Sugar - 840 Reviews

I had this whole idea for writing to Scotland and telling them that we were cool now and that all is forgiven for that Iron Bru garbage that they spewed into the world. Then, I realized that Cawston Press isn't made in Scotland. I just happen to have been there the first time I drank it. Well, it looks like I still have beef with Scotland, but my love for England is still running high, due to it being the home of these sodas.

No other company in the history of Thirsty Dudes has gotten a five bottle review consecutively for all of their products. They are truly a gift to the beverage world. With this soda that took their patented sparkling apple juice and added a top notch ginger beer to it. This has it all, flavor and burn. You can taste the flavor of actual ginger and not just an intense burn, but it has enough kick to keep you interested.

It seems like a bit of a hefty price at $7 for a six pack, but that's less than $1.25 per can, and that is not bad at all for this quality of soda. I can't wait until their other flavors make it over to the US.

So here we are, two for five with Sotea. Most of these flavors don't really work. Carbonating tea is always a crapshoot, and more likely than not turns out less than stellar. The same thing can be said for putting mint in drinks. I don't really want my drink to taste like I just brushed my teeth or I'm chewing gum while drinking it. Somehow this Mojito Mist beat both of those odds and is actually pretty darn good. It launches past acceptable into really enjoyable territory.

While I've never had a real mojito, every virgin version of one that I have drunk has been great. There is something about lime that counteracts the weirdness of mint and makes it acceptable for it to exist in beverage form. Neither are overly strong and blend together into a new uber flavor. The tea in this tastes a little weird, but it works with the lime and the mint. This is one unusual soda, but I find myself with an empty bottle wishing that there was more. That doesn't happen often these days.

Folks, I think this is it. I believe we have finally reached the bottom of our cache of Claire Baie beverages. I can't say it has all been enjoyable, but at least I went out with something pleasant.
It's in the mid 90's now and it's so humid that you can feel the air move when you walk through it. It's kind of disturbing, and it really, really just needs to rain to get all of the water out of the air. I wonder how much of the humidity is just from people's sweat? Ugh, that's gross. How much of the moisture you feel in the air is other human's grossness? I needed to cool off and drink something cold and refreshing. What better beverage to fight the summer miserableness than lemonade? This is made with real sugar, and it is sweet. I really want this to taste like fresh strawberries squeezed into classic lemonade, and well about half of that came true. I would say it has a “strawberry” flavor, but it doesn't taste like perfectly ripe fruit. Most people would never complain about this, but I get picky. Regardless , it helped me pretend I was dehydrated from sweating so much, and it had a decent taste. I can't really complain. I'm sure you'll love it.

While I was drinking this I kept thinking about the Red Rose tea my grandmother used to drink. Then I thought, wait I've drunk a tea that reminded me of that before, and I did a quick search and saw that I had reviewed Snapple Straight Up Tea, but nowhere did it mention that it was sorta sweet. The thing is that everything I was going to say about this, I said in that old review. I don't know if it's the same product just relabeled, or if it does have less sugar, but my review stands.

I think it might be a stone cold fact that every American elderly woman who was a grandmother in the late 80's/early 90's drank Red Rose tea. Mine certainly did and everyone I've questioned about it came back with an affirmative response. Red Rose ruled the tea world at that time, and as an added bonus, the boxes came with little animal (Wade) figurines, which were nice for the grandchildren; everyone was a winner.

As I drank this tea all I could think of was Red Rose. This tastes exactly like how my grandmother's tea would taste cold. It's a nice black tea with a bit of sugar in it. It's actually probably about a spoonful. This is a nice genuine tea. It's not particularly fancy, but it's just black tea and sugar with a little citric acid in it. I've had many a cup of tea in my life from all sorts of companies, and this has the very specific Red Rose taste. I had other try this to confirm my thoughts and we all agreed. So where…€˜s my little figurine?

On a hot day, you should be drinking water. We in Western New York have been suffering drought-like conditions. It rains for a half hour and doesn't rain for two weeks. It's bad. Combined with 85+ degree days day after day, it's getting pretty tiring to go outside. On this hot day and on my way to band practice, I needed something. I drink water at my desk all day but I needed something and this hit the spot. I wish it was twice as large but you can't get everything you want.

It was very lightly sweetened and flavored. It was just a nice, cool lemon honey tea that was instantly refreshing. I wish I had one here. Two. One went down too quickly. It was low in calories, too. I think seventy for the bottle which was quite a bit healthier than the tallboy of Arizona that I wanted to feel nostalgic. I can feel nostalgic another time because now I've got a nice "go to" when I go to 7 Eleven which is rare regardless of their omnipresence.

You wake up one day and your back in your childhood. You're old enough to do somethings on your own, but young enough that you still have to go where your parents drag you. It just so happens that where they dragged you on this return day is to the beach. You totally got sunburnt, but you don't care because you played in the water and dug a sweet hole in the sand pretty far back, but you still hit the water table, or what you would later learn was the water table. After everyone is exhausted and had their fill you hit up a little shack restaurant nearby for hotdogs and fries. As a treat your mom totally lets you get a Slush Puppie and it is heaven to your young taste buds. You close your eyes and take a big sip of the syrupy sweet goodness that tastes vaguely like raspberries. When you open your eyes you are nowhere near the beach. You look down and you realize that you're middle aged and your drinking something that is supposed to be raspberry lemonade, but it tastes like childhood. You forgive it for tasting more like sugar water than lemonade because for a few moments you escaped work and dug a sweet, sweet hole.

In recent times slowly but surely we have seen a rise in the number of cucumber flavored drinks that are on the market. It's nowhere near the amount of pomegranate or acai, but every once in a while a new one will pop up, and every time I get stoked. Cucumber is a wonderful flavor that I find ridiculously refreshing. The thing is that there are two different cucumber flavors, the pleasant “meat” of the vegetable flavor, which is what I usually find ideal, and the slightly dirty taste of the skin, which I still enjoy, but just not as much. I have some friends who hate the second version (I'm looking at you Jay Zubricky). Upon first sip of this I thought to myself, “This is more skin that meat, but I'm okay with it. It tastes pretty fantastic and it doesn't really taste like an energy drink. “ By the time I had taken two more sips my opinion had completely changed and I had had enough of this drink. What went from a slightly dirty, yet pleasant, cucumber flavor suddenly took a drastic turn into the world of diet sugar water that only vaguely tasted like cucumber let alone lime. I knew that they used a mixture of real sugar and sucralose in here to keep the calories low, but at first the fake sugar flavor was nowhere to be found. Suddenly it was all I could taste. I didn't even make it through half the can before I dumped it out on the side of the road. Well, at least it gave me a little bit of pep, even though my taste buds suffered for it.

There has been a lot of big moves happening in the beverage world this year. Ecto Cooler is back. Pepsi released its delicious 1893 line, and cold pressed juices are everywhere. To me the most important thing that has happened in the world of drinks is that Cawston Press is officially available in the States and that should be causing gigantic waves, but it's going mostly unknown. Until now I have only ever had Cawston products while in the UK and they are no joke. They produce sparkling beverages that are based on the most wonderful apple juice. I believe all of their flavors start with that same base and then more is added to create the desired flavor and so far they have all been flawless.

This past weekend I completely lost my mind around midnight on Thursday and decided randomly to fly to Atlanta the following afternoon in order to go see The Cure. I ended up with ridiculous seats and a set list that I thought only existed in my dreams. The show was the happiest I have been in a long time. The following day I hung out with some friends down there, ate some amazing food, and went to the Coca Cola museum. It was a wonderful day. As I was getting a ride to the airport to fly home this can was pressed in my hand by my friend, and fellow soda enthusiast, Dakota. Now I had two ridiculously wonderful days and this soda was the perfect cherry on top of a great trip.

As I stated, it has a sparkling apple juice base, but the addition of the lemon juice skyrocketed it to a whole new realm. This is the greatest sparkling lemonade I have ever tasted. It's like someone made perfect lemonade and then poured some perfect apple juice into it and them soaked some elderflower in it. It's a slightly appley lemonade with a light floral taste to it. This very easily could have been too tart, but the apple mellows it out and makes it perfect. Do yourself a favor and if you run into any Cawston Press sodas in your travels pick some up. You won't be even remotely disappointed.

I'd like to say that it's hard to mess up cream soda, but sadly that is not the case. It seems like it should be such a simple soda to make but I feel that a lot of the time it just falls short. When I was in high school I used to bring “40's” of IBC cream soda to parties, because I thought I was hysterical, but more importantly it was just a great cream soda and it became my ideal for the flavor. Throughout the years my tastes have refined quite a lot, but I still compare every cream soda to IBC in my head.

Twigs keeps the IBC dream alive in my mind and in my taste buds. This is sweet with a nice vanilla flavor that isn't too out of control. As I sip this on this warm summer night I feel like I should be 16 sitting around a fire in the fields somewhere while my classmates are getting drunk on whatever booze that could steal/convince someone to buy them. I thought they were dumb then, and I think they are dumb now, but it's all part of the teenage experience and it makes me smile.

When I think of “classic” lemonade what comes to mind is an ice cold picture on a sweltering hot day which only contains three ingredients; water, lemon juice, and sugar. It's a simple recipe that can be hard to screw up if you keep it basic. Claire Baie did not keep it basic. They used concentrate and added a handful of other ingredients that do nothing but detract for the simple glory that should be this drink. It doesn't taste like childhood freedom it tastes like plastic and fake lemons.I could have really used a nice lemonade today too. Damn.

I'm not sure if they were meant to be released together, or if it's just because they have the same parent company but I keep seeing Mountain Dew Black Label and Pepsi 1893 displayed together. I was shocked by how much I am a fan of the 1893. It's a throwback to the way cola was originally made, and there is something about it that is just classy. It's like they took one of the baseline companies for all soda and made it seem like it was upscale. Even though they had already gone back to an original recipe with Dew Shine, I was hoping that Black Label would be another old time soda. The can didn't have a fancy look to it, but it was more visually appealing than Mountain Dew's normal output.

Now this is much better than a classic Mountain Dew, but this is not the high end soda that it is posing as. Words/phrases like “crafted” and “black label” are a buzz these days and lead a person to believe that this is something that was prepared with more care and in smaller batches. The truth is that this is just soda created with slightly better ingredients than the company would normally use. Sure there is sugar instead of HFCS and there is grape juice involved, but this really just falls somewhere extremely close to their Dark Berry and Pitch Black flavors. It's like someone took their flagship flavor and added berry and grape juice to it.

I really wanted this to be better than it is, but to be fair it is one of the better Mountain Dew flavors. It's an improvement, but they still have a ways to go to create something (besides Voltage) that I would go out of my way to purchase for pleasure and not review.

You know what we need? A new poster child for a specific demographic. Not since James Dean have we had a person who identifies a people. No we do. Rob Gronkowski is this generation's James Dean. Like it or not, he embodies all that is today's youth. I bet he wears a backwards baseball hat. I bet he fist bumps no less than fourteen times per day. You know what else? I bet he could beat the living tar out of me on his worst day. Rob Gronkowski could have non-stop diarrhea for a week and still whoop me. Rob Gronkowski could have lost a limb in a bar room brawl, be hopped up on painkillers and wear glasses with wildly poor prescriptions and still knock my block off.

That being said, his drink might be the best Monster I've had. Yeah, it tastes like what fruit would taste like if you wrapped it in quotes and was made exclusively from chemicals but hey, as far as taste is concerned, it's the best that Monster has to offer. Could I drink a whole bottle? No sir or ma'am. Could Rob Gronkowski drink one? Rob Gronkowski probably adds it to his Trix instead of milk. Rob Gronkowski probably wears it as cologne and pulls down more in one night than I have my entire life.

Rob Gronkowski. King among bro-men.

Whenever meal replacements are advertised, why is it that breakfast is always the meal that is being replaced? Are people really that busy in the morning that they can't whip something up quick, or at a minimum spend the two minutes eating a bowl of cereal? I'm kind of a mess if I don't have my oats and honey cereal in the morning, but I think that has more to do with routine than actual eating. To me breakfast is the easy meal. If I had to choose a meal that I would need a quick replacement for it would be lunch. I'm always busy with work or some project in the middle of the day and I always go for a quick option.

So yeah, Mobius is supposed to be for breakfast, but I broke the rules and had it for lunch. Now I knew there was coconut milk in this, but what I didn't know was that the coconut flavor was just about as strong as the chocolate flavor. I take that back the coconut flavor is the strongest flavor in here and it tastes like toasted coconut, which I kind of hate, so instantly this drink is not for me. It tastes like someone liquefied toasted coconut and then added cocoa powder to it, which I guess is what this is if you take out all of the other vitamins and nutrients, which there is a lot of. This has 20g of protein, it's dense in micronutrients, it had medium chain triglycerides as well as nootropics and 100mg of caffeine. I have no idea what most of that means, but I guess it means it has everything you need for a nutritious breakfast (lunch). It uses a blend of sugar and stevia to cut down on calories, and I will say that it is the way to go if you're looking for a healthier drink that doesn't taste completely diet. I also just saw that this has gelatin in it, so I consumed that when I normally don't. Thanks for that.

If you really like coconut and don't' like preparing breakfast drink this. If you're like me and dislike toasted coconut give the rest of the packets you have to a friend like Mike, who will enjoy it more.

I'm, probably in the minority with this but I find milk to be completely and utterly (udderly for those who want dads jokes) disgusting. The thought of drinking glass of milk..just ick. Luckily I can turn off my brain to it when it's in other drink, such as this delicious cold brew coffee. Sure, I would have preferred this to have almond or soy milk instead of real deal cow grossness, but when something tastes this good you overlook the bad.

The black version of this was smooth as it was, but the addition of the half & half just makes it the subject of a Rob Thomas/Santana song. The coffee itself is delicious and the small amount of added sugar would make this enjoyable to anyone out there who has even the smallest interest in coffee, and perhaps even others who have no interest.

I said it before, but it bears repeating; if this was what your standard coffee tasted like I would drink it all of the time. I would become one of those people who just aren't themselves until they get the first cup of the day in them. I would welcome that misery and dependence into my life. This is that good.

Oh the high hopes I had for this. Mexican mocha? Really? A nice, chocolate cinnamon coffee drink? Well if that's what you expect, you will most certainly be disappointed. It might be coffee, alright. Might. This only has a hint of almost every ingredient but cream. It tastes like creamy sugar with coffee and cinnamon essence. It's strangely thick.

I didn't like it. There I said it. It tastes like a diet drink and is not a diet drink. It hardly tastes like coffee, which I expect out of a coffee drink and the Mexican part of it is so faint that it almost isn't worth mentioned. Do it or don't do it, Starbucks. You can afford to do either. Small, test batches. Amp up the spice and send a can to me. I'd love to review something polarizing and accurate.

Jay drank the straight and loved it. I drank the straight and it was coffee. I don't like coffee too much. Iced coffee has to have some sort of syrup in it for me to deal with it. Chocolate mostly. This, though, this was real coffee with chocolate milk in it and it made a world of difference. Also, I don't know what they added to the beans but man was I jumpy. Jay was jumpy when he drank his. I drank half and was out of my skin, man. It sure did go down smooth, though. Until the jitters, I was prepared to give Uncommon my bank account information to auto debit my account periodically to keep this stuff coming. The jitters turned me off to that notion but it shouldn't you. I don't drink enough coffee to be accustomed to the feeling of caffeine surging through my veins. I don't know if I want to be I'll tell you what I want, more of this. It was delicious.

Horchata; One of the strangest things made from rice. I like rice in its natural form. "Juicing rice" seems strange like you just made rice wrong.

This is cocoa flavored horchata but is it any good? It's...OK. It's sweet but not too sweet or not sweet enough. It's just a different sweet. It's a sharp sweet. I had to check multiple times to see if there was any other sweetener besides sugar but there wasn't. It tastes diet but is not diet. I guess what I'm saying is I drank half of this and don't know what I drank. Some connoisseur I am, huh?

To me lemon is one of the most boring flavors on this planet. A lot of the time it tastes like cleaner, but even when they don't it is rare that it makes me want to acknowledge any sort of greatness. Lemon in water is not very appetizing to me. I don't know how that even got started, but haven't people seen the reports about how dirty they are? Grozzz. The general exception to the forgetableness of lemons is when you get a great lemonade on a nice hot day. That can really hit the spot.

I have never once had a lemon soda that made me want to stand up and force others to drink it because it was delicious. My pattern has not changed with this soda. I will happily admit that it's on the better side of lemon drinks, and may be the best lemon soda I've ever tasted, but that doesn't get it very far. It tastes like it's 75% generic soda and 25% really nice lemonade. It's not the best, but I wasn't expecting the best, and It's much better than I anticipated. So well done Caruso's…€¦.I guess.

This is the model that all other cola should be based. It tastes like a Mexi-cola. I still think that cane sugar Coke is better but this is better than Pepsi and maybe better than corn syrup Coke. Hard to tell. This would be an interesting blind taste test. Pepsi, Pepsi 1893, Coke and Mexican Coke all together. I don't know if I could "pass" the test. I think it might humiliate me.

So how is it? Great. I really liked it. It didn't linger and had that lemon (?) taste that at least I think Pepsi has. It's in a tall, thin can so you think that it's better for you than a regular sized can but it's not. It's the same. You're the same person if you drink this or a regular can. It's good. If I had more, I would drink more. It worries me that it's not going to stay here for long.

I'm pretty sure that generic diet orange soda might be the world's worst pop. Regular orange soda has its place in the world and that place is at barbeques and accompanying hot (veggie) dogs in every capacity. Its diet counterpart belongs nowhere except down the drain. I wonder if there is a single person out there who actually enjoys it. If you find one I'd like to hook them up to a polygraph, because I'm pretty sure there are a no good dirty liar.

POP Water has attempted to make a low calorie orange soda that is actually drinkable. They have succeeded to some extent. This doesn't have an overbearing diet taste to it, but there is still enough of it to make me feel like I'm not truly enjoying it. The orange flavor is decent enough. It doesn't contain any juice, but it does have extracts of natural orange. It tastes like a light orange soda until you swallow and then you get the stevia/erythritol in the aftertaste mucking everything up. I've said it before and I'll say it again. They should have just kept their limited amount of real sugar and left it at that. Any drink I've ever had with a zero calorie sweeter would have been better without it.