Mike Literman - 1759 Reviews

Your expectations are low if you are like me. You don't have high hopes for anything really. I mean it's McDonald's. I play a strong "ignorance is bliss" role with them because I do good by not eating there but twice a year, maybe quarterly. When I go, I typically get a spicy chicken, for some reason also known by its alias "Hot & Spicy." I was in a rush yesterday, got my old standard, and got this guy on a whim because it's seasonal and I like chocolate and mint.

Was I surprised? Kind of. It was a reserved mint, not like someone put the base "mocha" in and poured it over a starlight mint. It was different and was not overpowering. Even on the last sip I wasn't left with some awful, thick, minty sludge. I tend to swirl my drinks out of habit in hopes of eliminating that and it worked. You can borrow that skill. Practice it. Hone it. Enjoy it.

McDonald's has been putting out some decent drinks as of late. Kudos to them and Kudos for me because those cats are delicious.

Dr. B. I don't know what to say anymore. One guy said that this smelled like cough syrup. I think that it tastes like plastic flavored, overly sweetened tea. The Xylitol takes the cake in this drink and overpowers whatever flavors my have existed in it. It's like fighting an unmatched fight. Xylitol is playing the role of the 250 pound seasoned boxer and the lemongrass and iced tea together weight 300 pounds but aren't boxers and collect stamps and coins from the Civil War era. The only way this tea has any flavor that isn't artificial is if you take a big sip and let it mull in your mouth. Don't move your tongue. Just let it sit there. Then you think, "Hey, there's that lemongrass flavor Dr. B, a person I'm questioning whether or not they are a real doctor, was telling me about." The time in your mouth kills the cool, sweet sugar and allows the B-Team to take over. It's a fight that no one has the right to watch. It's too much. It's the man standing up to the tank in Tienanmen Square except the tank didn't stop. He just kept going. I think that makes Dr. B Deng Xiaoping.

No. We haven't done this before. Yes. It has been out for a decade. There is no shortage of reviews for Arizona reviews on this site. As a matter of fact, they are one of the most reviewed products that we've done. Sometimes, though, things slip through the cracks. Things we've drank one hundred times we don't remember if we drank for personal pleasure or for the good of the site. Up until now, this was strictly a pleasure drink. Well, not any more, kids. Now it's business.

Look at all the darn fruit on this bottle. Let me count the ways this is a fruit punch: apple, pear, mango, cherry, both green and concord grapes, and strawberry. That's a plethora of fruit. That would make a pretty decent fruit salad. Does it make a decent drink, though? Well, yes, it does. You can't taste everything. I feel like I'm missing out on some mango action, perhaps some cherry, too. Do I hold it against them? No. How fine are people's taste buds that they can distinguish between like ten fruits all while being sweetened by corn syrup? No, that's not a dig. It's just what they use to sweeten it. Sure, I'd like to taste this with real sugar, or even sugarless, but it's not penalizing them. The sweetener is fine because there are a lot of fruit flavors going on in that bottle.

Arizona aren't a bunch of dumb dummies. They've been doing this for years. Remember how we just celebrated their twentieth birthday? They're vets. Pros, even. They did a fine job and you know that because you've been drinking their stuff for years. I'm sure they would thank you if given the opportunity. You should thank them, too. It's the right thing to do.

My buddy Dave said it best. His review of this drink was, "You can really taste the 11% sugar." This might be some of the sweetest coffee drink I've ever had. Jay, Dave, Editor Dan, and I went to a couple stores and just hung out all day. It would have been the same day we had when we were ten years ago. A couple small markets, clothing stores, the mall, and so on. Bunch of dudes hanging out. Oh, and Chili's. We all love Chili's. We easily co-drank two gallons of unsweetened blackberry tea that day.

Anyhow, we went to a favorite Asian market and did some shopping and this was one of the drinks we got. Dave got one as well as I and he drank his in the car. We spread it all around because we're all very good friends. Everyone's sentiments were all the same. It's too darn sweet. It's got a good iced black tea taste but the quantity of sugar will inevitably put the majority of this drink down the drain, on the parking lot next to you car where you bought it, rudely on some kid's head, on your table because you accidentally knocked it over forgetting there was still so much in there, or anywhere else that isn't down your gullet.

My boss, in an attempt to save his liver, is eating well. Very well. So well that he doesn't eat hamburgers, sandwiches, tacos, and pizza with us but instead he goes to the gym, rides a few miles on the bike and eats some fruit and sometimes comes back and drinks a protein drink. Today he had this and generously offered some to me.

First of all, I can't appreciate that "health" drinks have accepted the fact that everyone loves the flavors of junk food. I would say that "chocolate fudge" might be the most gluttonous flavor that has ever existed. No, eating chocolate fudge is not gluttonous and no I don't think less of you if you eat it. If I had some in front of me, it wouldn't be in front of me because it would be gone. I don't even care if that makes sense. You know what I mean. This drink is a gift to people losing weight, I'll tell you what. It tastes like a thick, chocolate milkshake and doesn't take a trip to Proteinburg for a couple seconds. Once we round the corner to that final destination, you get that slightly chalky, artificially sweetened taste but it's not terrible. It's expected so it doesn't catch you off guard.

My boss is more fit that me. He might be more fit than you. He's a big dude and lost a ton of weight in order to save his liver. I eat semi-poorly and he is not rubbing off on me. Sure, I would like to eat better and work out, become a hard bodied man of a man, but I don't have time for that. For now I'll eat poorly but eat less than my body wants. That's how I attack obesity; by malnutrition.

Nothing is more exhausting than a kid's birthday party. If you haven't been and are scoffing, I dare you to go to one and come home and not want to sleep. I dare you to go and not want to drive your car into oncoming traffic. It's not bad but if you have every been in close quarters with a seemingly infinite number of kids all making a mess of juice boxes and cake, you too will want it to be over before it began.

For that reason, I am happy that Jesus invented energy drinks and, more specifically, this one. I don't really like Red Bull. I use the same analogy of concentrated candy but it's what I taste. This, though, this is rather great. It's swapped candy for a good, slightly carbonated cranberry. It almost tastes like non-alcoholic cranberry juice. If you need to celebrate in around ten ounces at a time and don't have anyone to celebrate something with and need a pick-me-up then this is the drink for you. I know, I know, there are a lot of prerequisites for this drink, but you don't need to obey them all. I'm just trying to give you an ideal scenario to enjoy this drink. Honestly, you could enjoy this drink anywhere because it's very good. It actually makes me anxious to see what other new drinks Red Bull might come up with.

Ahh, the "other/weird" category of Thirsty Dudes. Most of the stuff isn't domestic so we have to travel and discover this stuff. This was quite the unexpected discovery, I must say.

I had a handful of people try this and here are some of the one sentence reviews that have been provided to me:

• It tastes like plastic.


• It tastes like grass.


• It tastes like pool water.


• I can't get past the texture.

I don't know what the flavor/ingredient of a"groud" and if I had to guess, I would fail. This drink is semi-gelatinous and really tastes like a goopy brown sugar drink. It's not at all offensive and is very smooth both in flavor and texture. It's not completely gross but I can understand how it is off-putting. It's a chunky drink and that is hard for people to take. It's not particularly great or even good. It's not bad, either. It's just kind of...there. It doesn't taste like much. Between that and the fact that most people just can't accept the texture, I can't give this a high rating. The texture caught me by surprise and I usually like stuff like this.

You know what's stopping this drink from being a good drink? The fact that it sucks. This drink tastes like sour apple plastic. If you had a book for kids that every page had a different smell and one of the pages smelled like sour apple, and then you ate it, this is what it would taste like: your child's book. Why are you eating your kids books? Why are you making drinks that taste like fruity flavored plastic? Why did this drink make it to production? Not every non-diet pop is still drinkable when you exchange real sugar for artificial sweeteners. Not everything we drink is a gem. This should be more acceptable than it is but surprise! We just found the reason why we found it for seventy cents.

I was thinking aloud today that it would be awesome if you could change the color of your pee. It is not gross. It's awesome. Obviously I wouldn't use a dye or anything not "natural" but I would like to use something like the things they use for food to make it a certain color. Carrot juice, beet juice, and so on. Concentrate the living daylights out of it, put it in a pill, sell it to kids, have them laugh as they pee purple. I would buy a year supply out of it and just drink so much water that I would pee every fifteen minutes.

Just as luck would have it, I would have this drink in the fridge queued up and ready to go. It's got all sorts of stuff in there for color and although I can almost guarantee that I'm not going to pee light pink, I am going to enjoy twelve fluid ounces of delicious and nutritious juice. A full day's vegetable and fruit servings in one with no added sugar and all the vitamin C a man can handle. This is great for this time of year when I could get a cold at any minute. I need all the help I can get. Now if someone can help me pee neon pink I would be ever so grateful.

VBlast is a terribly disgusting name for a company. Anything really. Just "Blast" would have been fine but as soon as you added the "V" in there, my mind only goes one place and it gets grozz. I just had to get that off my chest first.

Secondly, this is just juice. This tastes like cherry Kool-Aid. I know there is pomegranate allegedly in there but he is hiding and shouldn't be paid for his role in this drink. It's diet and zero calories and sucralose is not offensive so if you love kid juice and just can't get past the fact that it has like a trillion calories, here is a good supplement. Also, it's got vitamins in it so all of a sudden juice is healthy. Blows your mind with what science can do nowadays, right?

Diet cola. It's a rough game. Murderous. Competitive. Mostly kind of gross. This drink has potential. It's a brave venture into a dangerous game filled with tree hugging hippies. Filled with strange middle-aged women with distinctive salt and pepper hair that carry around canvas bags all times in case they come across a killer farmers market with rutabagas they just can't leave behind. Filled with young dudes who will stab you if you as much as mention chicken nuggets and loves the band Crass and has black pants that appear to be painted on his tiny, malnourished frame.

This drink, with all its promise, falls short. It's got a decent cola taste but is quickly replaced with a semi-bitter, sweetness that is known to many as "that Stevia" taste but is really Erythritol. Who cares? Right? Who cares? When a drink isn't that great, who cares what sucks about it? Well it's actually the Erythritol that eats it. It cruds up a potentially good drink. I don't know what would make it better. I don't even know if regular diet pop wins or loses. I don't know what's going on anymore.

Finally, I say. Finally I have found a black currant drink that doesn't taste like a foot. I don't know what other people were doing but seriously everyone. Are you still mushing up fruit with your feet and are you also not washing your feet? Classic. Classic.

In the modern day, we've got machines and...I don't know...steamrollers...that mush up fruits to make juice. Clean things. This company is pretty spot on with everything we've had. This tea is a good, naturally sweetened black tea with a very nice and fruity black currant drink. It is a good split between the flavor and the base that I could drink again and again.

Look, if you've got a small, intimate company that still makes juice with your feet; I would love to drink it as long as you have some sort of FDA related clearance. I don't often care about the FDA but when potentially skuzzy body parts are involved, I might like a little bit of interference of a third party agency.

Miller High Life is the self-appointed "champagne of beers." While I don't know much about beer, I doubt this is true and think that it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing, this could be the champagne of kola champagnes with one single caveat. Pre-caveat, right out of the fridge this is great. It's not as bubble-gummy as a lot of other kola champagnes I've had. It did have a nice, unexpected bit, like some of the ginger juice from their wonderful ginger beer got stuck in the machine, no one cared, and it bled into this drink leaving a little bit of a bite. I always want a little bit of a bite when it comes to food and drink. Spice almost always beats no spice.

Great, right? Awesome. But wait! I said there was one thing to worry about. That one thing is that you either have to keep this cold or drink it fast because once it lukewarms, it gets perfumey. I drank half, went and got a sandwich, came back, bad. Ten minutes or so killed this drink.

Don't let this happen to your kola champagne. Drink it fast or keep it on ice. Do the right thing.

My friend RJ was talking up a sandwich. He lives in Brooklyn and what he says goes when it comes to food. He's never led me astray before, knows what I like, and is more worldly than I. Therefore, when told me about a Vietnamese sandwich called "bahn mi," I had to find it. I went to a place that was rumored to have one but they removed it from the menu. It would have been awful had the pho and chicken dish not been so good.

The next day, I did a little bit more digging around on the onlines and found another place. I went and they had one fried pork bahn mi left. I grabbed it, noticed that I was a dollar cash short and hate charging for little purchases so I, in true Thirsty Dudes fashion, bought drinks to make it worth my while using my card. One was a drink for a friend and the other was this little dude.

I ate this sandwich, loved it, took a picture which I did later post to Facebook but not with a sepia tone or worn edge or overexposed filter. You're welcome, internet users. The drink, though, the drink...great. It's a sweet, nicely bitter green tea with a maybe honey and maybe barley. Why do I say "maybe?" Well, due to this country not making people learn anything other than French or Spanish and don't start teaching until ninth grade, I don't know Taiwanese. It's cool, though. Trust me. You always have in the past.

James. You did something nice here. Here I am, laid out in bed and you thought of me and brought me a drink. You are a treat. You overheard my like for black cherry and lemonade and you found me a black cherry lemonade. Not only that but it's not terrible for my sick body. Not only that but it tastes pretty good. Not only that but...well I guess that's it.

I spent the last three days just up-chucking all over the place. I've got old newspapers and sawdust and kitty litter all over the place covering up my hurl spots. Look around you. I don't know why you took your shoes off. I know it's typically good etiquette to do so but you should have known at the mound of dirty towels covered in pickles from McDonald's hamburgers and french fries that you shouldn't have bothered. Anyhow, this is all sparkling, fruitful, lemonady and not terrible. It's got a little Stevia taste to it but it's better than that awful diet taste.

You really are a good friend. Hey, I appreciate you coming but could you do me a favor and push that pile of napkins covered in Big Mac special sauce, mustard, and a little bit of puke off the counter before you leave? I'm trying to watch Along Came Polly and can't see Jennifer Aniston's wonderful face though my mound of spew. Thanks dude. You're the best. You can use that hockey stick over there. Please don't use your hands. It might make me lose this drink, too.

Dear Howie,
You are a liar. You must sell a lot of pop out of your false promises to afford to replace all of your pants that are constantly ablaze. You are the worst kind of person. Untrustworthy. I hope I'm not the first to tell it how it is, but you, sir, are awful. Where is all this coming from? This bottle of Lemon-Up is labeled "Howie's Premium Root Beer" and it is not root beer. Your company may be called "Howie's Premium Root Beer" and, if that is true, that is a terrible name for a company that makes things other than root beer.

As for this drink, you've done a fair job of making a mostly lemon, semi lime pop. You think it's going to just be another citrus pop like 7-Up or Sprite, and there is a little bit of it in there, but then cap'n lime jumps in the mix and scrambles your taste buds. This drink captures the flavor of limes and leaves it's inherent, chronic bitterness and depression out of it.

Howie, we haven't been the best track record with this drink but as a non-root beer drink, it's pretty good. It's no root beer as almost promised but it's acceptable.

Love,
Mike of the world famous supreme team Thirsty Dudes show.

You know why the holidays are great? Food and family. I don't care about gifts but I love to eat and talk about nothing. I don't care about sports so the whole "eat a million pounds of food and then sit down like a fat sack of crap and watch a gaggle of dudes throw the ol' pig skin around." Not a giant fan of sport. You know what I'm going to love about Thanksgiving this Thursday, though? All of the "thanks" I'm going to get from my family that I let try this drink. Oh, turned the tide, did I? Yeah. My family will be on their knees begging for another sip, a couple drops of this delicious, fantastic, quasi-seasonal drink. This is a secret gem amongst otherwise mediocre seltzers. This is a diamond in the rough.

How can I explain something so simple but yet so incredible? The "seltzerness" of this tricks you into thinking you are drinking a cinnamon pop. It's real cinnamon, though. It's like a less sweet version of that cinnamon sugar spice you have to basically only use on apples. It smells and tastes like real, not candy cinnamon. Do you have it? Do you get it? If you get it, get it. I mean it. Find it and get it. It's seasonal. Yes, this gets a perfect score but the candy cane one that I also saw probably won't get the same treatment. Sorry in advance. You are welcome in advance for this one, though.

This is one of those drinks that is hard to classify. If you asked a kid what this was, they would say a juice. I couldn't argue with him since it's dark, fruity, and tastes like juice. When you read the labels, though, they vaguely call it a "beverage" and use sweet buzzwords like "enhanced" and "natural" and "energy" which might or might not make it an enhanced natural energy beverage but those words are borderline worthless. Also, "agua" makes me want to put it in the same category as Vitamin Water and the like but I could be wrong. For the aforementioned reasons I will never discredit a scientist for having to pick the correct genus and species of animal, bug, fruit, et cetera. Some things are drifters. That being said, a tomato is eternally a vegetable. I don't give a rip what seeds mean.

This drink is good. I don't get a lot of pomegranate but get a decent amount of cherry. It does taste like if you ate a candle and I cannot pinpoint that. I worked at a skate shop in my youth that was next door to a candle store and this drink is like someone filtered a pomegranate and cherry juice through some strategically placed candles. I say strategically because if I were performing the task, I would have candles stacked up and carefully melted as to have a seamless, waxful route of like seventeen candles to pour the drink down.

Now I want to do this. Can someone commission me to make a candle slide in which to "enhance" my otherwise average drink with additional mystery flavors? If not to make a drink, just to melt a whole bunch of candles and hook up a garden pump to have water go through a multicolored slide-o-wax? I'll let you name it, just let me take care of the actual work and don't bother me while I make art.
e art.

"Holiday milk" sounds like the world's most generic product that has ever existed. It sounds like a gimmick that is used to just reel in idiots to think that it's something truly special. I mean chocolate and mint is not specific to any time of year. If it were eggnog or something with nutmeg in it, yeah, I would say that it is limited to Christmas. Chocolate and mint? Please. Give it to me any time of the year. Please. I love those two rascals together

Enough. Alright. Enough. As a product this is an absolute gem. It's smooth chocolate milk with a little bit of mint in it. It's not too much at all. I was actually surprised that they went as subdued as they did with it. Pleased but surprised. Normally the mix is fairly standard. This though, someone tried this one out and knew what they were up to. They didn't just call up Mix Warehouse over on Pine Avenue and order up the old "Chocolate Mint" mix to add to their product. They called up Harold at Mix Warehouse over on Oak Avenue and bought a chocolate and mint mix separately and mixed them to their liking. I know what you're thinking. A lot of streets are named after trees in this town. It happens. Trees are common. I would move to a city with a group of streets named after trees. Better than living in a city with a group of streets named after presidents or fruits. Those, my friends, are almost always bad news.

Blasted ladyfingers. Why? Why do you have to ruin a perfectly good dessert with rum? You turds. Why? I don't eat things cooked in or with alcohol so when I found out that tiramisu swam in the lake of Cap'n Morgan, I swore off the sweet treat for eternity. Honestly, I never was that crazy about it to begin with so not eating it doesn't really affect me but when I came across this little guy in a wondrous Asian market in Toronto with the Thirsty Dude called Jay, I had to buy it.

This drink tastes like tiramisu. It's odd. Cake flavored drink. Oh, I'm sorry, have you had one before? We've had ice cream flavored drinks, Masala flavored drinks, corn flavored drinks, but never cake. Why not? It seems to not be a problem for these guys. Maybe a chocolate cake tea would be nice. Try it. This tea tastes like the cake it's supposed to. I know it's a novel idea since it's a self-proclaimed "Tiramisu" flavored but we drink stuff all the time that doesn't taste like it's supposed to and this isn't exactly a "regular" drink so it could have gone either way. As far as the "milk tea" thing goes, it's more milk than tea but they're both there. A black tea powder (odd) and a skim milk (not odd) make up the base of this.

Also, it should be pointed out that one carton of this is about as bad for you as a slice of real tiramisu so if you are looking for a replacement, this is it, but if you're looking to save on calories, don't bother and eat real cake. If you've got your jaw wired shut like Kanye West before he felt the need to make up for lost time and never shut up, this is your go-to-guy.