unfortunately they are not quite there. I would never say any of their creations have been gross, and I had no problem drinking them, it's just that they never reach their potential. Tea pop should be the greatest thing ever, but they always see to fall short. The soda flavor is always far too light. I'd like to say that was because they were more concerned with the flavor of the tea, but that also gets lost most of the time. Take this drink for example; cola is one of the strongest flavors a soda pop can have, and there is no excuse for its weakness in this beverage. I want crisp, dark cola flavors. This tastes lighter than the most diet of diet bogus colas. The taste of the green tea is there, but it's muddied by the erythritol, which they used to sweeten this.

My final verdict is that while this is a completely acceptable beverage, it could be made much better if they either used cane sugar (it's a zero calorie beverage, so that won't happen) or make the cola flavoring stronger. I bet they could make it could even mask the sweetener. The tea flavor would probably be lost even more though. Let's get a team of scientists on this. I want this to be so good, and I know it can be.

Rumors have been circulating about where I have been. People have said that I was in China selling cows. I have heard that I had left Thirsty Dudes in order to work full time to fulfill my dream of becoming a professional competitive pie eater. I have also heard that I was being groomed to become the newest host of the late night television show "Mike Night with Mike." I can say, for sure, that these are all false.

Regardless of what I was doing, which you don't care about anyway, let's be honest, I'm back in full effect with this, a thrilling review of a drink that is supposed to get my metabolism boosted. Look, I'm thirty-one years old and don't have the metabolism that I had when I was a terribly haired, equally terribly dressed high school student. That being said, I do not believe that this is going to give me the endurance that would allow me to do things like get three hours of sleep and just rage all day. As a terribly, immature adult, this does quench my thirst because it is good. It doesn't have a strong tea taste. Light tea taste. Not strong. Strong berry taste. According to the pictures on the bottle, there are cherries (which I can taste), blueberries (which I cannot taste), strawberries (which I might be able to taste) and raspberries (which I also might be able to taste). That's a good fifty percent tasty fruit to tasteless fruit. I suppose it's a fair ratio.

Hey, regardless of what seedy or otherwise not terribly entertaining things I've been up to these past five days, I'm back and this review proves it. I'm off to continue my new career of playing as a rodeo clown but you don't care about that.

What's that you got there? Black tea? Nice. You didn't put any sugar in it, did you? No? Good. Yup this tastes exactly like I would want an unsweetened black tea to taste. It wasn't steeped too long, so it's not very bitter. It just has a nice tea flavor to it. It's a bit on the watery side, but I think that helps to make it better. I mean it doesn't taste watered down, just not terribly strong. Yea, I'm 100% on board with this.

Oh tropical fruit how I love you. I just can't get enough of passionfruit, guava and…€¦pears? Wait…€¦what? Since when are pears a tropical fruit? I grew up in Western New York and my next-door neighbor had a pear tree in her backyard. I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that I do not live in a tropical location. The snowstorm we are currently in can attest for that. So why is there a picture of a pear on this label? I guess it could be some special kind of tropical pear, but the ingredients just say pear, so I imagine it's just a run of the mill pear. I know that not all of the fruit in here is tropical, there are also apples, but maybe they should have switched out that pear image for an orange. At least they are quasi tropical.

Whatever the deal is with the pear, it's unimportant when it comes to the taste of this juice. It does in fact taste tropical with an underlying vegetable flavor of the carrots. It's not very strong, and this tastes way more like a fruit juice than anything, but you can definitely taste a little something extra going on.12.5 carrots were murdered in the making of this drink, yet the ¾ of a passionfruit that was also brutally slain is far more present in the flavor. The tropics win again root vegetables, like they always will, like they always should.

Many a sailor has been known to warm his belly on dark stormy nights with a large bottle of whiskey. What is there out there for those teetotalers of the high seas who have lost their families and their former lives, not to the harshness of the sea, but to that of the bottle? The answer is simple, get each and every non-drinking sailor on your holiday shopping list a bottle of this Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Brew. It may not numb the pain in their lives, but it will give their throat and guts a similar warmness as their former love once had.

An employee has told me that all Trader Joes private label products are really other company's products that they have worked out a deal that they can slap their own name and label on. I really wish I knew the original producer of this soda, because I would sincerely thank them for creating such a treat.

The label announces to the world that this is “Ginger ale with a kick!” Don't be fooled, this is most definitely a ginger beer, and if you go into this expecting a nice pale dry ginger ale you're certainly going to get that aforementioned kick to the throat with the burn on this thing. It's simply wonderful. The thing is not only does this have a nice little kick to it that is better than most ginger beers, it also has an incredible flavor. Most companies just use ginger and maybe a little lemon in their ginger brews and while that is fine and good, it's a pretty straight forward flavor, albeit with a lot of kick. The mix in the bottle not only contains the usual suspects, but it also have honey, lime juice, spices and most importantly pineapple juice. Even though it's barely noticeable that little bit of pineapple makes all the difference and puts this ginger beer at the top of the game flavorwise. This is sweet, bubbly, throat burning and slightly fruity. I couldn't think of anything more to ask for in a soda. Oh wait, they did think of something else. They put it in a classic looking green glass bottle with a swivel top. Now that's class.

Big Jak was a gambling man. He loved to play the ponies, roll the dice, and more importantly bet on the outcome of cards. Black Jack was his game. He loved it so much that he thought about starting to call himself “Big Black Jak,” but that just didn't sound right to him, cause…€¦well you know.

In his off time Big Jak spent his time developing beverages. He would spend hours and hours slaving away to get the balance of everything just right. The problem was that just like with the cards he always bet big. You see Big Jak may have loved black jack, but that does not mean he was any good at the game. He always bet everything he had, and had the dealer hit him, no matter what. He was so enamored with getting exactly 21 that he lost nearly every hand. This spilled over into his beverage making. The quantities of his flavorings were so high that it made them nearly undrinkable. Take this energy drink he worked on. It would have been nice to have a tasty non-carbonated energy drink that tasted like iced tea, but of course he had to go overboard. Even though he used sucralose, he used too much and it tasted so overly sweetened that you couldn't even make out the tea flavor. In addition to that he decided to add some artificial peach flavor to it that made it just plain awful. Never before has a fruit flavoring existed that tasted so fake.

Sadly, shortly after the release of this beverage Big Jak's bookies came looking for him and things did not bode well for him. That is why we talk about Big Jak in the past tense.

Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Professor. Wait…€¦what? I thought we were a group of esteemed physicians here giving each other nice salutations. Now there's this professor in the mix. He doesn't even have a doctorate, just a measly masters degree. Like someone with an inferior education to us could ever show us a thing or two about a thing or two. Fine, I'll try your stupid soda that you created with your lower level education. Hmm, this is actually…€¦kind…€¦of…€¦good. I didn't expect that. I saw the cherry on the can and I didn't even process the implications of the name you gave it, since you know I have a doctorate and I need not pay attention to lowly professors. This isn't cherry at all, not even black cherry. Okay, I lied there's cherry in there, but it's the way that my college over there Dr. Pepper has cherry in it. It's a close facsimile to his product, but why would the market need this? Wait you're telling me there is no sugar and zero calories in this beverage? How can that be so, it doesn't taste like diet poison?!?! It's sweetened with erythritol and stevia? Well then, I really wish you possessed that sheet of paper that would allow me to be friends with you because you have created one heck of a beverage there. I normally detest all things diet, but this really tastes wonderful. I don't know how you've done it. Perhaps we can get Pepper's degree transferred over to you for your scientific breakthrough in the world of soda. He's been working on cracking this code for decades and has never even come close to your products.

I don't know about you, my fine readers, but I am a big fan on bahn mi sandwiches. They are a staple lunch for me. I mix up some tofu, carrots, cucumber and sriracha and put them on a roll. I know that I should put daikon on it, but I haven't been making it to the Asian markets as much as I used to. My whole point of this is that when I make the sandwiches, I peel the skin off of the cucumbers. I find it to be a bit distracting from the overall taste. It's not a bad flavor at all, but it's not what I want in this particular sandwich.
Now what should be done with those leftover skins? I could compost them for my garden in the spring. Instead perhaps I will let them soak in water so that their flavor is transferred to the liquid. That my friends is exactly what this water tastes like. I've had other cucumber drinks that taste like the soft innards of the vegetable, but this tastes unmistakably like the skin. It's not bad, but it's not what I expected. I would also say that the flavor is much stronger than a “hint” as well. It certainly is refreshing and I like it. If you are iffy about cucumbers I would stay away though. This thing is pure cuc.

I bought it, tried it and thought it tasted familiar. A quick visit to the Guayaki website told me that it's just a rebranding of their Pure Empower Mint tea. So yeah, go there and read that to see what it's like.

It seems that more and more people are turning their backs on modern medicine. While I do believe that it has its merits and most definitely can help people, the bottom line is that it is a money making empire. Things are prescribed that can have strange side effects, when there are natural options out there that would help you without making you suffer from things like aches and pains, dry mouth, bowel control problems, heart stoppage, compulsive gambling and what not. I for one am glad that holistic medicine is on the rise once again. I didn't have health insurance for ten years, so I relied on it a lot when I got fell ill. The amount of garlic cloves I consumed was astronomical.

Mission Root believes in the holistic side of life. They follow a Ayurvedic lifestyle, which involves meditation, yoga, deep breathing and a special healthy diet. To help spread the word of this to others they have created these “teas.”

First off, you're probably wondering, as I was, what tulsi is. Well, it's an herb that is used to cleanse the respiratory system and to relieve digestive pressure. It is often used as a treatment for colds and coughs. You mix that in with the magical properties of ginger, and you have yourself this nice healthy drink that is fairly sweet (due to the agave) and has a vague floral taste. I had expected this to have a much stronger ginger taste, but it's mostly tulsi and agave with some hints of ginger in the background. It's a fairly unusual tasting tea, but it's in an interesting way that makes you keep drinking it instead of a gross, “this needs to go in the filth bin instantly” way.

Also, note that 5% of their profits are donated to Akshaya Patra, the world's largest NGO school meal program.