Xylitol - 17 Reviews

When things clearly say “Sugar Free” on them it makes me nervous. Artificial sweeteners should be filed directly in the filth bin and natural zero calorie sweeteners, while slightly more palatable, are really no prize. Typically I would prefer zero added sweeteners to something with zero calories. Hydro One has things worked out that make their products exceptions though. The beverages are sweetened with a mixture of Xylitol and Stevia, but for some reason they don't cut through the flavor of the drink like nearly every other “diet” beverage out there. I believe that reason is the addition of cinnamon. I don't know if it just happens to fall in the same taste spectrum, but where I would normally taste any variety of diet flavors, all I really get is a faint cinnamon taste. I am really on board with that.

As with the other flavors, to me this is a better version of a diet Vitamin Water. There is definitely a water base, as it is not thick like juice. The blueberry and pomegranate are not super strong, but are there more than enough to give it a proper flavoring. Of course there is that cinnamon riding through it all as well. This is a good option for those watching their sugar or calorie intake.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please take this moment to enter your bathrooms, open your medicine cabinets, grab your toothbrush, floss, and mouthwash and throw them directly in the trash. You no longer need them. Think of all the hours you have spent throughout your life cleaning your teeth, when you could have simply been drinking a can of this tea after every meal. Say goodbye to toothbrush stains on your shirts (if you don't know how to brush in a proper fashion) and say hello to a ginger green tea that has a lemongrass aftertaste. It tastes like real ginger and it tastes like real lemongrass, and it tastes like real tea. The reason being that they are all real in here and it's wonderful. On top of that perfect blend they add their XyVita compound on top of it and that is what is there for oral care. It is a mixture of Xylitol, vegetable glycerin, sodium bicarbonate, and sodium alginate. Actually my dentist just called and yelled at me. I was also told that 9 out of 10 dentists would tell me that I am a moron for throwing all of my teeth cleaning utensils away. This is not a replacement, but to be used in conjuncture (it reduced the acidity in your mouth). I don't really care. All that matters to me is that it tastes pleasant and that I can't really taste the Xylitol. That could have really messed things up.

Vemma has been slowly building it's empire based on a promise of a healthier energy drink that does more than just get you amped up, as well as giving those beverages flavors that are outside the norm in the world of taurine, B vitamins and a whole lot of sugar. Now I seem to have left my Bunsen burners and my Erlenmeyer flasks back at the office so I was unable to perform the proper scientific research to confirm their health claims (they do seem above water though). What I can do with confidence is confirm the taste of this beverage.

This is no Red Bull, Monster or Amped clone. The Verve! line tastes like to other energy drink that I have encountered. For this can of ParTEA let's start with the fact that it is uncarbonated. This is a good thing since the base of it is green tea and as much as companies work on it, I have yet to taste a carbonated tea that I have preferred over the still variety. They have added mangosteen and aloe to the tea, which give it a nice fruity flavor. Actually the fruity flavor overpowers the tea a bit more than I would prefer it to. By a bit I mean that the tea flavor is hardly there. Such is the sadness in this world. Vemma chose to sweeten the whole deal up with a bit of organic cane sugar as well as a heaping of xylitol, which is a little used zero calorie sweetener. The result is that you end up with a fruity drink with a slight diet flavor to it that has a minimal tea taste, without any trace of the “classic” energy drink flavor to be found.

Did I need to be wearing a lab coat and goggles to type that out to you? Of course not. Did I do it anyways? Of course I did, I'm a scientist!

It's amazing how much mangosteen tastes like orange juice in this case. It's also quite amazing how unhealthy orange juice is for you. It's amazing how orange this drink is while not being orange juice and it's amazing how this just tastes like a diet orange juice.

Now even though I used the phrase "amazing" a lot previously, this drink is not amazing. Actually, I received polar opposite opinions during the survey that I ran in my office yesterday. I got "not bad" and I got "tastes like baby powder." Both sides of the spectrum. What do I think? I think it tastes like a pulpless, lifeless orange juice sweetened with Xylitol or Stevia. I didn't hate it and it was actually pretty good when it was cold. When it warmed up a bit, it got a little gritty like a protein drink might.

I do enjoy that strange little mangosteen cat sneaking in the mix more and more. I'm sure I'll regret saying that as soon as "the big guys" start making it and ruin it like they do everything. You know what, big guys; you're making that green. You're doing what you came here to do. Play on, playah.

What a tease. Here I thought I was going to get a delicious, non-carbonated drink birch beer but come on. This tastes like some sort of agave juice. It's smooth, has no definition and won't really offend anyone.

Now that my clear disappointment is out of the way, yeah, this is pretty average. It is from the birch tree. Giants came from the sea and the sky and squeezed birch trees into tiny bottles. This being the "original" flavor is the base in which the rest of the flavors in this line are based. How does it stand up? It's fine. It's non-offensive and therefore a tad lackluster.

Did I know that you could drink that lifeblood of a birch tree? No. Will I try it next time I can identify a birch tree and have a tool to stab said tree to let the juice out? Maybe. Probably.

Are you tired of energy drinks all tasting the same (ie. like some candy Willy Wonka dreamt up)? Well Vemma has a solution for you with their “insanely healthy energy” drink. Now I have qualms with them saying this is actually healthy as I don't think it's helping your health at all by drinking it, but I will say that after perusing the ingredients list and seeing what is in it I will concede that it is a “healthier” version of an energy drink. It may not cure, nor prevent illness, but hey it's an energy drink and it's not supposed to.

The base of the drink is mangosteen juice, and its caffeine comes from green tea and aloe vera. It also has taurine and a bunch of B vitamins in it, but you take your health where you can get it nowadays. When you open the can it has a weird almost bubble gum smell, that I don't understand. I don't think I can actually taste it. I think I can, but I also believe that the smell may be planting subliminal flavors in my brain. Overall this tastes more like a weird juice than it does an energy drink, and that is a great thing.

This is also the more intense energy version of the beverage. I drank this around 1PM as I had to go to a family party, then another party, and then another. I didn't think I would make it through the day. I also knew if I drank this later in the day when I actually needed it I would never sleep. So I drank it early. Around 6PM I started to crash. I made it through, but then by 9PM I was back with a crazy second wind that was anything but natural. I hadn't had anything else caffeinated or anything like that, so I can only hold this drink accountable. I came back with a fury and I felt like I had drunk three Red Bulls. Luckily by the time I was ready for sleep around 2AM it had worn off and I passed right out. Now that's efficiency.

Finally! After all these herbal mists, we finally found one that tastes like actual yerba mate. Yes, it's only for a limited time but for the limited time, it's great. After this limited time offer, you are given a nicely sweetened mango tea. Xylitol, a natural sweetener, and all its Stevia brethren have been in seemingly everything and it's nice to see this used well. It's not too sweet and doesn't taste fake. It has a good mango taste to boot so this whole bottle has got winning all over it.

If I could have a lot of this, it would be great. I don't love mangos anywhere near as much as Jay does but I think that even him, ever-incrementing hater of all things Stevia, would enjoy this drink.

The county fair is one of the most wonderful places in the summer. There is a ton of gross awesome food, animals galore and great people watching. Sometimes spending all day out in the sun gets to be a little too much in the heat department, so there are little “mist tents” set up where you walk through a little tunnel and water is misted on you from spray bottles and fans. It's really not the most effective thing in the world, but any little bit of help is appreciated.

All I can think about with the name of this company is one of those tents, but instead of spraying you with water, it pumps out iced tea. It would be the stickiest refreshment anyone has ever seen. It would also be absolutely terrible. If I were forced to go through one, I would choose the diet peach option. I can only assume it would be less sticky than real sugar, and also the peach doesn't taste as insanely strong in this as it does in the regular version. I would just wander through, with my mouth open and let the refreshment wash over me, and hopefully get a little flavor on my tongue along the way.

Like every flavor in this line, it tastes nothing like yerba mate, which as always is disappointing. It tastes a little bit diet, but not in a chemical death way. It's a little strange because it's specifically the peach flavor that tastes diet and not the actual tea. It tastes diet in a way that makes you say, “Why not, there's nothing else to drink, and I don't find this completely disgusting.” Can you really ask for more in a diet drink? The answer is yes, but this is still better than most 0 calorie beverages on the market.

I'll tell you what I don't like and then I'll tell you what I like. I like that I was scared to try this because it said "diet" and diet is synonymous with sucralose, aspartame, or some other borderline poisonous chemical. Anything to shed those extra inches, right? We're talking about things I like though, right? That's right. I'm still there. This isn't sweetened with those demons but it's sweetened with teeth's friend, Xylitol and the ever increasingly popular Stevia. As far as a lemon tea, it's pretty good. Speaking of "good," that's about it for the good.

The bad is that I was excited to taste a woody, bitter, adult yerba mate tea but the tag team of Xylitol and Stevia sweeten it up too much and erase whatever bitterness might have been there. I still don't hate those two but they are becoming a crutch that people don't know how to properly harness. Not everyone needs to have a super sweet tea. Some of us enjoy a weaker, lightly sweetened tea. Apparently Herbal Mist doesn't agree.

If I had to sum it up, which is what you want because of your non-professionally diagnosed ADD, this is a lemon tea sweetened with Stevia.

Here we are again. Dr. B's. I don't taste pomegranate and I don't taste acai. I like pomegranate but I dislike acai so that is a push. The Xylitol is running rambunctious through this drink and overwhelms even the worst flavor (acai) and is too bad because the thought of a pomegranate red tea that is naturally sweetened, low calorie, even with that turd acai is enticing to me. Cut the sugar in half. Xylitol just masks everything with its uber-sweetness and doesn't allow everyone to shine and do their thing.

All the ingredients in here are fine but the levels in which they exist is incorrect. It's as simple as that. Do you want to taste what fruity Xylitol tastes like? Here's your drink.

Dr. B. I don't know what to say anymore. One guy said that this smelled like cough syrup. I think that it tastes like plastic flavored, overly sweetened tea. The Xylitol takes the cake in this drink and overpowers whatever flavors my have existed in it. It's like fighting an unmatched fight. Xylitol is playing the role of the 250 pound seasoned boxer and the lemongrass and iced tea together weight 300 pounds but aren't boxers and collect stamps and coins from the Civil War era. The only way this tea has any flavor that isn't artificial is if you take a big sip and let it mull in your mouth. Don't move your tongue. Just let it sit there. Then you think, "Hey, there's that lemongrass flavor Dr. B, a person I'm questioning whether or not they are a real doctor, was telling me about." The time in your mouth kills the cool, sweet sugar and allows the B-Team to take over. It's a fight that no one has the right to watch. It's too much. It's the man standing up to the tank in Tienanmen Square except the tank didn't stop. He just kept going. I think that makes Dr. B Deng Xiaoping.

A few months ago when Dr. B's emailed us to tell us about their microbrewed teas I was very excited. It's no secret that Mike and I love a good tea, and if microbrewing could do to iced tea what it did for root beer, then everyone was in for a good time.

Dr B's obviously cares about the quality of their tea. They took the effort to use quality ingredients and brew them in a special way. By all means this should have been one heck of a beverage. The thing is the company had a lapse in their judgment. They wanted a healthy tea, so they went with a zero calorie sweetener. In that instant all of their hard work went out the window. I understand wanting to have a healthy drink available, but I wish they would have taken it the other way and not added a sweetener at all. There is monk fruit in all their teas and that would have given them a slight sweetness, which is all it would need. Unfortunately they went the Xylitol route and that cold sweetness is the most prevalent flavor in the mix. I really have nothing against natural zero calorie sweeteners, I just think that when companies decide to use them, they should use a smaller amount so it's not so overpowering. This could have been great, but instead it's hard to finish.

Coconut: -2 points. Red Tea: +1 point. Xylitol: +1 point. Knowledge of the previous one I drank: -3 points. It took me some psyching to actually try this. I thought it was going to blow. The math just doesn't add up to something that is good. Now there is a lot to take into consideration when drinking this. Issue one is that the Xylitol in this drink runs rampant like lava flow through the ancient city of Pompeii. If you don't like this new blend of artificial sweeteners, just steer clear of this entire line because it is quite overbearing. That being said, it did a great job of covering up the taste of coconut. It's a little coconutty but not too bad. If you like coconuts, you might not like this because it's not as coconutty as you would like, I can assure you. It does manage to squeak in a little bit of a decent tea taste in between the violent tongue lashings from the Xylitol.

I hardly gave this drink a proper review but as soon as they get their mix straight and can serve me a proper flavor that doesn't taste like artificial sweetener with a hint of whatever flavor they're calling it, they'll get a decent review. For now, I work with what I have and that's not much.

Is this what honeybell oranges taste like? Really? Do people want this? They do? Well, jeez. I don't know what to say other than your opinions on "good tasting" fruit is terrible. This tastes like orange flavored powder mix sweetened by an overly sweetened massacre of Stevia's crappy, younger brother Xylitol. The time I spent with orange flavoring was promptly annihilated by the time I spent with a strange, overly sweet drink.

I don't know if I could correct this. Half the sweetness? Twice the tea? That might make a taller bottle. I think less sweetness could have saved this. It's not that I don't appreciate the fact that I've never had a honeybell orange before because I do, but this is no honeybell orange. Believe you me.

Did you know that Beavis and Butthead was set in Texas? I had no idea until I just read that online. Did they ever come out and say that in the show, or is it something that Mike Judge just proclaimed? Either way I bet living down in the south like that must be a real bummer for them. Sure it can be rainy and kind of cold, but it's the good kind of cold, and autumn in the northeast is the best smelling time of year. On top of that I bet those troubled boys have never had apple cider in their life, well at least not anything decent.

A nice glass of cider is really the heart of the season if you ask an expert like myself. Dr. B's understands this and wanted to make a drink that the entire world could enjoy, even if they were thousands of miles away from a cider mill. At first sip this just tastes like watered down cider, or more specifically what a Cider flavored Vitamin Water would taste like. The more you drink the more the subtlety of the tea comes out. This is in fact a tea that is flavored with spiced apple juice. So it's not watered down at all. It's just not overly flavored, which is a different thing all together. If you don't go into this expecting a full-bodied cider then you won't have any disappointments. It is what it claims to be and it does it well. I wish I could try this without any sweetener added. The taste of the Xylitol is faint, and does not interfere with the flavor much, but I've grown to love completely unsweetened drinks lately.

Johnny was a masochist. He would go to S&M clubs many nights and would enjoy being hit by whips. It might not make sense to you, but you're not Johnny. He would come home battered and bruised three to four days a week. He would always wear collared, long sleeved shirts so no one was the wiser. He worked as an accountant in the big city and didn't want others to know what he did in his personal time.

On his way home from Whipped Into Shape, one of his frequent clubs, he was a bit parched and headed into a small corner store to get something to drink. He was going through a bit of a passionfruit kick so when he saw Kahe's passionfruit drink, he had to get it.

He went home, checked out his new gnarly bruises and welts, and then cracked open his new drink and had at it. It was like a free admittance to another S&M club because this drink was bad, but he kept going back for more. It was tart, didn't taste like passion fruit, and was poorly, artificially sweetened. Every time he took another sip, he would make a strange face of disgust, but for reasons beyond his knowledge, he kept drinking it.

Although he prefers the clubs, he now knows that anytime he can't make it, he can pick up a bottle of that sparkling fruit juice and have twelve ounces of sadomasochism.

Cherries. Red gold. It is currently summer, also knows as the summer of sticker shock when you put a pound of delicious cherries in a bag, weigh them and get presented with a $32 price tag. I don't know why. Reason number 1 is because I don't work in the cherry industry, and two because I feel like I have seen like a trillion cherries on a tree and I just can't justify that absurd price. I'm cheap, that also doesn't help.

This drink brings the delightful taste of bing cherries to your fridge year round...kind of. The initial taste, like four seconds, is a lovely cherry taste. I'm not the master of cherries, and I don't claim to be, but it does taste like cherries, no doubt. Then Xylitol and Stevia kick in and ruin the party. They're like that duo of jerks that come to your party, bring beer, and somehow rip one of the couch cushions, getting you in trouble with your parents. You don't need that. I typically like what Stevia does for drinks, but this one doesn't make the cut.

Cherry lovers, this is still a drink for you. People who like cherries, "Cherry likers", give it a whirl. People apathetic about cherries; move on to something else, like therapy because cherries are pretty delicious.