Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

Before we even took a sip my girlfriend proclaimed Rosé to be the grossest of all wines. She also added that it was wine for old ladies. It's apparently a mix of red and white wine for the geriatric woman.
This is my least favorite of the Vignette sodas. It's very dry, and not very flavorful. It really doesn't taste much like anything at first. Then it has a slightly grapey aftertaste.
If you see Vignette anywhere go with one of the other flavors.

I really need to get myself some cane sugar stalks. I think it would be an interesting experience. Pannela is raw unrefined cane juice. It's a pretty great sweetener. I like this way more than the sugar cane juice I had last week.
This looks like it should be a tea, but it's just pannela and some natural peach flavoring. There are two ways peaches flavor drinks. This unfortunately did not fall under the category that I love. It's still better than artificial flavoring, but it does leave me wishing it were a little bit better.

Upon first sip I thought "Wow this actually tastes like strawberries." The more I drank the less it tasted like fruit, and the more it just tasted like sweet liquid. It's not my favorite Aloevine flavor, but it's not bad. I would just recommend the other flavors first.

You know what's awesome? A decent grape pop. Grape pop has the potential to be so bad, so when a company gets it right it's cause for celebration. A celebration such as a work picnic perhaps? All the adults are playing softball downing some brews while the kids are running around getting in trouble with grape pop dribbling down their chins.
Nehi is a picnic pop. It doesn't actually contain grapes, but the flavor they have created does taste more like a purple grape than it does chemical.

After Mike's review of the Made Blueberry Lemonade, I couldn't wait to try this. Do I like it as much as he liked his? No. Do I still think it's very good? Yes. My only real complaint is that the tea flavor gets lost in all of the fruit juice. It has a very strong fruit flavor, with a slight tea aftertaste. It's pretty sweet, but not to an overbearing extent. If I were in the mood for an iced tea, this would not be my first choice. It is something that I will definitely be enjoying again when I just want a nice fruity drink.

I just recently found out that a bunch of beer breweries also have their own line of root beer. I for one think that's pretty rad. A friend recommended this, and said that Abita also made really good beer. I will just have to take her word on that.
I really like the bottles that these come in. They are shorter and fatter than your typical bottles. Something about them just screams "Hey these are the kind of bottles cowboys would drink out of!"
I was a bit skeptical when I read the ingredients and it says "root beer flavor." I was expecting it to taste like those little root beer candies. Luckily I was wrong and it has a fairly good taste to it. This is a great root beer for someone who wants something more than an A&W or Dads, but doesn't like the complex flavors in a root beer like Virgils.

After I wrote my review of the Original Noon to Midnight, I had an email chat with Steve from 12. He let me know that they would be releasing the Rouge version of it, and asked me to give it a try. I told him I would because anytime a company takes the time to write us a nice thought out email, I will always give their product another try.
My girlfriend found it at our local grocery store, and we decided to drink it tonight with our gourmet meal of pierogis and stuffing (We made it once when those were the only two foodstuffs left in the house. It ended up being surprisingly good). I definitely enjoyed the Rouge way more than the Original 12, mainly because it lacked in fennel. I just couldn't get over the taste of it in the Original.
It is a very light, dry drink. It's a mixture of a bunch of different teas, fruit juices, spices and carbonated water. If this had sugar added to it, I bet it wouldn't taste too different from a mid level soda pop. I'm glad there's not though. It makes 12 stand out, and it's not terrible for you. It isn't very refreshing, but it's not supposed to be. It's the kind of drink that you sip with a meal, not something you would gulp down while watching a sporting event.
I was going to give this a rating of 3, but after some thought, it's getting a 4. It may not be something that I would normally grab, but for what it is, it's very good.

Last night I went and saw Let Me In. It's the American version of Let The Right One In. If I never had seen the original I would have thought it was an absolutely incredible movie, but seeing as the Swedish one is possibly the best vampire movie I've ever seen, the remake just seemed okay.
The point of that is that I drank this tea while I was watching the movie. Did you need to know that? No, but I felt like since I was reviewing two peach drinks in a row I should let it be known that there was a time lapse in between them.
I've had quite a few peach oolong teas in my day. I don't know who decided to put those two flavors together, but I understand why the couple is now in an open relationship. This is by far the best one that I've had. It's not peach flavoring, but actual peach juice in it, and the flavor is strong. The peach tastes like it was just about to be fully ripe when they juiced it. A slight bitterness of the oolong still sneaks by though. I also like it when the sweetener in teas is in the bottom half of the ingredients list. It's nice to actually be able to taste the real flavor, and not just sweetness.

Another cider I got on my trip down south. When you're at a peach farm in Georgia, and they have peach cider, you buy a bottle. I think that might actually be a law.
I don't really know what I expected this to taste like. Actually I do. I expected a little bit of a fall flavor, but you know what? They don't really have the fall where peaches grow. This is very good nonetheless. It's slightly different than a peach juice, but it's not as far off as apple cider is from apple juice. One of my friends said that it tasted like the juice in the bottom of a can of peaches. I can see that, but it's better.

This is a bright blue soda that looks eerily like the poison that Christian Slater mixes up to feed to the girl in Heathers. You know the one that makes her fall right over into the glass table.
It tastes like you might expect, like a melted freezie pop. Unfortunately it has a pretty bad aftertaste. It tastes almost diet. How does something with cane sugar have a diet aftertaste?
The cap asks the question "Are you thirsty?" I have to answer "Yes, yes I am because your beverage wasn't very good and I didn't finish the whole thing and pawned it off on my friends."

I saw this on the shelf in a random grocery store and I needed to have it. Then I got home and saw that it fairly largely proclaimed to have "Egg Cream." The thought made me want to hurl. Imagine a nice root beer and then someone dumps a bunch of whipped egg in it. That probably sounds like the worst thing ever.
After putting it off for a few days, I decided this was the night. There were a bunch of people hanging out and I could pass it around, so I wouldn't feel like I had to drink the whole thing.
You know what? It's not that bad. It tastes like someone took a sweet flavorless soda and dumped a packet of Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix in it. It has the consistency of chocolate milk, with a nice thick head on it. It's a bit weird, but the more you drink of it, the better it is. It's really only the aftertaste that is weird.
I also just realized it kind of tastes like when I was a kid and I thought I was awesome, so before school I would mix all of the beverages in my fridge and drink it at the bus stop. On the days that there was chocolate milk, and no orange juice, it really wasn't all that bad. It's like the Burger King self serve special. We've all done that.

You have to love when your grocery stores private brand is as good, if not better, than it's name brand competitors. Wegmans continuously puts out quality products that I love. This juice is no different. It is a perfect blend of orange and pineapple juices. The pineapple is the stronger of the two flavors, just the way I like it. The orange juice tames the pineapple a bit, so it's not so harsh on your mouth/throat. I once ate so much pineapple that the acidity made my mouth bleed. How does that even happen?

The Cawy sodas have been pretty hit or miss. This one is closer to the center of the board than most, but it doesn't quite hit the bulls-eye.
Fruiti Cola is similar to a cherry cola, but instead of cherry being the added flavor it's more of a fruit punch. It has an aftertaste that, as a friend pointed out, is very reminiscent of cotton candy.
I like the flavor of this, but it's a bit too sweet for me to finish an entire can. I can see this being a favorite for little kids.
I also think this may be what Neil Diamond was singing about in "Porcupine Pie." "Tutti fruit, and fruiti blue cheese." Really what was that man thinking?

Like Mike said about the Wegmans Water With Lemon, this tastes like your out at a restaurant and the waiter serves you some water before taking your order. Oops! It looks like the restaurant was out of lemons, so they improvised and gave you a lime in your water instead.
It's nothing fancy, but it's not supposed to be. It's just water with a slight squirt of lime with it. Now stop thinking about your water, and figure out what you're going to order. This is a busy restaurant.

Awhile back, a long time before we started this site, I had the peach Joe's tea. I loved it, and have been keeping an eye out for it since then. I recently found this one at a Whole Foods on a recent tour. While it's not as great as the peach variety, the green tea is pretty good.
It's a pretty mild tea, and the "low sugar" is nice. It's always nice to have a tea that isn't overly sweet, yet not completely bitter. I appreciate the resealable bottle since it is a large quantity of tea.

This is health in a bottle, or so I'd like to believe. This is nothing but pomegranate and mango juice. It's bitter and harsh the way pomegranate juice should be. For those who are unfamiliar, pomegranate tastes like a very intense grape juice. I wish the mango juice were a bit stronger. It's hard when you're dealing with so much pomegranate juice. Let's hope this helps to kick my cold in the butt.

Wow when that first sip hits you this is so incredibly sour. It tastes like your drinking the lemon concentrate that comes in those little plastic lemon shaped bottles. With each future sip you become more acclimated with it and it doesn't seem nearly as sour. At first I thought it was too much, and that I wouldn't be able to finish it. After a few more gulps, I was really enjoying it. I super tart lemonade with a nice mango overtone. It's a little harsh, and I couldn't drink it on the regular, but it would be a nice treat from time to time. I wish I had drunk it when it was super hot outside. You know, how lemonade is meant to be enjoyed.
The same company makes this that makes Hansen's sodas. They know how to made a great pop and interesting lemonade. Bravo.

Disappointment city. A donkey wearing glasses showing its teeth says, "It kicks!" This should have been the best ginger ale I've ever had. Instead mediocrity reigned supreme. When it was in your mouth it tasted like carbonated candy water. Then when you smiled it burned. I love a good ginger burn, the thing was this was a different type of burn altogether. Upon reading the ingredients I discovered there wasn't any ginger in it at all. I don't even want to know what created the burn. I choked through about a third of the bottle, and then I had to give up. To reiterate: Disappointment city.

This is my first review of the slew of sodas I got at the Abbott Farms rest stop in South Carolina. I walked in and saw a wall of random bottles of soda, and my day just got brighter.
This root beer is actually made by Abbott Farms. It's a decent run of the mill root beer. It reminds me a lot of Barq's actually. Instead of having "bite" it comes "with a kick." I would have expected that to mean it had caffeine in it, but no.
Sometimes you want a fancy root beer and sometimes you want a "candy" root beer. This is something that can fill your needs in those times.

Like most people around Buffalo this time of year, I have come down with a cold. I've been downing an obscene amount of juice, and I thought I'd switch it up a bit and try this Pom tea.
Even though my nose is clogged and my taste buds are suffering, the pomegranate, peach and passion fruit flavors cut right through. The fruit makes it really sweet, but there is also a bitter hint of the white tea mixed in. You can really make out each of the separate fruit flavors in each sip. I really love this, and hopefully all of the antioxidants will help clear the sickness out of my head as well.