United States - 4098 Reviews

You know that classic picture of the evolution of man? All I can picture is an updated version of it that depicts protein drinks. It starts off with just gross clumps of straight whey protein. Then it goes onto gross protein powder from the 80's. There are several different shots of various protein drinks that have risen to fame in the past decade or so. Then there is Muscle Milk. It stands tall, like the fully evolved man Darwin spoke of. To the left of that there is a smaller carton, but it is in an omnipotent glow. It is a carton of Evolve. Now that is advertising people. We should be getting paid to come up with this stuff. Instead I have a cat “ice gilling” me because I'm not letting him drink any of my beverage.

Evolve is based on the Muscle Milk formula, except that it is all-natural. It's sweetened with stevia and monk fruit, as well as cane sugar. Surprisingly you can only faintly taste the other sweeteners, and I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read the carton. On top of all that it is gluten free, so all of you out there who suddenly suffer from wheat gluten allergies (something that I'm pretty sure didn't exist a decade ago, all hail the modern world and the way it mutates us) can have at it. Seriously, have at it. It's pretty tasty, and you look like you could do with a protein boost.

Mojitos aren't just for the Mexican or the lovers of Mexican food anymore! Was it ever that way? I rarely see people drink let alone drink mojitos. I like the idea of mint in a drink but there is an awful lot of mint in a mojito. People sit there and stab away at the mint and hope that they didn't just pay twelve dollars for ice and mint. Before we go any further, I know mojitos have lime and not lemon, but this very closely resembles that of a mojito so I'm going to push forward with it as is.

This is actually pretty refreshing drink. Light but adequate mint and equal parts lemon meet in the middle, shake hands like they sold each other a car at a very reasonable price, and do so very maturely. This does taste a bit like a watered down and for some reason minty lemonade but it's far enough away from it that I shouldn't bother mentioning it. It's just too bad that keyboards don't come with some sort of key that I could go back and erase. I mean, typewriters had it. Seems like an odd thing to forget after all these years.

Summer? Yes but for a limited time. If you can, find this, enjoy the sun, and try to surf. Even if you can get up for a couple seconds, that's enough to get the itch, right?

It as if nature knew I had bought this cider because it decided to drop the temperature twenty five degrees. All of a sudden, I want to just walk around wearing a hoodie with headphones on and not acknowledge anyone or anything, as I enjoy doing because I can be a bit of an introvert and sometimes enjoy when people think I'm just creeping around. I'm not, I just want everyone to leave me the hell alone for a little bit. If those same people knew that I was thinking of things like apple cider, they would probably be alright with me lurking around the city.

I rarely eat candy apples and eat caramel apples even less. Why? Well, a beard does not mesh well with a ball of sticky candy, for one. For two, they are impossible to eat on their own. I thought that if I got this I could drink the fall up in an old coffee cup. Was I right? Sure, if you are concerned about drinking all that fall has to offer and, even in your imagination are concerned about your weight.

This initially tastes very strong. The first two or three sips really taking some getting used to as this cat is a sweet treat if I have ever had one. Subsequent sips are a mix between a pretty good rendering of a liquid caramel apple and a rendering of a liquid caramel apple of your gluttonously and stupidly dipped your caramel apple into aspartame. Ahh, yes. The ingredient that we all loved in the early nineties but now venomously despise is back and hiding in our caramel apple drinks. The sweetener is very strong but the flavor of the cider is pretty good and close to it's model so I can only penalize it so much. It tugs me in both directions so much that I can only cop out and give it a three and wonder how long it's going to take me to get through the other seventeen K-Cups. Dilemma.

The long of it:
Order yourself a nice key lime pie to go. Then take a pit stop to Gotham and get yourself a scoop of that toxic sludge that transformed the Joker in Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Blend that together with your pie, and then set up some bunsen burners and a little torch to evaporate any liquid that might be left in the concoction you made. Take the crust that is left and crush it up into a fine powder to add to your drinks when you want to pretend that you will sleep.

The short(er) of it:
This tastes like liquid key lime pie that someone spilled toxic waste on, and it didn't work for me. I got home around 2am and immediately took this to ensure I would be able to fall asleep quickly (I know it says to drink a half hour before sleep). Come six am I was still awake. Gross and ineffective.

Does anyone else have second thoughts about drinking a beverage that pops when you twist off the cap and an eerie smoke pours out of the opening? I feel like I should be wearing a has mat suit with some thick gloves that you can handle uranium with. Essentially it makes me feel like this beverage should not exist outside of some lab somewhere.

Being as I am a scientist, specifically one with a degree in drinkology (no , not like some pretentious mixologist, I had to spend eight years in college to get my degree), I through caution of radioactivity to the wind an dove in head first. By that I mean I took a small tentative sip. I can safely say that this does not taste nuclear, and I have no fear of my pee coming out glowing later.

The strange thing about this beverage is that it is made with real orange juice (it's the second ingredient, but it's only 3% of the whole), yet it still tastes like Tang. Have they ever thought of marketing this as an energy drink for astronauts? I imagine that is exactly what space explorers do not need though. They're stuck up in orbit for months at a time with, what I expect is little to do for a good portion of their days. Why would they want to be all hopped up on energy drinks? I think I would like to sleep through as much as that experience as possible. So yeah, nix that idea.

As part of the recovery line this beverage is meant to give you energy as well as hydrate you. Think of it as Rockstar meets Gatorade with sexy results!!! Wait, that's not right. There is nothing sexy about this. It tastes like Gatorade made a Tang flavor and then they added a bit of an energy compound to it. It doesn't taste too much like chemicals, but it's there around the edges. Actually it's there in a way that makes it taste vaguely diet, even though it's sweetened with sucrose.

On a side note, while I do like the idea that it is in a resealable can, I have to say that about a third of the sips I took resulted in some sort of splash back that got on my clothes. Either they need to work on the design a bit, or I need to learn how to drink properly.

I walked into the beer merchant in my city knowing full well that they have a decent selection of non-alcoholic drinks. Someone mentioned to me previously that they had the Lester's Fixins chicken wing pop but they didn't tell me that they had a couple different ones there. I thought, you know what? I'm going to share this with my good friend Lauren and maybe some kids. I'll get something kid friendly and perhaps more interesting. Welp, I'm the fool because this was completely and utterly disgusting.

Travel back in time to when you were around four and your parents bought you a new cooking set with fake food in it. Remember when you could get plastic food that actually smelled vaguely like what it was supposed to be? Well be a four year old idiot and make and eat a plastic piece of jelly and you've got this drink. It tasted like melon flavored plastic, nothing like what it should have tasted like. No peanut butter, and not strawberry or grape jelly either. Oh you know that old American lunch staple of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no peanut butter and melon jelly served in and around a plastic plate that you just eat the whole thing of like this is your first time eating a piece of Cinn-a-burst gum and you heard you can eat the wrapper, too. Exception being that Cinn-a-burst was fantastic gum and this pop sucked more than my fantastic Dyson vacuum and that thing truly never clogs. It just keeps sucking just like this crappy pop.

Companies send us a decent amount of products for review. When we got an email from a gentleman in our fair city that wanted to meet up so he could give us some samples of a beverage we had not tasted we were shocked that there was a product in Buffalo that we didn't know about. When we met up with him, we discovered that he was a part of the elaborate sales team for Vemma. He gave us the samples and then launched into a presentation to get us to become part of his team. It was unexpected, but we weren't upset by it. The man was just trying to secure a more comfortable station in life. We politely declined, as we are clearly not salesmen of any sort, and made our way to our second meeting of the day (a meeting of friends at a delicious Indian restaurant).

Somewhere during the speech we were given a little factoid jumped out at me, “the orange can tastes like Flintstones vitamins.” That is a statement that will always get my attention. As a child I probably nearly overdosed on vitamins a handful of times because I loved how they tasted and I would just keep eating them. Luckily for me my love of drinking fluids had already bloomed by that time, so the vitamins were diluted and quickly flushed out of my system.

Today I was finally in need of a little boost so I decided to take a one-way train to Children's Vitaminburg. That sounds way creepier than I meant it to. Anyways, I think a cow had wandered onto the tracks because I was certainly detoured to a different town, a town where childish things are put aside and people take grown up vitamins. Not for a second in drinking this did the taste of children's vitamins pass my lips. The base of this drink is mangosteen, which is great because it doesn't taste like a typical candied energy drink. It tastes of fruit and unfortunately the bad kind of vitamins. Their flavor is not as strong as I portray them to be, but it's still there. If this had a normal energy drink base with that added, it would be absolutely horrible, but the mangosteen course corrects it a bit. Also, even though I gently shook it, as recommended, the last gulp of the can was very chalky, and nothing that you want in your mouth.

This energy drink has its ups and it's downs. I was on the fence as to give it a two or a three bottle rating, but I decided that since it was an energy drink that didn't taste like it was made by the Wonka corporation I should give it the benefit of the doubt and so three it is.

Did mango make some back door deal in order to blend so well with erythritol? While it is one of the least offensive zero calorie sweeteners on the market, it normally has a very distinct taste. When it's hanging around mango, it's not as apparent. Did they meet to exchange documents for cold hard cash in some dirty, dark parking garage? Did they use fake gruff voices until one of them inevitably coughed? Were Nixon masks worn? Was it all done to finance a surfing expedition? Find out the answers to all of this and more next week on the Adventures of Sneaky Pete (and Pete).

I have surprisingly been a fan of this line of beverages. The concept of oats, fruit juice and zero calorie sweeteners being mixed together didn't exactly produce a Pavlovian response from me. I guess that is because I haven't had the proper conditioning, which as it turns out simply means trying the drinks.

This tastes like a decent mango juice with a slight hint of erythritol, but as I said it's not all that bad. There is a very light oat taste to it as well. I originally expected some sort of texture, but it's as smooth as can be. The amount you taste the oats is similar to how any drink would taste if you drank it while hanging out in a horse barn. The association of the smell of that dwelling would impact your taste buds as much as the oats in this juice do.

Oh and the spoiler is that Pete is sneaky because he added oats to his drinks and you wouldn't know unless you were told. You should still watch the show though, from what I hear there will be “sexy results!!!”

Shakes the clown did not get his name for good reasons. He was known for shaking very badly while making balloon animals. He never knew why he shook and didn't ask a doctor until a group of kids were picking on him for being at a birthday party and it took him a long time to tie a knot.

He went to the doctor and the doctor asked him what was on his mind. Shakes, or to the doctor, Gerald, said that he didn't know what happened. The doctor asked him about a normal day and Gerald said that he would wake up, drink a bottle of mango iced tea, and go to work. The doctor asked him what brand of drink it was and he said it was called "Zum XR" and the doctor gave him a look, took off his glasses, and gave him a little chuckle. He said, "Gerald, do you feel fine for about a half hour and then start to shake?" Gerald said that he did. He said that he really likes the flavor of it. He said it tasted great and you could taste both mango and a decent, smooth not bitter green tea. It was well sweetened and he liked the little balls in the bottom. The doctor asked Gerald if he knew what the balls were. Gerald said that he didn't know. The doctor told him that it was time released energy beads that was just giving him too much energy and his body couldn't handle it. Gerald was happy that he knew what it was but sad that he might have to stop drinking his favorite drink.

The next week, Gerald went back to work for kids birthday parties and felt like he was doing the best because he wasn't shaking. He could tie balloons no problem. He had no problem squirting water from his lapel flower. He never missed another pie in the face. At the end of the shows, though, at least one person would ask him why he was called "Shakes" and he said that he used to shake all the time. The kids actually missed the shaking and he missed his favorite drink. He made the tough decision to be worse at his job but to enjoy his drink and live up to his namesake again. Shakes the clown was back!

Oh Country Time. Many people are city folk but some enjoy slower, more rustic times. Times like not having to wear shoes, constantly eating assorted pies, chewing stalks of straw, tractor pulls, and the soft, soothing sounds of alternative rocker Chris Gaines. Did you know that if you live in an official, federally accepted "country" town, you could get any Country Time products for free, within reason? It's not anything they advertise because they would lose money. Think of it like the "secret menu" that some restaurants have that serve you things like the bacon wrapped bacon burger or the Cobb salad.

In the country, miraculously, everything is powdered. I think it's to conserve space. Do you know how when people from the country complain that buildings in the city are too close together? It's because in the city, things are stored in their natural state and they stack them up and take up a lot of space. In the country, everything is wet because in order to get everything to their intended state, you have to add water to it. Add water to a can of chairs, go make a sandwich, and you will come back to a nice, assembled set of wet wooden chairs. Add water to a tin of boots and in no time, you will have a nice, wet pair of steel toed boots ready for use on the farm.

When you add water to this powdered strawberry lemonade, you are promptly provided with rather good lemonade. Sure, there is no pulp, but there is plenty of sour and tartness. It is made from real sugar, powdered of course, so it tastes like a classic lemonade with quite a bit of very good strawberry flavor.

Country life can be thought of as difficult but for some it is the only life they know. They know the importance of keeping your tins of powdered product dry because in the case of a flood, there will be destruction because everything will expand to its natural size. You could leave for your honeymoon and the town could have a flood, come back, and your roof will be of the house because all the furniture, flatware, coat racks, televisions have expanded to full size and filled up the small closet where they were being kept. Be careful in the country. It's very dangerous while wet.

Finally. My last bottle of Chubby. I bought this in the early stages of Thirsty Dudes and it has just been sitting on different shelves awaiting my acceptance. After that cream soda...ugh...I've been dreading this day. Was it as bad as I thought? No but not by much. It tastes more like carbonated bubble gum cake or ice cream than actual gum.

It's not too sweet which is a godsend otherwise I would have thrown this little number into the street with complete disregard to things like decency, etiquette, manners, and other people. It sucks, but it sucks a lot less that I was worried about.

Can we all agree that the beverage world has taken pomegranates and blueberries too far? It seems that nearly every company out there has that flavor in their line. Sure some of them add acai into the mix, but that's not really helping much. I understand the allure of antioxidants, but I'm just getting so tired of this flavor (orange mango is not that far behind). The thing is that these are flavors that I loved, and I was excited when they were more accessible in drink form, but enough is enough.

At least with this beverage V8 uses real juice, so it tastes like the fruit. They also mix in some other fruits (apples and white grapes) as well as some vegetables (sweet potatoes, purple carrots, tomatoes, and carrots), which give the drink a little something extra that makes it ticker and darker tasting. It's still primarily pomegranate and blueberry but you can certainly tell that there are some other flavors floating around in the mix.

If this were 5-10 years ago I probably been all over this drink, but it's too late in my beverage life to fully enjoy it the way that perhaps an eight year old would. Man, I wish I could enjoy this drink like he would. I also wish I could enjoy new music as much as he does. Looks like I'll be listening to R.E.M. for the millionth time and complain about how bands don't sound like this anymore. I'm old, it's my right.

You've had a watermelon, right? They're great. Seedless you get to eat and not worry about seeds. Seed-full and you get to spit seeds all across town like it is the twenties and you are some sort of fruit crazed mobster just spraying out your friend's car window. Sometimes you get a watermelon that is a bit too soft for your comfort but I think that the flavor is always pretty decent. It's just the texture that goes with old age in a watermelon. The people at Day's have never had a real watermelon a day in their life and this drink is the proof. This tastes like watered down candy watermelon. It's almost flavorless. It just tastes like carbonated sugar water and before you get all "all pop is is carbonated sugar water" this time you would be right. There's a real lack of flavor going on in this too-big bottle.

For all of the children of yore, this is not the watermelon you remember. This is some new, space watermelon that lacks everything that made the classic watermelon great. Flavor, seeds, and the ability to see how long it would take you to spit a mouthful of seeds.

I know I've complained about this before with the peach version of this drink, but “half and halfs” are supposed to be tea and lemonade, not tea and juice. In my book that is just a flavored tea. This tea doesn't make me think of professional golfers at all and it should with a name such as this.

All complaints aside this is a pretty decent tea. Tea's Tea (when did they drop the Ito En?) always uses high quality teas in its beverages. In fact if I were ever trying to explain the way a certain tea tastes I would give the person that version of Tea's Tea. They are the company that taught me that what Arizona calls green tea, is nothing more that a delicious bastardization of a perfect beverage.

In this bottle we have their perfect unsweetened green tea, with some acerola cherry juice mixed into it. It's more tea than cherry and I am okay with that. I do wish they had used a different type of cherry though. Acerolas are not what I'm used to and they have a slightly different flavor. The real disappointment in this drink (to me at least) is that they chose to sweeten it. Even though they didn't add too much sugar, I feel like it detracts from the taste of the green tea, and muddies all of the flavors a little. I am just nitpicking though. This is a beverage that I would happily drink again and again. I dream of the day that I see this companies products in every gas station across the country. As I get older the tall boy tea loses its allure. Sometimes you just want real tea that isn't made by Lipton.

I am currently on tour in California and found this at a cafe in Goleta. I love grapefruit soda so I jump at the opportunity to try new kinds anytime I can. The more sour the better. If a soda can make my mouth pucker, it's an almost guaranteed 4-bottle rating.

Is this a mouth puckering soda? Sadly no. It's moderately sour, but nothing too special. It's a decent grapefruit soda, definitely better than most.

You know that I drink a lot of stuff, right people? A lot. I would say that we drink more drinks that 99% of the rest of the world which, finally, puts us into that equal parts idolized and hated 1%. Ahh, the one percent. The air up here is just nicer to breathe. Filled with the scents of the most exotic of woods and scented oils. The people are all very easy to look at and their clothes are made from materials so soft that if the rest of you heathens as much as touched them, you would never be able to touch anything else because your fingertips would quite literally revolt from your hands. You will have to wait for eye scanning because your fingertips will be blank and you will never be able to use a biometric scanner ever again. Our hair is styled from both the greatest living hairstylists for free as our shoes are shined by perfect robotic representations of the world's finest dead shoe shiners.

We are also provided, at gratis, the finest drinks. We receive soda pop with all natural flavors and just the right amount of fizz. What do you get? You get drinks like this that could be personified as boring, tired, and characterless. While I am drinking something that was made from fresh fruit, you are drinking something that in every sense of the word is artificial. I am drinking something carbonated to my liking and you are drinking this drink that might as well be a juice due to the lack of fizz.

In order to get where we have gotten you will have to work very hard, know the right people, and do some schmoozing. It's all part of a days work and since none of us have to work any more, it does leave time to clean up at the back nine, polish off a case or two of the finest cigars, once again, for free, and shop for things we don't need like chrome shoes, personal elephant groomers, diamond Montblanc pencils, and heated cat hats. Which reminds me, I've got to pay my tie repairman and personal closet organizer before the end of the week or my life will just be the pits.

Cheribundi continuously walks the line between being great and being amazing. They use real cherry juice that is not from a concentrate in all of their beverages, which is great because that means there are cherry drinks out there that don't taste like cough medicine. Who decided to call that flavor cherry anyway? The fruit tastes nothing like that sugary monstrosity that has usurped its name.

This is very similar to the Jasmine Tea version I had a little ways back, minus all traces of anything floral. It has a classic sweetened green tea base that is amplified by the cherry juice. That juice is just great. Anytime a drink has a taste to it that makes me think about eating fruit, I know I have a winner on my hands.

My only complaint is that I could do with a little less sugar, but I prefer unsweetened teas, so this will probably be just right for those of you who drink the sweetened stuff on the regular.

Diet fruit punch should not exist in any form.

Carl was a pretty cool dude. He always wore a jean jacket no matter what the weather was. He always wore jeans and a white shirt. Now that I think about it, it sounds a lot like someone else we know about. He would always go around slamming jukeboxes in fifty's style restaurants even though it never worked and more than likely would get him yelled at by the staff. They knew what he was up to and they weren't buying it. It was one thing when he was in his twenties but in his forties and into his fifties, it seemed as if he was holding on to something for too long.

One day while riding his motorcycle down a highway, he stopped at a gas station to get something to drink and fuel up. He filled up the tank and went into the shop and grabbed a pre-made turkey sandwich and a bottle of the shops own cherry pomegranate iced tea. He sat down outside under an umbrella to eat before hitting the road again. He took a bit of the sandwich and it was not very good but when he took a sip of the iced tea, he was relieved. It was a good iced tea that somehow tasted like cherries, pomegranate and still left room for some iced tea taste. It wasn't too sweet and he knew that he was going to have no problem choking down that awful sandwich after this rather good drink.

As soon as he finished lunch, a group of three teenage kids started walking towards Carl. He thought they were going to make fun of him for being "too old to be cool" or something. They walked up and said, "Hey, that's a really nice bike." and Carl lit up. He thanked them and let them sit on it. It was time for everyone to leave and he gave everyone high fives and as the last one left, the youngest one told Carl, "You're a pretty cool dude." and that's all that he needed to feel like a million bucks again.

Weight loss / muscle building drinks are all the rage these days. There are new products flooding the market all the time. The newest one to grab my attention is “bod-e” by Vemma. There are a lot of mixed feelings about the way the Vemma company is ran, but I'm not going to get into it. I'm not a businessman, I'm just some “dumb dummy” who like to try all sorts of beverages and then write poorly about them.

Bod-e doesn't really taste like any other “weight solution” beverage I have ever had before. It's fruity, lightly carbonated and it doesn't taste all that diet, even though it has sucralose in it accompanying the cane sugar. The first thing I noticed when I opened that can was that it has a milky orange color. I wasn't expecting that at all since it's carbonated and the coloring makes it look thicker than it actually is.

There is a whole mess of ingredients in here to help with weight loss (and to keep it off), There are a lot of the familiar vitamin faces that you know from energy drinks as well as protein, aloe vera and green tea. I'm not that kind of scientist, so I can't claim to know which ones works and which does not. I can tell you about tastes though, and this has a decent citrus taste thanks to the mangosteen. By the time you get towards the last quarter of the can you are able to taste the sucralose a bit more, but it wasn't enough to turn me off.

After a single can I have no idea how well this product actually works, but I can tell you that it tastes decent enough, and flavorwise it is much better than most of it's competitors.