Organic Hawaiian Honey - 4 Reviews

Bitter. Sweet. Sour. Fizzy. This is a complex drink. It also has a bit of a learning curve. If you take baby sips. It sucks. I'll say it. No gray area there. It is all bitter between the yerba mate and the Stevia. If you take a bigger drink, you can actually get the lemon lime. Unfortunately the honey doesn't get a chance to shine through because between the bitterness of the yerba mate and the sweetness of the lemon lime, that kind of fills up your palate dance card.

I think, so far, that my one complaint with this line is that I don't know what their yerba mate tastes like in itself. I don't know what the starting point is to base the flavors off of. It's very strong. You can taste it for a while as an aftertaste. I feel like it might be good but I think that it's always masked by whatever the "flavor" of the drink is and you can't take in and appreciate the taste of the base drink. This is a good lemon lime flavor. Honestly it is. The drink isn't bad but I think that the mix has to be reconfigured to allow all the flavors to shine in. I can tell that there are good things going on in here but the mix is off.

Well this sucks.

I've recently reviewed a lot of really good turmeric drinks but this is not one of them. It's spicy. Not spicy "hot spicy" but spicy like "contains a lot of spices" spicy. Spiceful. I tried hard to like this. It's different but it's not fantastic. It gets more punishing with every sip. The more lukewarm it gets, the more thick and gritty it gets, like everything settles into a sandy mess at the bottom at when you let it sit next to you for a half hour, it just settles and gets downright thick and gross. It's now been on my desk for an hour because I cannot finish it. It's almost come full circle and gotten spicy and gritty at the same time. I feel like someone swapped out my drink with something you would order at an Indian restaurant. Ginger turmeric sounds like a great chicken dish. Ginger turmeric is a terrible, terrible drink.

If you were a pre-teen in early 90's you know doubt know that the greatest fictional band of all time is The Beets, from the show Doug. While they might have been meant to be a play on The Beatles, but in reality they ended up sounding like a British version of Men at Work…€¦ weird. Their hit single was called “Killer Tofu” and was about how it's better than junk food. As a child I don't think I had ever tried tofu. As an adult I fully concur with them. The most important thing that the show taught us was that beets are in fact nature's candy; a statement that led me to want to try beets whenever they were available.

While I may not eat beets very often these days, I do enjoy a good beet juice. It has a sweet yet earthy taste that is refreshing. It also has one of those flavors that you just know it's good for you. This company took that wonderful juice and mixed it with yerba mate, my current favorite form of tea. Everything about it is great. It's two earthy flavors that have been mixed together to create something that is not entirely new, but still interesting. Both flavors are very distinct, but somehow the earthiness does not run rampant. That is probably mostly due to the fact that it is sweetened with Hawaiian honey. On top of all of that there is the Hawaiian fruit noni in here. I'm still not exactly sure what it tastes like, but it certainly doesn't distract from the greatness of this beverage.

I've mentioned my brief time spent in Hawaii many times on this website. I tend to romanticize that time of my life, well, because it was magical. I went off to a tropical paradise with all expectations of not enjoying it, because I simply am not a beach person, but my friends who planned the trip were no dummies and they made sure we stayed in the “natural” part of Hawaii. There were no cities. I think I saw two chain stores the entire time I was there. Everything else was local little shops and nature and it was exactly what I needed. Any troubles I had did not matter for those 8 days. Anything that takes me back to that time makes me smile and I appreciate it in the low times.

While only the pineapple in here takes me back with the taste sense, just knowing it was from Hawaii was enough tonight. I'm imagining I'm walking through some lush jungle type area, or that I'm sitting on a beach at dusk watching the waves and truly relaxing for one of the first times in my life. There is caffeine and niacin in this beverage, so it shouldn't be relaxing me, but it's giving me energy while the thoughts keep me calm. On top of the wonder that is pineapple juice this can also contains mostly yerba mate tea, which may be my favorite type of tea. It tastes earthy and slightly bitter, the way nature does. Actually that pineapple I mentioned it's not even a secondary player in here. It's yerba mate, then noni and then pineapple. It's refreshing. It's tropical. It's just the push I need on a spring day like today where there is still snow on the ground, but the temperate has finally hit 50 degrees. There is a light in the darkness of winter and it is here and everything will be warm and new.