Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

From great juice to great coconut water Purity Organic has you covered. While it is easy to screw up a juice, most coconut water is pretty standard. Unless it's something deep in the fancy end of the spectrum most coconut waters taste pretty much the same. There is something about this coconut water that is a bit different. I know this isn't the right word, but it tastes more fiberous. It's as if you can taste the shell of the coconut in this more than other brands. It's not a bad, nor a good thing; it is simply an observation.

The use of mango puree gives this a nice fruity kick that will make your hydration taste just that much better. I've met humans that don't like eating mango (I'm looking at you Mike), but I've never met one that does not like the taste of mango. When in doubt go mango, you can't lose.

Dear Bolthouse,
Why did you hide that coconut all the way in the back of the image on this label? The way the fruits are arranged makes me think that this is going to pack a powerful fruit punch, with just a splash of coconut in the aftertaste. In reality this is mostly coconut water with some fruit flavor to it. I will give you that it has a thicker consistency than most coconut water, but the flavor is still there. Actually I will say this is 50/50 coconut water/juice. It's enjoyable, but it's just not what my taste buds were expecting.

Even with the coconut being stronger than I anticipated this is truly a tropical beverage. It's made up of coconut, guava, orange, banana, pineapple and dragonfruit. Get rid of that banana (you can't really taste it anyway) and that is a party I would be severely bummed if I wasn't invited to. All of those flavors blend into a new greatness that I can only assume most people would love to add rum to. Tropical fruit and rum go together, right? I mean if I understood everything correctly it's the official booze of desert islands. There is also “finely ground chia” in here, but it's so finely ground that I can't pick it out in the texture nor the flavor.

While this drink wasn't what I expected it to be going into it, it ended up being a nice ride that I will happily take again.

If pop culture has taught me anything it's that nothing will change today. Okay, maybe that's slightly obscure, but I'm referencing one of the greatest songs ever written: New Years Day by U2. Say what you will about their later output and what Bono has become, but those first couple of records from the 80s are totally solid. As you also may have guessed today is January first and I'm at home awaiting nothing.

Last night was a different story altogether though. I threw a party at a local bar where I made people listen/dance to the songs I wanted to hear. At midnight while nearly everyone else guzzled their champagne and other libations I was taking pulls of this delicious sparkling juice. I think it's safe to say I won out in that scenario because this is just wonderful. This is just apple juice and mango juice (from concentrate) with some bubbles added. It's fruit, so it's sweet without added sweeteners. It's also apples and mangos so it tastes great. The mango flavor was a lot stronger than I expected and that was a pleasant surprise. Should I have drunk this entire 25.4oz bottle by myself? Probably not, but while I was working on diabetes, I watched a lot of those people get drunk and do things/go home with people they never would have if they were sober. Maybe that's just part of the human experience though, and I'm just missing out. Ehh, who am kidding, I'll stick with the sweet juice.

I honestly thought that I was coming around to diet drinks. I thought that I had become somewhat immune to the artificial/zero calorie gang; you know the guys who wear bandanas over their faces when they rob you of the flavor of a beverage. A lot of the time it doesn't bother me anymore. Perhaps it's like the bully who steals the same kids lunch money every day; at a certain point that kids body is just no longer going to expect lunch and learn to deal with the hunger. In this drink the sucralose is strong. It's strong enough to take away from the Tang-esque orange flavor that is obscured by it.

It's not completely overpowering and there is a definite faker orange flavor in here. I also give diet drinks a little bit of leeway because there are a ton of people out there who love them, and I can't disparage an entire genre of beverages when there is a learning curve. If you don't mind the diet flavor, this is a zero calorie beverage that is probably right up your alley. Me I'm gonna get a badge and hunt down that group of taste thieves.

Man, I'm so glad you talked me into going to that baseball game. I mean the game itself was just as boring as I expected it to be, but when that guy you brought got that foul ball to the face, man that made everything worthwhile. I mean I guess I feel bad for laughing so hard, but he really just wouldn't shut up and was being such a know-it-all. It just seemed like it was the universe telling him to shut up, just like everyone around us wanted to.

Oh man, he actually broke his jaw and had to get it wired shut? Now I really feel bad for laughing. You know what he did go on for about 40 minutes about how he loved a perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so let me make him one and you can drop it off. First you lightly toast the bread, then you spread peanut butter one piece and a generous amount of grape jelly on the other. Actually he did say about 20 times how he loves his grape jelly, so I better double up on it. Don't worry that it will be messy, he can't chew anyways so I'll throw it in a blender for him. Hmm, I don't know what would be the appropriate liquid to add to this. I guess grape soda will have to do. Now we blend.

This is actually kind of insane. It tastes like a grape soda, but then you get weird flashes of bread and light hints of peanut butter. The grape soda kept it's carbonation as well. That dude is going to love this if he's really into PB&J as much as he claims. Me, I think it's kind of gross after a sip or two. Oh, don't forget the crazy straw!

Welcome to Old town folks. We have our world renowned gunfight shows at the top of every hour from noon until 8pm. If seeing men in white hats shoot at men in black hats is what your heart desires, then there is no better place to you to be every sixty minutes. Don't be alarmed when the man falls from the roof after being shot. It's all an act and he lands on some hay bales that break most of his fall. Sure you hear a rib snap every once in a while, but he knows the danger he puts himself in for $10 an hour.

There's really not much around here other than the show. Our town is pretty small and you can see it all in fewer than 15 minutes. Might I suggest that you check out the shooting range while you wait for the show? For a quarter you can shoot our guns that make cans flip and someone play the piano. I'm not sure if they work with lasers, or just shots of air, but it's quite fun for about 3 minutes. The rest of your time you might as well saunter over to the saloon and get a nice cold one. I of course mean sarsaparilla, since this is a family establishment and we don't have a liquor license. I know all of you out there are hoping to drink a nice Sioux City sarsaparilla, but it's my duty to inform you that we only serve the Old Town Root Beer Company's version. I know it's not as good, but our owners are trying to scrape every nickel they can out of this “amusement park,” so they made their own soda. It's not too bad. It's not as strong as I like my sarsaparilla, then again they spell it “sarsparilla.” I don't know what's up with that. It tastes like someone took some of the good stuff and mixed it with an equal amount of standard root beer, then added a bit more vanilla. The result is that it's the creamiest sarsaparilla I've ever tasted. It's a nice change up, but the harshness and boldness is what I love about this flavor, and it's absent in here. Oh well, it's all we serve, so it's what you're going to get. Better nurse it for a while, we still have 34 more minutes until the next show.

Ah, familial holiday parties, what a better time to eat more garbage than you ever would on a normal day and also get a standard beverage review out of the way for Thirsty Dudes. Somewhere in the haze of cookies, pies and ice cream I found myself with this bottle of Schweppes.

Sometimes it boggles my mind when I realize we haven't reviewed a certain drink. As it turns out when we started this website we wanted to review the drinks that people might not be as familiar with, and now we have some catching up to do on the usual suspects. To me Schweppes is THE classic ginger ale. It's what was around when I was young and it's what I was given when I had a stomach ache. Side note to parents it's the ginger in old time ginger ale that soothed the stomach. In most modern ginger ales the amount of actual ginger included is minimal if it's there at all.

If you've ever had a ginger ale you can imagine how this tastes. It's a ginger beverage that contains very little ginger, so it has zero burn, but sometimes that is just what you're looking for. To me this is what all store brand ginger ales are based off of. It is superior to them, but it's that type of ginger ale. It's sweet, quasi ginger flavored sparkling water; exactly what you would expect from a “big soda” ginger ale.

I've been trying to figure out how to best describe the flavor of this soda. It has a specific taste that I just could not put my finger on, as hard as I might try. I decided to go back and read some reviews of other guarana flavored sodas that we have written, and none of them seemed quite right. In the past I have talked about how sodas of this nature taste like a fruitier version of kola champagne aka liquid bubble gum. Seeing as this doesn't completely gross me out and make me feel like I'm drinking a sweet shop, I kept reading. I finally came across a review where I compared guarana to pineapple flavored bubble gum, and I believe that is as accurate as I'm going to get. Luckily the gum flavor is pretty low. Actually, so is the pineapple. It's like someone took hints of those two flavors and mixed it in with a general fruitiness. They then took that concoction and mixed it with generic bubbly sugar water. The result is this soda.

The bottle says nothing about caffeine, but the guarana plant has one of the highest concentrations of caffeine found in nature, so I'm sure this thing will pack a punch that will wake unexpecting people right up. Me, I'm just going to have a couple of sips and see where things take me.

This little guy proved to be a minor conundrum for me. You see I generally drink the protein shakes we are sent after I work out. That is what I was originally told to do when I first started going to the gym, so it's what I always followed. With this it seemed like I should drink it beforehand. Who needs an energy boost after a workout? Get that in there beforehand to give yourself a little extra push and stretch your limits a bit. Being that this is the terrifying modern age, I took this question to Google and found out that there is actually an argument amongst professionals as to when is the best time to consume protein in the work out world. Some say after because it helps repair muscles, while others say before because it will give you extra strength during the workout. You know what? I'm not that serious about this whole thing. I go to the gym so that I don't become a fat, lazy slob like so many Americans who are approaching middle age. I'm not looking to get ripped, I just want to stay remotely healthy and work off some of these unnecessary Thirsty Dudes calories. Since there was no definitive answer I chose to go with before the gym for this round. Let me tell you I certainly got an energy rush from it. I worked out longer and harder than I normally do, and now I'm a gross sweaty mess in desperate need of a shower, but I forced myself to write this review first.

A lot of protein drinks are chalky, due to the whey protein, but this is nothing if not creamy. It's also thick, as if a milkshake was halfway thawed and you pounded it. Luckily no brain freeze accompanied this ingestion. I think the greatest thing that Monster pulled off with these is that it's incredibly chocolaty and it doesn't taste a thing like an energy drink. I think this may be the only beverage that includes taurine that I have tasted that doesn't make me question if I'm being poisoned or not with chemicals. Sure the use of sucralose along with the sugar gives it a bit of a diet taste, but that is something you come to expect and accept with protein drinks. If they were laden with sugar they would kind of defeat the purpose of the workout. The 16g of sugar in here is pushing it a bit as it is.

At the end of it all, this tasted fantastic and I'm still buzzing with energy after a fairly intense workout by my standards. Who'd have known that Monster had this in them?

The Pop Shoppe is a classic Canadian soda company that has had a bit of a resurgence in recent times. They tend to put out pretty standard flavors that taste, well like the standard. That unfortunately is not the case with their orange soda. Generally orange pop has a strong crisp flavor to it that doesn't really taste like oranges, but has still managed to enchant the Western world's taste buds. Sometimes companies use actual orange juice, but that's a whole other ballpark of wonder. This soda tastes like neither of those things. It's like the company got the ratio wrong of flavor to sweetened carbonated water. The orange flavor is much weaker than one would come to expect in a soda such as this. There is a flavor very much there, but the part that makes it anything similar to the fruit is in low quantity. How am I supposed to enjoy my veggie dogs now?

I don't mean to be a jerk, but has anyone else noticed that the Sunshine State has been putting on a bit of weight? It just looks like it's getting a little paunchy in the middle. I blame it on the whole scene surrounding Orlando. That damn gluttonous mouse and his friends make bulging out the center of the state. There are so many people, who consume so much terrible food. Those same people always want to be on the go to make the most of their limited vacation time. What we have here is something of a cure all. It's the essence of Florida, in a diet, liquid form that gives the imbiber a boost of energy.

Unfortunately it is a bit heavy on the diet side of the flavor. This taste insanely like fresh orange juice, except it tastes like that very specific flavor has been made into a powder and then mixed with equal parts zero calorie sweeteners . It's insane how such a pure taste is there, but also ruined by the sweetener. I've come a long way in accepting these sweeteners, but in here it's still too much for me. I'm sure those who are die hard diet soda drinkers would be all about this, but the rest of society will surely be put off.

Oh, this is actually called Ultra Sunrise, and not Ultra Sunshine? Well, everything I said stands, it just makes a little less sense talking about Florida the way I did. It really does taste like that state's staple fruit though.

If you ever want to feel real dumb go into an establishment and order yourself a hot tea. You'll ask for green tea, but all they will have it black, but that is fine. They also offer cream with it. You normally drink your tea black or with soy/almond milk, but hey why not live on the edge. It will show up to where you are sitting, and the mug will be filled, as well as the tea pot on the tray. It's always such a nice touch when they leave you a tea pot isn't it. You add a little cream and stir it up. You let it sit for a minute to cool down, and then take a sip. This is the weakest tea you have ever tasted, you immediately think. You take a few more sips, annoyed, but oh well the show must go on. A few minutes later it gets a bit brighter and you notice there is a tea bag on your tray. A metaphorical palming of the face occurs and you just hope no one else noticed your stupidity. Yes, this was my past Friday night when I went to see Jen Kirkman at a comedy club (dumb two drink minimum).

My reason for telling this story is that the only way you can really mess up plain unsweetened black tea is by forgetting to actually ad the tea. Luckily for me the folks at Purity Organic are not the same sort of dummies as I am. This is exactly what you would expect. It's black tea that has been properly brewed with no sweetener added (or anything else for that matter). If this is what you want, you simply can't go wrong.

The way that some people talk about Tiki parties makes me think that there are some weird undertones at said parties. You know the kind that might involve a bowl of keys and swapping of some sort. Now I'm 99.9% sure that's not the case, but man do people get excited to dress up like they are in Hawaii and drink tropical tasting alcoholic concoctions. I personally have no place at these gatherings and will continue to keep my distance. They can continue to do what they do an if I ever get the urge to drink something that might remind me of palm trees and a warm ocean breeze I'll grab a bottle of Tiky pineapple. Actually, wait…€¦no this is just your standard pineapple pop and it's only the name that puts me in that state of mind. There are many other more deserving beverages to send my mind to paradise. Give me a glass of guava juice and I'm all set.

This is pretty much the same as their US pineapple soda except they use real sugar and it's made in Guatemala. Oh, and don't forget it has a much cooler bottle. It's made with artificial pineapple flavor that does well enough to imitate the real thing. It tastes closer to fruit than just sugar water.

Get out your grass skirts, your Hawaiian shirts and your rum if you so choose people. This winter isn't going to be going anywhere for quite some time, and anything that helps you keep sane I'm okay with. I will continue to hide under a large pile of blankets in read because your fun is not my fun.

For you drinkers out there in the world, this is a classy way to use soda as a mixer. No longer will you have to bust out plastic bottle and aluminum cans of syrup heavy soda to mix with your liquors. Now you have a nice glass bottle of higher quality soda (or sparkling beverage for you fancy types) to mix with your adult beverages. To me everything about this bottle screams mixer, and it looks like it's not meant to be drunk on its own. Oh but it is.

This is a mixture of the extracts of Valencia and Pera oranges, tangerines, key limes as well as pumpkins and carrots (hey why not?). It's on the dryer side of things and isn't very sweet (14g of sugar per serving). The flavor is lighter than you would expect from a soda, and it has a citrus taste that is heavy on the orange. I personally can't taste the pumpkin or carrot, but I will assume that it would taste differently if they were excluded.

This is nice because it is dry and light. It's the kind of beverage that I could sip all night at a party and not feel terrible, emotionally and physically, for doing so. In fact I did just that Friday night. This is about as classy as I get folks. It's the antithesis of brands like Faygo. Those companies have their places and so does Q.

2014 is winding down, and if someone were to ask me as a professional imbiber of beverages to sum up the year I would have to say that these 365 days have been all about low/zero calorie sparkling waters. The past couple years have been owned by fake Vitamin Water, but man sparkling water is everywhere this year.

While I may not be the biggest fan of these drinks, I do appreciate their growth and that humans are taking more interest in what they ingest, particularly their sugar intake. Americans drink far too much soda, diet or not it's just too much. Since I've cut most of it out of my diet (minus reviews) I feel better and I dropped pounds pretty quickly. Now a lot of these sparkling water companies are just dumping some sucralose into flavored water and calling it a day, and their lack of effort is very noticeable. Skinny Girl (I still hate the name) takes things a bit further. They use fruit juice (albeit from concentrate), sweeten it with honey, cane sugar and sucralose (culminating in only 2g of sugar per bottle) and then add some vitamins and super fruits so your body is actually getting something beneficial from this drink. That's right they have combined the former champion with the reigning one, and they mingle oh so well.

This is made with grapefruit juice and it tastes like it. It's not an overly strong taste, but it's stronger than if you just left some grapefruit soak in water. It has a bit of a diet taste to it, but it's not bad at all. Arizona it's hard to stay mad at you for your dumb brand name, when you make it taste so good. Who needs garbage grapefruit pop that doesn't even taste like fruit when this is available with only the slightest fraction of calories?

Excuse me, waiter? I have a question about the menu. It says here that you serve “Classic Margarita Pizza,” what is that all about? Is it like a pizza that has margarita mix stirred into the sauce? I mean I'm assuming it's not a pizza with a drink poured on it. Oh, it's “margheritra” not “margarita.” So it's just a pizza with sauce, moz cheese and basil? That makes much more sense. The thing is that I now have a hankering for a margarita since we've been talking about it. I understand that we're at an arcade for a children's birthday party, but I've got the itch. Do you have anything that would scratch it? Of a mocktail? That would work.

You know what, this is pretty darn good. It's like a lime soda with a little bit of a twist. I have to be honest here; I have never actually had a margarita, so I don't know what they are supposed to taste like. I always assumed it was something festive and slightly tropical, and that is exactly what is being served to me in this can. It makes me with this party had an island theme so all the kids could have a reason to enjoy this, and I wouldn't look like a total creep trying to get them to drink it. Man, that lime taste is strong, and it's great. Now where's my pizza?

Is everything nicer and classier in Italy? That was my experience in my brief time there. I have very little interest in coffee, and I extremely enjoyed my cups there. The baked goods were some of the best I've ever had and the people were all wonderful.

The picture on this label makes me wish I was in a little corner diner, or better yet a soda shop in Italy and a nice cold glass of Paoletti was being placed in front of me by a friendly waiter/ress. I would smile and nod politely, because I only know how to say excuse me and thank you in Italian, and as they walked away I would take a nice refreshing sip and all would be right in the world.

This is an exquisite grapefruit soda that borders on being dry. I don't understand how it has a dry flavor when there is 30g of sugar in it, but here we are. I mean it's definitely sweet, but I guess it's just not over the top like most other grapefruit sodas are.

I'm just going to sit in this cafè, slowly sipping on this soda, soaking in the atmosphere until the last drop passes my lips. Then I will get up with a smile, leave my money on the table and go get lost in a city I've never been to before and then none of you will have to read my ramblings anymore because I was too trusting of people and I was brutally murdered.

Growing up in the suburbs of Missouri there were two things that Little Jimmy hated more than anything. The first was hearing the different ways that people pronounced his state's name. It was completely infuriating to him that people cared so much to argue about it, especially since they all lived in the same state anyways. The second was that soda pop never really tasted like the flavors they claimed to be. Cherry? Orange? Grape? Those are fruits that have very specific flavors and the sodas that companies like Crush were putting out simply did not resemble those flavors, except in the most rudimentary way.

Once Jimmy was old enough to properly work with lab equipment and kitchen ware he went about creating his own sodas for him to enjoy. His carbonated refreshments were dead on with their flavors. He made sure the cherry tastes like cherry the orange like orange, and of course the grape like grape and not a syrupy mess. Once he had perfected the fruit flavors, he moved on to a bigger fish. The soda shoppe in his town served a caramel cream soda that was just awful. People loved it, but Jimmy had more refined tastes, and it tasted nothing like the caramel candies he would get from the five and dime. It just tasted like overly sweet, overly burnt sugar. A dumb description I know, but Jimmy is in fact a child.

I don't know exactly what Jimmy did to perfect his soda, but he spent weeks locked up in his house working at all hours that his mom didn't make him go to sleep or school. The final result ended up being a soda that did in fact taste exactly like a liquid version of caramel candy. It was creepy how much it tasted like it, with just the smallest cream soda undertone.

Jimmy never really drank more than that one bottle he originally made, because he quickly realized that it's not a flavor that he wanted to have in soda form. He loved the candy and would chew it all the time, but it was just too much as a soda. So he moved onto bigger and better flavors.

Is there anything more yuppyish than a juice bar? I'm sure there is (perhaps a wine bar) but it's pretty high on the list. The thing is that I love them. They are like a dream to me. I don't venture into one very often, but that is solely due to the cost, and I'm poor. Juice bars may be the only yuppie thing that I actually enjoy, but oh how I enjoy it.

At the juice bar that I occasionally visit along with their dizzying array of press made juices they also have a giant dispenser of water that is infused with a variety of things. Sometimes it's fruit and sometimes it's spices. My favorite times are when they have water infused with basil to sip on as you wait for your juice to be made. That's right, basil isn't just for Italian cooking anymore, and when you let it soak in water the water tastes incredible. It's not something you would chug on, but it's one fine sipping beverage.

When I saw this on a recent trip to Toronto I absolutely needed it. I forwent food and spent what was left of my Canadian money on this drink, and I made a wise decision. This is fantastic. It's simply water that had peaches and basil soaking in it (there are actually some peach chunks floating in the bottle). There is also some sweetener added to it, which I don't think is necessary, but humans like their sweetness. The cane sugar isn't so much of a problem as the stevia is. When you infuse water the flavor is generally pretty light, whereas stevia is a fairly strong flavor. In here it's pretty much kept in check, but it still distracts from the natural flavor of the peach and basil. My advice is ditch the sweetener and let the actual flavors work their magic. I'm excited to try the other flavors on future trips up north.

Raspberry tea, who doesn't like it? Oh, adults who think that it is too sweet? Yeah I can see that. It used to be a standard for me, but the older I get the less I drink of it. Actually my intake of sweetened tea is fairly low these days, while the amount of unsweetened tea is through the metaphorical roof. The thing is that you can't quite get a proper raspberry flavor without the sweetness. This product falls somewhere in the middle. It's nowhere near as sweet as say and Arizona or Peace raspberry tea, but it's definitely got some sugar in it to keep the flavor up; 19g per serving to be exact. Sure they could have gone even lower, but the taste of the raspberry probably would have suffered.

I like that this still has a good deal of the “dryness” you get from unsweetened teas, but it also has a nice raspberry flavor. It helps that they used real juice in the flavoring process.

Is this perfect? No. Is it still great? Yes. This may still be too sweet for those of you in middle age and above, but I bet it would sit just perfectly on the palate of someone in their late 20s. Am I really at a point in my thoughts where I need to rank teas by the age of their consumer? No, not yet, but close.