Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

I actually had this a few weeks ago, but I was so disgusted by it that I left the bottle somewhere. Where to begin? How about by listing three things I love? Strawberries. Yogurt. Granola. One would think that by mixing them all together you would have awesomeness x's 3. One would also be wrong, just like this drink. It's a crime against nature that such great ingredients when mixed together would turn out so terribly. It tasted sour. I checked the expiration date and it had not passed. I also bought it from the grocery store, went home where I immediately put it in the fridge. No more than eight hours later I took it out and drank it. By drank it I mean took three sips before giving up. I shook it properly and everything. It's just not good. It's the only product Bolthouse has put out that I haven't loved. To add insult to injury there wasn't even chunks of granola in it like I had expected. It had all been blended together into a smooth liquid. Lame.

Calypso claims to be the "Taste of the islands." What I want to know is what islands? Are we talking islands out in the Caribbean, or are we talking some tiny little pieces of land in the middle of lake Minnetonka. If you don't know what that is you really need to brush up on a little movie called Purple Rain. Speaking of, I bet this is how Prince drinks to relax on a hot, hot day. He wakes up early, spends a good portion of an hour talking to himself in the mirror, heads down to his basement studio where he lays down some guitar tracks that would melt your brain, makes some pancakes, and then heads out in the backyard where he inexplicably does the Bat Dance for two hours while sipping on some Kiwi Lemonade. Of course he has his servants die it purple for him before he allows it to pass his lips.

Like all of the Calypso lemonades this is very tart. That is because they use real lemon juice and pulp to make it. You can see the lemon pulp floating in the drink, but unfortunately you can't feel them in your mouth. The thing that really stands out with Calypso is that they actually use fruit juices instead of artificial flavors. I think this may be the first drink I've ever consumed that actually has real kiwi in it. You can really tell in the flavor. Hey if it's good enough for Prince how can you argue with it?

Dear friends from the "Great White North,"
My intentions are not to offend you, but what do you really know about rodeos? I understand that a good portion of your police force rides horses, but I don't think the words "rodeo" and "Canada" have ever appeared in the same train of thought before. Hockey, now that's something that makes me think about Canada. You were in the right to use that on your cans of cola. The site of maple leaves and a buckin' bronco together just doesn't sit well with me. It's like when someone who obviously has never looked at any print design in his or her life decides to make a flyer for a show. Not only is each band's name in a different wacky font, but so are all the crucial info for the show. Oh and it's all typed over a way pixilated picture of train tracks, or something just as tacky. Maybe that's going a bit overboard. Your general layout isn't bad, I just can't get over that rodeo thing.....Oh wait never mind. I just took a sip and it made me forget about any flaws to the packaging. This is one hell of a root beer. This is in fact a root beer that cowboys would drink...if it were in a glass bottle. A cowboy would loose all of his cred if he were seen drinking out of a can. Did they have cans in the wild west? I think not! Seriously though, this is top notch. It has chicory root, vanilla, coriander and clove in it. I can get into any root beer where all of the spices and ingredients are all boiled down into wonderful syrup. It gives it such a rugged flavor, as if it should be drank out on the prairie while riding your dusty horse down the trail.

I am serious about the glass bottles though. If Vintage Soda packaged their pop in glass bottles I would give them five bottles all around. They make a serious soda.

There are three out of print beverages that are the holy grail to me. They are Crystal Pepsi, Ecto Cooler and Orbitz. Seeing as I am a nerd I refer to them as the three pieces of the Tri-Force. I paid $14 on this bottle of Orbitz and I don't regret it a bit. Clearly Canadian stopped making this drink in 1996, so this is at least 15 years old. We expected vomit, but it actually wasn't too bad. I used to drink cases of this stuff when it was first discontinued. A store by me blew them out at a quarter a piece. You can't beat that.

Check out this video review we did of this mystical beverage. Due to some weird file conversion the video looks like we shot it in the year this drink was put on the market with a huge VHS video camera.

I opened up the paper today and this is what the headline read: "Thirsty Dudes Makes Reviewers Fat." Print doesn't lie my friends. I can't speak for Thirsty Neuls, but I know Mike and I have each put on weight since we started this website. How could we not? Do you know how much our sugar consumption has increased it's ridiculous. At this pace we'll be starring in the next installment of the Big Mamma's House franchise (for the record I've never see any of those movies). Instead of cutting down on the amount of drinks I imbibe for the sake of Thirsty Dudes, I've cut down the rest of my diet. Also, since the weather is nice I've been exercising a lot more. Specifically I've been riding my bike a decent amount every day.

We had received these "Ultimate Fitness Partner" drinks a couple of months ago, so I figured I'd review the rest of them as I try to lose some weight. The other ones I've had haven't been too bad, but like most things in a concentrated form this tasted like poison. It's as if someone grabbed a bottle of booze to spike the punch at a high school dance, but instead of grabbing the bottle with three X's on it, they accidentally grabbed the bottle with three skull and crossbones on it. Has there ever been punch at dances since the 60's?

So this may taste like Poison Punch (I think that was the name of Mike's band when he was in junior high) it did seem to have the desired effect. I can't confirm that I burned more calories, but it certainly gave me more energy while I was out riding. I was exhausted when I went out, but about 10 minutes into my ride the drink kicked in and I rode for way longer than I expected.

For flavor I would have given this drink a negative 5, but for it's functionality I will give it a 3. I really need to stay away from "shot" drinks.

Corn is by far my favorite vegetable. There are others that I may enjoy, but those other vegetables just aren't as versatile. Sure asparagus is delicious when it's cooked in garlic, but would it work on a burrito or in chili? Okay, I would probably eat that and think it's great. My point is that corn is incredible on it's own with no seasoning, but it also can make almost any meal better. One of the many important life lessons that I learned from Pee Wee's Big Adventure is that there are thousands and thousands of uses for corn, and Tina from the Alamo would be happy to list them all for you. Corn in salsa? Oh god yes. I feel cheated when it's not in there. Through my mass consumption of corn I have never once considered drinking it. That is until this magic bottle of goodness ended up in my possession.

It's Fall. Everyone has their decorations hanging up. A lot of people have dried out colored corn on their walls and doors. As a kid I always wondered why people used to paint their corn. I was little and an idiot. I am now less of an idiot and know that it grows that way. Being as I was an idiot when I was young (how many times can I say that in a review?) I of course tried to eat the colored corn. Bad scene. It does not taste like the corn I am used to, especially since it's all dried out. I later became to associate that corn with what was fed to animals. Now Simply Originals has come around to yet again throw my world into upheaval. They have turned the purple corn, or maize, into a very refreshing beverage.

In Peru chicha morada is a traditional homemade drink. I will tell you this for free: the people of Peru know what they are doing when it comes to beverages. One of their great ancestors was thirsty as hell some hot summer day. He was tired of all of the water he was consuming and decided to mix everything he had laying around the house into a bottle and drink it down. It's lucky for us that he only had water, purple maize, sugar, pineapple, clove and cinnamon. Imagine if he had some meat juice laying around. I assure you if that were the case I would have vomited all over this keyboard. Nobody wants that, especially my keyboard. Seeing as he didn't have meat juice he created (maybe it was a lady of Peru and not a man. The gender was lost a long time ago) what it a refreshing harvest time drink. After a long day of sweating out in the Peruvian corn fields wouldn't it be nice to come home and have your significant other pour you a nice tall glass of corn juice? If you said no, you are horribly mistaken.

I do have this one negative thing to still say about corn. Like Mrs. Tremond in Twin Peaks I will always request no creamed corn. I have a thing with textures.

Last night I went up to Canada to see Laura Stevenson and the Cans play. They were fairly incredible, which is to be expected. In-between bands I walked to a convenient store to see if there was anything unknown to the Thirsty Dudes in their coolers. Vitamin Water. Snapple. Coke. Pepsi. Jones. All of the usual suspects were there. As I was about to give up and head back to the show I noticed this little fellow on the bottom shelf. Canada Dry is a fairly standard "safe" ginger ale. No burn. Not even a real ginger flavor. It is still enjoyable for what it is though. Now they have gotten the crazy idea to mix in white tea and raspberry into the mix. Yes sir I will put my toonie down on the counter and take a bottle.

As soon as this passed my lips my mouth was invaded with an intense flavor, or flavors to be more specific. All three of them (tea, ginger ale and raspberry) hit you in their own way. At first it's just a highly carbonated white tea. Then a small hint of raspberry sneaks in to the mix. Finally as you swallow and take a breath the ginger ale flavor sits on your tongue for a bit. This drink has surpassed my expectations. Canada you've done it again. This is just another reason to lure me up north. First it was beavers and moose, then delicious veggie food and now drinks.

I went for a nice long bike ride today. When I got home I got a call from some friends inviting me over for an impromptu barbeque. Seeing as it was my first BBQ of the year I decided I needed to accompany it with some orange soda. I don't know when I started associating grilling with orange pop, but I feel like it had to have been in the last 10 years. I don't remember ever drinking it when I was a kid. It doesn't really matter because it accompanies it perfectly.

I stuffed myself with veggie dogs, fruit salad and asparagus then washed it all down with a. cold bottle of Olde Brooklyn. As far as orange sodas go it was fairly standard. Nothing stood out bad or great about it. The same company that makes Sioux City also makes this soda, so I always expect greatness from it. The three flavors I've had so far have been fairly average. There's nothing bad about that. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, just not going above and beyond.

I just went to the toity and the smell of my pee took me by surprise. You win this round asparagus.

This is Brazil Gourmet's version of mango juice that they add sugar to. It's really sweet, but it tastes so much like biting into a perfectly ripe mango. I can just imagine the juice spilling over my chin as the stringiness of it ends up between my teeth. The label says there are 1.5 mangos in every bottle. That, my friends, is a lot of fruit.

I really hope that the image of a toucan on the label is really a drawing of their pet bird that sits on the president of Brazil Gourmet's shoulder. There's a board meeting going on and everyone is sitting around a big table. The president gives a speech about quarterly sales and the quality of the latest mango crop. All the while the bird caws to accent certain points. All of the employees are intimidated by the toucan. If it caws while they are being addressed they know they soon will be in need of a new line of work. The bird's word is final! If this is not true, it really should be made a reality.

Honest Tea is fairly common. You might not find it in every gas station or mini mart, but a majority of grocery stores I've visited have it. Due to the fact that it's right in front of my face all of the time, I tend to take them for granite. For that Honest I am sorry. Every time I end up picking up one of your drinks I am reminded of the high level of quality that you keep in your beverages. This tea is no different.

It's made from white tea, which in case you didn't know if the same plant as green and black teas, but it's harvested a lot earlier. This way it has less caffeine and more of those crazy antioxidants everyone is talking about these days. To add even more antioxidants they added acai to the mix. You can't really taste that particular fruit in the mix and I for one am okay with that. It gets put into everything now a days and I'm getting a little sick of it. The mango on the other hand shines through nicely. It lets the tea do most of the talking in the flavor conversation, but it still puts in some good points every now and then. Another good thing about the Honest company is that they don't over-sweeten their teas. They use cane sugar and agave syrup to make the tea "just a tad sweet." Something I greatly appreciate.

Recently I got to tour a coffee plantation. After trying Bai I was pumped to see (and try) coffee fruit. Unfortunately it wasn't the season for the fruit, so they weren't ripe yet. Of course that didn't stop me from picking what was available from the plants and the ground. Here is what I discovered: A) Not ripe coffee fruit just tastes like your run of the mill plant you would pull out of the ground. B) The dried out fruit on the ground tastes like old wood. Both were gross.

Bai apparently knows the proper time to harvest their coffee fruit because this does not taste anything like a poinsettia or some old Amish furniture. It's sweet, fruity and the stuff dreams are made out of. This really tastes like I mashed up a whole mess of blueberries and filtered out all the seeds and chunks. Do you realize how many blueberries that would take? I bet at least a five-gallon bucket of them would be needed to fill this bottle. Bai means business. Don't forget that. Ever.

Zero calories. No sugar. All-natural soda. All of these statements are true about Zevia sodas. In my opinion Zevia is the in process of single-handedly overthrowing the world of diet soda. They were the first company I knew of to use stevia as a sweetener. If this were a movie there would be a pivotal scene where the ambassador of Zevia would give a speech to the towns people to get them riled up. Of course he would be on a horse. He would tell the people that they have been fooled for all these years. Diet soda does not need to taste like butt, artificial butt at that. It can taste decent, and it can do so naturally. At the end of the speech everyone would cheer and then they would run into an epic battle where they would slaughter the armies of aspartame sucralose. When the smoke clears and the battle is finally over Zevia would be crowned king of the realm of diet soda.

In all seriousness this is one of the best diet sodas I've ever had. I have diabetic friends who swear by it, and I should have not taken so long to try it. It doesn't taste 100% like a "regular" soda, but it has the least diet taste of any that I've ever tried. I could go for a little stronger grapefruit flavor, but it's okay where it is now. Even though I haven't had it in over 15 years something about this instantly made me think of Faygo Frosh. I couldn't remember the name of it I just remembered it as the white Faygo that was always at my grandparent's house. It's apparently still in production. I had no idea.

Hey bartender, serve me up a nice cold sarsaparilla. What, you don't have any? What kind of western bar is this? Okay, then fix me up something olde timey. Don't go slippin' no alcohol in there either. No I don't want a Shirley Temple! What do I look like a child to you? A non-alcoholic rickey you say? What on Earth is that? Oh a grown up version of a Shirley Temple. I guess I could try one of those. Let me get this right. This is half a lime squeezed into a glass of carbonated water? There normally is some sort of alcohol added, but you can replace that with any juice? Sir you have sold me on this drink. I will take one with raspberry juice. I do find it odd that of all the juices in the world you have some of the raspberry variety behind that rickety old bar.

This is outstanding. It definitely has an olde time feel to it. On my first couple of sips I couldn't pinpoint exactly what it reminded me of, but when it hit me there was no denying that it tasted like a fancier Shirley Temple. I believe I may be a fan for life.

Those of you that know me probably know that I have stomach issues. They started in high school and have persisted through my adult life. Blah. Blah. Blah. Woe is me. Well anyways a couple of years ago I realized that HFCS is what triggers a lot of the pain. I simply cut the majority of it out of my diet and for the most part I'm fine now. I still occasionally have issues, but who doesn't?

If I still had issues I would be all over probiotic drinks. They balance out the bacteria in your stomach and helps with digestion. That will lead to you have a smiling face, not unlike the one on the top of these little containers.

The mango is pretty fruity. There are also some bananas in here that poke their little heads into the flavor a bit. When I drank the first one of these I thought it tasted a bit medicinal. Perhaps I didn't shake it up enough, because this one did not taste that way. It has a pure fruit flavor. Try it out and give your stomach a little treat.

I decided that I was done reviewing drinks on my trip. I had emptied out the fridge in my hotel room, and we get on our flight in a few hours. I felt like I had drunk a good cross section of the local drink delicacies. Then I stumbled upon this. When I had one of these the other day it was one of my favorite drinks I had on the island. That coupled with it being passion fruit and mango left me little choice. I said to myself "self you must have this!"

This is even better than the mixed berry one. 70% juice with no sweeteners added. It's absolutely incredible. Neither of the fruits are too overpowering, but they are present and flavorful. It's a true taste of the tropics. This is made in CA, so hopefully it will make it's way out east for me to enjoy on a regular basis.

Just like Ben Murphy in the blockbuster film "Riding With Death" this drink is mellow. Passion fruit and orange make a nice combo. They even each other out nicely. A quick blast of passion fruit followed up with some calming citrus. I've drank so many of these type of drinks in the past week that I don't really know what else to say. It's great and I'm going to miss it when I head back home.

All fruit juice, all the time is what I wanted my vacation to be. I was planning on eating nothing but pineapple and avocados all week. The problem with that is that neither is in season right now. I did eat a bunch, but I consumed plenty of other food as well. Seeing as it's my last day I. Decided I should see the island off properly with 100% pineapple juice.

It's good. It's nice and sweet and not to acidic. Apparently pineapples on the island are less acidic, which means no weird pineapple vomit smell. I hate that smell. It's the only flaw in an otherwise perfect fruit. Luckily we're puke free here.

I drink a lot of aloe beverages. I love them, and I've never had one I didn't enjoy. I've also had an aloe dessert cup from an Asian market, which was great. Taking that into consideration when I was out walking around and I saw an aloe plant I decided to break off a leaf and eat it. Big mistake. Even though every aloe based product I've consumed has been sweet and delicious this was incredibly bitter and it tasted like uncut poison. Oh you didn't know you cut poison? You don't watch many movies do you. You have to poison people slowly so it goes undetected. If you don't you'll end up in "the hut." So it was foul and I hated myself for letting it touch my tongue. In order to feel better I realized I needed to renew my faith in aloe so I picked this up. It's pretty standard with the exception that Family uses real fruit juices in their drinks. The chunks are average size and there are plenty of them. It tasted like a mellow mango juice with pulp. Good times.

In our modern world full of so many natural and small company sodas made with real sugar it's rare that I will choose a "mainstream" soda. They generally lack an interesting flavor, and the HFCS wreaks havoc on my ulcer. When I was in a gas station the other day and I saw pineapple Crush for the first time I knew I needed to give it a try. Unlike other Crush flavors this actually has some fruit juice in it instead of just artificial flavors. It actually tastes like pineapple mixed in with that fruity syrup that you would expect. It's not the world's greatest soda, but it's better than most big name sodas.

Here we have Hawaiian Sun's take on the popular Hawaiian drink POG. Both drinks are comprised of passion fruit, orange and guava, hence the name POG. While the classic version is a pretty even blend that favors passion fruit a little more than the others this version is all about waves of flavor. The waves crash on the coast of your tongue in the following order; guava, passion fruit and finally a distinct orange flavor sneaks in the rear. I really enjoy when drinks attack you like that and each individual flavor can be made out.