Jason Draper - 2709 Reviews

Remember that time when you had an undying need to get a poncho? You thought they were just the coolest and you needed one to live, well at least to live with the kids who ditched class and snuck across the street to smoke cigarettes. It was the early 90's and it was a different world than it is now. It was a world where poncho's, or drug rugs, were a sign of stature.

You begged and pleaded with your mom to take you to get one. She wouldn't give in said that you would look stupid wearing one, especially since you hated the Grateful Dead. So you waited and ended up going with the older kids in your shop class that wore leather jackets, even in the summer. Those guys must be touch. They said they were going to the "head shop" anyways, but you had to pay gas, and ride in the trunk. Whatever, anything for that sweet, sweet poncho. As you walked into the shop, still a bit woozy from the exhaust that spilled in through the holes in the trunk, you were blasted with the smell of hippies and incense. It's a smell that you would become familiar with over the next few years at parties in dimly lit basements.

When you graduated high school you thought, and hoped that smell would never be apart of your life again. It didn't until you cracked open a can of Yeo's green tea. The smell was kind of there, but Christ did it taste the way that head shop smelled. One would think that something like that should never hit your taste buds, but it's actually a little bit of alright. This is supposed to be jasmine green tea, but I've had jasmine tea before and it tastes nothing like this. The only way to describe it is to say it tastes like ill lit basements, black-light posters, and incense. It will also fill you with shame for once owning a drug rug, even if you only wore it twice. Really, what was I thinking?

Grandpa was the king of cookies. Whenever we'd go to visit he had a smorgasbord of confectioneries that he would sneak us when no one was looking. Grandma on the other hand loved her hard candies. Her assortment would change, but there would always be the strawberry candy in the mix. You know the ones whose wrappers are printed to look like the fruit. As soon as I tasted this drink it made me think about those candies. They were never my favorite, of course they couldn't compete with grandpa's cookies, but I never turned one down. I feel the same way about this drink. It's not my favorite aloe drink, but if it was offered to me I would always happily take it. It has average sized aloe chunks in it, which almost come off as bits of berries. It may not be the best, but it's a nice walk down memory lane. Drink one and think of your grandmother.

It's been said that Goose Island is a part of Chicago, but I think that's just a ruse. I think they want people to believe this magical island is in the boring Midwest when in fact it resides just outside of Buffalo, NY in historic East Aurora. I know because I have seen it. It's chock full of geese and other waterfowl. It's also a perfect place to enjoy a pizza and some root beers with your ladyfriend at the end of a nice day trip.

It was really a no-brainer choosing what root beer to accompany our delicious pizza at such a location. Sure there are brews that I prefer over Goose Island but many of them are full bodied and heavy. Those are drinks for sipping around a fire, contemplating you day. This is a light and smooth soda. It's the kind of flavorful root beer that works well with food and nature. It reminds me of What IBC or Dogs N Suds root beer would taste like if they used cane sugar as a sweetener.

So while Virginia may be for lovers, Goose Island is for root beer and greasy pizza. Watch out because those birds may try to steal your pizza after awhile. Don't let them have it though because bread is bad for waterfowl and can cause their stomachs to explode, and no one wants to have to clean up that mess.

Energy shots are garbage. It's a scientific fact. They are concentrated so they taste like liquid trash. It's up to you to decide if the trade off it worth it. Do you want to chug a big sugary can of something that will make you pee at least twice, or do you want something quick and compact? The cans generally taste better, in their own chemical way, but the shots can be stored in a pocket for anytime use.

Normally the shots and cans are around the same price, but On Go has put out this line of shots that are less than a dollar each. So they are compact and inexpensive. This one also tastes like radioactive raspberries. It's sad that the flavor doesn't put it at a disadvantage against other energy shots. As I said they all taste like neon trash. I can say that this works, possibly too well. I drank it on an all day excursion of bike riding/hiking/beaver watching and pizza eating and I was unable to fall asleep until about 4am. I should have been completely exhausted like my friends, who passed out around midnight, but this little bottle kept me alert, even when I pleaded for it not to.

This drink is more soymilk than it is coffee and it shows. For some people that might be a turnoff, but for me it's a green light to keep on drinking. The coffee taste is at a level that puts it at "fancy coffee drink" status. Something that you would order at a local coffeehouse with a wacky name. It still has a coffee flavor, but it's smoothed out. If you drink your coffee black, this will taste insanely weak to you, but for those of us who only dabble in coffee drinks that are flavored with other things, this may be a stepping stone for getting into the hard stuff.

I am a licorice addict (except black licorice, it's some of the worst crap ever) . Seriously it's sad. If I open a bag it has to be taken away from me or I will consume it all in one sitting without even thinking about it, and I'm talking those huge bags of Twizzlers. Recently I've moved onto bigger and better things with Australian licorice. Now that is some good stuff. When I opened our package from Rocket Fizz and saw this bottle of red licorice soda I will admit I sort of lost my mind (I threw that black licorice one in Mike's pile, he can drink that swill and lie to you and say it was great).

So yes, I am an addict. I love licorice more than most foods. I had incredible expectations for this drink. Sadly Rocket Fizz did not follow through, and I mean very sadly. I thought I had found my new favorite pop. It smells almost right. By that I mean it smells like red licorice, but not as strong as Twizzlers. I was still extremely excited. I took a sip and noticed that while it's in your mouth it doesn't really taste like much. I took another sip and it has a very light "red pop" flavor. It's when you swallow that the actual flavor hits you. It's vaguely licorice tasting, but it's more of the cheap knock of brand licorice that you would find at a discount store.

Did I expect too much? Probably. Could Rocket Fizz have made a better soda? Definitely. It's by no means terrible. It's a decent fruity soda, but it didn't deliver what I wanted and that is saddening. I just really wish it was a lot stronger tasting.

Oh and to those of you who say that it's not real licorice unless it's black licorice, I will never understand your taste buds. I'd rather eat dirt. That's right dirt with worms in it!

Most energy drinks are targeted towards people between the ages of 15 and 30. Companies market them as "extreme" drinks that give you a rush. Most of them are so jam packed with artificial chemicals that I won't be shocked when studies come out in 10-15 years showing that everyone has pickled their insides and we're all going to die, but hey I stayed out all night partying so who cares?

There are other people who need pick me ups as well, but they aren't going to drive to the local convenience store and pick up a Monster or a Rockstar. There are health conscious people out there who want a little extra help getting their day going. Typically those people drink coffee, but Sambazon offers an alternative. This drink is a mixture of sparkling acai and acerola juice that are both extremely healthy fruits. Then they mix in organic guarana, guayaki and yerba mate to add an energy burst. It's all natural, and it's not going to give you the jitters like you might expect from your run of the mill energy drinks.

It definitely tastes like acai, which I know a lot of people are turned off by. If it's a flavor you're not into, you should steer clear of this product. I personally enjoy it when it's not too overpowering and it's not in this drink.

Franklin Mercer realized how much he had put his family through for the past couple of months. Whatever made him think that he was cut out to be an Olympic athlete is beyond me. Now that his dreams were behind him he decided to take Sharon and the kids on a camping expedition in Wisconsin.

They got a nice little lakeside cabin and everything was calm and relaxing. It was the most perfect vacation any of them had ever been apart of. When hiking the first night they discovered a cherry orchard and a cranberry swamp. What cranberries were doing growing in Wisconsin Franklin had no idea, but it was a nice discovery. On the third day Sharon decided to take the kids out to pick some fruit. They were filling their baskets and bindles full of juicy fruit (not the gum) when the trouble began. Dozens of cardinals came out of nowhere and started attacking the children, pecking at their tiny hands and faces. The family dropped everything and ran the mile back to their cabin, where they filled in Franklin on what had happened.

Franklin was infuriated and stormed out the door, grabbing his butterfly net off the porch. He made his way out to the orchard and hid until he saw a bird. He caught they cardinal in his net and was getting prepared to bash its skull in (Have I mentioned that Franklin has anger management problems?) when he realized that it wasn't an actual bird but rather it was animatronic. Suddenly he fell out of his hiding space in the tree. When he looked up there were two men standing above him. They helped him up, brushed him of and took him to the other side of the swamp where they had a small brewery. They were the Sprecher brothers, and they explained to him that they had grown the fruit in such a strange location in order to produce their new soda "Ravin' Red." They gave him a bottle to try, apologizing for their robot bird attack on his family. They had built them to keep away other animals, never expecting humans to stumble upon their orchard. Franklin accepted their apologies and cracked open the soda. His first thought when he took a sip was how full bodied it was. It had mostly a very sweet cranberry flavor, but some cherry was poking it's nose through. The brothers said the full bodiedness was due to the fact that it was fire brewed. That made sense so Franklin continued to drink. The more he drank the more he noticed a problem. The flavor didn't really fade away into an after taste after he swallowed. The more he drank the more intense the flavor got. BY the time he was 3/4 of the way done with the bottle it almost tasted like he was drinking a concentrate without the consistency. He finished off the bottle, told the brothers thank you for the soda, but you may want to work on it a little more and then walked home. Of course he did steal their butterfly net off of the porch as he had landed on his breaking it earlier in the story.

I have mixed feelings about the Fall. On one hand it's awesome because the it's "jacket weather," being out doors is great, everything smells great and it's cider season. On the other hand it means that winter is coming soon and every year around this time I get sick without fail. It's never incredibly sick, but enough to annoy the hell out of me. That is where I am now; annoyed, stuffed up and achy.

To combat this illness I've been downing mass amounts of juice. For today's selection I went with Earth Wise's Harvest Select. It is harvest time after all. This is apple, tangerine, pineapple and carrot juice mixed together. It's strange how that one vegetable (which is at the bottom of the ingredients list) can effect a drink so much. This would be a "fun time" fruit punch, but the carrot definitely takes it in a different direction and makes it a nice Autumnal drink. It doesn't tastes like you're eating a bunch of carrots, but you can tell that there is a non-sweet juice in the mix. It's a nice twist on what would have been a fairly common juice.

Get healthy, and get out outside to enjoy the season before the snow comes and you're stuck indoors hating life for months.

Today R.E.M. announced that they were no longer a band. For most people that probably means very little. I'm sure a lot of people probably thought they broke up years ago. To me it's a major upset. They are and have been my favorite band for the last 25 years or so of my life. With the exception of an album and a half, their catalog is solid. This year's Collapse Into Now is one of the best records I've heard in years. They were the best live band I've ever witnessed and at one show Michael Stipe even threw me the microphone to sing the end of "It's the End of the World." I met bassist Mike Mills a couple years ago in Athens while I was touring through. He was one of the nicest people I've ever met. I just meant to say hello and tell him he was the reason I play bass now, but he engaged me in conversation for a while. The band has been with me throughout the highs and lows of my life and I will always hold them dear.

To celebrate this band/mourn their death I decided to review a southern sweet tea. Something that the folks of Athens, GA would sip on their front porches on a hot summer day. Okay they probably brew their own, and probably never think to buy this product, but it was the only sweet tea I had on hand. It does taste fairly authentic. It's made with cane sugar and you can totally tell. It's very sweet, but it actually tastes like tea and not sugar water. Bravo on the product.

Now onto the packaging. Really? Is Larry Johnson relevant at all anymore? The grandmamma character is from
Converse commercials that came out in the early 90's. I will be the first to admit that those commercials were awesome, and this would have made sense 15 years ago, but now would people even remember it by name? A gimmick that is out of date, but a product that is great. Now I'm going to go and listen to the entire R.E.M. catalog in chronological order.

Sometimes I feel like I need to go to a S.S.A. meeting (no that has nothing to do with the Nazi SS, I'm not a scumbag). I would walk right up to that podium and say, "Hi, my name is Jason, and I'm a soda snob." I would then talk about how I bashed some sub-par soda or another on this site just because it wasn't as good as some crazy specialty pop I had drank at some point months ago. I'm using the restraint I learned at these completely made up meetings in reviewing this soda.

I would like to start by saying that had I found and drank this pop in the time before Thirsty Dudes ruled my life I would have absolutely loved it. The thing is that in the past year or so I have had the pleasure of tasting some of the best ginger beers this world has to offer. At this point a normal ginger beer just seems okay to me. I've also have this undying need to drink insanely strong ginger beers that burn your mouth/throat for hours. My girlfriend has the taste buds of an infant and she would probably say that this is too spicy for her. To me it's very mild. For a normal drinker, it would probably be somewhere in the middle.

This has the typical Jones sweetness to it. I was expecting it to be very candy-like and for it to basically be a glorified ginger ale. Luckily it does taste like a real ginger beer, and I'm thankful for that. I need to search out what other flavors Jones has as Canadian exclusives, but until then I'll have to keep attending these meetings in the church basement.

They promise. They deliver. Or I can only assume, since I can't read the packaging. This is a guava juice box. When I was a kid I always got Ssips juice boxes. While those were all well and good, if I had gotten a guava flavored one I would have been one ecstatic kid. I'm pretty sure this is only 15% juice, but it's still enjoyable. Do you have a kid in elementary school? Treat them well. Get them some fancy juice boxes.

From the taste of this I would suspect that Tropical Azul is some sort of blue sugar candy. Perhaps is a blue off brand Lick-a-Made or Pixie Stick. Cintron has taken this beloved treat and somehow removed all of the sugar. You might think that you would just have an empty plate after that because it just looks like a pile of blue sugar, but if it were that simple my friend. Cintron developed the science for their diabetic friends and they have used it and used it well. Due to poor candy sales last quarter, they infused this treat into an energy drink. What was created is what is before me now. It tastes like blue candy and it tastes like an energy drink. It also tastes like a diet energy drink that doesn't taste like death. So ride the blue wave my friend. Ride it to lower blood sugar and a thinner waist.

The new Chevy Volt is as innovative as they come. The car does not run on gasoline, nor does it need electricity. Instead, Volt Soda powers it. I think this came about because they had warehouses of the stuff because no one was buying it. They needed to do something with it, so they teamed up with Chevy and built and engine that can run on it. Coming soon to a dealership near you.

In all seriousness I feel like this is an energy drink marketed towards children and that is a horrible idea. I feel like it's unhealthy for me as an adult to drink energy drinks, so for a kid...geez. I feel like all the time I see kids younger and younger downing them, and it really concerns me. So much extra stress on their little hearts.

This is basically carbonated fruit punch with all that energy garbage thrown in. It tastes like it should be a special flavor of Mountain Dew. I'm really just not into this. It tastes like a crappy soda that gives me the jitters. I say no thanks.

For the past couple of days my cat will not leave my lap. She goes through phases where she completely ignores my existence and then in the blink of an eye she needs all the attention in the world. I'm okay with that. I like giving her attention, well except when she insists on sitting directly in front of my computer monitor staring at me when I'm trying to get work done. I love when she's a lap cat. It's comforting, especially now that the weather is starting to cool down and Fall is right around the corner. This tea is also comforting. There's something about jasmine tea that just calms me down. The effect is greater when the tea is hot, but even when it's iced it does it's job. I think this may be the first jasmine tea I've had that has vitamin C added to it. It very subtly effects the flavor, but it's in a good way. It still has the great jasmine aftertaste, which I love.

Now I'm going to sit on my couch with my cat and this bottle of tea and read like a nerd. Yes I am fully aware that when I get old I will be the male equivalent of the crazy cat lady.

Cintron's canned teas and juices are fairly average. They taste like most other tallboy drinks. Those are what I first came across in the stores and I had written them off as just another cheap tea company. Then their glass bottle teas and energy drinks came into my life, and I can tell you for certain that these categories are where the company really shines.

I appreciate an iced tea that you can tell from the first sip that it is made with real brewed tea. Especially green tea. Junk iced green tea has become too commonplace. I really have no need for it in my life. I don't care if it's cheaper. Give me a nice brewed green tea and I will be a happy camper. That is if you give it to me when we're out in the woods and I'm setting up a tent. Well as long as the tent is easy to set up. Then I may be an annoyed camper with happy taste buds. Cintron uses a good quality brewed green tea. In this flavor the peach and mango taste like you're eating the actual fruit. They blend well with the tea. The use of cane sugar is also noticeable in the taste. I only wish their tall boys tastes like this because sometimes I want to be a glutton, but a glutton for high quality tea.

This has been sitting on the shelf in my kitchen for months. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen. First off it's an energy drink soda. While the majority of energy drinks are carbonated, I still wouldn't consider them pop for some reason. Secondly it's a cherry energy drink. Most things cherry flavored end up tasting like cough drops or cold medicine. Not a flavor that one looks forward to. To sum this up I was expecting a chemical tasting cough syrup with bubbles in it. Just thinking about that makes my stomach turn.

Lolli's were successful in not achieving that. This is a natural energy drink, so it doesn't contain the chemicals. It has ingredients like ginseng, guarana, niacin and caffeine. As far as the flavor goes there is no medicine to be tasted at all. In face it tastes like grape and apple juice mixed together with a splash of grenadine added for good measure. This was way, way better than I expected. Now someone tell that lady on the label to watch out because she is sitting on a cherry bomb and it's about to go off. I don't want her to have to be rushed to the hospital.

Take a really good Gatorade flavor and mix it with coconut water and you get this drink. I'm sure the company probably hates getting compared to Gatorade, but they were on the forefront of sports drinks, and their products are what comes to mind for most people when they think about said category of drinks.

Want to know a secret? I would pick this over a Gatorade any day. First off it's tastes great. Secondly it's all-natural and it's sweetened with beet sugar and not HFCS.

We can only hope that someday sports teams will have giant coolers filled with Greater Than to dump over their coaches when they win the big game. Gatorade has run that monopoly for way too long.

Call me old fashion, but I feel that once you start adding sweeteners and the like to your drink it should no longer be referred to as water. I mean aren't 99% of the drinks on the world water based? By that thinking then pop should be called water. This is water, sweetener and concentrated peach. As I see it this would be a juice. It definitely tastes like a watered down peach juice to me, well one that is overly sweetened. I also have no idea what "2%" has to do with this drink at all. It just makes me think of milk. On the bright side I really like the packaging. It is pleasant to look at.

Every time I read Oggu I instantly think of the commercials for Boku juice from the 90's with Richard Lewis in them. Those commercials were ridiculous and terrible. He seriously says Boku eight thousand times in each commercial and it's a ridiculous word to be said once, let alone more than twenty times in a minute. Now that I think about it he really didn't do much other than those commercials and terrible stand up. Oh the 90's when the bar was set so low for comedians.

This is a soda, not a juice like Boku. It is also not sub par like Richard Lewis. It is one of the better lemon & lime sodas I've had. It has actual juice in it and it's also not nearly as sweet as most of it's counterparts. That is a great thing about European sodas; they don't feel the need to over-sweeten them. Which I definitely appreciate. This drink is actually good enough that it doesn't need a stand up comic, humorous or not, to sell it. It's flavor sells itself.

Now I just have to remember what show made fun of those commercials. I think it may have been Wayne's World. I'm actually pretty sure of it. If you can confirm that, please do.