Reed's Jamaican Style Ginger Ale

Reed's Jamaican Style Ginger Ale

The green bottle sort of blends in with my green couch.

It's making my moustache curl in a ludicrous way.

And now it's turning my lips into some kind of faux vagina,
at least now that chin hair has a good reason to be there.

If you look really, really close, you can see
that Replacement Cat has his little cat tongue
stuck out in the cutest way.

This stuff inspires mixed feelings. It's not very good and it hurts to drink it. That's bad. The aftertaste is a mixture of honey and cardboard, that's bad too. On the other hand, the classy green bottle lets me pretend I'm drinking grown-up beer. That's kind of good.

The stuff isn't one of the most gingery ginger beer's I've drank. It hovers somewhere in the middle between the Holy Grail of Bundaberg and some hideous stuff I drank long ago, in the machine room of a video facility long shut down. I took a swig of whatever that stuff was and staggered around the room, spewing bile and curses, as doughy video engineers looked on and laughed.

It's not the ginger that's offensive, it's the "sweet". There's something broken about it. It has that annoying tang of roadside honey where the crazy vendor boasts "Them bees've been fed up on clover and nuthin' but." There's another taste in there, too, a sweet taste that I sort of like but feel that it's not there of it's own free will. Like an apple tasting good at gunpoint.

Actually, I think that might be the mystery taste. An appley taste? Is apple a traditional Jamaican flavor? I'd like to think it is flavored with the rightfully spilled blood of Jamaican slave owners, that'd be more on topic.

The smell is pretty blah, like a swimming pool full of gingery cardboard, on a cool summer morning. The bite of the ginger sort of peters out as it loses carbonation, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I've gotta admit, after drinking the kangaroo flavored Bundaberg, ANY ginger beer would have a hard time competing. The bottle could double as a Fleshlight, and it'd still be lagging behind.

Okay, I'm going to cheat and look at the label now:

carbonated water
honey (ha! did i call it or what?)
pineapple juice from concentrate, 20%
fresh ginger root, 5%
lemon, 3%
lime, 2%
and spices.

Well, I'd guessed apple and got it half right.

So no sugar in this stuff. Sneaky. I actually think I knew that, as this bottle was left at my house by rollerderby girl-hero "Straight Razor", when she came over to play old fashioned AD&D. Straight Razor is a no-sugar, no caffeine "straight edge kid", which is pretty remarkable. Even more remarkable, she rolled an 18(90) for her half-orcs strength. She pretty much decimated my dungeon full of goblins, as her +4 damage bonus guaranteed a kill with every hit. That, and she rolled 3 natural 20s.

This is her soda and I drank it, without her permission.

Okay, the bar having been lowered to take into account the 'no sugar' handicap, this stuff is pretty good. The honey is tastable, as is the pineapple. I don't like honey, but others might. Especially those "no refined sugar" people, they like anything which pretends to be sweet.

This is the "no sugar" handicap embodied.