Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

It's been quite some time since I've come across a new Boylan's flavor. Luckily I came across this one waiting at my front door for me. Gifts are always nice, especially when they are a limited release pop. I don't know what exactly makes a Shirley Temple a seasonal release. I mean you can go bowling any time of the year and while beer may be the official drink of most bowlers, those of us who do not drink alcohol know that there is no other choice on the lanes than a Shirley Temple.

I just looked it up and I was shocked to discover that the actress Shirley Temple is still alive. I had always assumed that she had passed on…€¦crazy. I also discovered that her birthday is April 23rd, so perhaps this soda will be seasonal in celebration of her birth. I can accept that.

The best part of this soda is that Boylan got it correct. They used the proper base of ginger ale and not lemon lime and some people who like to cheap out use. Everyone knows that ginger ale is a superior soda, and it is what belongs in a Shirley Temple. You take that superior soda and put a splash of grenadine in it and bam there you go, a tasty beverage. This tastes exactly like it should. The only thing more I could ask for is for there to be a cherry floating in the bottle. Now that would be true magic. Well, that and me bowling a 300 tonight.

Does anyone else out there think that iced mocha drinks are the adult equivalent to chocolate milk? Like most prepackaged versions I have tried this is a very milky drink that has a nice blend of chocolate and coffee added to it, oh and a healthy heap of sugar. If you are a hardcore black coffee drinker this certainly is not for you, but if you like fancier gateway coffee drinks, step right up my friend. Seriously, if this were labeled coffee flavored chocolate milk, I wouldn't even question it, and kids would be getting all sorts of hopped up on caffeine. Now that is something this world doesn't need. Lay off the caffeine kids, you have enough natural energy as it is.

There are two things that this drink reminds me of. First is the most suburban America restaurant I can think of: Olive Garden. I would like to go on record and say that anywhere that has endless breadsticks, salad and soup is in no way shape of form a fancy restaurant. There is no need to pull out your fanciest clip on tie, and your slightly stained suit coat to take your family out for a meal there; t-shirts and jeans are just fine. Also, it's not gourmet food. It's a crappy chain restaurant that has a fake fancy image to trick the common folk. The one thing it goes have going for it is that they serve peach bellini, which is a nice tasting peach and raspberry iced tea with chunks of peach in it. Now that is something to brag to your friends about, not how large the portions of mediocre pasta are.

To be fair Olive Garden is my only form of reference for peach bellinis. Apparently, it's normally an alcoholic drink that is a mix of peach schnapps and champagne. That sounds horrendous, especially because in the way back time in the early 90's when I actually would drink alcohol I drank way too much peach schnapps and vommed everywhere and it was black and stringy. I couldn't eat anything peach for years.

This is closer to the Olive Garden version than that other unmentionable version. In moderation it tastes like a watered down peach/raspberry tea, but if you add more mix to give it a bit more flavor there is some weird taste floating around beneath the surface. I don't know what it is, but it tastes remotely like plastic. This is to flavor water though, not make a sweet drink, so follow the directions and go light on your squirt and it's a nice treat that has no sugar and no real diet taste.

Oh, and that other thing that each bellini reminds me of? Well, that would be the Kids in the Hall's “Touch Bellini” contest. In fact I'm going to have my own “Touch Bellini” contest. For the next week anyone who sends us an email to thethirstydudes@gmail.com or comments on our Facebook page as to why they should be able to “touch bellini” will be put into the running to receive what is left in this squeeze bottle of drink mix. Kraft sent it to us to review, so we shall pass along our leftovers to you, our twelve readers.

Can someone look back at the Truman Show-esque tapes of my life and tell me exactly what happened to make me such a fool for melon? When I was younger I never disliked melon, but I always thought of it as just there. In fruit salad it was the filler. One of the greatest Simpsons' quotes is about how cantaloupe doesn't matter when it comes to honey dew. I don't think a good laugh is enough to change my taste buds though. It remains a mystery, but I love melon these days.

For years I have been talking about how all I want is a bottle of cantaloupe juice. Think of how amazing that would be. It would be so damn flavorful. The last place I expected to get a little fix for my urge would be in a bottle of Gatorade. While this is a far cry from a glass of actual melon juice, it does taste enough like a mix of cantaloupe and honey dew to satisfy me until science comes through for me. It mostly has that general Gatorade flavor, with notes of said melons. This is the kind of Gatorade I would drink at an early morning sports practice. Remember that dumb summer when I decided to join the school football team and had to waste my vacation getting up way to early? You don't? Well looks like you should rewind those tapes of my life a bit further. I forced a fumble once that won us a game. That play probably consisted of 75% of the game time I actually got. Go make some popcorn, you're in for a wild ride.

I have never drunk apple nectar before. Since most beverages that are labeled nectars are basically a thicker version of the juice, I was expecting this to be somewhere between apple juice and applesauce. Excitement ran high. Let it be known that when I purchase a bottle of applesauce I do not eat it with a spoon like a normal civilized human being. Instead I drink it straight from the bottle, and it's glorious. Why dirty your silverware?

Unfortunately this was only slightly thicker than normal apple juice. I would estimate that there is maybe a spoonful of applesauce mixed in with the rest of the drink. It has a little texture, but nothing to write your congressman about. The real downfall of the drink is the added sugar. If there were ever a juice that did not need added sweetener it was that of the apple. Adding sugar to apple juice gives it a weird candy flavor, which is not what I want at all. If this would have been a thicker/slightly more textured apple juice I would have been pumped. Instead it's sweetened apple pulp concentrate that has way to much sugar in it for any self respecting lover of the fruit.

Do you know what lions don't like? Processed, chemical garbage. Don't get me wrong they will eat the hell out of it, but they won't feel good about themselves doing it. I feel the same way. Does that make me a lion? I have no fierce roar, but I do have a nice golden beard, so perhaps I am partway there. I will on occasion partake in an energy drink, but I generally feel terrible about doing it. There are all sorts of weird chemicals in those things that humans, or any creatures for that matter, should probably not ingest. When I find an organic energy drink, it's something I feel a bit better about drinking.

Roaring Lion knows that most people don't care about such things, so they have a line of regular energy drinks. For folks like myself they formulated the “Au Natural” version. Nowhere on the bottle does it say that it is organic, but it does say it's all natural (with artificial flavor) and that is enough for me not to feel like I'm poisoning myself all that much. Yes I know there are plenty of things found in nature that could kill me instantly, but I'm fairly certain none of them are contained in this bottle.

I don't really know what I expected this to taste like, but it ended up reminding me of a slightly lighter tasting version of your generic energy drink. You know the ones that are all derivative of the flavor of Red Bull. I personally have no problem with that, because it's a flavor that I enjoy. It's a somewhat regular occurrence for me to wish out loud that there were a soda available that tasted like that, without the energy giving properties. If you're striving to be a lion like myself and you like the flavor of such energy drinks, but you don't want to pour all that toxic garbage in your body that will more than likely end up killing you in a couple of decades, give this little guy a try. As an added bonus it comes in a resealable bottle. Now that's something more energy drinks need.

Did you know that Mountain Dew has a new CEO? That may or may not be shocking to you, but what you will say “wait whhhhhhaaaaa?” to is that fact that the new man in charge is no one other than Motley Crue bass player, Nikki Sixx. In a press release he assured stockholders that his crucial rocking will not interfere with the running of the business. He was quoted as saying, “If I can get our sound guy to teach me how to use Photoshop on the bus, that I can certainly run a multinational company from that very same home on wheels.” This left many people in the business and soda world shaking their heads until Mr. Sixx announced the release of a new line of Mountain Dew drinks called “Kick Start.” The newly appointed head of the company then told the world that the product tag line would be “Kick Start your heart from another overdose.” This left shareholders even more bewildered.

We recently received samples of this new line, and everyone at Mountain Dew can calm themselves down as no such tagline exists anywhere on the packaging. In fact it looks rather tasteful and one would never expect that a person capable of such debauchery had anything to do with its creation. The flavor of the Fruit Punch version isn't all that bad either. Even though it is sweetened primarily by high fructose corn syrup, it's not as think as you would expect, especially for being a fruit punch. It has 5% juice in it, all of which seems to be grape juice for some reason. If I had to break it down for you, which I do, I would say it tastes like someone mixed two parts of mild fruit punch in with one part regular Mountain Dew. It's not mind-blowing, or anything all that new, but it tastes pleasant enough.

It has 92mg of caffeine in it, which is slightly more than regular Mountain Dew and about half of the amount in a comparable sized coffee. I know they are trying to push this as a morning drink, but I really have no interest in drinking anything carbonated within the first couple hours that I'm awake. Mountain Dew obviously is always marketed towards younger folks, but man even in college I wouldn't have drank this until the afternoon. Rumor has it that Mr Sixx has been on a steady diet of nothing and Kick Start for the past month. He has overdosed a half dozen times in that time period.

You've come a long way baby…€¦is what I would tell myself if I was a complete creep. It wasn't all that long ago that I would drink “mainstream” soda all the time. I didn't know that there was more out there. Now that it's years later and I have drunk more of a variety than 95% of the population it's hard going back to these types of sodas aka basically anything that also comes in a 2lt bottle.

I don't even remember when the last time I had Cherry 7Up was. I do remember that I used to enjoy it a decent amount. Now I would never refer to it as “Crisp. Clean. Refreshing,” as the bottle does. It's so thick and syrupy to me now. I loved drinking Shirley Temples when I would go bowling as a kid, so when I was able to get it on the regular in this form I was stoked. I remember thinking it tasted exactly the same. Oh how our palates grow to be more sophisticated. This tastes nothing like a Shirley Temple, which I will be enjoying tonight as I actually have a bowling date. As an adult the cherry flavor tastes cheap to me. It's too bad because I was actually looking forward to drinking this, hoping that it would be as good as I remember.

Since I do not have the same tastes as the general public, and because I remember how much I did enjoy this pop at one point in my life, I will give it three bottles. If this was something new, it would probably get two, but nostalgia runs high.

Someone get me a Delorian, this iced coffee has given me an idea. You see the chocolate in here that makes it a mocha rather than a normal iced coffee, actually tastes more like a malt. To be fair, my first couple of sips I was kind of put off by it, but the more I drank, the more I became accustomed to it and really enjoyed it. It's different from any other mocha that I have ever tried, and that makes it interesting. It also got me to thinking. IN the 50's there were malt shops where the teeny boppers would go to hang out and listen to the juke box, you know the whole one drink with two straws deal. Back them coffee shops were places that only dope fiends hung out at, so you know there was a bad stigma about them. I say I take said Delorian and go back and start introducing this at the malt shops. It will get the kids acclimated to the taste of coffee and I will slowly bring in more coffee drinks, until I have created a coffee shop that everyone hangs out at, kids and dopers alike. I will usher in the coffee shop culture of the early 90's four decades early and I will make a killing doing it. I will then leave all of my earnings in some sort account that I can then gain access to at this very moment in history. Think of the interest. I can then use the money to buy even more drinks for this dumb website, and die early of diabetes.

ps. I didn't finish this in time before it started to go bad. I took one sip post goodness and I can't get the taste of rot off of my tongue. ick.

Thirsty Dudes' friend Diana and her sister have a serious problem. It's to such an extent that I am looking into getting them on Intervention. No, they are not alcoholics, nor are they popping pills. They aren't even hysterically inhaling computer cleaner. Their addiction is something so much more sinister. The Vito sisters are addicted to the Dutch food, toast sprinkles.

“Like junkies waiting for their sweet, sweet fix” these two sisters will drive up to St Catharines, ON in order to fill up their tiny hatchback with box upon box of little chocolate sprinkles to put on their buttered toast. It is truly a sickness that needs professional attention, and perhaps a television spot.

I suppose we did benefit from their addiction as on a recent trip Diana brought me back this bottle of juice/lemonade concentrate. Let me rephrase that, “this enormous bottle of juice/lemonade concentrate.” Seriously it would take me years to get through this bottle as you add a tablespoon of concentrate to a glass of water. It is a mixture of apple, strawberry, elderberry and rosehip concentrate. It tastes like what I always hope fruit punch tastes like before I take a sip. This is 75% fruit, which is more than can be said about most fruit punch. It mostly just tastes like a mixture of strawberries and elderflower, which is a recipe for greatness. I mixed it with normal water, but I think if it were added to sparkling water, I would be in for a real treat.

Now back to pestering the folks at intervention, so I can make one of my friends day and embarrass the other a great amount.

I put a limit on myself at the beginning of the year. I was not allowed to buy any new drinks until I got through everything that I had at home. For those of you who have had the pleasure of visiting my palatial two bedroom apartment you probably noticed that I have (had) cupboards and shelves chock full of drinks (not to mention the fridge). I had drinks that I had acquired over a year ago, just sitting there waiting to be reviewed. Most of it was drinks that I didn't have a single iota of excitement about, but for the sake of science I had to push through them all. It took me about two months, but here I am with only two drinks left (I cheated a few times and bought some new juices, sue me…€¦seriously you can try, but I have no money, nor drinks to give up).

For the second last drink of my back stock I have a lemonade that I was actually excited about, but I had wanted to wait until the weather was fittingly nice to drink it. Who wants to drink lemonade in the winter, unless you have the heat cranked, some freshly cut grass candles lit and Summer Breeze blasting on the hi-fi to fool yourself into a different season? I pressed on though and drank this little guy down faster than you would believe. It's great. Some would say that it is close to perfection. It has the good side of lemon flavor, just enough sugar to not pinch your cheeks all the way, and an authentic mango flavor that just cannot be messed with. The mango flavor is ever so slightly lower than that of the lemon, and that is how flavored lemonade should be. It makes me wish it was summer more than ever.

Now I just have one more drink to get through and I can go scour the Earth looking for more drinks again. It feels good to be so close to leveling out.

Editor Dan is a photographer. Mainly he shoots abandoned buildings. He's surprisingly good at it. The point of this is that he told us over the summer that he had access to a building that had a room with a glass wall. On it's own, that is not exciting in the least bit, but then we learned that behind that glass wall the entire room was a giant bee hive. It sounds so creepy and awesome. I had just bought this bottle of Honeydrop and I knew I wanted to do a video review in front of that window.

It's now seven months later, and we never got around to getting Dan to take us to that magical bee place, so I decided to just drink this bottle. As I'm doing so I realize I really should have done it in front of the bees, because it has such a ridiculously strong honey flavor. It is called a tea, but there is really no tea in it at all. It's like someone had a sore throat, so they boiled some water, cut up some ginger in it, added a splash of lemon and then for every two parts of “tea” they added one part of honey. It's definitely a drink that would traditionally be served hot, but it's kind of nice to drink it cold. I could do without the lemon, like I could with most things that flavor. The ginger more than makes up for it though. It has a bit of a burn to it, which I always approve of. If you ever have a sore throat in the summer, you should drink this, because who wants to drink a hot beverage in the blazing sun.

Now that I think about it more, maybe it's a good thing we didn't drink this in proximity to a giant beehive. I know they would be separated from us by glass, but this smells and tastes so much like honey that I bet they would have found a crack to sneak through and the next thing I would know I'd be wearing a beard of bees. That is something I just don't need.

Alova,
This is so unlike me. I never do things like this, but I feel a grand gesture needs to be made. You see, I love you Alova, and I don't care who knows it. I am stupid head over heals in love with you and your wonderful drinks. That is why I am going all out and proclaiming you my favorite drink of 2013, even though we are only two months in.

This is my second beverage I have had form you (okay it's really been a lot more if you count the number of cucumber mint sodas I have imbibed over the past few weeks), and I already know deep down inside that you will have my heart and I will be singing your praises for months to come. It's rare to find a soda that tastes exactly like the fruit it is representing, but you have grapefruit spot on. The best part is that the aloe juice neutralizes the intensely sourness that it usually entails. It's the flavor, without the sour. It's every child's dream (or maybe three children in the world would really care). The moderate amount of sweetener that you used is really what makes this a perfect beverage.

I'm kind of like smitten,
Jason

Since I had never seen a rooibos tea plant, I Googled it (yes I use Google as a verb. It's 2013, embrace it).The plants themselves do not look all that extraordinary, but the pictures of the dried tea look like they would smell delicious. Have you ever gone into a fancy tea shop? It's on of the best smelling places ever. It's also a fairly expensive place to be, but it's worth it to treat yourself from time to time.

Rooibee Red Tea took this what I can only imagine to be delicious smelling dried tea and brewed it up with some sugar in a way that I can only describe as sweet tea made with red tea. It's not as insanely sweet as southern sweet tea, but the base of the flavor is there. That alone is enough to earn this company high marks, but their genius shines through with the subtlety of their flavoring. If someone offered me a watermelon mint drink, and gave no other description I would assume it would taste like a hellish combination of eating watermelon Jolly Ranchers while chewing an entire package of spearmint gum. The thought of that is just completely sickening. Luckily this bottle resembles nothing of the flavors in my mind grapes. The watermelon flavor is very light. You don't even realize your tasting it until you hold the tea in your mouth for a bit. Then you realize that the flavor has been there all along, but it blends in perfectly with the taste of the red tea. As for the mint, it's more of an afterthought. It only rears its head as an aftertaste, the way mint should. Mint is rarely good when it's strong, unless it's gum or you know…€¦a mint.

This is tasty and refreshing. It's a high class tea that you should drink on a nice spring day when it's warm enough to cast off your hoodie, but not so warm as to feel your flesh burn as your sweating yourself into dehydration. I can picture myself out in the country, just lounging on a porch, staring out over fields of wheat, sipping away. I wish I was there now.

Hey Rog, I think you forgot something. No you definitely shut the stove off, and yes you remembered to feed the cats. What you forgot was to add the pears to this tea. I'm pretty sure you remembered to put everything else in, but I don't taste even a splash of pear in here. It's got that herbal, almost licorice, flavor that the wolfberry fruit, euphoria longan, coastal glehnia root and balloonflower root give it. I don't know why we put all of those things in an iced tea, but it does give it a different taste. It's also has that weird rock sugar sweetened flavor. I always thought that was an odd choice for a sweetener, to melt down rock candy. All of that stuff is there, but no pear whatsoever. You really must have forgotten to add it.

I know I'm not supposed to be drinking the product while working on the line, but hey I'm thirsty and I like to think I'm working quality control. Wait, why are you on the phone? You're seriously calling security on me? For drinking one bottle of tea in the 35 years I've worked here? You're a real jerk Rog. I hope your cats got annoyed at you always forgetting to feed them and they turned the stove back on and escaped out a window before burning your house down. That's what jerks like you deserve.

American's will be in for a shock if they ever go to Europe and order lemonade, as more often than not they are carbonated. I don't understand why that is, but it's life. I was certainly surprised the first time it happened to me, but it was a good surprise. It doesn't end up being a standard soda. It's more like an Italian Soda aka carbonated juice. Instead of adding whatever other garbage is in your every day pop, it's like they took a glass of lemonade and just added bubbles. It's interesting, and a nice change of pace.

Now I knew this was carbonated, as it says so fairly large on the label. What tricked me this time is that I thought it was going to be lemon and lime with some blood orange mixed in. I mean what would you expect when you see the word “limonade?” In reality there is no lime contained, or lemon for that matter. I guess limonade is just a word that means any sort of ade made from a juice.

This has a nice blood orange flavor, that doesn't taste overly sweetened. The use of beet sugar was a nice choice. Now I want to go to the store, buy a bunch of blood oranges and make blood orange-ade. I bet it would be incredible and I could put the kids down the street's lemonade stand out of business. That will teach them to throw snowballs at my car.

If this bottle weren't completely sealed I would have questioned whether or not someone had replaced the beverage with some sort of poison. Actually, do you guys thing someone could have done that with a syringe in the nub at the bottom of the bottle? It really didn't taste right. It had one of those flavors that set off alarms in your taste buds/brain that warn you to make sure you're not drinking antifreeze. On top of that when I first shook it up there were these clouds floating in the drink that were definitely a different consistency than the rest of the drink. It's a little disturbing.

So what we have here is a bottle that tastes like watered down berries mixed with some sort of coolant. Not exactly what I look for in a beverage. It's a totally different chemical taste than other energy drinks. Apparently this is a natural poison.

As it turns out it either wasn't poison at all, or I have a high tolerance. I drank this a while ago, and I have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil, or show any signs of doing so. Looks like “heart stoppage” does not need to be included in the list of possible side effects after all.

Show me someone who doesn't like peaches and I will show you a being that is obviously not human. Peaches are glorious. They are juicy and delicious and I just can't get enough of them. The thing about peaches is though, they should not be chopped up into chunks and left to float in a can of peach juice. They tend to start to break down a bit. Being the consummate professional that I am, that doesn't bother me one bit, but I feel the texture of these chunks could be a turn off to some people.

I also don't understand why this can needs to contain things such as citric acid, xanthan gum and white cloudy antifoaming agent. Juice, water, sugar and peaches are all you should ever need/want in a juice like this; well you could even do without the sugar. That being said this juice is fine. It tastes like peach juice and it has a ton of peach chunks. Aliens would be so pissed.

There were two things Johnny Snake Eyes loved in life: his switchblade and his dice. To be fair, he really only pretended to care about his blade to give him a tough appearance. He really just lived for his six sided friends. You could almost always find him in some back alley or subway platform running a game of bones. It was more than a game to him. It was a science. He knew the laws of probability and used it to advantage to always come out on top.

He took his love of the game to new levels. The only ate vegetables if they were diced. He would only take a dare if someone said it was dicey. Most importantly for our reading audience, he always had a bottle of Sappe Aloe Vera drink on him. The reason was that the aloe chunks in it were not only diced, but they were actually the exact size of his beloved shakers. Seriously, the chunks are that big and they are wonderful. His particularly enjoyed the apple variety. When he first picked up a bottle (he won it in a game of cee-lo from a worker in an Asian bodega) he had expected it to have that terrible fake apple taste, that is so specific, but in reality tastes nothing like fruit. Luckily the odds of probability were in his favor, and it did taste more like a real apple. The sugar gave it a little bit of a candied flavor, but it was mostly fruit. For that he was thankful.

Next time he's in that area, he plans on playing the shop keep again for a different flavor. It may be a while though because the comic book store that sits beside it always has a gaggle of nerds outside that always challenge him with their twenty sided die, and Johnny Snake Eyes just doesn't roll that way.

Back story time. There is a little beverage center here in Buffalo that sells little glass bottles of soda for like $.30 each. It's not mind blowing, but it's better than most “normal” pop. They usually came in Pop Shoppe bottles, so we thought that was what it was, until we discovered that it was actually made by a company called College Club from Rochester, NY. They just bought up reusable bottles from old companies who no longer used them. Later on we were on a trip to Canada and I came across some soda that was made by the real Pop Shoppe. In reality it wasn't much different than the Pop Shoppe stuff, but that means that it was still good. It came in glass bottles so that was a plus, even if it was about 5x more expensive (still only $1.50).

Now you're caught up to the time when my band was doing a Canadian weekend a little while back and I came across Pop Shoppe skinny cans in a grocery store. I bought a couple of four packs because they were on sale for $1.50 each. Sadly this Groovin' Grape did not measure up to their bottled sodas. It tastes like they were trying to go for a more actual grape taste than grape soda normally does. The problem is that they didn't get it quite right. There is no grape juice in this, and while I can taste where they were trying to go, they missed their mark. It's not horrible, but it's not great. I don't know if I would even call it good. It's just kind of there. I could drink it if it were served to me, but never would I purchase it again myself.