Sugar and or Corn Sweetener - 28 Reviews

Last year we had Avery's bottle some private label birch beer and sarsaparilla for us. We made up some rad Thirsty Dudes labels and Mohawk Place, a rad local bar, sold them. Within a couple of days we were out of all of them. We wanted to order more, but the shipping cost was too high to make it cost effective. We've been searching for a closer bottler since. That's not really important. What is important is that the sarsaparilla we got from them was decent, but nothing to write home about. It was actually fairly light in color, which was a bit odd. I realized we never ended up reviewing one of them for the site, so we ended up picking up a bottle of it at Soda Pop Central. Since we already knew what it tasted like we have been sitting on it for a while. Now the time has come and I have to say that this tastes way better than what they bottled for us. Maybe we got a bum batch or something, but this is very strong. It actually tastes more like a root beer than a sarsaparilla. Actually it tastes like a root beer while a whole mess of licorice in it. It's dark and great. It's a bummer that our batch wasn't their best, but it's good to know that this company can make a really nice soda. I wouldn't pass it up if I saw it in the store, and neither should you. Now someone find us a place to inexpensively bottle some soda with a Thirsty Dude's label.

Some pop is strange. You have certain expectations for the way that it tastes. Then, when you actually take a sip, it doesn't abide by your crazy made-up rules. Suddenly, rudely, when you burp, those expectations are met. To drink a bottle of pop that you need to burp to get what you want out of it seems fun, but the ratio of drinking to burping is very far off. Unless you're completely disgusting or completely alone, you aren't going to get your money's worth of burps out of pop.

This drink is right there. To drink, it's sweet and lightly watermelon'd. Then you burp and BAM! Candied watermelon or watermelon candy. Whichever you choose. I have not been very impressed by any watermelon pop or any of Carousel's drinks. I won't stop drinking them but there hasn't been one that I would go back to or even recommend. If you like them, speak up, but there are plenty of other companies that just moderately blow my socks off that I don't feel bad leaving this by the wayside.

I wish I had found kola champagne sooner in my life. I've always enjoyed bubble gum flavored sodas, but the only one I was ever able to find was the one Jones makes. I know a lot of people hate bubble gum flavored pop, but I love it. This is the first dark kola champagne I've had. Until now, the one's I've had have been orange in color. This threw me off a bit because it has a cola color, but tastes just like other kola champagne. It's still good, but definitely tastes a little 'heavier' than others.

I was racking my brain once I took a sip of this as to what it tasted like. Yeah, it tastes like cream soda but there is something else going on inside of this lil' bottle. Lil' Bottles. That's a good rap handle for a baby if it was acceptable for babies to rap and if I didn't hate kids singing so much. I think that one version of my personal hell would be to have to listen to all 20 Kidz Bop records on repeat for eternity. I think a place between hell and purgatory would be to have to listen to half of those records once. Ugh, kids singing. The worst. To pop songs, no less. Oh, I've got a great idea. Let's have the worst songs on the radio sung poorly to alright-ly sung by at least three kids at once. Great ideas.

So this drink. It's got a distinct taste and I couldn't put my finger on it. I was doing word associations in my head. Baseball. Gum. Just spitting words out. Then, I got it. The stick to a Lik-M-Aid, or Fun Dip to you new brat kids. It tastes like someone made cream soda with a Fun Dip stick in it. It's super sweet but acceptable somehow.

...and this ladies and gentlemen will conclude our tour of historic London. You've seen the Jack the Ripper locations, Parliament, Buckingham Palace and some cathedrals. For our final destination I give you Big Ben. This "clock tower" is one of the most recognizable structures in all of England. What most people don't know is that the framework of the building is entirely made up of bottles of soda. Many people try to call my bluff at this point in the tour and point out that soda bottles could never be structurally sound. My retort is that this was built in a time when companies sold soda in reusable bottles. Have you ever seen those things? They are really strong. Many different types of pop bottles were used for different parts of the building. The actual area around the clock is completely constructed from ginger beer bottles. You can tell by the green tint to them. Something about a ginger beer that is sweet and flavorful, with just a slight kick to it, resulted in the perfect bottles for that area. The flavor of the specific ginger beer that used to be housed in those bottles taunted the drinker. It really tasted like it should have a very strong burn to it, but in the end it just had a very strong flavor.

Bottles of the same recipe can be purchased in the gift shop for a modest fee of 15 quid. Yes I understand that is a ridiculous price and you could probably purchase the same soda in eastern Pennsylvania for $1.50, but what you're purchasing here is a piece of history and who wants to leave London without a bottle of culture?

Over six years ago Mike and I moved into an apartment together. The house number was 23, so we dubbed it "Michael Jordan". Now all these years, and an absent landlord later, I am moving out. Yesterday we moved pretty much everything. One thing I have to remark on is “where did I get all this garbage from?” I thought I didn't own much of anything, but I have so much crap. Ugh.

After a couple of hours of moving, I was completely beat. I went to the fridge and cracked open this cool frosty root beer. It was extremely refreshing. To be fair I was covered in sweat and completely beat, so anything that didn't taste like liquid garbage would have been welcomed.

Frostop has a classic root beer taste with some extra ingredients added. It tastes vaguely medicinal in a Moxie sort of way. It may just be that there is a lot of anise in it. I still enjoyed it, and guzzled down the bottle way faster than I should have.

I should go finish my move now, but instead I'm going to go wander around the woods with some friends.

We had people over for an impromptu grilling session at our house yesterday. I consumed way more beverages than any one person should in that short of a time, so now I have to play catch up.

We cracked open a couple of bottles of College club for everyone to share. I had yet to try their Golden Ginger Ale, and I really don't know why I waited so long. Their Pale Dry Ginger Ale has a very strong ginger flavor, which is not as sweet than most sodas. With this variety they flip-flopped it. It's way sweeter and the ginger is lower in the mix. So now you can fine-tune your soda choice to your tastes.

I had really high hopes for this, I really did. Small soda companies usually make normal soda flavors a little more interesting. This was not the case this time. I don't know if this was the worst orange soda I've ever had, but it was far from the best. It tastes like someone started filling your cup with lemon-lime soda and then realized you asked for orange soda. Instead of dumping it out, they just mixed the orange soda with the lemon-lime. It gives it almost a bitter orange flavor. This might be delicious to some people, but I didn't like it at all.

Jay says to me he says, "I've got something for you." Naturally, I got excited, even thought I knew it was a drink because that's all we exchange anymore. "Anymore" like we used to give each other gifts all the time. Eh, we probably did. We're great friends. So, Jay got me something but he can't find it. We take a trip out to his car and it's not there. I was getting let down by the second. Then, with a stroke of genius, he lifted that spare tire cover and pulled out a fresh bottle of Ale-8-One. He told me he got it on tour and it had caffeine in it. It's a ginger ale but it has a bit extra to it. It doesn't contain, but feels like it should contain, capsicum in it. It has a little baby-sized bite to it. It's nice because it's not a ginger ale trying to be a ginger beer. It's just a ginger ale with some spice to it.

I have had a long weekend. Not a rough weekend, but a long one. It was hard to get out of bed and while looking through my cache of drinks I grabbed this and didn't look back. I felt I needed a little pick me up, even though I don't think that I've ever need "pick me up's."


Jay, thanks. Ale-8-One, thanks. Everyone for leaving me at work to listen to The Best Show by myself on a snowy Monday...you's guys are kind of jerks.

Root beer comes in two different varieties; good root beer and great root beer. Even the "worst" root beer is still acceptable. Since we've been doing this site, we've come across some really surprising and different varieties like some made with vanilla, cinnamon, clove, and licorice. What does it all mean? Drinking Mugg or Barq's just isn't the same as it used to be.

Although the Big Ben's birch beer was surprisingly good, this root beer is...less than. It's not bad, as I mentioned above, it's just a bit too standard and safe.

This took me by surprise. I thought a few things before I drank it. The first of which, who has ever seen, let alone heard of, clear birch beer? Not I, and I'd like to think I'm some sort of professional. Two was that it was a company I had never heard of and the pop was in a plastic bottle.

I. Was. Wrong. This was strong. Like mouth numbingly strong. It was like every sip was a burst of birch flavoring. I liked it. Re-buy liked. It was kind of like if you ate a mouthful of black licorice to the point where you tasted licorice for a while afterward. It was stagnant, but in a good, powerful way.

If you have the opportunity, try it. It only takes two sips to get used to and then you're hooked.

*After this review we realized that all of the Big Ben birch beers were the same flavor, just different colors. So I changed the picture. Red, white and blue. It's like our country was founded on this soda.

This was one of Jay and my first companies and we've almost completed their line of drinks. When we went into the place to get a case of drinks, we came across this drink. It's labeled Quinine Water. I had never heard of it and thought it was going to be like tonic water. When I picked it up, an old man sitting on a case of drinks said, "You drink that when you've got to rehabilitate an arm or a leg.". I didn't know what he was talking about but it turns out that quinine is used to treat malaria and it may have historically done "something" for joints.

The taste wasn't something that everyone could get into, I'm sure. It was parallel to the taste of the San Pelligrino Chinotto drink I reviewed. It's got a bitter citrus taste to it, but it's sweet enough to combat any strange or "off" flavoring.

If anyone can elaborate their grandma's use for quinine, please do as I have never heard of the stuff before I touched this drink. As a drink it wasn't bad, but I would pick the San P instead of this because I don't take medicine and I guess this could technically be called a medicinal drink.

Sarsaparilla: the drink of cowboys (or so I choose to believe). It makes me want to put some spurs on. Can you imagine that? Seriously imagine if every time I drank I sarsaparilla I put on cowboy boots, spurs, chaps, a 10-gallon hat, and some cap guns in some holsters. I would be all ready to work the old west show at the local amusement park.
For those of you who don't know sarsaparilla is a close relative to root beer and birch beer. It just has different herbs used in its creation. I for one am a big fan. It tastes like a more woodsy root beer.
This version of it is a sugary mixture that has a similar flavor, but it's not the same as those that are brewed. It's still great though. It's not the inoffensive candy version of the classic beverage. My only real complain is I wish it had a harsher carbonation, but that's just me being picky.

It's almost 3am and I'm in Gainesville, FL. What else would I be doing that drinking this brutal ginger beer? It's got one heck of a burn, and it's nice and sweet. I kind of feel like I just chugged a gallon of liquid smoke. It's probably not a great idea to drink this before bed.

How do I describe the smell of this drink in a way that you could understand? Red wine mixed with body odor. I'd say that does it justice.

Taste? Kind of like a grape juice. Like a red grape juice, not like a white grape. Not a lot of body or presence either which is kind of strange. There's no bite or sharpness or bitterness or tartness or anything.

Now myself, and possibly you, have no idea what a blackcurrant is. To me it kind of looks like a purple grape on the carton. I don't know what it tastes like to base the flavor of it, but I assume that the actual fruit has some sort of character. This just feels a bit lacking. It's got a lot of flavor though so you could possibly use this as a mixer.

Who doesn't love the fair? What's the best part of the fair? Okay llama fashion shows are, but coming in a close second is the food and drinks. This tastes exactly like fair birch beer. It would be crisp and refreshing on a hot summer day. It's got that great bite that should be accompanied by fried dough. Can't you just smell the midway now?

We're finally heading towards the end of our Monroe Beverage Co adventure. Only a couple left. The grapefruit left a little to be desired. It only faintly tastes like grapefruit, unlike the other grapefruit sodas I've had. It just tastes sugary with a very slight sourness to it. It's not bad, I was just expecting it to be stronger.

This is the thickest of the Monroe Bottling Co. sodas that I have had. It tastes like your average orange soda. Nothing special. It's still tasty, but it's just nothing new. So fire up the grill, get out the veggie dogs and let's get this BBQ started.

This is great, a pop that actually tastes like the fruit it's supposed to. It tastes like someone dumped a whole mess of sugar on a pineapple, and threw it in a blender. It actually reminds me of a Slurpee flavor. I was told that it tastes exactly like the old Sunkist pineapple pop that used to exist. I was also told it made my friend parachute little men. Strange times indeed!

My friend Mike said that this is the best ginger ale he's ever had. I'll lead off with this. There certainly is a lot of ginger in this lil' bottle. There are some ginger ales that are pretty sweet and some ginger ales that aren't. This is right in the middle. It actually takes you for a loop. You think that it's super sweet, but then you realize that it's all ginger, doing her job. It's sweet, but there might be more ginger than any other ginger ale I've ever had. If you believe that ginger ale will cure your aches and pains, this would be the one to be papa doctor.