Cane Sugar - 601 Reviews

Normally when you see settling at the bottom of a bottle it means that the company knows what they are doing and you will be in for a treat. When I grabbed this and saw that it was pretty much all clear liquid with an inch of dark brown at the bottom things were looking up. I'm not normally a fan of tamarind, and I don't really understand how anyone could be, but Angeleno's other flavors have been great, so I thought this might be my stepping stone into this flavor. Wrong em Boyo.

The sweet and sour flavor of tamarind makes me feel like it is normally used in Chinese food, but they decided to liquefy it and add a bunch of sugar. Liquid Chinese food is no one's friend. I really couldn't get past three sips (very small sips) of this. This is the final straw: tamarind is definitely not for me. If you are a fan of this fruit, this is a very sweet version of it. I got no enjoyment out of it, but hopefully someone will. It's always sad when a product made by Hansens misses the mark.

Pineapple juice? Check. Orange juice? Check. Together? What is a half-check? That's just like a "v," right? This is fine. I'm making jokes about what half a check mark looks like. Ugh, terrible material. Some kid told me I should do comedy at a local bar. I hope he reads this and regrets ever even thinking it, let alone saying it.

This, although not a certified trip to Hawaii, is a decent liquid representation of what I assume Hawaii is. It's not too bad. It's not as great as Hawaii probably is, though. It's not super pineapple and it's really not "really orange." Together it's an acceptable blend of the two but nothing that should ever be considered an award winning drink. It is pulpless, gutless, and nothing to write home about. Once again, nothing like Hawaii. Just go to Hawaii and eat both of these fruits. It will be better.

Blah blah blah. Thirsty Dudes don't drinks beers. Are we militant about it? No sirs and madams. We just keep to ourselves, talk about how smoking is gross, constantly refuse people giving us beers, answer the same question of "Why don't you drink." and promptly allude to it not being family related. We just don't and we don't need it.

This has hops in it. Beer has hops in it. I did not want this to be another Caveman Foods fiasco where I feel like I drank beer and feel a decade and a half of guilt. Turds. This does taste a little like beer. Let it be known. It does not taste alcoholic but it does have a hint of pilsner according to Dan, my resident bouncing wall of opinions. The hops just kind of liven it up a bit and it's pretty good. It's too sweet to let the hops taste alcoholic and, if anything, just tastes more floral and fresh that some dusty old beer.

You can continue to ask us if we want a drink. We will always turn it down. Maybe if you invite us to a party we will bring this and at least our taste buds will be closer than when we normally go to parties and bring some strange craft iced tea and people treat us like lepers. Happens every time.

Is chai tea magic? I mean it doesn't involve eye of newt or toe of frog, but there is a very specific list of ingredients that when combined together make something truly wonderful. I get the feeling that if you mixed things up and added the wrong thing in comical movie way the results might not be as bad as the silver screen portrays it, but it could get gross, fast. You add cinnamon, cardamom, ginger root, black pepper, cloves and star anise to black tea and bam; you have a beverage that has been enjoyed by many forms of royalty throughout the centuries. I can only imagine that if those ingredients happened to be mixed up that some sort of beheading or torture would have resulted. I mean everyone was treated as savages back then, right?

I don't know at what point milk started being added to this spiced tea, but whoever came up with it deserves a tip of my nonexistent hat. While straight up chai tea is great, the addition of milk makes it so much smoother and more enjoyable to drink. Chill that and you've somehow made it even better.

Tea's Tea has smoothed out their chai tea to the max. This is ridiculously enjoyable as it has a spicy flavor that is not overpowering and at the same time it doesn't taste like milk with spices added to it. This is still primarily a tea, which is as things should be. The only thing I could think of that would improve this would be for it to be made with soy or almond milk instead of skim milk powder. That would be right in the pocket.

Now I just need someone to make me a chai green tea latte. I bet it would be amazing, but too bad it would probably also be considered black magic that would cause it's created to lose his/her head to a blade.

Where as Filbert's doesn't do much except let down the folks of Chicago, Berghoff has nothing but city pride. Unlike it's competitor this does not taste like a generic soda water with just a hint of flavor. In fact this is pretty much as good as an orange soda is going to get without the substantial use of actual orange juice. You can totally guess what this tastes like. It's basically a higher end general orange soda. They use cane sugar to sweeten it though, so it already has a leg up on the competition. Besides the sweetener it just seems to take everything in the right direction.

They didn't create anything new with this soda, but they sure did a classic the right way.

For those of you with weak stomachs, aloe may not be the drink for you. Why? Well it's chunky and I know how you are all prone to throwing up as soon as something hits your "hangy ball." You gag when you brush your teeth and since this is mint and has chunks, you're destined for Upchuck College. Throw-Up U? I don't know which I'd rather attend.

For those of you who can take a little chunkage when you down drinks, you may have something you will like. This has everything you might want, right? Refreshing mint? Some chunks to remind you that something is actually going down your gullet, and green tea, which considered it's sweetened and soiled with chunks, not too bad. The mint, which look, it's mint and does what it's supposed to, cools things down a little bit too much on the green tea side leaving you with a fraction of what bitterness I may desire out of even a sweetened green tea. That being said, not the worst mint drink I've had. Not the worst aloe drink I've had. Not the worst green tea drink I've had.

All in, I'd give it a three out of five and since that's what I do, that's what I'll do.

Oh Hansen's. You have done it again. You've conquered pop and now you have done nothing short of it with this juice. You've even cleverly disguised it as some sort of very Spanish drink with the fonts and colors and sun stuff. You've got it all under control. Oh, how is the taste? You nailed it. I'm telling you. If I didn't not like mango for the texture, I would easily have been converted. This is sweetened with cane sugar so it leaves me with a clean mango taste that doesn't taste candied or fake at all. It's quite refreshing to boot. I have read that mango is originally from India and the East but I think if the people who first tasted them tasted this, they would wonder a couple things. One would be what witchcraft you used to get their fruit in your bottle. The other would be that it tastes very good and then a whole rip in the fabric of time would happen and we would all never have mango. Please, for Jay more so than I. Do not go back in time and give bottles of this to the original harvesters of mango so that we may enjoy mango today.

There are the goods in this world and there are the evils. There is the black and the white; the yin and the yang. There are the stances and items in the world that are strong parallels and polar opposites. It's hard to live with extremes and most things fall somewhere in the middle, in the grays. I would never call this drink strictly a tea, nor would I call it solely an aloe beverage. It falls into that previously mentioned gray. Ick. No one wants a gray drink. Luckily for us this does not have that particular hue. I would say that it falls closer to a tea than an aloe, but that is mainly due to the lower levels of sugar added.

Let's talk about the sweetness of this drink, shall we? Now I like my green tea unsweetened. I like to taste the actual tea, and I do…€¦a lot. On the opposite of that, aloe drinks are one of the few beverages that I like really sweet. This drink doesn't fill either of my preferred criteria for maximum enjoyment. It's too sweet for how I like to enjoy my green tea and it does not contain enough sugar to satisfy my aloe needs. Instead we find ourselves in that middle ground again with a whole new beast.

So what we have here is mainly a cane sugar sweetened green tea that has a light peach flavoring to it that has aloe chunks in it and a bit of the natural flavor of aloe that normally gets obscured under obscene amounts of sugar. I'm sure for some people that is a magical combination, but while I do enjoy it, it leaves me craving just a little bit more, or less, whichever way you choose to look at it.

Did you know that Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails are the masterminds behind this beverage? I think it may have been part of the weird Year Zero marketing that was going on. If you're a fan of the band you may know that every release the band puts out gets a Halo number. Halo 1 was the Down In It single. Year Zero was Halo 24. I'm pretty sure this is Halo 24-Pi or something weird like that. Here's some background into that whole thing:. Weird, right?


I don't remember exactly how this drink fit into everything. Maybe it was what was served at the secret shows, and one of the bottles had a USB drive in it with a secret song or something. All I do know is that they were strange and awesome times, which I wish I had been apart of.

This flavored water is infused with trehalose, which comes from the resurrection plant and helps it to regenerate after a century of drought. So there has to be some sort of coded meaning in that. I mean the movie is about some distopian future, and I can only assume that by using trehalose they were hinting that society needed to regenerate into a functioning unit. Oh, and that specific ingredient has shown benefits in the realms of anti inflammatory, anti oxidant, neuro-protectant and reducing cell damage from dehydration.

This tastes like very lightly sweetened, perhaps even lighter flavored water. It's pleasant and completely unobtrusive. It's like when people soak fruit in water to flavor it, instead of adding juice to it. You get hints of the fruit without it being the main player in the game.

Okay, it looks like this product came out after Year Zero, so apparently there is no connection, but according to their website it was developed in 2007, the same year the record came out. Coincidence? I think not!

It was nearly a decade ago that an ex of mine said the words that would haunt me to this day, “I wish I could just buy a bottle of cantaloupe juice.” Every since then I can't help but crave a bottle of the best juice melon have to offer. Sure, watermelon is fine, but it's so watery and any attempt to make it otherwise makes it tastes like gross candy. Honeydew is wonderful, and it also eludes me, but it doesn't pack the same punch as a cantaloupe. Why doesn't this exist!?!? Have you ever cut open a cantaloupe? The amount of juice that pours out is ridiculous. It would be so easy for a company to juice them for our pleasure. I've hoped. I've longed. I've dreamed. My prayers have not been answered.

My friend Dave handed me this bottle, and I thought life had changed forever. The flavor said melon, and the picture was clearly of cantaloupe, with no other melons in sight. A quick check on the ingredients had me slightly disappointed, but still with high hopes. This isn't pure cantaloupe; it also has white grape and watermelon juices in the mix. It did clearly state “cantaloupe extracts” in the list though, so at least there was a trace of the real fruit.

One sip, and I knew this was not the beverage I've dreamed of so often on those dark lonely nights, but it also was nothing to pour out. The flavor is definitely the melon I want, but you can also taste watermelon fighting with it. It's a compromise that I am willing to deal with, as I'll take what I can get in this regard. I made it through about half the bottle before I decided that it was a bit too sweet. I still drank the entire thing, and greatly enjoyed it, but I could have done without the added sugar. I'm not a kid anymore and excess amounts of sugar can get me down. Now I will sit here and daydream of a 100% cantaloupe juice, with no added sugar that is readily available in stores.

This bottle explains that Hubert Hansen would drive around the studio lots of Hollywood selling his tasty lemonade to anyone who would pay the price. It leads us to believe that many a rising star refreshed themselves with his tart beverages. What the bottle doesn't tell you is all the lemon related pranks that he also pulled on those lots. He would swap out actor's waters with highly concentrated lemon juice just for a laugh at their pinched in cheeks. He would rub lemon juice on the eyepieces of all the cameras and then squeal with glee as the operators screamed from the burning. He even shoved a lemon into the tailpipe of a producer's car that had made a rude comment about Hubert's beverages. A young writer witnessed this prank and went on to add it into a script he was writing called Beverly Hills Cop.

It was through a retaliation of one of these pranks that this blackberry lemonade was born. The producer who's car had been lemoned the previous week decided to switch out Hubert's batch on lemonade with old laundry water. The problem was that he had nowhere to just dump out the lemonade without it being obvious that something was amiss, so he poured it into a tub that was a prop in one of the movies and then filled the lemonade jugs with gross gray water. The result of this rebuttal prank was that producer received a black eye, care of Hubert's left fist and when he revealed where he had put the lemonade it turns out that it had been mixed in with some blackberry jam that was being used as war paint in some John Wayne movie. The mixture was delicious and it caused the Hubert's line to expand into flavored lemonade. It remained tart and wonderful, but with a healthy dose of blackberry flavor. Is there anything that fruit can't do? It tastes authentic and natural, as if someone just squeezed the hell out of some lemons and mashed up a whole mess of berries and then mixed them together with a bit of cane sugar. To think this was all because Alfred Hitchcock didn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

How do you ring in the New Year? Do you kiss the person standing next to you? Do you make resolutions about losing weight? Do you drink until you can't see straight and drive home like a total idiot? Not me. I sit around with family watching Dick Clark's New Year extravaganza until about five to twelve when we prepare. We prepare to irritate the neighborhood by blowing horns, spinning noisemakers, setting off car alarms, and banging pots and pans. Five minutes later, we go inside because it is now the first, which doubles as my uncle's birthday. He makes a toast, which, this year was "the golden rule." I don't come from a drinking family, so not everyone drinks. Kids drink non-alcoholic champagne and most of the adults do, too. I drank raspberry iced tea from the Keurig.

It's how I ring in the New Year. New drinks. Thirsty Dudes doesn't stop. 2013 to 2014 is just one more year we do this. This iced tea started the year off right, too. It was lightly sweetened. It tasted like a watered down raspberry Snapple. It had a good raspberry taste and was a lot less sweet than the sweet tea, which I love. This was good and I was actually surprised, even after stirring and making it to the bottom of the glass, that there wasn't a "sweet spot" in there somewhere. It was well blended, well flavored, and a good way to kick in the New Year.

This is a drink for a warm summer day down in Georgia. This humid 90+ degree mess is “warm” to the locals, but to northerners like myself it's “sweltering.” I don't know how people get anything done down there. When the weather is that hot I just want to be a bum and sit in front of a fan until the sun falls down. Of course I live in the land of 5 months of winter, where I also want to do nothing except hide under mounds of blankets and either read or play Zelda and Final Fantasy games, so who am I to talk?

The label on this says it's half tea and half lemonade, split right down the middle. My taste buds assure you that that is not the case. To me it tastes more like 65/35 split with the higher side going to the tea. You can taste the peach tea more than the lemonade, but the all American summer beverage is still very present in this liquid. Actually this could very well be an even split if the lemonade they used was a little on the weak side. You can taste the lemons, but there is no tartness to it at all. Oh, and the peach flavoring they used is natural and it really tastes like you're biting into a fuzzy fruit instead of a gummy ring.

Sure, I would have preferred that there was more of a sting from the lemonade to this, but when it's “warm” down south, this would do just fine in keeping me cool, refreshed and with happy taste buds.

Dear Everyone,

We all agree that candy canes aren't very good, correct? The flavor is just okay, and there is too much substance to them, at least for a mint. On top of that at some point in their consumption they become flat out messy. Sticky faces, sticky hands, or worse yet, sticky gloves. They just aren't worth it. I mean if you absolutely need that flavor in your life, which I highly doubt anyone does, just eat a starlight mint. I understand the holiday esthetic has a lot to do with this particular candy persevering, but some on. Enough is enough.

The reason for the above rant is because this tastes like someone brewed some coffee with the wrong proportions of grounds to water, and while it was still the temperature of the sun they melted a handful of candy canes into it. It's something that a dumb kid would do. Let's be honest here, it's something I would have done when I was a kid…€¦or you know in the past couple of weeks, just to see how it would work/taste. After that they duped some cocoa in it and way too much milk. The result is that this has a base of a very weak coffee with not enough chocolate in it to make it taste like a real mocha. The peppermint flavor just sits on top of everything like it owns the place. Lucky for us this jerk is only seasonal and he won't be mucking up our drinks for much longer. I mean sure it definitely has a Christmassy taste to it, but it just could have been done better.

Bolthouse products are normally better than average, but they haven't been doing that good of a job getting the recipes right for these seasonal flavors. Don't worry your regularly scheduled programs will be on soon.

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.

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.

Hey dude, mom bought you some water. Yeah, water. Well it's called "Halo" because she knew that you spent so much time playing Halo. No, I don't think Bungie makes it. Just go get it. Mom is putting the groceries away now. If you don't get it, she might let dad drink it and you know he doesn't stop when it comes to drinking bottles of stuff.

Did you get it? Do you want to play Halo while drinking it? I think it's only fitting. You can be Master Chief because I know you have a cow when you aren't. I'll be, I don't know, Master Chief 2? We play as the same dude, don't we? Alright, open that bottle up. I'm getting thirsty.

This is good. It's just like a watered down juice or something. I think mom would like this because it tastes like one of her types of drinks. What do you mean you don't know what I'm talking about? Have you ever drunk mom's juice? It's like one part juice to four parts water. This is good though. It's got a better raspberry taste than strawberry taste. I feel like I can taste that tartness from the raspberries more than the flavor of the strawberry. I don't care though. Do you know why? It's because I have a Warthog. Oh crud. You have a Wraith. Great. Welp, looks like I'm drinking tea tonight.

Oh Sir Limonitz. What brings you to this part of town? You don't leave your castle as much as you used to. It seems that you just wave your scepter around having us peasants to do your bidding for you. Sir, if I may say so, you have become rather slovenly since you have taken this position as a proper sir. Don't think that we haven't noticed that you have begun to overflow out of your once respectfully fitting clothes. We still adore you, sir, we really do, but I thought that it would be nice if someone told you before it got out of hand.

So what brings you here to these parts? A new beverage? That's fantastic. Your last lemonade was very good and we can only hope that this one is as well. Let me see here. Ahh, strawberry. Good fruit choice, sir. Oh, it smells wonderful. It smells like a veritable bouquet of strawberries. I also appreciate the bountiful amount of pulp that is swirling around in here. Let's take a sip...wow. Sir, you have outdone yourself with this. It tastes as good as it smells and it probably bites harder than your little dog that you've got there. It's got a wonderful lemonade base but the fruitiness of the strawberries cuts through. Sir, you have outdone yourself. Now I know why you have us doing your tasks for you; so you can invent things like this drink. Keep up the good work and, Sir, please, take care of yourself.

When Jay goes on tour, he comes home with some different drinks. If you stay in one place, things get stale. Jay knows that all too well so he's on tour a fair amount and, if I didn't know better, he spends as much time with the band as he does on the hunt for new drinks.

Now he just was in the United States but came across this little Australian tart. You know a drink that comes both in glass and with an awesome pull-tab is going to be good, so is it? Well, it's good and it's better than most but is it as good as I wanted to be? I don't think so. It is a nice, dark licorice filled root beer. That's for sure. What's wrong with it then? It's a little too sweet. Is it the molasses? Maybe. It almost tastes like a good root beer with something like a grape hard candy in it. That's not the worst thing but whatever that "candy" thing is in there, it knocks its great potential down a peg or two. Am I in the position to be assigning proper peg state? I like to think that I am. I would like to think that in turn someone out there is placing me on some ladder whether it be a skill ladder, sexual ladder, or something in between. We can all agree that those are the two extents of social ladders, right?

Honey, it's so nice out here at the hotel pool. I know I've been depressed, even during our vacation. It's just that it's been really tough at work and I feel like everyone is coming down on me. It's nice to just relax and sit with my feet dangling in the pool with my sunglasses on, the sound of the ocean in the background, babes in bikinis...what? We're on vacation! Don't think I didn't see you turning it on when we were at the bar last night. We're just here to have fun and unwind, right? Right.

Oh, what's this? Aloe and iced green tea? That sounds pretty good. Honey, um, why is that kid looking across the pool at me doing that fingers to eye thing like Robert Di Niro does in all those Focker's movies? Do you think he heard my remark about fat kids wearing shirts in pools? I think he did. What's he doing? Oh...oh no. He's going to do a cannonball. Ahhhh!!!!!

Oh come on, kid. I'm finally relaxing and you got me all wet. I know it's a pool but sometimes you just want to dangle your feet. I am not an old man. I'm thirty one. What a jerk. He got pool water all over me and, oh man, he got it in my drink. I'm sorry, honey. I saw him coming and I should have covered my drink. Well maybe he didn't get that much in there. Let me see. Bleh, he did the damage. This tastes exactly like you would expect it to. It tastes like aloe green tea with pool water in it. The green tea is trying to poke his little head out and you can taste it and you can taste and see the aloe bits but then that strange, plastic, chemical water taste is there to ruin it.

You know what, honey? I think I'm just going to go up to the room and see what's on TV. Now all I can think about is Meet The Fockers and I think I would like to do that. You go turn that charm on and get yourself a free drink. Sorry I'm such a pretty literal wet blanket. If I'm sleeping, wake me up for dinner. I want a sloppy joe.