Erythritol - 101 Reviews

When I was in college, pretty exclusively now that I think about it, I ate a lot of oatmeal. It was cheap. Yes I ate my fair amount of ramen but that comes with the territory. Had I known that ten years later I would be drinking oats, I would tell you that would be disgusting. Was ignorant, uneducated, me right? Future, smart, attractive me says, "Eh, 70%."

What you've got is an artificially sweetened apple juice that tastes more like a weak cider than an apple juice which actually give it a better rating that if it were just apple juice flavored apple juice. Where did that extra 30% go? Well it's simple. If you artificially flavored plastic beads to taste like artificially sweetened, light apple cider, you would have it. I can't pinpoint what makes that true but it is as true as non-provable stats can be.

You were close Sneaky Pete, but you left the bottle in the sun too long and let it infuse itself into your drink.

Patrick! What is this garbage? I leave you alone with the business for two weeks so I can have my first vacation in twenty years and I come home to you ruining my company! I wrote you out very specific instructions on how to make our beverages. They were all layed out for you line by line, and it took up only half of a page, yet you still couldn't follow it. You think you know oats better than your brother? You think you know oats better than Pete!?!? I spent years working on this recipe to make sure everything was exactly right. You come in for two weeks, and decide you can do better and throw the instructions out the window? What made you think that making a vat of oatmeal with double the water and just throwing a handful of grapes into the mix would make for a good beverage? What you've created is a gross sludge that no one in their right minds would want to ingest.

You see when done correctly, following my instructions I might add, the oatmeal is not the base for the drink. It's more of a watery juice. Don't get me wrong it has a strong white grape flavor that almost tastes like “original” aloe juice, it just has to be fairly liquidy because when you add in the powdered oats, it needs a little extra fluid to absorb them, so the drink doesn't become too thick. Actually when done correctly the results shouldn't have a consistency all that different from peach juice, you know just a little thicker than water.

If what you created wasn't bad enough, you also didn't even properly mix in the sweetener. I use a mixture of erythritol, evaporated cane juice and stevia in my products It gives it less calories, without tasting too diet. In yours you just through in regular sugar and it's in there in big clumps. Everything about what you have done is wrong and gross.

I wish I could divorce you from being my brother. If this was some sort of retribution prank, you have done terribly. Pranks need to be smarter and well thought out, you know sneaky like I would do. That is why I am called Sneaky Pete. Maybe we should just start calling you Mean Spirited, Lazy Patrick. How would you like that?

Ugh. I'll have to dump this all out and start over. Grab one of the bottles I made before I left from the cooler. See how this is actually a drink and not just slop that isn't fit to feed a pig? You really are the worst Patrick, now get out of my factory and tell mom it looks like I'm going to be late for family dinner, and that she has you to thank for that.

Here is another one of those times where I just can not get down with a drink, but I give it an decent review simply because I know there are a lot of people out there who would truly enjoy it. Everything thing about this drink is organic and perfectly fine, so it would be unfair for me to give it a bad review simply because I do not like this aspect of coconuts.

If coconuts were to be portrayed as a character in the DC universe, they would be Two Face. The Harvey Dent, unscarred side of Two Face would represent coconut water. It's clean and refreshing tasting. It makes you feel good and there is hope for the fruit. I believe in Harvey Dent, or at least his side of the coconut. Then there is the other dark side of the tropical fake nut. It's the side that is toasted and burned, much like the face of this adversary. It's also the side that makes you think of the beach and tanning oil. It's something I certainly cannot get behind. I kind of wish it was thrown into Arkham once and for all.

This beverage does not taste like toasted coconuts, but it unfortunately really tastes like you're trying to catch some rays and you lick a little too far past your lips and taste your tanning oil. It actually is like someone took that oil and really sweetened it up. There is erythritol in here, so it's a cool, sweetened tanning oil. It's strange. It has the makings of some sort of candy that half the population would absolutely love and the rest of us rational people would hate.

It's been sad times out on the old horse farm. You see horse thieves have come by and done what they do and now the farm is horseless. I know horse thieves in this day and age? It's a sad but true reality in the world that we live in. Without the ridiculous amounts of money that the owners pulled in from all of those 4H shows at county fairs, they don't know how they are going to make ends meet. The mortgage is due, the electricity is in fear of being shut off and everyone's bellies are rumbling. One would think that a farm would have some sort of food growing, but you would be wrong. The only edible things on the entire farm are the bins of oats that were once used to feed the horses before they were thieved in the night.

They have been staving off hunger with a steady diet of oatmeal, but Teddy decided to use the oats to add a little something-something to his beverage. To begin with his drink was really nothing more that water, stevia and some natural peach flavoring (aka the ruminants of a can of peaches that he has been stretching for weeks. He was getting no nutritional value out of the drink, so he pureed a bunch of oats and mixed them in for fiber. As we all know fiber is a very important thing when your life is on a farm.

The results of his experiment were shocking. He had expected it to be a thick drink, with chunks of oats in it, kind of like the milk at the end of a bowl of granola. Apparently the house had a super blender, because it was pure liquid; there was not a single chunk to be found. The oat flavor was to a minimum as well; perhaps it was because it had been drying out in the bins for so long. It really just tasted like peaches and stevia albeit lightly. There was a slight oat flavor that could have been turned up a little bit more. It would have been nice for it to taste a little bit like oatmeal. Even though it was not what he expected Teddy proclaimed it to be “Oatstanding!,” to which all of the rest of the farms hands just shook their head and continues to bale hay for the ghost of horses past.

Here we have the five calorie aka diet version of Bai's Jamiaca Blueberry. I'm sure if I drank this and the original back to back I could tell the difference easily, but from memory I sure could be fooled. Bai has done a great job of making a sweeten beverage with only 2g of sugar and 5 calories not taste diet. About that, when did the word diet become such a no-no word? Everything that would have been called diet ten years ago is now referred to as “light,” “zero,” or “low calorie.” They all amount to the same thing, but companies seem afraid to label their drinks diet. Was there some vocal backlash that I am unaware of, or are they afraid that the word diet is too closely tied to aspartame and sucralose (you know the devil's sweeteners)?

Bai uses both erythritol and stevia in a way that it doesn't distort the flavor of the juice. Even though there are zero calorie sweeteners and other berries in here as well, the blueberry really shines through and tastes like fruit. That's really all you can ask for in something diet (I'm still not afraid to use the word).

It's impossible to drink this without singing the well known bossa-nova tune from the sixty's The Girl From Ipanema. I was fine with that. I enjoy that song. More songs today should adapt that sound versus those garage/garbage sounds from a similar era. Not my cup of tea, that stuff. I'm a groove man.

I have had many bottles of this prior to review. Why didn't I review it before? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because I might want to enjoy a drink with a meal without having to remember how it taste to bring it home and write all about it. Sometimes I just enjoy drinking drinks. This though, it's worth drinking three times. It's got a great pomegranate taste and the erythritol does wonders to actually compliment the bitterness of a real pomegranate. It doesn't taste too sweet and the sweetener doesn't junk up the flavor. I really like it, can you tell? It's one of the best Bai drinks and an easy decision when it comes to buying a drink at the store with a meal since it's only ten calories per bottle.

Getting smarter, drink makers. Getting smarter. Keep it up, Bai. You're one of the good ones.

Remember when you asked for that drink that was made from oats that has a real 80's Prince vibe? Well also remember when I said that they'd never make it? Well I was wrong. They made it and they made it well. Sure, the entire song I was singing, both aloud and in my head is the titular track of the drink. That made it go down smoother but without it wouldn't have penalized too much.

This was good. I was leery because, well...oats. It's really hard for me to spell "oats" without putting an "e" in there in an homage to my favorite moustached man from a similar time period. Oh, if this drink were called "Sneaky Pete's Raspberry Beret Oatestanding Beverage" it would probably make me comatose with excitement.

Back to the drink and out of my dreams. It tasted like raspberry had a little bit of a thickness to it but not offensive, just thicker than, say, a water. Even though it was sweetened with Erythritol, you don't really get that. I thought it was cane sugar until I looked, actually.

Raspberry Maneater. I'm leaving you with that. Erotic One On One. Bonus.

Last night as I was purchasing a loaf of Italian bread and an avocado for some late night hangout snacks (yes I ate almost all of it myself, and yes it was delicious.) I saw that Goya had ventured into the “Vitamin Water” world with a new line of drinks called Hydro Health. The cashier told me that Goya has been going crazy and is making everything these days. She was dumbfounded that they now made baby food and these drinks. That was all of the examples I was given, so I can only assume that Goya has two new product lines. Perhaps two=everything in some worlds.

It seems that for the entire Hydro Health line Goya decided to forgo cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, and kept them all zero calories. They did so by using erythritol and stevia, so that it would be zero calories and all natural. The end result turned out surprisingly well. It doesn't taste overly diet at all. In one of those blind taste tests that were all the rage in the 80's I bet a good majority of the participants wouldn't even realize this was diet. It may be the most un-diet diet beverage I have ever tried.

This is just as good as any Vitamin Water or any of the other similar brands out there. It's a little light on the flavor, but I actually prefer it that was. It's supposed to be a water drink, so I don't want it to taste like a mouthful of sweetener and artificial flavor. It's light and it's smooth. It has more of a generic tropical taste rather than a heavy guava or passion fruit, but I can look past it since it's so refreshing.

First things first; I believe the label for this packaging was misprinted. You see I have this and a bottle of the mango pear sitting in front of me, and the ingredients lists are the same. Sure they could just use different quantities, but I don't taste pear in this at all, and I had the “non-diet” version of this a while back and that had mango and pineapple in it, and this tastes the same as I remember that. Just a heads up Bai, you might want to look into that.

As I just mentioned two seconds ago I had the regular version of this, and I have to say this tastes eerily close to it, even though erythritol was swapped out for the cane juice, the flavor stays fairly consistent. It still has a great mango flavor with some pineapple mixed in. I'm going to feel like a real idiot if there is not any pineapple in the 5 calorie version, but I can taste it, but it could be totally psychosomatic. It also has a nice white tea base that is hard to miss. There is only the faintest erythritol coolness to this. So little that if I didn't know it was in there, I might not notice. Bai did a great job masking the flavor, while still keeping it low in calories. Good job folks.

Quote direct from the can: "Ultra Blue is a little less sweet and lighter tasting with zero calories..."

They had me at less sweet. I love Monster energy drinks, but some are ridiculously sugary to the point that I feel like I'm developing a new cavity with every sip. Every word in their quote rings true. Well I can't scientifically prove that there are no calories in this, it tastes like a non-gross diet drink. My guess is due to them using erythritol to sweeten it. Not only does it taste good for a zero calorie sweetener, it's actually good for your teeth!

"Erythritol has been certified as tooth-friendly. The sugar alcohol cannot be metabolized by oral bacteria, so does not contribute to tooth decay. Interestingly, erythritol exhibits some, but not all, of xylitol's tendency to "starve" harmful bacteria."

So next time your mom or dad tells you energy drinks are rotting your teeth, as long as it's sweetened with erythritol you have a great argument.

Overall this is a great energy drink, it is delicious and light and the perfect amount of sweetness. The flavor is hard to pin point, it has a grapefruit taste to it but also has that classic "Monster" taste to it as well. The can is textured like they have been doing with their recent releases and I like it.

post script: Due to the name of this drink, "Ultra Blue", I thought it was beer at first and got really confused when it was next to the other Monster drinks.

I love coffee, there's no hiding it. I don't know why it's taken me this long to have a drink made from the fruit of a coffee bean. Verdict? I love it! This lemonade is really delicious, especially for a diet lemonade. I opted to drink this instead of coffee this morning after only a couple hours of sleep and it definitely did the trick. Granted it doesn't have as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, but it has enough to wake me up this morning so I didn't pass out on the bus to work.

I rarely have trouble sleeping but last night and the last couple nights, my mind has been racing and it's all about one thing and that thing is SimCity. I have been building a region with two dudes from work and have stayed up later than I have in a long time. One o'clock, two o'clock. Who cares? I need more simoleans. I need more power. I need to build another block of residential. I've got a sewage problem. There is always something that needs to get done. After a week of intense game play, it has eaten so much of my nights up that I am ill. I just need too much sleep now to compensate.

In hopes that this knocks me into a nine hour coma, I am trying this drink. It's small, two swigs, and it's gone. It's a little diet but less than most diet drinks. It's fruity but doesn't taste like a "real" fruit. I assume without doing any research that "dreamfruit" is not a real fruit. I don't know if all the fruits, but I am going to jump the gun and say that it isn't real. It might be psychosomatic, but I am getting sleepy. That's good. It's been about ten minutes. I have to manage the strength to brush my teeth and wash my face and then just fall into bed. I just need to stop doing this review.

We're all in agreement that root beer (and it's like brethren) is the best soda out there, right? I could drink the stuff all day long. Sure I would feel like garbage, weigh a couple hundred pounds more and my teeth would fall out of my head as I talked, but I would have a happy palate doing it.

I hope it's safe to assume that we all also think that “normal” diet pop is grozzzzzz. Some people say you just have to get used to it. I say I could also get used to drinking glasses on vinegar on a daily bases, but I'm sure as hell not going to do that.

So here we are with a flavor that is amongst the best and a version that is amongst the worst. Traditionally when these two things are combined the diet overpowers the greatness of the root beer, and it just tastes like a diet soda. They all taste more similar than they do their individual flavors. Krisda stood up and said “No world, I will not accept that! I will create a diet root beer that actually tastes more like root beer than diet and the world will love me for it!” Apparently Krisda realized that the solution was just to raise the black licorice content of the soda. This tastes so much like the good version of licorice (not the black jelly bean version) that it's ridiculous. It's more licorice that root beer. I'll tell you what though. The combo of that and using stevia as a sweetener creates the best diet root beer I have ever tasted. For a second you can tell that it's diet, but then that licorice aftertaste kicks in and erases your zero calorie memories.

Diet cola. It's a rough game. Murderous. Competitive. Mostly kind of gross. This drink has potential. It's a brave venture into a dangerous game filled with tree hugging hippies. Filled with strange middle-aged women with distinctive salt and pepper hair that carry around canvas bags all times in case they come across a killer farmers market with rutabagas they just can't leave behind. Filled with young dudes who will stab you if you as much as mention chicken nuggets and loves the band Crass and has black pants that appear to be painted on his tiny, malnourished frame.

This drink, with all its promise, falls short. It's got a decent cola taste but is quickly replaced with a semi-bitter, sweetness that is known to many as "that Stevia" taste but is really Erythritol. Who cares? Right? Who cares? When a drink isn't that great, who cares what sucks about it? Well it's actually the Erythritol that eats it. It cruds up a potentially good drink. I don't know what would make it better. I don't even know if regular diet pop wins or loses. I don't know what's going on anymore.

There's sugar in grapefruit, right? I mean I buy juices with no added sweeteners and there's always a decent amount of sugar in the juice, just from the fruit. The internet tells me that grapefruit has sugar, which makes sense, it's a fruit. According to Google half of a large grapefruit has 11.59g of sugar in it. So does Rob's somehow remove that sugar and replace it with erythritol, because the label on this clearly says there are zero grams of sugar. That would be some wacky science that just doesn't seem worth it.

I don't know how Rob's makes this, but this is tasty. It has the essence of grapefruit flavor without the extreme tartness. Sure it has a zero calorie sweetener in it, but it doesn't have a gross diet taste. I think the grapefruit flavor balanced it out nicely. My real question is was the erythritol really needed? Was it just used to round off the tartness? Only Rob knows and he's not talking. He's too busy with his Pirate's Booty (seriously one man, two great products. I'd give him a high five).

Plum flavored drinks are not something that you see too often. Well, outside of an Asian market, and the plum drinks you find there are entirely different beasts that you simply want nothing to do with. They tend to taste like smoked mold. They are perhaps the worst beverages I have ever tried. I couldn't even swallow a single sip.

Real plums are great though. I went to a flea market a few weeks back and the fruit vender was closing up so he sold me 10 plums for a dollar. It was a good couple of days. I miss those days. Rob's does a great job with this drink and it actually tastes like you juiced a plum (well and then added some erythritol). I can't think of any other drink I've had that tastes so much like a plum plucked out of nature. The sweetener isn't too over powering and it actually gives it that specific bubble tea flavor. That is a taste that I will always love.

Rob's knows what they are doing with drinks, especially diet drinks. Diet no longer means absolutely terrible in this day and age. With the amount of obesity in this country it couldn't have come sooner.

I've had this drink spilled on me and I've spilled this drink. I handed it off to my girlfriend to try and she thought that handing it to me at mach 3 with the lid off was a good idea. That was how it was spilled on me. I spilled it on myself because I over chugged. I didn't know what my mouth limit was and just kept chugging until I overflowed. That's a good thing for good ol' Rob. I simply couldn't get enough and threw limits out the window like an unwanted apple core. That is the only littering I do is apple cores. You will never see me throw as much as a crumpled gum wrapper out of the winder of my car. Yeah, this is the only planet we have, for now at least, but more importantly is that I'm not a scumbag.

Anyhow, this drink is good: a little tart, as advertised, and a solid juice throughout. It's quite laden with that Stevia taste that I like and if you do, too, you'll be down with this drink. If I hadn't just brushed my teeth, I would have slammed the rest of that leaving my face, torso, and floor beneath me all sticky.

For those of you who grew up Southern Ontario, or Western New York any time from 1888 until 1989 probably remembers Crystal Beach (I can't believe it was around for a hundred years). It was a great amusement park, which was basically Coney Island on Lake Erie. Growing up in the 80's, the 1980's, we hand a handful of amusement parks within an hour drive of us. My favorite was always Crystal Beach. It had great rides, but on top of that it also had a beach, which gave the park a completely different feel than Darien Lake, Fantasy Island and the other smaller parks. It always felt like I was traveling back in time, or stepping into a completely different world when I was there. We would always go early, hit up some rides, and then head to the beach for a few hours before finishing up the night with some more rides. The world famous roller coaster The Comet was always ridden as much as possible. Every trip to the park would be concluded by getting one of the fancy suckers they sold there and going on the “umbrella ride” that carried us in a cart over the park and over part of the beach. Once I was on that ride I knew my day of fun was over, but it was always a fitting end to a great day.

Now I've hated coconut since I was a kid. I just recently started to like coconut water, but I did and still do despise the candied and toasted coconut flavors. For some reason I really liked the pina colada suckers they had at the park. I don't know if I just got them because I thought I was being a rebellious kid getting a sucker named after an alcoholic drink or what. All I know is for some unknown reason these suckers got a pass from my hatred. When I took a sip of this beverage my first thought was “oh gross candied coconut.” Then a second later I realized it tasted exactly like those suckers, and I was okay with it. It has a watered down pineapple flavor that gets overpowered by coconut at the end. It tastes nothing like coconut water though. In reality it has the coconut flavor that I can't stand in most cases, but it brought me back to some great family outings from my childhood, and I can't hold a flavor I don't like against it.

After high school all of Stan's friends went to college to become teachers and businessmen. He knew from an early age that he would not follow the same path. He wasn't dumb or anything. He actually got high marks in school, but he just had no interest in higher education. As soon as he got his diploma at the end of his senior year he enrolled in clown school. Clowning seemed like a dream come true. His classes failed to hold his attention though, and after a semester he dropped out. He then spent a few months just hanging out, working at his uncle's shop. Then one afternoon he was on break flipping through the local arts paper and he saw an ad that would change his life forever. He had been close with clown college, but he now knew that his true calling was to be a magician. He emptied his bank account and took a three week crash course in magicianery. It was there that his instructor gave his the stage name of Zevia the Magnificent, a title that the whole world would soon know.

While he loved being a magician, he really wasn't very good at it. His rabbit would always end up in an audience members purse instead of his hat, and he could never keep a firm grasp on those darn rings, what did they polish them with anyways, lard? One trick that he did master was to hypnotize people into thinking that diet pop tasted good. His secret was that he would make his own soda and sweeten it with a natural zero calorie sweetener caller stevia. This was in the late 90's when everyone was trying to keep the pounds off with aspartame and sucralose. They never knew what hit them. One flavor that he worked hard on was a diet ginger ale. Even though there weren't many diet ginger ales on the market, and people weren't familiar with it, he still thought it was integral to his act. It didn't really taste like the other ginger ales he had drank in the past. It was more like slightly sweet seltzer water with a slight ginger taste to it. He prided himself on using real ginger, but not enough to have any sort of heat to it. It was a completely non-offensive soda that he drank all the time, and why not when it had no sugar and no calories. Sure it could have used a bit more flavor, but who was going to argue with it' healthiness compared to the leading brands?

It was during the portion of his act when he was convincing people that diet soda could taste good when his infamy began. The prime minister of China was in the audience that evening for some unknown reason. Zevia's helper monkey became irate and flung his dung at the prime minister before shaking up a can of soda and spraying it in the foreign dignitaries face. As you well know that was the catalyst for World War 3. Zevia the Magnificent, and his monkey, were later tried for war crimes, and we all know the outcome of that.

You know how mob guys always have names like “Fat Tony” and are always overweight from living a life of excess, or so television and movies always tell us? Well some of the higher ups in the “family” got together and started a drink company a few years back. They decided to call it Made, because they thought they were clever. Okay I'll give it to them, that's a good name. Well after a bunch of people starting having heart attacks from each a case of cannolis a day they decided to make a low calorie version, to help prolong the lives near and dear to them so that they may continue of causing “boaking accidents.”

As I said these guys were used to a certain standard of living, and just any diet drink wasn't going to cut it. They needed to make it just right so that the family would enjoy it and want to drink it. The only way they could make this work was to use real juice in their beverages, even if it was from concentrate. Artificial flavor has no place in the mob. They also decided erythritol was the sweetener to go with, as to avoid the stereotypical chemical diet taste. The result was a blueberry green tea that hardly tasted diet at all. There was so much flavor from the juice that it covered up any hint of the erythritol. They added pomegranate juice as well for added antioxidants, but it doesn't show up much in the flavor. It is blueberry through and through.

You know what this drink would go great with? Soft pretzels. It's a good thing that the mob is involved with a vender.

“I'm afraid I must insist. You see, my wife, she has been most vocal on the subject of the pretzel monies. …€˜Where's the money?' …€˜When are you going to get the money?' …€˜Why aren't you getting the money now?' And so on.”