Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

As a pseudo-impulse buy I got a new laptop. I was at the store and I saw they had them cheap. The entire ride home was spent justifying to myself that I could afford it and that I needed a new computer. By the time I walked in the door I was convinced and walked right up to my computer that works perfectly fine and typed in newegg.com. I found a better computer for cheaper within a couple of minutes and after a bit of hemming and hawing, I bought it.

It's now a few days later and I have my new toy in front of me and I have just finished installing what I believe to be all the programs I need. I am now at the point of extreme frustration; getting Traktor to recognize my MIDI mixer for when I DJ. When I first set it up with my old computer I thought my head was going to explode. I convinced myself it would be easier this time, but nope. I'm sure I'll spend hours working on it and get extremely frustrated. I am at a fairly high level of frustration now. That is where this drink comes in.

Like a lot of functional drinks this tastes like some sort of melted down treat. In this case it's orange freezie pop with a medicinal aftertaste. It really isn't nearly as bad as I expected. It's actually kind of like Tang. I wonder if this is what astronauts drink to stay calm and focused. I feel like it's starting to kick in, so now back to my personal hell for the night.

I always thought it was great when you would go to a diner and you could get Cherry Coke, but it wasn't made that way, they just added cherry syrup to the regular Coke. It always tasted better than the Cherry Coke you buy in bottles/cans.

Caruso's Legacy has taken this a step further, or actually backwards. When diners first began doing this they would use the juice from maraschino cherries to flavor the cola. Nowadays it's a cherry syrup that is manufactured expressly for this purpose, and it's not the same.

This bottle I hold in my hand is more like the original. A cola that is made with cane sugar instead of a gross syrup with maraschino cherry "juice." It tastes like something you would make for a little kid at a family party, and I am all for that. Someone in my family used to make "kiddie cocktails" which were just cherry juice and a random soda. I loved them then, and I love them now. I actually made one at my mom's birthday party a few weeks ago.

If you're a fan of Cherry Coke, put down the swill you're drinking and pick up one of these. You'll never look back.

In the past six months I've gone from thinking that coconut water was worse than a cup full your gross uncle spit from his chew to becoming a fan. I still think it's completely disgusting when it's warm, but give me a nice tall ice cold glass of it and I will show you a refreshed individual.

When I saw there was a guava coconut water I knew that I needed it to continue my existence on this planet. I get that way about most things guava flavored. I'm glad I get that reaction because this is the best coconut water I have ever tasted. It could be due to the guava, or it could be that I think this is the only coconut water I've had that has a sweetener added to it. Either way it's sweet, refreshing and has a strong guava taste. I highly recommend it.

Organic. Organic is good. No harmful pesticides or other garbage making it into your food/drinks. The thing that some people forget is organic doesn't mean it has to taste good.

When this is right out of the fridge and it's really, really cold it's fairly good. I tastes like a fruit punch flavored sports drink. You can tell their is something hidden underneath. Like sea monsters hiding in the murky depths of the seas, there is something unpleasant in this drink. You can barely make it out when it's really cold, but as it warms up it becomes more apparent until it's like someone proclaimed, "Release the Kraken!" Then there is nothing but sorrow for everyone.

I was confused as to what it could be since it's sweetened with agave, which I love, and it has actual juice in it. I've narrowed it down to brown rice syrup, sea salt and potassium citrate. One of those three has to be the culprit, which ruins a potentially decent beverage.

Welcome to 1987. I'm eight years old and my two cousins are sleeping over at my house, and I'll be damned if we're not going to beat The Legend of Zelda! My mom got us stocked up on brownies, Twizzlers and Jolt. She wanted to get us store brand cola, but after a lot of begging I convinced her to shell out the cash to get the Jolt. By begging I mean promising I would do a ton of yard work to make up for it. I'll do it, but it will be half-assed by golly! She thought I wanted it because it looks a lot cooler compared to the store brand, but in reality I knew that we were going to need the extra caffeine punch if we were going to make it to Ganon.

You don't see Jolt soda in stores too much these days. You can still find their cans of energy drink, but the actual soda isn't as common. I had never seen this flavor before until I got it at Village Candy in Sewickley, PA. It differs from modern energy drinks because it doesn't have all the extra chemicals in it, just a butt load of caffeine. I actually enjoyed this way more than I expected. I was expecting this to be a cherry cola, but it's a cherry/orange mix (it actually has orange juice as an ingredient) with no cola. It's slightly candied flavor, but not as much as a lot of sodas. I appreciate that this company still exists and that they explored flavors other than straight cola.

Did we beat the game? Eventually, but not that night. We did stay up obscenely late for 8 year olds (probably 1am). That's what Jolt was to me though. It was for those nights when I needed to stay up for some menial task. It's pretty much the same way I look at energy drinks nowadays.

The first time I ever heard of Ikea was in the following context: "And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalog." That's right, Fight Club introduced me to Ikea. Those two sentences left me with no interest whatsoever to look into this company further. I thought it was some yuppy upscale mail order Sky Mall type scenario. Cut to several years later and I'm helping a friend move to Brooklyn. We get her minimal possessions loaded into her new apartment and then we drive to New Jersey so she can buy some stuff from Ikea. The quote from Fight Club suddenly made perfect sense. It's like a giant toy/candy store for adults. There was some neat stuff, but I had no need for it. Now cut to nearly a decade later and here I am with an apartment full of Swedish bookshelves. I gave in. They make some decent furniture and it's affordable. I'm not getting off over a catalog, but I know some people that would.

Is there a point to this? Not really, I just wanted to tie in Fight Club with this, because it's still my first thought whenever someone mentions the store. I went to Canada last weekend to get some shelving units and picked up a couple of their drinks. This one is sparkling apple juice. It tastes like a slightly lighter version of the sparkling apple juice that us non-drinkers buy for New Years Eve. It's a very specific taste that normal apple juice and cider doesn't have. I like it. It's sweeter and slightly fermented tasting. A carbonated version of what my grandpa would slip me a sip of when I was a kid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again 2011 is the summer of lemonade. The amount I have consumed it absolutely ridiculous. I can't believe it has taken me so long to try the Bolthouse Farms version, as I am a huge fan of their beverages. Wrap your brain grapes around that.

This is thicker than most lemonades. It doesn't have the consistency of a smoothie, but it's way denser than your average glass of lemon water. The thickness is due to the mango puree they use to flavor it. It really is a perfect blend of lemon and mango. It's more of a breakfast drink. I can see waking up making a nice large breakfast and settling down on my nonexistent back porch to enjoy it with a glass of this lemonade.

There is a common misconception in this world that the life of a hula girl is an easy one. The truth is nothing could be further from the truth. They are required to wake up an hour before dawn in order to get a proper workout before the brutal sun rises. Said work out included power lifting crates of pineapples and running four miles barefoot over a trail of discarded pineapple "shells" as wild boars chase them. They do this in order to keep up their stamina. After a three-minute rest period, each hula girl must then eat 1/4 of her weight of a mixture of pork and poi in order to keep up her "plump" body type. There is a fine line that they must walk between being healthy and in shape and not becoming skinny. After gorging themselves the girls go out to their first jobs of the day on tourist boats. After the first eight hours they are allowed 30 minutes of personal time before they must report to the luau for the nights festivities. After several more hours of grueling dancing they are allowed to pass out for a few short hours before they must rise and begin it all again.

In the olden days the girls would often collapse from exhaustion. Then energy drinks came onto the scene. Many of the girls refused to drink them because they tasted foreign and did not fit in with the tastes of their culture. Now that Cintron has released this Pineapple Passion energy drink 99.4% of all hula girls are on board. When you first pull it out of the fridge and drink it while it's nice and cold it doesn't taste like an energy drink at all. It actually tastes like a nice pineapple pop. As it warms up the chemical flavor raises it's head more and more. If you drink this over a half hour, by the end it will be kind of gross, and the pineapple flavoring will become nothing more than an afterthought. I suggest you drink it ice cold and bask in its glory that way. Celebrate the salvation of the hula girl!

For far too long Gatorade ran the sports drink world with its syrupy fluids. Other contenders came along such as Powerade that really did not step up their game. The Vitamin Water came onto the scene. I don't know if it really counts, but I'm going to say it does. They didn't use HFCS so their drinks had a thinner consistency. Now Greater Than comes onto the scene. They are here to let the world know that sports drinks can be all natural and still be hydrating and refreshing.

To boil it down to me this is like coconut water mixed with Gatorade, but it's sweetened with beet sugar. At first it's kind of strange, but after two sips I got used to it and it was enjoyable. It really tastes like someone mixed a little classic orange Gatorade into a bottle of plain coconut water. I drank this after spending a couple of hours in my sweatbox of a print shop, and I definitely felt refreshed. I'll have to try it again after a long bike ride and see how it works.

M - Oh my god Jenny like what are you doing?
J - I'm like totally talking to Brad on the other line. He's such a hunk!
M - As if! He doesn't even have a convertible! You should like totally hang up on him and pick me up so we can go to the mall.
J - But Mindy we were just at the mall yesterday. Actually we've been to the mall everyday for the past 8 months. We even went on Xmas.
M - I know aren't we like totally hardcore! So just shut up. You know you love the mall as much as I do, so get your skinny little butt in your Mustang and drive over here. I hear that the mall diner totally has a new root beer.
J - OH MY GOD! I was totally just talking to Brad about that! He told me that it doesn't taste so much like a root beer. He said it's more like a cola that was brewed with some of the ingredients that were left over from a batch of high quality root beer. He said he didn't even realize that it was a root beer until he was halfway done and read the label! Can you believe that! What a dreamboat! He also said that it has a decent amount of vanilla in it and something else that might be a total butt load of wintergreen or maybe some cloves. He just kept going on and on about how awesome it was though.
M - Jenny, what the hell just happened there? You totally sounded like you were from the Midwest or something.
J - Mindy we live in rural Iowa, we do live in the Midwest, we just like totally love the mall.
M - Whatever girl. Just come pick me up. That food court is calling our names.

If I had to choose the number one achievement of the South I think I would have to choose sweet tea. Sure they gave us submarines, miniature golf and antibiotics, but do any of those really hold a candle to sweet tea? It's so refreshing and tasty.

Even though Tradewinds has a tropical ocean scene on their can they make a decent sweet tea. With every sip I feel like I'm sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch and kudzu is growing all over my property. I have an old yellow dog laying next to me, and a 12-gauge shotgun sitting across my lap. It's the southern dream, and this tea brought it all on. Of course people who are from the south whose grandmothers made sweet tea all the time will probably say it tastes all wrong. I wouldn't believe them. Tell them to invent something more important than beverages.

John Goodman is a man amongst men. I have never seen him in a role that I didn't absolutely love. Keep in mind that I don't think I've seen anything he's done since the early 2000's. He may be the most famous for his roles as Dan Conner and Walter Sobchak (which are both incredible), but for my money there is never a better moment of him on the silver screen than when he states "You just got your asses whipped by a bunch of goddamn nerds.....NERDS!" I think that might be the most commonly said phrase by Editor Dan. Incredible. It's because of that speech that I told the other Thirsty Dudes that I was going to review this drink.

The NERD company stresses that their product is not just an energy drink, it is also a focus drink. On top of your normal energy drink chemical ingredients it also has Vinpocetine, Huperzine-A, Chinese Ginkgo Biloba and DMAE in it, which are cognitive enhancers. I drank this can before I went to band practice today, and I wasn't even thinking about the focus part until I just sat down to write this. I think it actually really works. In hindsight I feel like I was way more focused on what I was playing. So it's got that going for it.

Now on to the fun stuff. As a scientist I can assure you that it is a scientific fact that most energy drinks taste like various melted down types of candy. It's something that I both hate and love about them. Now I know what you're thinking, and yes your dreams have come true. This does in fact remind me of liquefied Nerds candy. It may be a psychosomatic thing, but I had my ladyfriend try it and she also confirmed it. This is one tasty, tasty energy/focus drink. It's one of the best energy based drinks I've ever tasted. Also the company wants to be known as a study aid and avoids being associated with anything extreme or bar/club events. To quote them "Basically, if you want to study drink NERD, if you want party drink a Red Bull. " That is something I can get behind. Hopefully this will get the popularity it deserves. Like the company told us

Now in the eyes of your father, your maker and your coach: go get some NERD!

It had been a long day in the studio. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band we're hard at work recording their "come back" album The Rising. Today had been particularly hard. The Boss was being a real taskmaster and was laying it really heavy on Little Steven. You see all of the music was done being tracked, and now they were working on vocals. Being the professional he is Bruce hit all his parts in one take. When I say one take I mean it. He sang all 15 songs in a row with no breaks, one time through. He didn't even wait for the Brendan O'Brien to load the next track. It sang them all a cappella while the tape ran. It was truly a sight to behold. After he was done and the tracks had been added to the proper song is when the problems started. Little Steven went into the booth to sing his harmonies and he just couldn't hit them because of a dry throat. Bruce just kept telling him to drink some water, but Steven protested. You see he was under contract with HBO for his work in The Sopranos. Part of that contract was that he could only imbibe Sopranos brand soda. Normally he would sneak water and no one would be the wiser, but in the studio they were filming everything for a documentary. He would obviously get caught and sued. Things got so bad that Clarence had to drive all the way out to Newbridge, NJ to pick him up a couple of bottles. Since the show was wrapping up production of the soda had stopped and all the store had left was the amaretto flavor. Little Steven downed a bottle of this strange fake liquor soda with its almond flavoring that is far too strong to seem natural in a soda. Seriously I feel like it's supposed to be mixed with something like the actual liquor. Little Steven loves almonds and it was still hard for him to get through an entire bottle, but he is a champ and he did it. He then marched right into that vocal booth and I'll be damned if he didn't give one of the best performances of his life.

You don't believe me? Watch the video footage it's all in there.

PS. Tony totally dies at the end of the series. I don't care what anyone else says. The screen goes blank like when he got shot before, except this time the music cuts dead instead of fading out. Deal with it.

Is there a juice shortage in the world? If not, does Wegmans think that there is? The last one of these I had was "100% Sparkling Fruit Juice." Now we're down to 50%. Is this going to be a continual decrease? In a few months will there be 12% juice? It will be like a selling point. "Now containing .5% actual fruit juice." People will think it's a good thing and eat it up.

Seriously though, why is this only 50%? Do they think these particular juices would be too strong if sold at maximum capacity? Are they trying to cut down on the sugar? Either way it's still pretty good. The flavor is strong. It tastes like a slightly watered down blend of the two juices it represents. If it were a little bit stronger I would absolutely love it. Maybe 75% is the way to go. I'm talking to you Danny!

Every review we've done for the Lipton PureLeaf line all say basically the same thing: Brisk is absolutely terrible, but Lipton has redeemed themselves with this line. It's repetitive, but true. The Brisk peach tea is basically undrinkable in my eyes. This on the other hand is very nice. I think there could be a tad less sugar, but other than that it's great. It's a nice black tea flavor with a slightly overpowered by an authentic peach taste. There is no peaches listed in the ingredients, but I expect they fall somewhere under the natural flavors. Above that apple juice is listed. Why aren't there more apple teas? That would be great. Get on that Lipton, but make sure it's included in this line.

2 liter bottles are the worst form of packaging for soda to come in. Okay 3 liters are actually worse, and I suppose if a company chose to package their drinks inside of an octopus' stomach that would also be worse. Let's just say out of normal packaging it is the worst.
A. It's plastic, which is inferior to cans, which is inferior to glass bottles.
B. It's too much drink. You generally don't finish it in one sitting and the pop ends up going flat before you get through the whole bottle.
C. If you do finish the entire bottle in a single sitting, you are a glutton and probably are going to end up weighing 398 lbs.

Most companies realize how terrible of an idea these bottles are and forgo using them. Quality companies that is. Generally all you see are Coke and Pepsi products as well as store brands like this one. We went up to Canada on Sunday to get some bookshelves from Ikea. Nothing is better for LPs. We stopped at a grocery store and I saw this on the shelf for $1.19. I'm not one to ever pass up a ginger beer I haven't tried, even when I expect the worst. I made my purchase, made my way out to my car, took a photo in the bottle and cracked it open like the impatient American that I am. While it was in my mouth it tasted like an average root beer. Then I swallowed and the ginger beer flavor became more apparent. Two seconds later a very decent burn swept over my throat.

This is a shockingly decent ginger beer. It's not the best I've tasted, but it's far from the worst, which is what I expected. I still think 2 liters are a terrible idea, and this is most definitely going to go flat before I finish it, but flavor wise it was pretty darn good.

Before I go into how this pop is pretty tasty I first have to ask; can a soda be considered gourmet if it is sweetened with HFCS and has no actual fruit juice in it (well maybe that's part of the natural flavoring)? I don't think this is a run of the mill store brand soda, but by no means would I call it gourmet. Like I said before it's pretty tasty. It has a fruitiness to it that is something like artificial strawberries and oranges mixed together. I enjoy it, but I refuse to accept it as gourmet.

An Ode to Lemonade:
So Simple. So Pure.
Three Ingredients.
Water. Sugar. Lemon Juice.
Tart Yet Sweet.
The Drink Of The Summer.
Harney & Sons Chose Less Tart.
Still Tasty. Still Refreshing.
All Organic.

Apparently "Ode" means writing like a crazy person with every word in capitals.

Sharon, I'm telling you chewing 37 pieces of bubble gum at once is not a smart move. You're going to throw your jaw out of its socket. Of course jaws have sockets how do you think they move? There you've gone and done it. You have 37 assorted brands of bubble gum and you're chewing them all at once. You're just lucky if you ask me. Hey that's my birch beer! Why are you drinking that with all that gum in your mouth? You're just being a glutton now. What's that? It tastes like carbonated bubble gum with a slight aftertaste of birch beer? I would imagine the gum would overpower the soda, I mean you do have 37 pieces in your mouth. Of course it's sickly sweet. You just mixed a butt load of gum and soda. I can't believe how much you're enjoying that. Don't go for 38!

*POP!*

I'll go pull the car around and take you to the hospital. It's a good thing Real Soda makes Girlan Pink Birch Beer since everything you'll be consuming for the next few weeks is going to be through a straw and you can't seem to get enough of bubble gum.

On a side note Mike got called out for being sexist in a review last week. I thought it was funny that the reader complained that he equated something he didn't like to the female gender. He did say it was a "girl's drink" but it wasn't because he didn't like it. I thought it was hilarious and ridiculous that the reader took offense to something that wasn't even stated, yet took no offense to the actual sexist statement that it was a girl's drink because it was pink. This drink is pink, it's called "Girlan," and the bottle says, "It brings out the little flower in you." I'm sure someone is going to have a field day with that.

The Honest company has a small team of knights that it keeps on it's payroll. There are really only three of them, but they are in the upper echelon of the payroll, even though they only have one job to perform. That job is to distract without killing the dragon that guards the green tea that lives on a certain mountain whose location I cannot reveal due to legal reasons.

Not only is this physically tolling and extremely dangerous to the knights, but the psychological damage is through the roof. You see knights are programmed from birth to kill dragons. It takes all of their will power and concentration to merely distract the beast and not kill it. That is the true reason for their astronomical salaries.

40 knights once agreed that it was well worth it to taste the tea that their efforts brought forth. It's just a shame that 37 of the 40 perished in the line of duty. The few that are left have discovered that if you mix in a little passion fruit with the tea the already wonderful taste is improved upon. It's still a bitter green tea taste, but the slight fruity hint gives the tea a new dimension. Here's to hoping that the final three knights live long and productive lives!