Aspartame - 49 Reviews

Want to make this at home? Here's what you need: two parts diet Pepsi, one part artificial cherry flavor. That will about do it. There's not much else to say about this soda. Luckily the cherry flavor cancels out some of the diet taste and it's semi-enjoyable.

There were two things that Mario loved in life. Those two things were chocolate and soda pop. What can you really expect from a six year old? Seriously though, Mario had terrible parents, or so his bedroom would have you believe. It was littered with empty pop cans and chocolate bar wrappers. They said it didn't matter because he ate it all of the time and he was still “skinny like a bean.” Mario's parents were idiots. A. All of that garbage would catch up to him weight-wise as he got older. B. I'm sure all of that sugar gave your poor child diabetes or some other disease.

One morning Mario woke up and found that there was not a drop of cola left in the house. On top of that he was out of chocolate bars. He felt like garbage. He now understood why his dad was so irritable on the mornings when he didn't have coffee. The boy was going through withdrawal. It was as he was writhing in pain on the kitchen floor that he came up with an idea. He took one of his mom's seltzer waters from the fridge and dumped a whole mess of cocoa powder into it. He grabbed a bunch of sugar packets and pours them into the mixture as well. It's unfortunate for Mario that he didn't realize that they weren't actual sugar, but his mom's “diet sugar” packets. Mario then took out an oversized spoon and mixed it until it was just a liquid with no powder on top.He took a whiff and it smelled like his mom's chocolate scented lotion. Pleased with himself he took a big gulp and immediately spit it all over the kitchen. His concoction was utterly disgusting. It tasted like a three day old, melted chocolate float that had aspartame in it for some reason. Even though the ice cream had melted, the carbonation remained. Ugh…€¦so gross. Being the scumbag child that he was Mario didn't even clean up his mess. He just took a five from his mom's purse and walked down to the corner store to get his provisions. That little bastard.

Up until this pop touched my taste buds I had completely forgotten that Faygo used to make a chocolate cream pie soda. I remember convincing my grandfather to buy me a bottle. I took one sip and thought it was completely revolting, and I felt bad for wasting it. I pretty much had the exact same reaction with this similar tasting pop, except this time I wasted my own money instead of someone else's.

As if the 10 calories in Sugar Free Red Bull were too many, they recently came out with TOTAL ZERO. Imagine those words being emitted by an ominous voice and it makes the drink sound more intimidating. Sadly, it's not really that much different (taste wise) from Sugar Free Red Bull. I was hoping they were going to shake up the Red Bull recipe a little for this, but they stuck with what they know.

"I don't like this. Do you want it?" she says to me. I don't often get proposals like this but I will always jump at the chance to drink something someone else doesn't want as long as it makes a good review. Obviously I said yes and the effect of that was over half a dozen packets of cherry pomegranate diet drink mix in my hand and a happy co-worker that doesn't have to look at them ever again. Everyone wins.

I made myself a glass of this and here's how it goes. If you fast-forward to Fall where people make candy covered apples, take their excess candy coating and roll some cherries and pomegranate arils in it and munch away on that. After you're done eating those at-one-time-healthy-snacks-now-made-terribly-unhealthy-snacks, imagine how they would be liquefied and that's about the slot that this drink fills. It's candy sweet but you can still manage to taste the pomegranate and cherry. That surprises me after thinking now of how good candy covered pomegranate is. Candy covered cherries doesn't appeal to me for some reason. If you're covering arils in the same stuff you use to make candy covered apples, you will have more candy than fruit. I guess I didn't think the logistics and dynamics of the comparison before I mentioned it. Oh well. It still stands. Enjoy your diet, everyone. Now with candy!

Ahh mocktails, the perfect drink for a summer afternoon. This drink fits many "perfect" slots for many people, too. For instance, did you know that you cannot drink when you are pregnant? Well, technically you can but there's no telling what will happen to the baby growing inside your tummy. Answer? Mocktails. Alcoholics shouldn't drink because it could quickly spiral out of control for them and the next thing you know they'll have a unicorn with a rainbow on it tattooed on their ankle. No one, not even fans of unicorns want that tattoo. Who else would love a mocktail? Kids? It's a stretch but kids that want to act cool and drink like their parents could drink mocktails all day long.

Now onto the drink itself: It's a fantastically retro peach Bellini. Traditionally made with sparkling wine and peach puree, this drink is probably closer to none of those things. It's not sparkling although you probably could make this with seltzer water and it would be spot on. It does taste quite peachy and no, I don't mean that in a 1996 KoЯn kind of way. Could you imagine if you went backstage at a KoЯn show and Munky, Head, and Fieldy were all drinking mocktail peach Bellinis? That would have been quite an image. Tough, nu-metal dudes drinking a low-cal faux alcoholic drink? I mean, they are professionals and had a show to put on. I would imagine that the pre-show ritual would include mock drinks but the post-show would involve shear chaos.

This drink isn't bad. It doesn't taste terribly diet, which is a plus and a bit of a shocker since I can usually spot a disgusting aspartame drink a mile away. This is loud on the peach, but take it from someone who isn't 100% into peaches, it's still good. KoЯn agrees. The Allman Brothers agree. The Presidents of the United States of America agree. This peach Bellini is pretty good.

This has been sitting on my shelf for longer than any other drink I have to review. I don't particularly like Big Red. It tastes like bubble gum with a hundred pounds of sugar added to it. After one sip I swear I can feel my teeth rotting. On top of disliking the flavor, I also am not a fan of most diet drinks. That is two strikes going against this drink and it was enough for it to sit in my cupboard for over six months.

I decided I should start working on getting all of these older drinks reviewed before I worry about the newer ones. Basically I was sick of looking at this can every time I opened the cupboard. The company sent us samples and it was a “preview” can that is just a silver can with a sticker on it. I actually like the look a lot, and I wish it were the real label. I looked online and apparently this new diet version of the drink is sweetened with sucralose, Ace-K, and aspartame. That's a whole lot of artificial flavors that I want little to do with. The thing is, I found this to be better than the original version of the drink. It still has that bubblegum flavor, but it kind of masks the flavors of the artificial sweeteners, and it doesn't tastes like you're drinking an entire barrel of sugar. It's sweet, but not cavity sweet, and with only slight fake sugar flavor. I think you may be onto something here Big Red.

MOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM, I want lemonade! Now son, you know we're in Mexico and you can't just have everything you want. We've been here for a week and all you've done is complain about how you want some lemonade. I told you before I looked in every store and nowhere sells it. I also haven't been able to find any lemons to make you some fresh. They must be out of season or something. But MOOOOOOOOOM I really want it. What about that weird plastic lemon that is in the fridge, couldn't you make some with that? Well I suppose I could. I don't want to make it with the tap water though. W have a lot planned today, and I can't have you running off to the bathroom every five minutes with the runs. The only bottled water I have is carbonated, but if it will get you to shut up let's give it a try. Oh, now you've gone and put far too much of that lemon juice in the sparkling water. We'll have to fix that by adding some sugar. Unfortunately since this is a rented room, there isn't any sugar here. Oh wait, I think I have some packets in my purse. Ugh, all I have is artificial sweetener. I guess it's better than nothing. Here try this. What do you think? Ugh, MOOOOOOOOOOMMM this is GROOOOOOOSSSSSSSS! Nothing about it tastes natural. MOOOOOOOOMMMMM I don't want lemonade anymore. I want iced tea!!! Well lucky for you they had some down at the market. Let's take a quick trip there.

So yeah, this tastes exactly like the drink this family made, except it has little dark chunks in it. It's apparently part of the limejuice, but it just looks like the drink has gone bad. This also says it has no diet aftertaste. Guess what? They are liars.

In less than 2 weeks, I will no longer be living in Buffalo. I am returning to where this website was started, Portland, OR. While I won't miss the snow or the bitter cold winter here, I will miss Wegmans. I've been to grocery stores all across the country, and none have ever compared to Wegmans. Trust me, it's a great store.

What's not so great is this diet cola they make. It has the patented battery acid taste that comes with most diet drinks. It's a cheap soda and it shows in its taste. Wegmans is amazing, but I think it's a natural law that it can't be awesome at everything or else the world might explode.

I accidentally purchased this. I just looked quick and thought it was the non-diet version. Oh well. I'm not a huge fan of black cherry sodas, nor do I like diet drinks. Give me a came sugar “regular” cherry soda any day. Oh that would be nice right now. Instead here I sit with aspartame and my friend's darker cousin. Wow, that sounded racist.

If this wasn't diet, I actually think I would really enjoy it. It has actual cherry juice in it, which is a rarity in the world of sodas. It starts you off with a nice sweet fruit flavor, but unfortunately the devil's sweetener calls for a mutiny and the flavor is upset into a gross diet aftertaste. It's still decent and I would choose this over most diet drinks. It's also kosher, so if you're Jewish the doctor says, “You're welcome.”

Lemon-lime sodas are generally pretty substandard in my book. If there is a big cooler full of random sodas the lemon-lime would be the last one I picked. It's not bad, but it's just kind of there. It's rare that any of them really even taste any different. That apparently goes for the diet variety. This is diet lemon-lime and the flavor only slightly differs from the regular variety. It tastes like fake lemon and lime with some sweetener added. The aspartame doesn't have an overly diet taste at all. Normally that would be awesome and I would be super pumped. Too bad it's a flavor of soda I would never want to drink, diet tasting or not.

We're on our way to Austin, Texas for Fun Fun Fun Fest and decided to break up the driving today by stopping in Pensacola, Florida to get something to eat. A friend suggested we check out Sluggos so that is where we went. I ordered this with my meal and the only thing exciting about it was that we hadn't reviewed it on the site yet. As you can guess from the can, it is a very generic diet cola. It was pretty gross actually as far as diet sodas go. Luckily the food was incredible and got the awful diet cola taste out of my mouth. Next time I'll get the Abita Root Beer that they have on tap there.

Wilson Farms is the local convenience store chain in the Buffalo area. They are so prevalent that it sometimes seems like they are on every corner. Like most corner stores, they have lots of things you could get at a grocery store but they charge more for the "convenience". The only exception to this is that they have their own line of soda.

At 99 cents a 2-liter, it's a much better deal than Coke or Pepsi. But like most things, you get what you pay for. It's a really bland diet cola with more of a aspartame taste than others. Some people might think it tastes "close enough" to Diet Coke, but I'll pass on this in favor of the top shelf stuff from now on.

Matt loves going to dance clubs. He loves dancing so much that he weaseled his way into a job as a bar back at his favorite club in town, Blue Monday. Yes, they are so original that they named themselves after New Order's most well known song. They even host "New Order Mondays". It's pretty absurd if you ask me, but the kids seem to like it.

Another interesting thing about Matt is he's straight edge. He gets made fun of a lot for being around alcohol all day long, but he doesn't care. His love for dancing overrides his distaste for alcoholic drinks. Since he's been working at Blue Monday for so long, they started taking his suggestions for non-alcoholic drinks to stock. The owner was pretty loyal to Red Bull for a while, but when Matt told him there was a line of energy drinks called "Blu", he jumped for joy. Literally, he leapt into the air. I wasn't there, but I know the bartender on at the time and he said it was really weird.

A few weeks later they got their first shipment of Blu energy drinks. It was a huge success. The post-ironic crowd the club drew loved the idea of drinking Blu energy drinks, inside of a club called Blue Monday, while the song "Blue Monday" by New Order was playing. Occasionally they'd also play "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" by Eiffel 65 to mix things up a bit. It was really gross.

Last time I was there was for the opening day of New Order November (don't ask). They were all out of the other flavors of Blu so I tried the sugar free version for the first time. I was expecting it to be gross, but it wasn't that bad at all. It tasted really similar to sugar free Red Bull. I'm glad to see my friend Matt is happy and the club is doing well with their Blu energy drink sales. I just hope someday the owner will realize that irony is dead.

A couple weeks ago was the annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Sadly I did not attend (nor have I ever), but I can still enjoy the festival from the comfort of my home thanks to blogs, digital cameras, and Youtube. My favorite article thus far is Buzz Feed's 89 Things I Learned at the Gathering of the Juggalos.

Every year, as I mull over the thousand's of photos of ICP fans camping in the middle of the woods, I always learn something. This year I learned that ICP prefers to use 2 liters of diet Faygo to drench the crowd during their set. Their reasoning apparently is because it's less sticky than the high fructose corn syrup bottles and they are also physically lighter so they are able to throw them much farther into the crowd. I can't really attest to either of those, but I'll take their word on it because they definitely have more experience with Faygo than I do.

The one thing I can comment on is the taste. This is a pretty standard cream soda, there's nothing special about it. It has a nice vanilla flavor, but the fake sugar aftertaste cuts right though it. While it's not the worst diet pop I've ever had, I've had much better. Maybe I should go to the mall and spray the rest of this on some juggalos. They'd probably give me a high five and start chanting "fam-il-y! fam-il-y! fam-il-y!"

So where do I start?

I suppose, at my refrigerator!

My husband LOVES his soda. Our refrigerator is always amply stocked to the brim because he drinks at least 12 cans or bottles of it a day. So, a few weeks ago, on a weekend jaunt to Massachusetts, we went shopping at the local Big Y supermarket and found a sale for 12 packs that we both just couldn't resist. FOUR 12 packs for 12.00. NOT BAD!! A pretty damn good deal!!

One of the soda's he picked in the mix and match aisle was the DIET FRESCA PEACH CITRUS soda, and I am going to pop one for me now to try.



I have to admit to you that I have never even heard of this flavor much less tasted it, so here goes.
Okay...clearly a diet drink, I can taste this right away as it hits my tongue. The taste is peachy, and not too bad.....UH OH...now the citrus has hit and it has totally wiped the saliva clear out of my mouth!!! I have TOTAL COTTON MOUTH!!

So now I am drinking another sip to see if this is an aberration of sorts, but it has happened again. It has taken me about a minute for my salivary glands to start working again.

I need to drink a water immediately to wipe out the dry mouth and aftertaste.

The moral of the story is YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR SOMETIMES.

I rate this one bottle for the Peach taste.

It's so hot. Water...water...where is it? What's going on? What's happening in the paper? What?! A toxic spill causes rain shortage? Oh man. That's pretty terrible. What am I going to...what? What's going on? It's raining. Awesome I'm going to put my head right under it. This isn't rain! It's appley. Let me try this again. It tastes like a green apple and it's green. This is going to make everything sticky and probably kill all the plants but it's pretty refreshing. I wish it would hail so that...holy crud it's hailing. This is the best thing that could ever happen. It's like I'm taking a shower in a Crystal Light Appletini. There is even got the flavor down to that strange stinging in the back of my throat.

I think that, yep, now that I'm reading this paper, it seems that the toxic spill was actually a giant shipment of the powder of Appletini crashing into a river during a drought. So it naturally wasn't raining and the river mixed up the drink and then it evaporated into a lake. What a delicious disaster! Good thing Kraft sent us some samples so we could properly place the flavor.

Since I normally don't like diet drinks, I bought this along with Cherry Coke to contrast the two. Much like I expected, it tastes the same with the usual fake sugar aftertaste. The cherry flavor masks the gross taste enough that this actually isn't that bad as far as diet drinks go. It's still nothing that I'd want to drink regularly.

I didn't mean to buy this. I wanted a grapefruit pop, but I didn't mean to buy the diet version. I didn't notice until after I opened it so I decided to just keep drinking it.

The weird part is I didn't notice it was diet when I tasted it. For a diet pop, this is pretty good. It has a nice tart flavor to it as well. Hopefully next time I'll look as I'm grabbing pop out of the cooler at Wegmans and be able to try the non-diet version.

Kraft Foods sent us a sample of Crystal Light Mocktails and out of the goodness of my heart I made a pitcher of this and poured a glass for my girlfriend and myself. When I was pouring, she asked, "You have to make that in a pitcher." thinking that I had poured powder into cups and was just going to mix it up. Like I don't know how to read the simplest of directions. I quickly mocked her and brought her a glass with crushed, not cubed, ice. Honestly, when you have the option of having crushed ice, why would you ever go back? Oh, it gets my drink colder, faster? Naw, I'll go with the classic. Please.

So, not drinking, I don't know the pleasure or sorrow of a "real" mojito. I've had mojito drinks; little bit of lime, little bit of mint; but I've never had a pure, authentic one. So here's how my authenticity review process went:

Me: What do you think? Does this taste like a real mojito?
J: No. It tastes really diet.
Me: It's not really a mojito but compared to a real one, what do you think.
J: Well, I guess it tastes a little like it. If you put some rum and mint in this, it would taste pretty good.
Me: Well there is mint in here.
J: Actually it tastes a lot like a mojito.
Me: ...

Straight from someone who has had a mojito, and so that I'm not some poseur, there's your review. Within half a glass, you too can come full circle and feel like you're drinking a real mojito. My review? Sure. It's not bad. It doesn't really taste diet and actually all of the flavors are pretty calm and subdued but if they were any more enhanced, I feel that it would get overwhelming and might not be as quenching. I didn't get a lot of mint flavor, but the lime was there. It wasn't bad and I've got several more packs of the stuff that I won't get upset if I find made in my fridge. One small pack makes two quarts so a little bit goes a long way. This will be great for a party we're having next week for all those women who are watching their figure. Dudes, it's for you, too. It's just a drink. There is nothing fem about drinks.

File this one under "I drank it because it was free". Regular A&W root beer is a fine, generic root beer. It's a step above most store brand root beers, but a diet version of an already mediocre drink? Bad news. This taste like someone dumped dish soap into a can of perfectly fine root beer. I'm sure there are some people who wouldn't mind the taste of this, but I'm not one of them. The only reason why I'm finishing this can is because I don't want to be rude and dump it.