Mike Literman - 1759 Reviews

Oh the spices of the island. Depending on what island you are talking about could really have a strong affect on the drink. If I were to drink Jamaican spiced lemonade it might be a ginger jerk lemonade. I don't know how I would feel about it. Indian, although not an island, spiced would be a masala or curry lemonade that makes we want to ralph all over the place. A Puerto Rico island spice would be what...Adobo? That would be bad, too.

This island, although never discussed by name, is home to I guess a little bit of cinnamon because that's all I'm getting here. It's a good lemonade, don't get me wrong, but in terms of having a different title pointing to some mystery island and just barely if at all changing your recipe, that's kind of a waste of time. If this was just "Cabana Lemonade" I would say, "Oh, this is pretty good lemonade and it has a hint of cinnamon which puts it over the top." If you are going to call it "island spice" and not put enough to push it over the edge, well you missed the point all together.

I'm not trying to be a greedy child, but I want more spice! More spicy! Spicier! More trips to the island. I mean, come on. Who is complaining about trips to the island? Go get more spices and send me a new batch.

I was just saying the other day that I was wondering what the elixir of life was. Finally, an answer to this age old question. Sure, some might think that it's water, or water infused with gold and diamonds, but they would be wrong. The true elixir of life is, apparently, a spicy, Indian inspired, coconut drink. I know; we were way off until this point.

What do I think of the elixir of life? Well, I don't think that I'm going to live that long if this is what we've got. Yes, as expected, this is a little spicy, pretty tangy, and doesn't taste that much like coconut water. All good, right? Sure if you hate the actual taste of the drink and love the delectable, rare exotic spice called salt. I'll say it, and parents cover your kids' ears; this is a salty bitch of a drink. I wanted this to taste more like Indian food and peppers and all of the ingredients on the side but instead I got something that felt like whatever reverse blood pressure medicine would taste like if you poured all your spices from your spice cabinet into a bottle of cold water.

Even with doing that, which this company did not do, you do get a little bit of goodness in every sip but I could take about half a dozen sips of this before I, aloud, questioned what I was doing drinking this. It's quasi-drinkable but you've really got to have a dead palate to get past its downfall. And let's be honest, if you can't taste anything, you should not be wasting your money on drinks like this.

Part of being a Thirsty Dude is having a beard. It's a light pre-requisite and since we're currently not looking to fill any slots, you can stop filling out that resume. Thirsty Dudes aside, I would still have a beard unless I want to look ten years younger. Since I don't care as much as I probably should about my physical appearance, I have a beard. I grow it out and shave it down and grow it out and shave it down. When it is long, you have to take care of it or you look like a regular old scumbag. I have a medicine cabinet filled with oils, pomades, and waxes to help my hairy buddy look his best.

Now why did I just spend the last couple minutes talking about beards? It's simple, actually. It is because this drink tastes a little bit like a tea tree oil that I use in m' beard. It's very peculiar. It's got a little bit of a mintiness that tastes like when you were a kid and thought that Huck Finn looked cool while he had that wheat in his mouth so you put it in your mouth and it tasted like fresh cut, minty grass. Yes, there is cranberry in there but you are distracted by the other stuff that is going on in there.

I am not well read. I will admit it. I feel like I can grow a wonderful beard. Whether or not I look good with it is a totally different issue that we will undoubtedly handle in another, if not many other reviews. I urge you to try this because it's so strange, so very strange.

I know what you're thinking. No, not because I'm psychic. People that say they are psychic are shysters and crooks. I just know that you are thinking, "Oh, chocolate tea. That sounds grozz." Well, friend. Live a little because this tube of tea bags was a wise investment on my part.

There is a red tea base that you can kind of taste first. It's a very good tea in itself but then, oh, here it comes, Chocolageddon with a sprig of mint. It is a very refreshing drink because it's as "thin" as a tea but almost tastes like a mint hot chocolate. I did ten ounces and decided to roll the dice and snag a couple more O.Z.'s out of the same bag and it was a solid 80% return on investment.

It's almost unfortunate because they have so many other good flavors that it's going to cost me a pretty penny to, much like Ash to his Pokemon, collect them all. I've got thirty one bags left of this treat so it might take me a little bit to get to the rest of the family.

We took the plunge. This is a real 1% drink. Remember last year's 99% versus 1% debate? Well I'm bringing it back because unless you are making $250,000 per year, you don't really have any business buying twelve dollar drinks. I don't mean to be rude, but I'm trying to make it so you can afford to put bread on the table. For the cost of this drink, you can put three loaves of bread on the table. That would feed your carbohydrate hungry family for quite a while or just quench your thirst, oddly, for an hour or two.

"Special birthday drink" aside, let's get into the nitty gritty of this beverage and no, I am not using that phrase lightly. Upon inspection of this drink of the shelf, you will notice that it is, like the other BluePrint drinks, a sixteen ounce bottle with lettering that makes it look like one of those hip hop shirts from the mid-2000's. You know, the ones that say things like, "Dre, Easy, Ren, Ice" and you are supposed to know, "Oh, that's NWA." You should know that's NWA but that's beyond the point.

Anyhow, you're looking at the bottle and you turn it upside down and there is three quarters of an inch of white sludge on the bottom. It looks almost like paste. It shakes up just fine but man, it is sludgy as can be. You shake her up and smell it and...well...it's like if your three year old son made you a drink comprised of paste and milk. That's two out of the five senses.

You say to yourself, "I spent an hour's worth of money on this drink, I'm going to drink the whole thing. You take a sip and it does not taste like milk paste but it tastes like the milk after a heaping bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, also known as Jay Draper's favorite cereal. There is sense number three.

Number four is touch which I should put in quotes because you are feeling it with your tongue. It is a gritty son of a gun. I assume it is the handful of cashews that were murdered to make this drink. It tastes a bit sandy but it's cinnamon, nut flavored sand so it's alright. You know it's not going to hurt you so you are fine with your newly sanded esophagus.

I suppose we could have put our ears to this drink and said, "Sense five is that it doesn't sound like anything." but that would be a cop out. We could also go the more new age way and say that we heard it "calling us." but we're not really that type of guys.

Four out of five senses were used in the drinking of this and the flavor itself would get a three out of five but in terms of uniqueness and quality it has earned another bottle.

"Well this is something," says someone who drank this. I, professional drinker and skeptic of most things, agreed. This is a tangy, sweet drink. Tangy. Jesus Christmas. Limes and grapefruit? You needed to put the two tartest fruits imaginable together in one drink? Are you trying to turn me into a reverse Dizzy Gillespie? Suck in my cheeks to look like a malnourished, third world child? Who can drink this for pleasure? You want to know what Kiwi is doing while those other two are stealing the show? Well I'll tell you that he is not carrying his weight. That or between the lime and the grapefruit he simply compete.


This isn't bad. If you like Squirt and Limca, put them together into a container that is too large for one or even two servings and call it a day.

Mr. Brown, I've come to your house not to sell you vacuums, not to sell encyclopedias, and not to sell knives that cut pennies but not tomatoes. I have come here to shake your hand and thank you for your consistently great coffee drinks. Whether it be a Blue Mountain blend, a latte, or a simple cappuccino, you hit it out of the park. You are the Babe Ruth of coffee drinks. You see what I did there? Are you a baseball fan, because I just likened you to one of the greats? Why no, I do not know anything about baseball. It's been about fifteen years since I've cared about baseball when I stopped collecting baseball cards.

Specifics? You've got it. This drink is smooth but somehow not too sweet. It's got a great cappuccino taste that isn't as bitey as some of the other cappuccino drinks. I shared some and the consensus was that you do good work. I will further that sentiment by adding that you should be proud of yourself for once again nailing it.

I'm sorry that I don't have much more to offer you in terms of gratitude. Here is...let's see what I've got here. I've got two dollars and...twenty two cents you can have and the knowledge that this review will be up on Thirsty Dudes dot com illustrating our love and appreciation for your drinks. Thanks again and don't worry about where I got your address. Let's just say it was in a little thing called the map to celebrities' homes that I bought from a man around the corner from here.

Part of an essence water is that it doesn't really taste like much. This, on the other hand, not at all following directions, tastes like a Stevia laced hard candy. There is natural sugar in it but it's almost to the "what's the point" line where it tastes primarily of said artificial sweetener. It's not bad but it is very, very sweet and tastes entirely of a juice and nothing like flavored or essence water.

As far as strawberries and watermelons are concerned, yes, they are in there. If you keep it in your mouth and swish it around you can taste those two rumbling around like a couple of unbuckled children in the way back of an early ninety's station wagon. As soon as you swallow, you get a rush of everything that Stevia has to offer which you can take at however you feel about her and her doings.

I don't know the rules of naming a beverage but I like to think that I've been around the block enough to know that this was mislabeled.

We're talking about a diet root beer here, friends. I'm about to tell you that it is actually good. They must have pumped the diet so full of root beer flavor that it is no longer gross. This is sweetened with aspartame and they have managed to do a pretty good job of keeping a dark root beer flavor and not making this taste like something a fat housewife would drink while she's watching her stories. I mean it. A dark, diet root beer that I haven't spit all over my monitor.

I'll say the titular line...Dang! That's good root beer.

Sudz, Spuds MacKensie's little known brother, loved root beer. He was up for the beer commercials himself but in the interview process, drank so much that he gained too much weight to be suitable for the part. Depressed but still in need of something more in his life, he decided to start his own pop company.

They made fairly average pop that wasn't bad at all. The root beer, Sudz favorite and pride and joy, was good. It was safe but still good. It didn't have any of the licorice or anise that a high end one would have but it has everything a basic root beer would have. It's pretty comparable to other "store brand" root beers.

Sudz now has a long lasting legacy of pop where as his brother was just a temporary staple of a beer company. They fight at family reunions but who doesn't.

For some reason, I don't know if I've had any of the original Pom drinks. I really like pomegranates, too. There is no reason why I haven't done it. Now, though, I'm almost to the point of saying, "Who cares?" because I bet it isn't as good as this. As presented plainly on the bottle, this is 50% pomegranate and 30% pineapple. "What is the other 20%?" you ask? Apple juice. No sugar was added to this to make it as wonderful as it is.

Now somehow this drink clocks in at 210 calories but I get a feeling here is where the age old debate of "good calories versus bad calories" comes in because there is nothing in this but fruit. I understand there is sugar in fruit but I feel like it would break down a little differently than, say, a Whopper.

This tastes like pomegranate juice first, nicely fruity and bitter. Then you are whisked away to a tropical land where it is raining pineapples for some reason. If you are safely sheltered, you should be fine. It happens once a week without notice so you should always remember to wear your hard hat when you are walking in the open. You don't taste the apple juice and it's used as a way to stretch out the other two cool cats.

I want to go to this tropical town. I'll wear a hard hat if I get to drink this all of the day. It would be worth it.

I want to hire a sweet MC and have him say, "This is a 7-11 exclusive" in that voice that they do on mixtapes. You know the one. The arbitrarily placed, out of time, over lyrics, poorly recorded, mostly yelled tagline that someone like Don Cannon would do so you know you can't get it anywhere else and more importantly, partially ruins it so you can't get a decent recording of it without some dude yelling over top of it.

Now that my mixtape fantasies are looming through my head, we can get down to brass tacks. You know what Gatorade tastes like, right? You know what lemonade tastes like, right? You know what strawberries taste like, right? Well, if you can draw a line through all of them, you get this. It's good, not too sweet, but no Gatorade is really too sweet now, is it? It didn't have a sting that one might expect either. It was actually, probably due to the Gatorade core, a pretty smooth drink that I will come to again and again until it's gone.

Since I can't drink for pleasure and I don't play sports, I probably won't get another bottle, but it will certainly make me wish that I could shoot some hoops, toss around the pigskin, slap some pucks, or play soccer. "You forgot Baseball, you stupid idiot!" you say? No. I did not. Most baseball players could smoke and drink and it wouldn't change the game one iota. Only the runners on base deserve Gatorade and since, at max, four people at a time can drink it, it's not really fair to the rest of the players so no one in baseball can drink Gatorade unless it's pre or post game.

So a lemon, blueberry, and bag of green tea walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What will you have?" And they say, "We'll just have each other." and proceed to get really handsy on the bar. The patrons of the bar collectively agree that they have no time for that public display of affection and since they weren't buying anything, the doorman threw them out of the bar.

Green tea is wonderful. Blueberries, eh, fine. They're good. Lemons, good in things. No one really eats lemons. Together they are a pretty good team. I will say that the green tea lets it's stronger friends take the helm because you cannot really taste it too much. It might be a little bitter at the end but it could be the Stevia deceiving you. The blueberry and lemon work together more as a juice than...well I guess what else would it be? It's two fruits coming together. It has to be a juice. Sorry for the black or white guys, but you're a juice.

This is a nice bottle of tea. Perfect for all occasions. The only catch is that everything is in Chinese and there is no telling what is in a bottle of "Farmer" flavored tea. Hey, I'm just telling you what Google Translate is telling me and they told me that this is made up of ground up farmers.

If I may say so, farmers don't taste so bad. They're one with the earth. They probably aren't too many degrees away from tea. You and I, city folk, we're further. We're closer to things like plastics and rubber.

This tastes like a pretty generic black tea. Generic, safe, good quality, and foreign: a good combination. I would take unsweetened black tea from a Chinaman before I would take it from a Yankee. Is that racist? Call in the feds on this one. I think I'm in the right here.

Whenever I see that green, it usually means two things. Thing number one is that it is green apple. Thing number two is that it is going to be way too sweet and downright suck-filled. Was this any different? Eh, 75%. It was green apple but it lacked the uber-sweetness that other green apple pop has. In doing so, you can actually taste the drink itself, which, in and of itself, was not too spectacular.

I think that this flavor as a whole should go by the wayside. I've never had a green apple pop that I could finish an entire bottle of and I've never had one that I've wanted to take more than a couple sips. Kids probably love the stuff but as we all know, kids are dumb and will like anything that has sugar in it because they are mindless idiots. Yeah, I said it. You have been thinking it and I'm the only one who stood up and said it. I'm not afraid of a cavity ridden, hyperactive, pre-pubescent, pre-teen. Bring it on. I've been grizzled by life and am way smarter, wittier, and worldly than you. Enjoy your impending teens, suckers. They're going to suck.

Espresso. It's life super caffeinated coffee. Also, so that I may be the voice of all baristas, there is no "X" in "Espresso." Although it will allow you to go faster as in "express mode," it does not get its name from that. As a matter of fact, no one really knows the origin or definition of the word "Espresso." It was made up as soon as someone tasted the stuff. It was born from an accident, you know, like Silly Putty. Someone improperly trained worker at a coffee shop in the 1700's went to go make a coffee, put the ground up beans in, poured someone else a cup of coffee, forgot he had already put beans in, crammed more beans in, idiotically couldn't figure out why it was so hard to close the machine with the normal amount of ease, and made a double batch of coffee.

That drink, an incorrectly brewed cup of coffee, birthed the espresso and also birthed Master Cafe. You see, the worked, having sold a couple dozen cups of his new, super strong blend, declared himself "Master Cafe" because people wanted his drink. Eventually that worker moved on to leave the company and just make this coffee. He handed it down from generation to generation until today where it is the same blend just with more sugar. When you put coffee in cans, you put sugar on it. It's a rule. It is a stronger than coffee, coffee drink with enough sugar to make it so people that don't completely love the bitterness of coffee enjoy it.

I enjoyed this and I think it is a fine homage to that faithful although misinformed employee that simply forgot what he was doing and turned that mistake into an empire. Here's to another three centuries, Master Cafe.

I saw a twelve pack of these at a barbecue I was at today and decided I would drink it to review it. I normally don't mix the two, social drinking and reviewing, but I couldn't possibly drink any more Arizona Sweet Tea. I had one glass and it was just one glass too much. I cracked it open and wanted to enjoy the ride but the only place it took me was right on down to the crappy gates of Dietburg, a town that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, is guarded by gates. I looked at the ingredients and there it was: the dreaded Aspartame.

I thought we were done with that one. This with a slew of other diet sweeteners both artificial and natural could have potentially saved this drink. I mean, cherry and grapefruit could have been a wonderful match but instead it tasted like cherry and tart diet generic citrus. Aspartame really took a dump all over this drink. Wegman's, I thought you were better than that. I was wrong. Now I know what a disappointed dad feels like twice today because my son threw a handful of rocks at another kid with simultaneously disobeying me as I cried out "Don't throw those rocks." Giant bags of sadness and disgusting drinks for all!

I don't remember these ever being in stores. They were always just on sale at a "bargain basement" type place. I love those places. It's like the graveyard for forgotten drinks. Well some are forgotten, some are overstock, and some are plain gross.

I have also drunk three of these without reviewing them. Why? Because I had them and the timing wasn't right. No, the timing wasn't right. Yeah, I just quoted Big D and the Kids Table. Warped Tour is tomorrow and although I won't be there, they will and kids will (hopefully) enjoy them.

Sure, Warped Tour is what made me fall in love with Hansen's, I guarantee that this Arizona Tea Water would have been better for me. It's super low in calories and really, without exaggeration, just tastes like really watered down, sweet green tea. I found it refreshing and it had just enough flavor that it wasn't like I used an old cup of something and didn't have time to clean it out, an action that is pretty my speed.

All you kids have fun at Warped Tour this summer. It's going to be hot and everyone is going to be sweaty. Drink lots of water and have a good time. Also, you are running out of time to listen to the back catalog of Goldfinger, Reel Big Fish, The Aquabats, and The Ataris so you can successfully sing along.

I missed about five minutes of fireworks to make this? Why? Well the Keurig we have at work allows all sorts of sizes of cups. This makes it easy when it comes times to brew over ice. When you do not have adequate cup real estate, you have to improvise and I don't know if it was because it was late or I was too excited to see fireworks but it took me quite some time to come up with the rather obvious solution that I ended up with; brewing it not over ice and promptly pouring it over ice once brewed.

As far as lemon sweet tea goes, this is good if you don't expect a "Southern Style" sweet tea. Celestial Seasonings, makers of entry-level tea as far as I'm concerned, did an alright job with this. They didn't want to overshadow the drink with sugar so they didn't overload it. It's as simple as that. It's black tea with lemon lightly sweetened. It still has some bitterness and a decent lemon taste.

After all was said and done, I had a nice, tall glass of iced tea to enjoy while enjoying fireworks, something my two and a half year old could somehow care less about. I don't think he's human.

Nothing says "America" like green tea. Wait...that's not right. That's China. That's not America. What am I doing drinking this? I should be drinking something like an apple pie pop or a Coke. I'm outside with a handful of people wearing red, white, and blue and I just ate hot dogs and hamburgers. What's more patriotic than that? Not too much.

This tea is pretty good but that doesn't come without any caveats. It's listed as a green tea but tastes more like a white tea. I don't care and am not at all disappointed. The hibiscus, for the first time in a long time, tastes like what I wanted. It's "mostly" sweetened with sugar but there is some Reb-A in there that leaves you with a little bit of a bitter taste. Combined with the bitterness of the "green" tea, you get a good amount of bite.

If you don't like Reb-A, you might still not like this drink. If you are still cool with that guy, you should like it. It's got a nice flavor all around and is forty calories for the whole bottle. I wish I had another iced cold one right now. That would be America. Ice cold green tea with herbal essence in it; the flower, not the shampoo. That would be absolutely gross. That is not America.