Cane Sugar - 601 Reviews

Companies have been flavoring their colas with various things for decades and we no longer bat an eye at cherry, vanilla, or even lime cola, this may be the first berry cola I've come across. More than likely I have and it's slipped my brain. I mean I do get dumber by the day and find myself forgetting normal words I use all the time. I will choose to believe that my brain is not malfunctioning this time and say that it is my first cola of this variety. I have to say, I'm into it. I do wish it had a stronger cola flavor, but what is there pairs great with the berry. It's similar to a cherry cola, but with a little twist. Is it better? I can't say. It is different though and that makes it stand out to me, and that is a hard thing to do these days.

While this isn't what I think of when I think of seltzer (They are right. I am wrong.), this still has possibly the smallest ingredients list I have come across for a soda. It's simply carbonated water, cane sugar, citrus acid, and natural flavors. It's simple, it's clean and it's delicious.

This soda falls under the category of so obvious that we missed it all of this time. How has the whole of humanity existed for so long without someone saying, “Hey let's mix grapefruit with cream soda?” Even as I type that out it seems strange, but how many of us love the combination of orange and vanilla? The creamsicle taste is a standard. If one citrus fruit can provide such great results, why have we never tried another? Well, that is until now.

This is a knock your socks off flavor. It's so familiar, with just enough of a twist that makes you truly appreciate each sip. The base is a fantastic cream soda that would get rave reviews on its own. Adding the grapefruit is just icing on the cake. It's not overly sour, but it is certainly different than an orange cream. Actually, after tasting this I don't know if I see a need for orange cream to exist anymore, at least not in the spotlight. This should be the go to flavor.

I'm not sure what the “Hopped” is all about, as I don't taste anything other than the cream and grapefruit in here. That's fine. I didn't want anything else anyways. This is perfection.

Want to hear the most adorable thing you'll come across all day? This company is owned by an 11 year old lady named Mikaila. It started when she was trying to come up with an idea for a children's business competition. She got stung by a bee, twice and received her grandmother's cookbook with the lemonade recipe in it. Through that she became obsessed with saving bees and donates a percentage of her profits to organizations working to help bees. It kind of makes you feel like you've wasted your life, right? I wish I cared about anything as much as this girl cares for bees. In doing so she also produces a delicious beverage.

The ingredients in this are water, lemon juice, cane sugar, honey, ginger and flaxseed. It's simple. It's delicious. It has digestive benefits. You can also feel good spending your money on it because you're helping a child help bees. The ginger and the lemons overpower the honey a bit, but you can still taste it. I like when beverages taste heavily of honey, but I'm not one to argue with ginger (which has a kick that's on the mellower side in here).

I'm not going to spend the rest of the day staring at the wall trying to figure out how I can be a better person.

Private Selection is Kroger Grocery Stores line of craft sodas. I personally am fine with them keeping this particular flavor private. It has all the makings for a great olde timey soda that doesn't taste like a Coke or Pepsi, but then there is that bourbon flavor in there. I assume that's what the flavor is, since I've never tasted bourbon before. It's the thing in there that makes this taste quasi alcoholic. I don't think it's psychosomatic because I was not expecting that at all. I was expecting a dark bold cola that is made with kola nut. Sure, that is there, but there's also the extra flavor that just turns me off from it. Without it I would have savored this soda and enjoyed the hell out of it. As it stands I can't get past half of it. I'm sure for someone who enjoys alcohol they wouldn't notice it as much as I do (the same way they say kombucha doesn't taste like all of the left over half drunk beers at a party mixed together a week later). This is for someone. Someone is going to love this. I am not that someone.

Is this the long lost Arnold Palmer pop? Kind of. In its most core sense it is until you realize that some time and love went into crafting this syrup. Taken directly from their website:

Bold, black tea from India the Nilgiri Blue Mountains of India blended with lemongrass and lemon myrtle

That's not messing around, man. That's not some garbage, every day black tea and some lemon squeezed over a cinder block into a cup. This is real. You can taste that it's different, too. This is not me being a snob, you actually can taste that it's different. It's not "just" anything.

You want to impress someone who likes to drink Half and Half, you buy them a bottle of this. Sure, they've got to have seltzer on hand but it's a small price to pay for such a quality drink.

Sometimes Fiz hits the mark and sometimes it doesn't. If this soda were thrown at a dart board it would have stuck in someone around the outer edge, not gaining you any points. Hey, at least it didn't put holes in the wall though.

This is simply boring. The orange flavor takes a back seat to a generic sugar soda flavor. If the percentage of orange flavoring was increased maybe this would have been decent. As it is I would more than likely politely decline if someone offered me a bottle. Yes, even if it were being served with hot dogs.

If you're looking for a natural tasting beverage this is certainly for you. I don't know what this has to do with a dragon, dancing or not, but what I do know is that it tastes like someone made a soda out of throat coat tea and it's a little much. I like sips of this drink. I've been nursing the glass I made for the past 45 minutes. If I take tiny sips it's enjoyable, but if I drink too much at once it becomes a bit too overpowering and medicinal. If you're not familiar with throat coat (which is absolutely wonderful hot) imagine chewing on a licorice stick (the plant not the candy) while drinking some black tea. It's pleasant and helps your throat. It's not quite the same in soda form but it is a re-imagining of a classic soda.
In here the tea is a mixture of pu-erh (fermented tea)and yerba mate. The rest of the flavor comes from a combination of sarsaparilla root and honeybush. It kind of tastes the way a natural market smells. Take that as you will. To me it's not bad thing, but it certainly is unique. Out of all of these tea sodas, this is the one that is certainly not for everyone.

When a representative from the Pearl Soda Company emailed us about sending us samples to review their products I was traveling and it wasn't until after I hit send on a message giving them my address that I realized, “Are we even going to be able to use these syrups in their proper fashion?” I had no idea if these were the type of soda concentrate that bars and restaurants used in their guns or what. I decided that instead of writing them back I would just figure it out when the samples arrived.

As soon as I opened the package I knew everything was going to be just fine. I mean look at those fancy little bottles. They look so classy. I ran out to the store and bought a bottle of plain seltzer water and got to mixing. Now normally the recommended amount of concentrate/flavoring is on the duller side of flavor town, but I mixed it as prescribed and it tasted great right off the bat.

I guess I should have stated that these are tea infused flavored syrups. I've never tried anything like it before and they are fantastic. This lime twist is made with greenbush tea with ginger, lime, lemongrass and lemon myrtle mixed in. The results are a concoction that tastes like a lemon-lime ginger ale that was specially made just for you. Underneath it all is a faint tea flavor that simply adds to the experience. Who needs to go to an overpriced bar, filled with turds who you would never interact with in any other scenario, when you can pretend to be your very own mixologist at home. I drank this with just seltzer water, but I can only imagine that people would love it with booze mixed in. I personally think that would be sacrilege and detract from a wonderful beverage.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Chipotle does not need to go into everything. I like a nice smoked pepper taste as much as the next human, and I put chipotle Tabasco sauce on a decent amount of my food, but I 100% do not need, nor want it in beverage form.

This is not horrible. If I tried hard I could probably drink the whole bottle, but something just tastes not right about it, like the time you ran out of milk and decided to pour orange juice on your serial instead. You powered through that bowl, but you did not really enjoy it.

I've had chipotle dusted dried mango before (which again was okay, but not necessary) and due to that I kept expecting this to be mango and not pineapple. Even concentrating on the pineapple flavor I still get a bit of mango somehow. Psychosomatic folks. The pineapple taste isn't as strong as other sodas of that flavor I've had in the past either. This doesn't even taste like chipotle to be honest, it just tastes weird. It has no spice to it, which I would have expected. Well it tastes like spice, but not spicy if you catch my drift. It's certainly not for me and I'm guessing it's not for most of you either.

Oh yeah, it's also sweetened with a mixture of cane sugar, agave syrup and stevia to keep the calories down. While it's better than it would be in full diet form, it's still not doing any favors for the taste.

There are two types of cola in the world. The first is “cola,” which includes products such as Coke and Pepsi and it is the taste most people associate with this work. The other is “kola” and there are different ingredients at work, which leads to a slightly earthier taste. If you're into the whole craft soda thing, this is probably what you crave. It's not just one general taste. There are different elements at work and you can make them out separately in the taste. Don't get me wrong there are many times in my life where a Coke is exactly what I need to hit the spot, but more often than not I would prefer something like this.

Kola Nut is slightly bitter and gives the whole beverage a unique flavor. It tastes special, and that more care was put into your beverage. In my head small batches of Caleb's Kola are brewed and carbonated and it's not just a syrup that is added to sparkling water. If this were just a tad bit darker tasting, it would be perfect. As it is I still enjoy it to a great extent and I wish more companies would follow in their footsteps.

Part of me wants to trash this for being glorified carbonated sugar water and part of me wants to praise it for being a smallish local company (Detroit) that is still putting out soda in glass bottles that is sweetened with cane sugar. The thing is that this is neither terrible nor great. It simply falls in the grey area of life. Towne Club gets some points for making a strawberry melon soda, but the execution could be better. It tastes so sweet that it makes it hard to decipher the different fruit flavors. I was certainly not able to drink even half of this bottle. Saying I drank a third of it is being generous. I'm sure there is someone out there who loves this and swears by it. I can only assume that same person devours Pixie Stix and Sweet Tarts all day long. They also most definitely live in Michigan. No one outside the mitten can have that much love for this soda.

My brother finds drinks sometimes and thinks he's going to be mean and buy me stuff he thinks might be gross. This isn't the gross one but is part of the group that he bought me. This one was actually really nice. It was sweet and really spicy, the way that ginger beer should be. It most certainly still had its feet in ginger ale territory but was dabbling in the ginger beer world. The spice was nice and it burns in all the right places. The fact that it was unfiltered means that it was laden with stuff at the bottom and you know how the Thirsty Dudes love stuff in their drinks. A+. Would drink again.

Oh how I wish I had one of these now. No, not a 48 ounce bottle as that would be suicidal but the smaller, equally available 10 ounce bottle. Long nights, friends. Long nights. I know it would make me sick and dizzy but anything over this underslept feeling, which is garbage. I took a shot or two of this over the weekend, you know, just to get by, and it was nice. It was smooth, and although advertised as "not too sweet" it was definitely sweetened and possibly more than many people would like.

I don't have a preference as far as coffee goes, as you may well know, but sweet and usually with some sort of syrup is preferable. This met the criteria just fine. Lucky for me, there is a 48 ounce bottle with two shots missing at home waiting, for a girl like me (to come into my life).

By naming their company Americana are they insinuation that that their products are artifacts of American history? Are these sodas a glimpse into our nation's past? If so, we've had one hell of a history of soda, because this is ridiculously delicious. Fruit sodas are a tough sell for me. They rarely turn out correctly and mostly taste like sugar water that is flavored nothing like fruit at all. This tastes distinctively like berries and I'm not talking about those of the straw-, rasp- or even blue- varieties. This is pure huckleberry, or so I'll assume as I don't think I've ever had the fruit in its natural form. It doesn't taste artificial at all, but rather like someone carbonated juice and added a bit of cane sugar. Sure it's fairly sweet, but some sodas call for that. If only America still tasted like this instead of like racism and hate I wouldn't feel so disgusting all the time. Okay I would still feel gross from consuming too much, but I wouldn't feel as bad.

I knew I was in for a wild ride when I didn't even have this cap completely off and I was blasted in the face by the familiar sent of anise/licorice. How is it that I hate black licorice/black jelly beans more than I have hated almost anything in this world, yet I kind of dig that flavor when it's in beverage form? Sure this tastes a bit like carbonated Nyquil, but it's still somehow pretty great.

There really isn't anything about this that would make me think sarsaparilla if I blind taste tested it. I would just assume it was supposed to be an anise soda, because that's all I'm getting. Perhaps sarsaparilla is something different in Australia, where this drink comes from.

This bottle is only 9.3oz, but I think it would be perfect at half that size. I really enjoy it, but it gets to be a bit too much for me at about the half way point. I really hope I stumble across this companies other flavors though, because I anticipate great things from them.

What exactly does the year 1922 have to do with ginger ale? A quick google search came up with nothing but a couple of ads that came out that year. Wikipedia tells me that ginger ale existed in a marketable form for decades before that. Perhaps, since this is a sugary beverage, they chose 1922 to celebrate the first successful insulin treatment of diabetes. Okay I dug deeper and it turns out that 1922 was the year that College Club Beverages (the company that makes Fiz) opened its soda streams. That makes more sense. Since I couldn't find any info, I'm guessing that ginger ale was one of, if not the first flavor they produced.

This is a nice little soda. It's sweet, but not in the “this is 99% sugar water and 1% flavor” way. It tastes like a fairly standard modern ginger ale. You don't actually taste the earthiness of the root, or the spice, but there is no mistaking that it's ginger ale.

Towne Club started selling soda in the 60's and it was the prime rival to Faygo, decades before it was coopted by the clowns. I did not know that, but Wikipedia just informed me and I always have more respect for such long running companies. Sure, the company has changed hands throughout the years, but it's still bottled in burnt out Detroit. Do people in Detroit get upset when people talk about how their city is falling apart? I've been there many times and it is certainly one of, if not the most, run down cities I have ever been too, and I travel to a lot of garbage places. Oh well, I hope they have pride in their city. The crappiness of Buffalo is what made me love it and I kind of hate that it's starting to become nice, because it's taking away the things I loved about the city. Maybe the denizens of Detroit feel the same way. They can live cheaply, so they can do what they want with their lives and not be tethered to a job struggling to make rent. It could also just be a terrifying place to live. I have no idea.

I will say they have some decent local sodas. As an adult it would be very rare that I would reach for one of these, but in my younger years when I craved all the sugar I could get, I would have loved it. It's slightly fruity cream soda that reminds me of the pink Crush cream soda (soda mousse) in Canada. I loved that as a teenager, so logic follows that I would have loved this as well. This is mostly sugar flavored, but there is enough of a “cream soda” taste that shines through to make it interesting. It's nothing mind blowing, but it's a local soda made with cane sugar with a wide variety of flavors in a classic looking bottle. I can get behind those things.

I love grocery stores. I don't really know why, but when I'm traveling I love stopping in at local stores and different chains. Even when I don't need anything I just like wandering around in them. I live in the land of Wegmans, so it's hard to beat what I have at home, but I still enjoy the differences of other stores. I've always been a fan of Kroger. Their stores look pretty standard, but they generally carry some different and decent stuff, especially for vegetarians. I recently was told about their new Private Selection line and I couldn't wait until I was back in their territory to check it out. It is their fancy store brand stuff. They call it artisanal. I call it delicious, well at least this soda.

Some other things that I greatly enjoy besides supermarkets are huckleberry and hibiscus. I used to be a big fiend for cream soda in high school as well, even though I don't drink it too much these days. Actually I guess I drink the adult version of it every day in the way of drinking Polar's vanilla seltzer. This soda took three things I am a fan of and mixed them together into something that is greater as a whole. Real fruit juice is used and the cream soda doesn't taste even remotely cheap. The huckleberry and hibiscus mix together nicely leaving only the faintest tinges of floral. This all interacts with the vanilla in a way that couldn't be better.

The fact that this is as good as it is and is a store brand is kind of a game changer. Sure, it does have a higher price (I think it was $5 for a 4-pack), but it's on the cheap side of the quality that you receive. I do warn you that once you try this there is a chance you will never look at another cream soda the same way again.

I travel a lot. Be it touring with bands, or just for leisure I like to leave Buffalo a lot. I love it here, but I appreciate it more when I'm able to take a break and then come back to it. When I'm out in the world I don't often do touristy things. I prefer to go on adventures and find the weird, cool things cities have to offer. Recently I was in Boston for the probably two dozenth time in my life and my friends who I was with really wanted to check out Cheers. They love the show and it we had some time to kill, so we walked across some park or another and checked it out. I must admit it was pretty neat to stop in for a few minutes. I really had no interest in eating there, or having a drink because…€¦yeah I'm not a fan of bars. The television nostalgia was nice though. They each picked up some souvenirs and I grabbed this bottle of root beer.

Being a novelty item I had low expectations for this soda and it ended up sitting in my fridge for a while. Obviously they went to some bottling plant and just had them slap a Cheers label on it. Normally in those situations the soda is completely uninspiring and more sugar water than anything. This was more robust than I had expected. It was better than store brand, which is the barometer that I use for root beer quality. It's a little dark, and fairly sweet. It did its job and I found it quite refreshing on this hot, anxiety ridden day. And no, I do not want to go where everybody knows my name. I want to hide out in the woods where I will come in contact with very few people. At what point do I need to admit that I have a problem? Oh, probably when I run out of drinks to review.

No matter how many flavors of Jelly Belly soda I try I am continuously surprised at how they don't taste like carbonated garbage water. Confectionary companies making soda has rarely, if ever, turned out well until now. So here I am with a bottle of soda that I don't really enjoy, but I can't say that it's bad by any means. I just am not a big fan of pears. They are at the lower levels of the fruit chain for me. I mean they come nowhere near the atrocity that is bananas, but they are still not even close to my favorite. Let me take an aside here and ask if we can hold whoever it was that created bananas responsible for war crimes? I think they would be getting off light.

Back to the subject at hand; this tastes like someone took a pear at the peak of ripeness, juiced it and mixed it in with some sweetened sparkling water. It only tastes vaguely candied, and that is shocking. I can't believe how much it actually tastes like pears since it says there is 0% juice in here.

I may not be a fan of this, but I can certainly respect it. I also know a bunch of people who would love this. It's a shame they aren't here to drink the rest of it, because I more than likely will not.