Soft Drink Reviews, Exotic and Non

Astral Conjunction

2012-02-11T12:05:00.001-08:00

Normally I perk up when I get a $6.66 but this is even better.

White Castle Love

2012-02-02T19:34:00.001-08:00

White Castle Love

Because nothing says loving like using White Castle grease for

lubricant. Sex lubricant.

Every time I see a typographical error in an ad

like this I start looking for secret codes.

Double Cola

2012-01-28T15:27:00.000-08:00

When I squint those two humps look either like
a butt or boobs, I can't decide.

The best thing about Double Cola is that it's "Bottled Under the Authority of Double Cola - USA". Seriously, I doubt that this stuff is put out by more than one bottler, and I bet that bottler is a guy stirring a big vat in his shed fearin' of the revenuers.

Double Cola is okay. Not great. It's unusual for me not to say about a cola that "...it's still better than Coke or Pepsi". Well, this time I can't say that with all earnestness. It's good, it's not too syrupy, but it has a carbonated water taste that I don't really like.

It's made with "invert sugar", whatever that means. The sweetness is fine, I ain't got no trouble with that. It's just the weird aftertaste. I'll drink the whole bottle, though - fear not.

So yeah. A little boring, the review I mean. Sorry.

What the hell is this?

2012-01-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

Ha ha! I'm a business and I'll rip you off for $1-20. I don't know what http://svpply.com/ is selling but I don't think any of it's real. Hey http://svpply.com/, please mail me 3 lbs of Google.

Rollers at 7-11

2012-01-26T03:54:00.001-08:00

The Slurpees at the 7-11 in downtown manhattan are pretty awful. The machines are seldom cleaned but the flavors often changed, yielding banana flavored Mountain Dew and other terrible tastes. One clerk actually had the nerve to claim the the varieties tasted mixed because the machines leaked into one another, a lie which if true must violate health codes. I also suspect that they dilute the mixes with far too much water or something, as halfway through a cup the Slurpee will be drained white as a cave lobster.

It's a cut-rate joint, in my opinion, and not a benefactor of the Brave New World of faux health food classiness that 7-11 adopted during it's Manhattan invasion. I loath being forced to go there, victim of corporate oppressors holding the sole keys of the Slurpee kingdom.

Actually no, I don't blame the corporation - I curse the lazy, corner cutting owners of that particular store. But last visit I suppose I was a victim of heartless corporation savagery. A hard tale, but I share with you the nightmare story of...

The Buffalo Chicken Roller!

WhooOOOooo. Yuuuucky ghost... I didn't know these rollers existed and was slipped one in place of a tacquito treat. The initial bite was a shock, the sort of surprise a bath house frequentor might experience if a strangers penis lacked its normal crunchy, deep fried shell and instead was confronted with a squishy hot dog. The horrible thing tasted like warmed Vienna sausage but was even more lacking in snap or texture. Or maybe it was like an Oscar Meyer take in a banger.

My first bite had me recoiling in horror, and it's hard to recoil from something in your mouth as it comes along with you - it's like trying to outrun your toupee. And it tasted like Buffalo flavored awful.

My first thought was that I had been delivered an improperly cooked food item and was poisoned. Then the roller vs tacquito conversation replayed in my mind, flashback style but in slow motion horror "you'll shoot your eye out kid" Santa-from-A-Christmas-Story style. Pride forbade my returning the thing so I toughed it out.

And I ate it. I did it, a small victory but never again. Never again.

My Form Letter Meets Your Form Letter and "Fuck" is Involved but not in a Sexy Way

2012-01-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Tim,

Thank you for contacting us at Pepsi-Cola regarding the availability of Caffeine Free Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew Throwback .

I am so sorry you are having a problem locating this product. We do operate under a franchise bottler system and as such, bottlers have the freedom to decide which product flavors and package sizes they will offer. For this reason, local availability can vary across the country.

To locate stores in your local area that might sell our products, (within a 50 mile radius), please log on to www.pepsiproductfacts.com. Simply click on the STORE LOCATOR tab in the upper right hand corner of the page, select the product you're trying to find, enter your zip code, and you'll see a list of the chain grocery stores and chain pharmacies closest to you that have sold the product in the last 30 days. This information is generated by stores that use computer scanning equipment in their check-out process.

If you would like additional assistance, please call our Consumer Relations department at 1 (800) 433-2652 Monday – Friday, 9am-6pm EST. When calling, please refer to the file number located at the bottom of this email.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Tina
Consumer Relations Representative

012910540A
{\i DID YOU KNOW ... *** All of Pepsi-Cola’s plastic soft-drink bottles contain an average of 10% recycled plastic, and the average aluminum can contains 40% to 50% recycled aluminum. ***}

Dear Pepsico,

You're a bunch of jerks. You can't leave important decisions like this up the bottlers, they're idiots. A fucking bottler can't make a same tasting drink two weeks in a row, yet you trust them to know what the market is? Did no one tell the idiot bottlers that Mountain Dew Throwback would sell out of my local store within a day? Have you ever TRIED Caffeine Free Mountain Dew in the NYC area?

No. Seriously, you should fix this.

Hugs,

me

Koch Industries, Brawny Paper Towels

2012-01-18T14:19:00.001-08:00

Not a soda, I know, but I couldn't resist writing a letter to Brawny telling them I wouldn't be buying any more of their paper towels because they are owned by Koch Industries. Seriously, that mustachio'd gentleman who traditionally adorns the wrapper would not approve of what the Koch dicks do.

Here was the response:

Thank you for contacting the Georgia-Pacific Consumer Response Center.
Georgia-Pacific places tremendous importance on the opinions we receive
from our consumers.

Georgia-Pacific is a wholly-owned, independently managed subsidiary of
Koch Industries.  Koch companies, the Koch family and Koch foundations
have worked for more than 40 years to make the world a better place by
supporting market-based solutions to society's challenges. The company
believes that emphasis on market-based solutions is important, because
extensive historical and theoretical research shows that economic
freedom best fosters innovation, environmental stewardship and an
improved quality of life throughout society.

If you would like more information about Koch's record of responsible
operations, the company's market-based policy positions or its ongoing
efforts to promote economic freedom, please visit www.kochfacts.com.

We appreciate your comments and they have been forwarded to our
marketing personnel and management.



Consumer Response Center
gpcrc@gapac.com | 800-283-5547
-

I am completely baffled at their belief that economic freedom is equated with environmental stewardship. And the idea that a company can believe anything is ridiculous. It's frightening that I've used these paper towels to blot up messes, as they were obviously designed by retards.

This Blog isn't Dead, I'm Just Bored...

2012-01-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

...because it's fucking boring to write "Oh, this strawberry soda tastes like strawberries but a little chemical fake" for the eight-hundredth time. Seriously, give me a break. I was powered by foulness, by liquid malignancy passed off as child treats. I haven't found a soda evil enough to be reviewed.

And I'm lazy. That too.

I shit you not, I have six milk crates of sodas and threw away another three last time I moved. Soon they'll all be botulism flavored, which at least will give me a run for my money. I can't bring myself to drink another boring god-damn soda.

Boring.

BOOOORING.

Shoot me.

Dr. Pepper Fucks Little Guy

2012-01-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

So the NY Times has a great article about the big Dr. Pepper snuffing Dublin Dr. Pepper. Which sucks. I had one, it tasted better.

Alas.

The Work of the Devil

2012-01-12T15:50:00.001-08:00

The world needs more White Castles, not less. Thus is a tragedy, painful and wrong. Seriously, someone needs to fix this.

The truly terrible thing, though, is that this is my fault. All 2012 I've been having my karmic balance aggressively maintained. I got my picture in the NYTimes, which was good, the next day I get a bunch of stitches in my hand - bad. Again and again, these wild swings...

The White Castle was shut down because earlier that day I'd struck up a delightful correspondence with a very respected game writer and it looked like we were sealing a Deal. Ba-zing, there goes the White Castle.

I'm so sorry.

Hotdogs and Chili at White Castle is Okay by Me, not to Give Anything Away

2012-01-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is a Nathan's hot dog. Nathan's is a NYC institution type thing, with a delicious ur-restaurant in Coney Island and a handful of exceptionally shitty chain restaurants scattered hither and non. Your average Nathan's hot dog from a non-Coney Island restaurant is awful. Which reminds me:

At a Nathan's in Bay Ridge I laughed at the condiment bar, it had these dipping ladles and all around the troughs of toppings and etc there was food spilled everywhere. It was like the palsy brigade had come through and had a spazz-fest while trying to relish up their hotdogs. I laughed at the implied incompetency of the customers there. But the trouble was not with the retards that eat at Nathan's, it was with the condiment bar itself - the ladle handles were so long that you couldn't lift the ladle straight up out of the troughs without hitting the sneeze guard. You had to turn the ladle half on its side, spilling most of the contents. Hilarious and stupid.

But White Castle has somehow gotten Nathan's hot dogs right. This was one of the best hot dogs I've ever had, seriously. It also lacked that weird Nathan's butter taste that I'm not always a fan of. The mini-hot dog from White Castle is fantastic - soft yet with a slight bit of snap.

Wow.

The chili, though, warn't so hot. The steak was chewy, the whole thing too greasy. Good as fuck on the hot dog though. Notice that cup behind the chili, it's a Mountain Dew not-Slurpee from a Hess station. It's fantastic.

Ouzon Soda, Opa! Originals

2011-05-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

Ouzon Soda, Opa! Originals

Dare I take the Ouzon plunge?

Whenever a company offers to send me a soda for free in the mail, I am always slightly afraid someone is trying to poison me. I mean, it's the internet, right? There are people out there who want to poison me. It's a given.

Ouzon was sent to my by, I presume, the company that makes it. While they didn't actually poison me, it wasn't exactly clear at the beginning if I would walk away or not. The initial yuck factor was pretty high.

Pre-yuck.

Post-yuck.

There's a handful of strikes against Ouzon before you even open the bottle. "The Original Non-Alchoholic Ouzo Flavored Soda" is a bad start. Any non-alcohol alcohol I've ever tried has been bad, except for Senorial Sangria which is dreamy. Senorial Sangria sets a high standard for unalcohol alcohol. The other strike against Ouzon is a suspicious panel on the back of the bottle saying that 5% of the after-tax profits go something to do with "Orthodox Minsteries". I'm not sure what that means, let's deploy google... Okay, the Farah Foundation seems to give out piles of money to Christian organizations of a certain bent.

Elsewhere on this blog I've made my opinion of that stuff very clear, so I'm going to pretend really hard that these are the bad-ass Christian types who fund secret anti-vampire squads and make epic mosaics. I hope. So if you spent a dollar on Ouzon this foundation probably gets two cents, don't do this if you are a vampire or are mosaicrophobic.

But to business. What does this stuff taste like? To me it tastes like bad, natural licorice. Or you can read this sentence aloud:

"Ouzon tastes like anise".

Read it aloud to a friend and watch their face. It'll be great.

But yeah, I don't like natural licorice. I don't like fake black licorice. I don't like things that are anise flavored. BUT! (Anise, but!) But, I keep taking little micro-sips while I write this. I can't really stop poking at the bottle, it's like a scab ready to pick. It hurts to do it, but I gotta keep sipping. Partially, it might be because it is delightfully cold - something Opa Originals can't take credit for. Partially, there might be some secret bit of good in here. But I doubt it.

Not the best thing to come out of post-Atlantis Greece, not as good as Stala Orange Drink. Maybe if I was a recovering drunkard this might help stave off my ouzo urges, but I'm not. And I don't like anise things. And I think religion is bad for everyone. So...

Coca Cola Icee from Burger King

2010-11-24T11:20:00.000-08:00

Over two months ago the Slurpee machine broke at my local 7-11. Not the whole machine, just one mixer/spigot arrangement, and that particular spigot dispensed Coca Cola Slurpee. They never bothered to change the flavors around, so I've been mostly Slurpee-less for quite some time. I mean, sure, I can bicycle to the far off 7-11 but now it's cold...

On occasion, I would walk past the Burger King and be tempted in for an Icee. They are always awful, but I always forget how awful they are. Today I was tempted in and the Icee was, as I should have known, awful.

This is the story of that Icee and how I came to get ahold of it:

I think my description of the broken Slurpee machine above is ample proof that my life is one of disappointment and pain. From all sides I am assailed by the horrendous forces of despair. This morning I went to the post office to pick up a package, but they didn't have it - apparently it had been sent out for redelivery instead of being stashed away for pick-up like they slip said.

The horror.

Moping home, I stumbled into the local Burger King for an ersatz Slurpee fix. I mean, if people can drink chicory and dirt in place of coffee, I can drink an Icee just this once. I order and watch as the counter guy takes one of the extra large drink cups and fills it up with Coke Icee. Holy shit!, thinks I, that is a SODA sized extra large cup - I'm going to get a lot more Icee than I'm paying for. Huzzah!

The oversized cup is filled, capped, and is about to be delivered to me when the manager stops the counter person and explains the mistake. The manager pops the lid off of the extra large cup and pours the Icee out into a standard large cup of the size I was supposed to receive. As soon as I saw this operation commence, I called out that the extra large was fine but they ignored me.

The manager handed me my smaller cup and here's the conversation:

Me: You know, it was pretty wasteful to replace the extra large cup with a smaller cup. I know it was a mistake but you could have just given me the larger cup.

Manager: It was a mistake, you ordered a large cup.

Me; I know it was a mistake, I'm saying it's wasteful. Now you are throwing away a perfectly good cup and the Icee left in it.

Manager: We need the extra large cups for the soda.

Me: Are you going to wash that cup out and reuse it?

Manager: Uh, no.

Me: Then what good does it do to change out the cups? All you did was cause more waste.

I might have accepted an answer of "We need mistake cups to count for inventory" as acceptably managerial. This guy was just dumb.

But yeah, Burger King Icees are crap. I regret buying it.

Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla

2010-09-28T07:45:00.001-07:00

Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla

I imagine the creation myth of the stuff goes something like this:

Bob: Hey Rob, we need to make a handful of generic soft drink flavors to round out our coffee line. I mean we got all these bottles and labelers and shit, so let's get 'em to use.

Rob: Do we care about taste or quality or anything?

Bob: What'd I say? I said, "Let's round out the line". Get a list of ten soft drink flavors we don't have in development already and get back to me.

two weeks later...

Rob: Here you go, sir, a list of ten new flavors. All written out.

Bob: To make it convenient to the conceit of conversational format, please read them aloud.

Rob: Coca Cola.

Bob: That's a good one, but I think it's claimed.

Rob: Ah. Okay. Cherry. See, I'm doing them in alphabetical order.

Bob: Rob, "Cherry" should come before "Coca Cola" alphabetically. You see, you go to the second letter to determine the order if the first letter is the same.

Rob: Oh, I thought that the second letter would be the "C" in "Cola". I do envy you your liberal arts degree sire. Anyways, I thought we'd make our cherry "natural" or some such thing. People like that nowadays.

Bob: Whatever sells. Next!

Rob: Chamomille.

Bob: I hate to hassle you, but you spelled it wrong.

Rob: What? How can you tell? I said it out loud and you aren't even looking at my paper.

Bob: It's "chamomile". I know it looks wrong but that's it.

Rob: I find this conceit of a written out conversation script thing to be confusing. I don't like it.

Bob: Anyways, chamomile is a stupid soft drink flavor and your a gigantic stupid head for proposing it.

Rob: Sob

Bob: Man up. Next.

Rob: Gassosa.

Bob: No one knows what gassosa is, but it gives fake class to the rest of the line by being all Italiany. Let's do gassosa.

Rob: Iron brew.

Bob: One authentic old country thing is enough. Hey, wait a sec. Why don't we pick something old Country, like Country-Music country, to draw in the cowboy hat people.

Rob: There aren't a lot of those in our distribution area, sir.

Bob: You're thinking small, son. With the sort of money that big manufacturers give the Republicans, cowboy hat people will soon be everywhere. Everywhere.

Rob: As you say, sir.

Bob: Root beer is too kiddyish, though is certainly in the right area. Anyone can make a rootbeer. It's just Root Beer Flavoring Pack 12H and Brown 3. But root beer is for kids, and we make classy adult soda candy.

Rob: How about a whiskey flavored drink, sir?

Bob: That has potential, but gimmee something else.

Rob consults Internet in whispers. Internet gestures wildly.

Rob: Apparently "sarsaparilla" is a cowboy word for a drink similar to root beer.

Bob: That sounds great. Perfect in fact. It'll be cowboy to the cowboy people but the word is weird enough to sound European or Amerindian to the non-cowboy people. Win/win!

Rob: The trouble is, sir, that an authentic tasting sarsaparilla is tricky to make. It has to be spicy but earthy at the same time, sweet and creamy but have bite. It's a root beer, technically, bit it's made from a whole other mess of stuff than what we call "root beer". This is going to take a lot of time and research to blend together a meaningful yet unique mixture which we can sell as "Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla".

Bob: Rob...

Rob: I foresee six months of work. I'd also recommend some research trips, sir, to areas where
people hand craft sarsaparilla at home.

Bob: Robert...

Rob: It will be a rewarding process...

Bob: HEY! Shut up. Listen up genius, you said sarsaparilla is just like root beer...

Rob: Actually, no...

Bob: ...AND we'll make ours out of what we have on hand. Root Beer Flavoring Pack 12H and Brown 3 will do nicely.

Rob: But sir! You are completely missing the point. It's not root beer, it's something else entirely, with a long and rich history...

Bob: FINE! You can add DOUBLE the Brown 3 to make it look dense.

Rob: And some Red 4, sir? Oh please can I add some Red 4?

Bob: Yes, Bob, for you anything.

Rob and Bob hug, curtain falls.

I used my web cam to take this picture,
and had to put the bottle super close to the camera
because it's 10am and I haven't put on any clothes yet.

Okay, to be fair, the ingredients claim there are no artificial colors and it uses natural flavorings and real sugar, but this does not taste like a sarsaparilla to me. Not in the least. It's overcarbonated and tastes like a generic root beer. Or at least the top half of the bottle does as I couldn't bring myself to drink the bottom half.

I don't need to do this blog anymore

2010-09-26T20:50:00.001-07:00

Because I done hit the big time! I'm outta here, jerks:

Coca-Cola Great Britain,
Promotion/Award Prize Dept.
305 Dallin Road.SE18,3NX
London, United Kingdom
Ref.Num: CCGB/81A/01/2010

Dear Esteemed Winner,

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the Coca-Cola Great Britain
2010 International Promotion Program. Your e-mail address attached to
Reference number: CCGB/81A/01/2010, serial number: 820534-1 and Ticket
number: 5637604545148, has consequently won in the 1st category. You have
therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of £500,000.00 GBP (Five
Hundred Thousand Pounds). Please note that this Promotional Program tagged
"THANKS FOR CONTRIBUTING TO OUR FINICIAL SUCCESS" was sponsored and
organized by the Coca-Cola Great Britain in view of showing our
appreciation to our numerous customers world wide.

To begin your claim, please contact our approved agent with the
information below. Also state your are in receipt of this notification and
you
require further instructions on how to claim your won prize.

Contact Name: Mrs. Cindy Parker
Email: ccgb.cindyparker@admin.in.th

1.) FULL NAME:
2.) ADDRESS:
3.) PHONE NUMBER:
4.) COUNTRY:
5.) AGE/SEX:
6.) OCCUPATION/POSITION:
7.) MARITAL STATUS:

Note, please remember to quote your Reference number in all
correspondence. Congratulations once again, from all members of staff and
thank you for being there for us.

Claims Manager:
Dr. Wayne Smith
Coca-Cola Great Britian
Tel:+44-703-198-4570

The Dr. Soda Phenomenon

2010-09-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

He don't drink beer

2010-08-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

"Look man, you've got it all backwards..."

Reader "Brian from Poisonedville, OR" doesn't seem to like Fentiman's Ginger Beer. Or maybe he loves it and his webcam still shows him making the soft drink equivalent of an air guitar face. He shouldn't make that sort of grimace with a nose that obviously attached by plastic surgeons, especially not inept plastic surgeons. It's likely to pop off.

I truly wish that the Fentiman's people would be forced to make a drink that was alcohol free. This shit should not be available to minors.

Sarcasm tastes bad

2010-08-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

Oh loooooook! Tim finally put up a new post.
Let's throw a party and show our sarcastic support
by sending him a still frame of our blog tracker thing.
Ohhh lookit that! Tim actually did something.

Cherry Slurpee

2010-08-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

Once again, a picture really isn't worth the effort. Imagine a Slurpee cup full of red crap. It isn't hard.

Now take an imaginary drink of that red crap. It's cold right? If it isn't, your imagining it wrong. Keep trying. Cold aside, the flavor you need to imagine is something foul. Focus in on burnt corn syrup and a taste of particle board. Seriously, imagine that as a drink and then add cherry syrup. It's not good. At least, it's not good for the first few drinks. That's the trick.

The cherry Slurpee tastes like crap, but like beer it numbs your mouth until you don't notice the taste. It's sort of like an unending burnt avalanche of gross which you grow accustomed to, and that lets you pick out the slighter sweet flavors. But don't stop drinking it, or you lose the numbness.

It's a similar effect to that crap Ralph and Charlie's, but realized in the opposite manner. Whereas you have to keep drinking Ralph and Charlie's to avoid the hideous perfume aftertaste, you have to keep slugging back cherry Slurpee to avoid the horrible initial taste. Ha.

Anyways, get the Mountain Dew or the Coke before you get any of the crappy fruit flavors.

Root Beer Slurpee

2010-08-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Photographs are a lot like Dungeons and Dragons minis. They are great for determining party order, but as soon as they go on the table you are laming out. It's a game of the imagination, dude, you should be using that time to think rather than laboring away at Hardee's so you can afford a bugbear raiding party for the next game.

So imagine a Slurpee cup full of root beer Slurpee. Got it? Now roll for surprise.

Anyways, I have no picture for the 7-11 root beer Slurpee. I could, if I so choose, use any one of the scads of Coca Cola Slurpee photos I have pinned up around my boudoir. The Coke and root beer are visually identical. However, I choose NOT to share my pornography on the internet, so you get no picture, real or fake.

Root beer Slurpee is perfectly acceptable if you like fake root beer. I think it's a branded root beer flavor, I can't remember, but either way it's a generic chemical candy root beer flavor. No goodness or reality about it, just the signifier for root beer. So, yeah, you can drink the stuff. It's cold, and it doesn't taste BAD.

And that is pretty key. It doesn't taste bad. There are two different sorts of Slurpees in the world, the "soda" flavored and the fruit flavored. Cherry Slurpee? Awful. Tastes like gross candy and corn syrup. Coke/Mountain Dew Slurpee? Not bad, not bad at all. The root beer falls in the "cola" side of the issue.

So yeah, it's okay. Get Coke, though, it's better.

Ak-100 the teaser for the sequel

2010-06-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

Photo from The Vain Gourmet.

I'm a little unclear about a lot of things, especially Mrs. French's AK-100. This exceptionally foul beverage has the dubious honor of being the worst thing I have ever drank AND has the best review I have ever written.

Sneaking around the internet this morning, I'd hoped to find a place in Brooklyn to buy some more as I really don't feel I gave the stuff a fair shake the first time around. I mean, it could've been spoiled or just old or an angry person might have shat in the mixing machine. All of those things are more likely true than the possibility that someone actually intentionally concocted the thing I drank to actually taste that way.

Blech.

Anyways, sniffing around I found this blog called "The Vain Gourmet". In it they found an apparently in-house restaurant version of AK-100 sold in a bottle with a sticker reading "AK-100". This completely changes my understanding of the world in that either:

A) AK-100 is a type of drink in general usage in the Caribbean. The wicked Mrs. French didn't originate the stuff, but instead just makes a (hopefully) exceptionally vile version of it. But how the hell does a whole category of drink denoted with a seemingly military code?

or

B) Some perverse Haitian restauranteur is making knock-offs of Mrs. French's products. Next to that AK-100 bottle might be a bottle full of thin grey liquid labeled "Coca Cola".

or possibly

C) The restaurant was rebottling Mrs. French's stuff, possibly after cutting it with bleach. But that seems silly.

Either way, this must be investigated.

Enigmatic Slurpee-in-a-soda-cup Pricing

2010-06-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

I used to always fill a Super Big Gulp cup with Slurpee whenever I went to a 7-11. Unfortunately, the local place started flipping out and charging random amounts of money for said uber-Slurp, sometimes $4+. It drove me nuts because it was so arbitrary, sometimes I wouldn't be charged extra, other times I'd be charged way too much. I finally quit getting the mega-Slurpees locally.

This is the first time I've seen anything in writing addressing the issue. Sadly it doesn't really clear anything up. It actually seems like you're getting a deal, that they are going to charge you for an Extra Large Slurpee even if you get a Double Gulp sized cup. You're getting more for the same amount.

Mtn Dew Typhoon

2010-06-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

Yo Punchy! Do the Dew!

Holy shit, never have I had such a disconnect between drinking a Mountain Dew and reading about it on the internet. Hee-larity reigns. Okay okay okay, I guess I guess I have to do this in order:

Mountain Dew, as many of you will know, is having a hokey "Choose the Next Dew" contest votey thing. They are trotting out three Mountain Dew flavors and we the drinkers can call or vote or text or something to get one of them to stay around. Straight up marketing gimmick, I dig it. In fact, I actually worked on a marketing campaign for a cereal which had a voting gimmick for new flavored shapes mixed in the cereal. What stupid shape will win? You decide! Of course, the commercials advertising the voting gimmick and the commercials announcing the winner were made at the same time. Your votes didn't count, not one bit.

Jerks.

Anyways, Mountain Dew is doing this stupid contest and there are three new flavors running around: A Sprite Mountain Dew, a Lime Mountain Dew, and a baffling little retard Mountain Dew. Being in NYC, it is completely random what any given store keeps in stock. I go to a dozen different places to round up new versions of standard drinks, getting suspicious glances every time I leave without a purchase. The three new Mountain Dews I found, drank and didn't write about. And repeat. Two of the three test flavors are really good which is why I kept buzzing through them without writing, the third one sucks. That sucky Mountain Dew flavor is, of course, what I'm stuck reviewing today - Mountain Dew TYPHOON! I first drank some in desperation two weeks ago while playing with my XBox, horrified I returned it to the refrigerator half empty. Today my wife prods me into drinking it and writing a review, something about needing space in the refrigerator for "vegetables". Bah.

So:

It's a fruit punch Mountain Dew. Not good fruit punch, not 1950s-era-dance fruit punch, but bad discount store fruit punch. The sort of fruit punch that's a mish mosh of random fruity flavors poured directly out of a vat, each flavor denoted by a number. "Hmmm, this here fruit punch needs more 1297A". That sort of punch. It tastes cheap. It's too perfumey. It's all yuck. It's similar to the grotesque Red Alert or Code Red or whatever it is.

So yeah, the Mountain Dew Typhoon flavor sucks. And it doesn't only suck, it's named in poor taste. Hey! Let's name a soft drink after a natural disaster! I'm looking forward to "Coke Plague! Feel the POX!" next.

But the hilariousesness isn't in the bad Mountain Dew drink. It's in the label. And not in the label but OF the label. The label has a random name on it: Shanea Wisler. It's next to a little star, so I thought it was a sort of footnote but it wasn't. Puzzled, I broke my "no research" rule and typed "shanea wisler mountain dew" into a Google search bar. Or at least I started to, it auto filled so I didn't even have to finish typing.

I THINK this means that a lot of other people searched for the same thing, because, seriously what the hell is this random name doing on the label? The public needs to know! I immediately found this article by Jason A. Kahl on the Reading Eagle website. In it we get some juicy quotes from Shanea E Wisler who designed the bottle label:

A 2007 graduate of Boyertown High School who is studying to lead religious youth groups has won a $10,000 award for her label design for a new flavor of Mountain Dew soda.

Shanea E. Wisler... said she felt divine inspiration for her design for the new Typhoon flavor Mountain Dew set to hit stores in April.

Okay, so the design wasn't even hers. I wish she'd given credit where credit is due, though. Who inspired it? Jesus? God? Mary? Buddha? I guess Satan would technically be "diabolic" intervention, so it probably wasn't him though he IS the Prince of Lies and could certainly put one over on a 20 year old aspiring graphic designer.

"I got an e-mail about the contest and felt the Holy Spirit move me to design this," said Wisler, whose interest in art began at Boyertown Junior High School...

Oh, wait. It was the Holy Spirit. That's the Catholic version of God, right? Where you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and you say the names and say "The power of Christ compels you" and Satan stops being an Exorcist or whatever. I thought the Holy Spirit was supposed to be the unknowable one, the one where if you "got it" you were a real Catholic. Hmmm. Seems unworthy of the ultimate Omega being to be dabbling in soft drink labels.

Regardless, I want to see this email. I bet it was all like "Yo Shanea, It's G-O-D and I (that's like double capitalized) got an idea for this thing you have to work on or, like, there'll be a toad plague to beat the band."

The three finalists were flown to New York City for a press event and each received $10,000, an Apple laptop computer and other prizes.

What? Mountain Dew had a press event in NYC and I wasn't invited? Oh the shame! I live next door Mountain Dew, you could have at least phoned!

"I found out that I won on Oct. 14, which is my parents' anniversary and also the 10th month and the 14th day of the year," Wisler said, continuing her sense that winning the contest was her destiny. "I see those numbers, 10 and 14, everywhere and have been seeing them since I was in junior high school."

Given the above quote, I'm surprised that the label didn't have a little more Dr. Bronner in it.

Wisler said her name will be on every can and bottle of Typhoon Dew nationwide and she hopes the flavor and design are selected to be permanent parts of the Mountain Dew lineup.

Okay Wisler, I think you just pointed out the worst thing about democracy: Those with a vested interest in something bad often vote against the greater good. Typhoon is a disgusting flavor, I earnestly doubt that anyone - ANYONE - would be able to say it is better than the other two flavors.

At last she looks nice...
Hang on a second, that design looks NOTHING
like the actual label. NOTHING.
(photo from the Reading Eagle, credited Erin Shoaf)
Seriously, look below:

What the hell? There swirl is completely different,
the color palette is only vaguely similar,
the actual can has fluer de lis or whatever
they are called... I call shenadigans.

Because I am interested in the sort of people that get to meet the Mountain Dew higher ups, I'm going to internet snoop for some more "dope". Here's some quotes from her on a Yugoslavian site called "http://www.formspring.me":

I will only pursue relationships that the Lord tells me to pursue and will hold that relationship with the utmost integrity. The Lord is continuing to do a work in me to become exactly what I need to be for my future husband. It's a beautiful journey :) and I'm loving every second of it!

Careful there, Shanea, that's the sort of stuff left Mary giving birth in a barn. A jealous God forbids her seeing other people, spending his time showing her how "to become exactly what I need to be for my future husband". Bang zoom, giving birth in a manger, hunted by Romans.

[The Dewmocracy contest] seems rigged to me too. I truly believe that people only like white out because it's white. :( which is a sad reason. I can understand though, how many times do we see soda thats white? but Typhoon tastes so much better.

Whoah there lady, let's not go hating things just because they are white. But I must say that your suspicions point you out as more than an unthinking tool of the Mountain Dew brand...

[In response to a question about what goes into the Typhoon drink] if you're talking about mountain dew typhoon, i did not create the flavor. That would have been Dominick from the Mountain Dew Brand team.

Dominick? You know these guys on a first name basis? I am afire with jealousy. I must craft a latex suit which gives me the appearance of a Shanea Wisler, then I will seduce this "Dominick" and soon the Mountain Dew empire will be MINE.

I'm with you on Supernova being the best. That one was by far my favorite in the last dewmocracy. I still think its probably better than typhoon, but typhoon does have more sentimental value.

What? But this is positively human. You liked another flavor better, and admit that you like Typhoon for special reasons? Curses! My innate dislike of you for your connection with horrid Typhoon is being confounded.

[On being a vegetarian] I tried it last year for a little while while working out. I was losing weight, getting into shape and feeling really good about myself. But then I stopped. So I decided I wanted to start again. No political or social or religious reasons.

Wait, what? You're a vegetarian? But Christians are supposed to be consuming the Earth as fast as possible in order to bring on the rapture... Stop making this so difficult for me!

[On designing the label] Though it was a collaborate effort because the typhoon flavor nation in the dew labs helped me create what I created. They gave me opinions, voted on different designs. I had to change a few things and if I would have just made it on my own without the flavor nations input, it wouldn't look nearly as good as it does.

Hey, you just totally cockblocked my righteous anger over the blatant adjustments your design went through between the two photos above. It's like you are purposefully not being a horrible, boastful, lying person. Man that pisses me off.

So what do we learn from Typhoon flavored Mountain Dew? I'll tell you!

The Christian God can't come up with a unique Mountain Dew label. He just sort of looked at all the other Mountain Dew labels and made something that looked like them. Then he showed it to the rest of the triumvirate who said "Dude, shouldn't you be worrying about more important shit?" Then he beamed it into the head of a girl and probably got her fired from her job at the t-shirt printing place. Good job God, you jerk. I somehow think a Japanese God would have made a totally awesome label and then gotten the girl a job flying robots in the army, much cooler.

Facebook is useless for picking soda labels. You offer people dozens of identical nothing designs and, yeah, one'll get picked BECAUSE IT'S DESIGNED BY GOD. Jesus, people, God has totally fucked over democracy here. I sort of suspect that the submissions were pretty carefully vetted by MD first, anyways.

This Dewmocracy gimmick isn't very good. I mean there's all this crazy shit going on about "Flavor nations", but I've never heard about any of it and I sit down and write about soda once every month or two.

Religion ruins everything and this horrible Typhoon drink will prove that when it wins.

God likes natural disasters and I propose that when he made this label He didn't know it was for a soft drink. "Holy shit", says He, "they are doing branding for the disasters I use to punish people for being brown? I'm all over this."

This sort of nonsense is going to run Mountain Dew out of business, I mean seriously, they already had to pawn off the vowels in Mountain.

Don't use Yugoslavian social networking sites that make all your postings available to an internet full of creepy, bearded soda reviewers who want to become your body double so they can seduce Mountain Dew flavor designers. Just don't.

In conclusion: Don't even try this Typhoon crap. Get the other two new Mountain Dew flavors or one of the video game flavored ones. Or a Mello Yello, they're being nationally distributed now. I think I have a new motto relating to how Mountain Dew should resemble a chartreuse spinner bait:

"If it's yellow
then I'm mellow,
if it's not
it'll taste like snot."

Elephant Ginger Beer

2010-06-02T09:29:00.001-07:00

EGB - "Elephant Ginger Beer"

As far as I understand it, ginger originated in India. Here is a historical account from the Bagha Disaata Bahir:

...and for seven days did Baahir walk

along the dusty road towards the sea,

until he did come upon a large and ferocious head

buried partially in the roadbed.

"Oh grotesque head, how did you come to be

buried in this road that passes by the sea?

The head was that of a man, with

a fearsome brow and tremendous teeth

upon it's brow it bore a shining trapezohedron

knitted upon a band of gold flecked iron.

It's hair was snakes and the nose

was that of the small bears found in the hills

near Muldorre beyond the mountains.

When the head opened it's mouth to answer

Baahir was as quick as a snake -

he cut out the tongue which was rough

and dry like an undesirable root vegetable.

"Ha ha fearsome head, I have cut out

your tongue" crowed Baahir.

"And I don't even want it, observe as

I bury it here in the roadbed beside you.

Now watch as I shame you further."

Baahir squatted over the head

lying in the roadbed

and began bobbing up and down.

From the locked camera view of the head

on the roadbed

it was quite degrading.

Thus was ginger brought onto the Earth.

---

Anyways, that tongue grew into the first ginger plant. It was promptly trampled by a passing ox cart because it had been planted in a roadbed but by that point everyone thought it was such a swell idea that Jesus made a new one and put it some place else and God made Moses get it and put it on the Arc because saltwater would ruin the plant and Jesus didn't want to have to go and evolve a new one again. It's a lot of work and Jesus just likes hanging around.

The moral of this story is that India loves ginger and wants to honor it as one of its most famous sons. Which is why I initially theorized that EGB - Elephant Ginger Beer - was created by Pakistan for Indian markets.

I found this bottle of EGB at one of those Indian groceries on the middle East side, in the 20s and 30s. The NYC indy comic thing was held at the armory there, and I'd loaded up on enough shit for my wife to kill me twice over. Barely able to move under the combined malefactions of a fortune in comic books and my awkward comic-girl-admiring erection, it truly shows my dedication to both of your readers that I stopped to snoop in an Indian market. After all, my wife couldn't kill me three times so more soda didn't really matter.

Truth be known, I'd already picked these places over pretty well. I was shocked to find three or four drinks previously unknown to the Western hemisphere - one of them being EGB. I bought 'em up and lugged all the crap home.

When I finally got around to trying the EGB I was shocked. SHOCKED I say. India, the first birthplace of ginger, had made an utterly unremarkable ginger drink. It had the most generic taste of any ginger beer or ale I've ever tasted. I'm thinking I would be unable to distinguish it from Tommy's in a blind taste test.

Now let's be clear: This crap was bottled in Tekkawatte, Biyagama on the island of Sri Lanka. This shit came from the OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING WORLD and pretty clearly uses "Generic Ginger flavoring no 3" as it's main ingredient. AND I PAID $5 for it! I think it's the most expensive drink I've ever bought over the counter, the most expensive period if you don't count shipping. And to think that other assholes thought this crap worth sending over here.

A quick aside: I have a theory on how most foreign grocery items wind up in the US. I believe that every country has its own version of the dollar stores that are ruining our cities. Poland, India, Canada, all of 'em. And when these dollar stores go out of business they have a fifty cent sale, and then when the doors actually close for good they are opened one more time and all the crap that no one would buy for fifty cents and no store employee would steal and no store owner would take home to store in his basement, all that remaining junk is put into a shipping container and sent to the United States to be sold in an ethnic market or whatever you'd call it. Because, seriously folks, why the fuck would anyone want a Polish made Brillo pad? Is grandma really so attached to that crap that she needs her Korean rubber bands enough that someone needs to import them? No. It's totally random crap. But anyways...

In the bottom middle of that there picture is a
bit of what us literary types call "foreshadowing",
just like on Lost.

India! You are magic! You are supposed to be bizarre and wonderful and a little uncomfortable to visit! How can you FUCK UP GINGER BEER!... Oh, wait, I see why, because it's bottled under the authority of Coca fucking Cola.

Coke, like religion, ruins everything.

I'm going to copy out the label for you completists out there:

Nutritional Facts
Ginger Beer Soda Soft Drink
Savings Per 100ml (3.5oz)
Energy 42 kcal
Fat 0g
Proteing 0g
Carbohydrates 11g

Containts: Carbonated Water, Sugar, Permited Flavours, Colours (110, 102, 122, 150d), Acidulant (330) & Preservative (2111)
Manufactured by:
Coca-Cola Beverages Sri Lanka Ltd
Tekkawatte, Biyagama
Under the authority of
The Coca-Cola Company
GINGEER BEER AND THE DYNAMIC RIBBON
DIVICE ARE TRADEMARKS OF THE COCA-COLA
COMPANY

There. My favorite bit is "Containts". It's a perfect amalgam of "Contents" and "Contains".

So here's what we need to do to wrap this up: Imagine me drinking some of the bottle, looking disgusted, a freeze frame and Animal House style text pops up saying

"Tim went on to get both diabetes AND pancreatic cancer from writing this soda blog".

Then we zoom into the bottle and the text reads

"The EGB bottle was left on a file cabinet corner, unfinished, for two weeks. At that point a cat knocked it off the cabinet and onto the floor, making a sticky mess all around Tim's desk. It looked liked he'd had one boss internet pornography session you bet. He walked in and got all pissed off and had to clean it up but did a bad job and still sometimes finds little bits of sticky here and there and put the bottle on the big table in the area that passes for a living room in his tiny apartment and the bottle sat there for like another three weeks before Tim realized that his wife hadn't yelled at his for leaving it there for so long which really WAS her way of yelling at him for leaving it there so he finally decided to write up the review. The bottle will eventually be emptied down the sink and recycled and Tim will wonder if the empty bottle itself should be sold on eBay but, man, that's a lot of work and probably no one would want it anyways."

This review is dedicated to the blog poster who posts actual comments on the blogs but still advertises Viagra in his little name tag thing. This is for you buddy.

Jones Pure Cane Cola

2010-04-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

Wha? I used my built in computer camera
to take this photo and it came out backwards.

Jones Pure Cane Cola

Okay, the Jones drinks have never "wow'd" me. They are usually serviceable at best, horrible at worst. The charm of the company is their tremendous variety and occasional gimmickry. Dungeons and Dragons flavored sodas? Sign me up.

Which reminds me, I have a D&D soda somewhere that I still need to review.

Anyways, today I had a "Pure Cane Cola" with my lunch. It's perfectly fine. MUCH better than corn syrupy Coke or Pepsi, a real cola's cola. It doesn't leave a slimy aftertaste like Coke, it's thin but still flavorful. It's sort of a list of all the things Coke does bady, inverted. Not too sweet, not too thick, blah blah blah.

Has an oddish smell. A little bit like the sea, but the sea along a beach littered with weeds. Sort of like if a Deep One left backwash in a cola bottle. Not a full on Deep One, but a person half-way through the change, full of regret at their Innsmouth background. Which is funny because the random photo on the bottle is of a surfer shooting a yellow laser out of their armpit into the back of someones head. Deep One's don't surf, and they don't shoot lasers, but they are bad ass just like a laser-surfer.

Anyways, this drink probably deserves a better review. I'm not really feeling it today, but I'm so far behind in my reviewing that even a shoddy pass is better than nothing at all. Even "Today I drank a bottle of something and didn't read the label" as a whole review is better than leaving the site un-updated. And writing this half-assed review is better than tracking down that rotten broccoli smell in my apartment.

It's good. I'll drink it again. If I was offered a free bottle of Jones anything and I was actually thirsty, I'd choose the Pure Cane Cola. It's safe. It tastes like it's supposed to, not too sweet, not too anything.

Okay, so my Aftereffects render is ready so I guess that means I'm done.

Coca Cola Review

2010-03-13T12:02:00.000-08:00

If I was dramatic, I might say that my writing a review set the entire Coca Cola intelligence machine into action. I could paint a picture of wires tapped and commandos sliding down ropes dangling from black helicopters. All very cool, but the sad fact is that Coke is so huge and so prevalent that their CEO himself could declare it was made of human feces, angel ashes, and rendered baby fat and it wouldn't impinge on sales at all. Not even if he showed video to prove it. Hell, Coke HAS murdered people according to these sources....

http://killercoke.org/crimes.htm
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_20311.cfm

Nobody cares.

Instead of covering the wide world which is Coca Cola, I'm going to focus in it's two greatest failings. Coca Cola, the great American drink, tastes more like Coca Cola the further you get from the USA. What we drink here isn't Coke, it's something else - a half-assed doppleganger too lazy to even roll its own hit dice.

If you want Coke, go to Mexico. Or Bermuda. Or Europe. I can't vouch for it in Asia or Canada, though, but I bet it's delicious there too. You try here in the US of A, it's crap. Total crap.

Coke the company is cheap cheap cheap. To make an extra few pennies they sell you corn syrup instead of sugar, and try to tell you there's no difference. Stop and actually taste the next American made Coke you drink, think about the taste of burnt wheat as you drink it. Focus on that odd sensation of sweetness, because it isn't sweet. It's something else entirely, something masquerading as sweet but failing upon any sort of second glance at all. Revel in the slimy coating it leaves on your tongue and teeth - you don't get that with sugared version.

Other sodas use corn syrup but it's Coke that suffers the most from this foul practice. Sugared Coke is delicious, possibly one of mankinds most delicious drinks. Corn syrup Coke is foul. This bitter is made all the more bitter by Coke having had the furthest to fall, from an astoundingly perfect soft drink to the worst of the worst. Poor poor Coke, cast from the garden and molded into a new Satan - by it's own choice. Boo!

Murder and incredibly unhealthy corn syrup and bad taste aside, Coke also suffers one of the worst sins a mass produced consumable might engage in. It's inconsistent in taste and quality.

Some Cokes are more burned tasting than others. Some cokes are more or less chemical tasting than others. Even carbonation can be inconsistent, from watery nothing to something tasting more like carbonated gas water sans syrup. Long ago I called Coke to ask why. They told me that it was the vagaries of the shipping process, that maybe the bad Coke I had drank was frozen at one point. Or was too old for consumption. Or whatever.

Well, Coke, I say you're full of shit. I've drank your demon brew from one coast to another and it always tastes different. Always. You're the biggest company in the universe and you can't even keep your product straight. Spend a little less time worrying about getting the red on the can within a half percent margin of consistency and try getting the horrible beverage you serve back on track. Please.

The reason that Coke changed to a chemical swill was because of consistency issues. Lemon, a prime ingredient, was unavailable in consistent quality year round. In the name of making consumers happy, they used a chemical lemon substitute. Repeat for every other ingredient and what are you left with? A chemical formula which should be perfectly reproducible, but they don't reproduce it and don't even seem to try.

Coke is huge and almighty. If they can't manage to give us a delicious and trustworthy drink it's because they choose not to. They know that consumers don't drink Coke for any reason other than that it comes in the shiny red can that they have been buying for their whole lives. They save two dollars a year by churning out a cheaper product and no one cares or notices because nobody cares or notices.

Coke is a huge failure as far as trustworthiness goes, but consumers are idiots so its a perfect match.

Let's recap:

Coke, the American drink, tastes better the further you get from the USA. This is because US producers use corn syrup, overseas they tend towards sugar.

Coke, a chemical formula, is incredibly inconsistent between cans. It can taste like burned wheat, or random chemicals, or very rarely like Coca Cola. The company doesn't seem to care about consistency and quality.

Coke has allegedly done incredibly wicked deeds overseas. You are practically drinking blood.

Within the next month, I'll drink a Coke. You probably will too. And that sucks because Coke has become the default drink, and everytime we grab one we are letting the company know that we don't care about quality.

This all applies to canned and bottled Coke. Between the containers I would say there is variance, with small plastic bottles of Coke tasting the worst and 2 liters tasting the best.

None of this, though, applies to fountain coke. Not even the human rights part. Fountain Coke generally rocks.

You know what. I'm going to take a vow that I am going to stop drinking regular Coca Cola. I might drink another Coke product, or I might drink Caffeine Free sugared coke, and I'll drink Mexicoke or other sugared variants, but no more regular Coke. You hear that Coke? I'm sick of your lousy, inconsistent taste which even at it's best isn't that good. And I'll probably feel better about myself too, knowing that I'm doing less to support the possible wickedness they are engaged in.

So there.

Waist Watchers Diet Citrus Frost

2010-02-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

That's the bottle six months after I first opened it, being photographed in my work room.

Waist Watchers Diet Citrus Frost

I bought this at a pseudo-fancy market in NYC right before descending into an abandoned bank vault basement, yes the vault itself had multiple levels. I had to paint a floor. They whys and hows of this situation I'll leave to your imagination. Suffice it to say that I brought along the bottle of Diet Citrus Frost and enjoyed it much more than I ever would have imagined.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to enjoy the whole bottle and brought it home with me. As I tend to do, I put it in the refrigerator to review later and promptly forgot about it. Six months later my wife walks into my room, slams it down on my desk, gobbles up a bunch of my candy while I'm still distracted, then demands I finish reviewing it. Finish? I haven't even started. And how am I supposed to review a beverage six months flat?

Poor poor Waist Watchers Diet Citrus Frost.

Anyways, I guess I need to choke down some of the stuff to get a reminder of why it didn't offend me from the outset... Yeah, it ain't so bad, even as old as it is... Okay, my wife is yelling at me to come into the living room and look at the TV. Hold on. All right, she showed me the beginning to a movie called "Tropic Thunder" which had a commercial for a fictitious drink called "Booty Sweat". I guess this somehow relates to me being in here trying to write a soda review.

Thank you dear.

Anyways: This stuff is made with Splenda and not aspartame, I'm not a big Splenda fan but in this case it's great. Ain't got no complaints, it's sweet and delicious and none of that diet flavored funk. I can't imagine a drink living up to the Citrus Frost name any better. It's primarily a grapefruity drink, but just a touch.

Ha. The ingredients list says "Crystal Clear Carbonated Water". That's a new one. What the hell does "crystal clear" mean? Why? This is good, Adirondack Beverage Company, no need to gussy it up in fancy talk.

So I'm done with this review. I'm now being summoned into the other room to watch the rest of the movie. Bah.

Zevia Natural Diet Cola

2010-02-01T02:15:00.000-08:00

Why did I shoot this photo in front of my bicycle? What was I thinking? It's not necessarily that this is a bad, or embarrassing thing, but it's just boring.

Zevia Natural Cola

As a cola Zevia Natural cola ain't nothing that special, as a diet cola it completely rocks. Incredibly carbonated, it's best when it's very very cold, otherwise the burn of the carbonation has no soothing balm of chill to help smooth over the wincing. I'll confess that I opened the can last night at room temperature, it was undrinkable because of the carbonation and a nasty middle taste of cantaloupe rinds. Cold, though, and slightly less carbonatey due to being left open in the fridge, it's good.

The ingredients are what makes this stuff special:

TRIPLE filtered carbonated water
natural erythritol
natural caramel color
natural tartar acid
stevia
natural fumaric acid
45 mg of natural caffein from coffee
natural flavors (citrus oils, cola nut extract)
citric acid
and in big caps after the ingredients: ZEVIA DOES NOT CONTAIN ASPARTAME OR SUCRALOSE

I'm going to cheat on my blog vow of ignorance, and look up "erythitol"... Hmph. According to these folks http://www.stonyfield.com/OurProducts/erythritol.cfm erythitol is a sweetener derived from sugar through some yeasty process, and is described as "sugar alcohol." Hmm. Don't know what I think about the principal sweetener in a drink named after stevia to not be stevia.

Of course, the principal sweetener in Coca Cola isn't corn syrup but is actually the blood of the oppressed. Stevia seems to have taken a much more reasonable route.

And for those of you who don't know what stevia is, it's an herb/plant/thing that has remarkably sweet tasting leaves. I used to grow it in my studio and use it as a tea sweetener. If I remember rightly, the leaves sort of look like mint leaves but I might be wrong.

Anyways, Zevia Natural Cola isn't bad at all. It's certainly better than most off-brand colas, and it lacks the burned corn taste which plagues Coke. It's sort of like a lighter Pepsi, without any of that sweet slime left on your teeth. The more I drink it, the more it grows on me, and the more assurance I have when I say that this is the best "diet" drink I've ever had that didn't involve dark cherry flavoring.

Mountain Rush

2010-01-25T02:07:00.000-08:00

So I write these reviews then let 'em sit
and ferment a while before I post them.
I think that background is from my old apartment -
two years is probably a little too much lag time.

Mountain Rush by Tropical Fantasy

I always love a good imitation Mountain Dew. I used to have quite a collection of empty cans from across America, if I saw a Mountain Dew knock-off, I drank it and filed the can away. Mountain Rush bites off the Mountain Dew gimmick at the base. Mountain Dew flourescent yellow, Mountain Dew label colors, the whole shebang.

It also does a pretty good imitation of the drink itself. Sort of. It doesn't taste like actual Mountain Dew so much as the "urban legend" of Mountain Dew. Like an idealized form of Mountain Dew described by an ignorant person. A few years ago I met a guy who insisted that Mountain Dew was nothing more than carbonated Sunny Delight. I complemented him on a funny description of the drink, and he insisted that he was telling the literal truth.

"What?", I incredulously asked, "you think that the Mountain Dew bottling factory has Sunny Delight delivered which it then magically makes carnbonated, translucent and bright green, then rebottles as Mountain Dew?"

This guy, I wish I could remember who it was, stopped at that point and reconsidered what he said. Then he returned to insisting that Mountain Dew was identical to Sunny Delight.

Ha.

That flavor, of Sunny Delight made into magical green carbonated sugar water, is the flavor of Mountain Rush. Very orange juicey. Very orange kool-aidey. Very good, actually. I would drink this in small quantities in the future. Mind you, this DOESN'T really taste like Mountain Dew, but it's in the ball park.

Another major difference is the amount of carbonation. Mountain Dew is very carbonated, Mountain Rush isn't. Not flat, but just not in-your-face carbonated.

The last thing to admire is the label. It looks like someone went crazy with the spline tool in Illustrator after color sampling the Mountain Dew label. And yellow. They added the bottle cap yellow from the Dew bottles into the label. Sneaky.

Dig that crazy toucan.

Sobe Green Tea

2010-01-18T02:01:00.000-08:00

It's always astonishing when
a company changes a formula for the better.

Sobe Green Tea

Bought it with an early lunch in grand central, hadn't had a Sobe Green Tea in years and years. I was shocked at how cool and refreshing the drink was. I felt like I was in a beer commercial and the product really did taste like a mountain stream instead of fermented urine. Not that Sobe tastes like beer, but that it tastes refreshing. And yes, beer does taste like pee.

It's clean and incredibly sweet, not in a saccharine way but in a shock to the tongue way. The flavor is there but almost unnoticable, hard to pin down. It's like that perfect blend of wonder that becomes an unquantifiable nothing.

The first three ingredients are water, sugar, and natural fkavor. Following these are green tea extract and a host of the crap normally found in energy drinks. These may account for the vigor of the drink, but I prefer to tlinagibe* that the natural flavor is industry code for beef blood, as I've been warned many times by many vegetarians.

But seriously, Sobe made a drink with guarana in it which tastes good. That's incredible. Every guarana drink in the world tastes like satans penis, except maybe China Cola - does that have guarana? Actually, I don't remember that it does.

So yeah, Sobe green tea is great. My true love used to be the black tea, I'll have to dig some up now that they seem to be screwing around with the mix. The only reason I stopped drinking sobe in the first place was an inability to find the decent flavors. The deli across from my work stopped carrying the Sobe teas in preference for the Arizona teas, of which only their green tea is really drinkable.

*This word is iPhonese, and has no suitable translation in English.

Sweet Leaf Pomegranate Green Tea

2010-01-11T06:40:00.000-08:00

Don't look her in the eye, or you'll be condemned
to a thousand years servitude in the pomegranate mines.

Sweet Leaf Pomegranate Green Tea

I had the Sweet Leaf Black Tea, or some such thing, some time ago but lost the review. That was merely one of a long chain of foolish Sweet Leaf related incidents thwarting my honest intent of A) drinking a bottle of the stuff and B) writing about drinking a bottle of the stuff on the internet.

I finally succeeded with the Cherry Limeade, and this one too.. Sadly, "Pomegranate Green Tea" falls further from the high bar set by the first two.

The pomegranate green tea performs a small marvel, it takes a drink that is all organic and makes it taste like a Jolly Rancher. It's a mov of syrupy, cardboardy, and fake fruit taste chasing an honest green tea flavor with torches and pitchforks. You can see the fear in the green tea's eyes as it feverishly searches for cover.

It's sad really. It tastes more like Fruitopia than anything natural.

The worst thing about this flavor of Sweet Leaf, is that it's everywhere. EVERYWHERE. If a store has only one Sweet Leaf flavor, it'll be this one. Whether that's because this is the default flavor you get if you only order one, or if it's because the good flavors all get drank up and this is what's left, I dunno. And I don't care. Burn it.

Sweet Leaf makes amazingly delicious tea drinks, but as soon as they start adding flavoring to them things go a little awry. So this is officially labeled a "bad drink", even though the unblinking, bug-eyed goblin lady on the label compels me to do otherwise.

Stala Cherry

2010-01-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

My cat doubles as a bottle opener during the day,
discount Fleshlight at night.

Stala Cherry

Stala Cherry ain't so hot. It belongs to the "sour cherry" school of drinks, which one tends to find in Greece and Eastern Europe. I'd had such high hopes for Stala Cherry, as the Orange version made me wet my pants in ecstasy.

Let's start... So cherry Stala is thick and syrupy. It has only the slightest trace of carbonation, which is just absolutely perfect. Or wait, is it carbonated at all? It has a bite to it, but I can't figure out what it is. Anymore or this mystery tang and it would be fighting with me, as it is it gives me a nip as it slides down.

The syrupy bit is fine too, I dig thick drinks. The main ingredient in this stuff is cherry juice. Pardon me, "pure cherry juice". Pure cherry juice, Spring water, Sugar, Aromatic Flavorings, Citric acid, Benzoic Sodium, Sorbic potassium.

But the flavor. Sour cherry. Yuck. A nauseating taste, calculated to make vomiting come easy.

The best thing about this drink is that it was a birthday present for my wife. I wrapped it up, gave it to her, she opened it and I drank and began reviewing it immediately. She hounds me about having too much soda around, so this was a funny gift. At least she thought so. I intended it to be romantic, and hoped she'd got all hotted up.

Alas.

Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel

2009-11-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

That can looks very small for some reason.

Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel

It's hard to improve on Mountain Dew. The stuff is heaven, sweet and bitey with a caffeine zing that few other sodas manage. It rocks. The long parade of non-Mountain Dew flavored Mountain Dews was nothing but a string of failures, beginning with "Red Alert" or whatever it was up to present.

"Gamer Fuel" might be an exception, however.

I laughed when I first clapped eyes onto a can of Gamer Fuel. It's a ludicrous cross promotion, almost offensive in its stereotyping - Gamer Fuel pairs Mountain Dew up with World of Warcraft. There's a somewhat angry looking orc on the can front, looking like a cranky, green Down's Syndrome child dressed up by an older brother with a Tolkien fetish. Or a Warhammer fetish, actually. I was sort of surprised how much Warcraft bit off of Warhammer, especially with the tremenous shoulder pads. Orcs armor up like it's the 80s.

There is a long standing problem with orcs: They are either
faceless mooks getting endlessly mowed down by
Dungeons and Dragons characters, or they are over
the top cartoon bad-asses like this here. My favorite orcs
are the Rankin and Bass guys from Return of the King,
truly horrific. The live action remake orcs were
kind of lame, suffering from the "guys in masks" problem.

As long as I'm picking on the can art orc, I'll draw attention to his ludicrous neck chain. It's a large linked, metal chain, and it sits on the orc in an incredibly unrealistic fashion. It's not so much that the bad-ass orc has draped a metal chain around his neck but rather that he took one of those redneck welded-metal-chain-steering-wheels and hung it over his head. It's hilariously poorly done, floating.

The chain is also confusing. It looks like it starts as a link of earring and connects to one of the awful Bloodbowlesque shoulder pads. The whole illustration is full of little awkward bits where lines fall into visual holes, looking like things they are not. The big goofy spike earring in the orcs left ear looks like it folds down over his left shoulder, blah blah blah.

Which leads me to my next point: Warcraft characters sure are vain. Look at this orc, looks like a tough character, eh? He's wearing at least six earrings, a necklace, a metal band to hold his purple dyed topknot in place, a nose ring, a TOOTH piercing, and that snappy necklace. Maybe the nose ring and the chain around the neck are practical tools used to enforce his servitude by his evil orcy masters, but the rest is just fancy pants and battle scars.

I bet he gets his fashions out of "Pretty Orc Monthly".

At least when a sailor wore a gold hoop earring it had a purpose, to pay for his burial if his body washed up on some foreign shore. The orc "bling" is just... visual busyness. An attempt to lend personality and authenticity through a glut of meaningless details.

Bonus: This orc is about fifteen feet wide. The layout people cut the orcs left arm off and moved it to the other side of the Mtn Dew logo, tripling the orcs size. Hilariously awful. I only wish this could come through on the photos.

Okay, okay, enough about the Bloodbowl wannabee orc. Yeah yeah yeah, it's silly, it's indicative of the kid-ification of games like this, it's a knock-off of Warhammer stuff which suffers from the same cartoon affliction. The rest of the can art is pretty neat, black and red is a kick-ass color palette. The black bands at the top and bottom ends of the can are edged in gold fancy work, and the metal parts of the orcy armor are all naked can metal.

All in all, it's a serious can, orc doofus aside.

And the drink itself isn't awful, either. Like I said earlier, Mountain Dew has an awful track record with it's flavor additives. They all taste cheap and chemically, totally dissipating the carefully cultivated air of class which Mountain Dew has spent generations acquiring. This stuff isn't as bad as the other Mountain Dew mutants, I mostly blame that on their choosing to go with "citrus cherry" instead of "double dingle berry" or "triple jungle lingonberry". Simple tastes are the best, and adding cherry to any soda makes it better.

The cherry isn't quite cherry, of course. They had to qualify it by adding "citrus" ahead of the "cherry" on the can itself. It's a little sour, and little mediciney, a little off-putting. It reminds me of nothing so much as these terrible cherry chew candy strips I had been given as a child, they were covered in crystallized sugar and sour stuff. Not very good at all, but those didn't have the blessing of Mountain Dew.

So yeah, I could actually see myself drinking this more than once. Shame they discontinued it. Seriously Mountain Dew people, this is the only non-straight Mountain Dew flavor you people ever got right.

I swilled this stuff down while playing twenty minutes of "Call of Duty: World at War". It's a game I'm not especially good at, but am lucky enough to have friends who are almost all worse at it than me. For this test, I played on-line against against unknown people, and didn't do exceptionally better than my typical game. No super-powered moments, no godlike omniscience and speed. No nuthin'.

Now the embarrassing part:

I didn't drink this stuff because I was anxious to do another review. Nay, I dread writing these reviews now. Rather, I wanted a caffeine dose to keep me awake as I went to a pseudo-rave party thing. Yeah, I'm embarrassed, but I had reasons. I shall enumerate them:

1. The party had a theme close to my heart, the Galapagos Islands, Darwin and the HMS Beagle. The title of the party was "Stranded", which also had a touch of nice to it. There was an interesting list of events, including some artsy stuff which I was interested in seeing. I also was under the impression that some puppeteers I wanted to see were going to be there, but they weren't. Alas.

2. The party was being held in a part of Brooklyn where I hope to get a work space. Actually, it's not that I want a studio there so much as it's my only possible hope of ever having an art studio. To be an artist nowadays takes a lot of dough, something which I ain't got, fat Google advertising checks aside. It turns out that the event was held in a building run by a somewhat overpriced studio rental company, not in their studios but on a floor below. I'll admit that not much was learned.

3. I was curious.

So I went and the event was a raging bore, a failure on all three counts. Of course, everyone else seemed to be having a good time, so I'm pretty sure the fault was mine. I hate people who have fun.

Top Pop Cola, Found!

2009-10-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Top Pop Cola, Found at Last

Top Pop Cola reminds me of an incredibly beautiful woman I've long admired from afar, yet only got around to seducing last night. The delayed gratification heightened my interest in the consumation of my desire, but the act itself turned out be a disappointment.

As loyal readers will know, I first spotted Top Pop empty on a sidewalk a few months ago. I cased the local shops but didn't turn up a bottle and had to decide that the litterbug had ported it in from some far off locale. Fortunately I was proven wrong when I saw some in a deli about four blocks from my initial encounter. A whole range of generic flavors was lined up for the eager customer, so generic I can't remember what was actually there.

Fearing my wife's rage, I only picked up the cola. I'm sure that those same bottles will be lingering on the shelves when I return in a year or two.

First off, the cost to flavor ratio is tops. I believe the bottle was sixty five cents, and it contains twenty four "fl" ounces of drink. That's pretty good, considering it tastes like medium class generic bar cola. It ain't bad at all, certainly not as awful as what I'd braced myself for.

Which brings me to an aside: The sodas I've been drinking for the past several months are all pretty not-awful. I mean, I haven't had a Skeleteens level of awful since the Skeleteens drinks, and I haven't had "sweet corn drink" awful since I woke up while sleep-eating out of the cat litter box. Damn you Ambien! The danger and excitement is sorely lacking from my reviewing, it's now sort of like hanging dry wall as I work through my umpteenth orange drink which is only differentiated from all the rest because it was mixed up in Oregon.

Bah.

Drinking Top Pop is like drinking dry wall, review-wise.

Anyways, it's a better tasting cola drink. Not as thick as Coke or Pepsi, none of the chemical nasty found in those drinks. No after taste, no slime on the teeth. It's still made with corn syrup, but I couldn't tell. It's main impression is that it's a diet soda that wasn't made with diet sweetener, as silly as that sounds.

In fact, that's what it is. It has all the qualities of Diet Coke but it's not aspartame sweetened or whatever that crap is.

Reviewing this soda makes me feel like Clement Greenberg.

As a failing artist, I appreciate the label in particular. It's a combination of Jackson Pollock with a Roy Lichtenstein drawing of a paint brush stroke worked through in a 60s slasher film color palette. The yellow band across the top reads "20% MORE THAN 20 OZ." then there's a circle with a U in it. What the hell does that mean? I know the "circle K" for kosher, maybe circe U means it was packed by an undine. Or it's safe for consumption with brains for the undead. Or the liquid is less than twelve percent umber hulk.

Anyways, there you go. Not great, not bad, just middling blah. But a good blah for the price.

President Lincoln Hated Fast Food...

2009-08-10T04:27:00.000-07:00

...and they've banned it at the Lincoln Memorial. He'd written that in as a requirement in his will, or his estate wouldn't have payed to have it built. Considering his book proceeds alone, that estate is worth a fortune. And with the money he gets from letting his likeness by used on the five dollar bill...

New 7-11 Gimmick

2009-08-07T04:23:00.000-07:00

New 7-11 Gimmick

I don't know what they're selling me, but I doubt that they'd've done this if they'd realized how tacky it is to make something so similar to the "missing children" milk cartons.

Speaking of which, do they still have missing children pictures on milk cartons? When did milk companies stop caring about missing children?

I wrote them a letter that goes a little like this:

I love Slurpees and drink them all the time. However, I was a little uncomfortable with a recent promotion I saw on a Slurpee cup. It shows the profile of a Slurpee cup and says "I lost my Slurpee".

I'm not an old fogey, but man... Do you folks realize how similar this is to the old missing children on the milk cartons? It's sort of tacky.

I'll be writing about this on my soft drink review blog, and would love to hear your side of the story.

http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=7117116885333133555&searchType=ALL&txtKeywords=&label=Slurpee

I do love Slurpees, though.

Best,
tim h

Stealing Stuff at McDonalds

2009-08-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

I commend whoever was able to get their act together enough to keep a McDonalds cup intact long enough to try and use it over two separate visits. I'll also salute whoever was cheeky enough to bring in their own cups to fill them at the station, and then tried to justify it by saying "But I was in here last week and bough at a soda, I thought it was all you can drink?"

I myself could never manage any of these things. Try as I might I could not keep a Taco Bell cup in sanitary shape long enough to use it twice. I'd stash it in my car in a safe place and by the same time the next day it was so full of dirt you could use it as a plant pot.

I wonder if I could score a free McDonalds meal by offering to fix the capitalization on their sign? Mind you, I don't eat at McDonalds very often, just when there aren't any other options. Or I'm in a foreign country, few things more awesome than a McDonalds full of funny talk and crazy items that should be in a Jack in the Box.

Ralph and Charlie's Green Apple and Kiwi Pineapple Juice

2009-08-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

My hand isn't to scale.

Ralph and Charlie's Green Apple and Kiwi Pineapple Juice

This is a drink fraught with contradictions - it tastes watery and thick, all at once. It's a little bit sour like a green apple, but in a way they isn't very convincing, as if pineapple was wearing a cheap green apple costume it rented from a discount masquerade shop.

The juice matches my teeth.

I just realized why this stuff strikes me as gross, even though it really isn't... It's the consistency of milk. It has the thickness and viscousity of 2%, and the mouthy aftercoat of fat free. I shit you not, it's identical.

With all my willpower I will push that horrid realization aside and focus on the taste. It really is pretty good, few manufactured flavors go out of the bounds of decency faster than green apple. It's like some guy in a fancy suit says "Make me an X that tastes like green apple" and the flavor chemist says "Oh, you want something that tastes like green apple Jolly Ranchers". In a just universe the chemist would be beaten and have his taste buds shaved off with a planer. Sadly, in our universe the suit guy would nod just dumbly as he dreams about his new sports car-

"Of course".

This stuff doesn't taste like Jolly Rancher's.

The label says it's "naturally turbid", a word my iPhone insists should be turbo. iPhones show an uncanny wisdom at times. The label also calls it an "everyday beverage", I am a little uncertain what that means. Maybe it's like writing "Consumer Loyalty" right on the box.

Oh no! Corn syrup! C'mon Ralph, charlie! I am ashamed of you both. It says "sugar (A) and/or glucose - fructose syrup (B)". That means corn syrup, right? Right? I'll cheat and look it up... Yep, generally means corn syrup in disguise.

Bummer.

Anyways, I drank it, hated it at first, got over it, sort of liked it, then didn't finish it. That's the big measure, if I finish the drink or not. And I didn't, so there.

Snake in the Grass, Coca Cola Slurpee

2009-07-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

It's important to grip the adder firmly behind the head,
so it cannot twist and bite you. Be strong.

Snake in the Grass, A Coca Cola Slurpee Betrayal

In an effort to offset the crushing sadness inherent in my being a guy who gets up for work before six and seldom gets home before ten, I bought an xbox. This was to ensure that the twelve free minutes I enjoyed at home each day weren't frittered away on my wife, or my cats, or my robot or my novelization of this blog. None of those things hold up to being cursed at by the effeminate voices of the next-next generation, a rather high strung people thick with racism and innumerable other incarnations of ignorance.

I mean, really, I have yet to meet a twelve year old who actually knows what "hull down" means. What do kids learn in school nowadays?

So in this "xbox" there is a game called World at War. One of a myriad of World War II games where we get to take the role of soldiers who never lived to be our grandfathers. While playing these men doomed to never don the mantle of "confused giver of unwanted and uncool Christmas gifts to ungrateful children", you can earn "achievements".

At least I think that's what they are called. An achievement is acquired when you've done something deemed noteworthy by the game designers like killed three enemies with one bullet, or having team killed your fiftieth crying eight year old.

Achievements, by the way, are pretty arbitrary. I've done things I thought were pretty remarkable but went unrewarded by the happy little pop up bubble announcing my accomplishment. In World at War, for example, I managed to roll a tank all the way over and back onto it's treads. Pretty cool, and I've only ever managed it once, no matter how much effort I've devoted to repeating the feat. But, roll a tank - no accomplishment. Neither do you get an accomplishment for making your friends sputter with anger, or for choking on a grape during "Headquarters". Fall off a building roof, however, and the game congratulates you.

I've fallen off roofs before, and nowhere in my swimming vision was a pop up commending me for it. Blood, gravel, stars - but no pop ups.

A charming characteristic of achievements are their often clever names. "Hammer Time" and "Soul-Survivor" are two examples. Maybe not so charming. "Saved Private Ryan" is another that quotes popular media, kids love that.

One particularly not charmingly named achievement is called "Snake in the Grass". You get it for shooting a Japanese soldier in a gilly suit while he is hiding in the grass. In the campaign versions of the game, there are numerous places where enemy soldiers hide in the underbrush, then leap up and rush you with bayonets. After playing once or twice you learn where they hide and can gun them down before they act.

Not very sporting - after all, it's basically cheating to use knowledge of the ambush to forestall an otherwise unforeseeable event. But that's sort of the point of any xbox game, to break the unfolding of the game so as to play it out with the least possible enjoyment.

But, "Snake in the Grass": an incredibly easy achievement to collect. I have it, got the way I described above. I'm not proud of it and certainly didn't learn from it. I wish the achievement conditions had been refined a little - that you only had the chance to earn it the very first time you passed through a level, before you learn where all the enemies are hidden.

But that just means that someone would release a cheat guide, detailing enemy locations so you would enter prepared. It's my honest belief that xbox players hate a challenge more than anything else, except possibly being surprised by something.

As someone who has a bronze medal in shooting threats before they manifest themselves, you might think I wouldn't have been surprise-bayoneted by a slurpee. But like I said, my qualifications weren't honestly earned.

Here's the story:

I was craving a Coca Cola slurpee, but the dispenser at the local 7-11 was broken. Two weeks went by without satisfaction, even the Burger King slurpee dopplegangers were consistently unavailable. During that time I even pressured my workmates to buy me a slurpee from a nearby town when they drove over on business. They merely laughed in a sinister manner and consistently "forgot".

I started calling the 7-11 and asking if the machine was online, to save myself the six block walk. Eventually the machine was fixed, I was informed via telephone and scudded over to fill my void.

I was immediately suspicious, the machine which dispensed Coca Cola slurpees wasn't repaired, they had merely changed one spigot on the sister slurpee machine over to Coke. This wasn't a well reasoned suspicion, but more of the feeling a cat seems to get when it enters a room and discovers something has been fundamentally changed about it's universe, maybe that someone dropped a sinister envelope on the living room floor or left a frightening umbrella leaning in the corner. Alert!

So I filled my cup, tasted and a screaming Japanese soldier rushed out of the weeds and stabbed me in the mouth with artificial banana flavoring. Alas, the worst of all artificial fruit flavors - and in my mouth no less! The slurpee machine had not been cleaned out properly, and a horrible flavor lingered from before. Awful.

Having committed myself (those cups are inventory!), and still burning with slurpee lust, I resigned myself to my imperfect drink, cut it with extra fountain Coke, paid and left.

Bah.

[Note: This was written on my iPhone during my daily commute. Please excuse the ad hoc nature of the writing, and any totally bizarre words. I would assure you non sequiturs are the result of the auto-spell build into my treacherous phone.]

Maine Root Sarsaparilla

2009-06-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

I get those stupid plastic pillows
from Amazon and keep them to reuse, but they suck to
store as they are just little balloons which take up
a lot of space en masse. Keep forever, though.

Maine Root Sarsaparilla
Maine Root Sarsaparilla smells like a mixture of lake water and SweetTarts, being from Missouri I like this. Really. It smells like a good summer's day spent menacing fish from the safety of a flat bottomed boat. Taste-wise it ain't so hot, though.

It has a great aftertaste, a bit like minty discount toothpaste. The initial flavor though, ugh. Somewhere between freezer burned vanilla ice cream and cardboard. You only get a flash of sarsaparilla about two seconds into a taste, then it yanks off it's Halloween mask revealing itself as root beer.

Yeah, this is a pretty bad flavor right out of the gate. Too foamy, too, right when it's opened but much better after it sits for about fifteen minutes. The foaminess early on covers some of the nastiness, but it really is better flatter.

Maine Root is puzzling in the big picture. It's part of a wave of designer soft drinks waving the flag of environmentalism and responsible social activism, which rocks. These are great things. What baffles me is that I bought this at Duane Reade in a fancy 4-pack. Why are these hoity toity drinks being carried by a big pharmacy chain? Is this part of the movement that put fancy coffee and fresh made sandwiches in 7-11s? It's puzzling.

The thing is that I don't trust it. Maine Root sells itself like it's a small label, but it must have a pretty significant factory output to fill all the Duane Reade's and everything else in the world. It says right on the label that it's a handcrafted beverage, but how? It's that sort of fake down-homeiness that puts my guard up.

I mean, yeah, it's awesome that it has certified organic fairtrade sweeteners and spices. That's hard to beat, but it feels... disingenuous. And it doesn't taste good, which is a bummer.

By the way, I used to work in Maine during the summers and have no idea how this relates to Maine at all. It doesn't taste a bit like the state.

I dub thee, Sir Buck the Cat, defender of the true faith
and upholder of my right to look at internet
pornography when my wife isn't around.

Sweet Leaf Cherry Limeade

2009-06-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

Diluted with my wife's spittle.

Sweet Leaf Cherry Limeade

Who would ever have thought that Sweet Leaf tea and etc products could prove so vexing? Not I, or else I would never have embarked on such a hopeless venture. At every turn I am faced with insurmountable obstacles, threatened by unfathomable forces, and generally menaced. I find my capers cut short and my spirit leadened by the hopelessness of my Sweet Leaf quest. I shall endeavor to explain:

After a long travail, I finally acquired a bottle of the Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea, only to have it consumed by a vengeful wife fueled by spite. She, no doubt, converted the organic cane sugar in the drink into further evil plots designed to thwart my life's ambitions. A kindly angel from the Sweet Leaf company sent me a packet hoping to rectify the situation. It contained some stickers, some postcards, some coupons, and a business card.

The business card was unusable as it didn't have my name on it, but the coupons proved useful. Very useful. They rode around in my bag until I found stores carrying the Sweet Leaf brand beverages, few and far between I found them, too. I would trade one coupon for one drink, and never had a coupon refused.

Mind you, this is New York City. I've never had a manufacturer's coupon accepted EVER until now. I travelled all over town trying to pass a trash bag coupon and had it universally reviled. Sweet Leaf has pull in this town, and it's a rush of power to be attached to them, even if in such a small way.

Excited through and through by my easy acquisition of the drink, I sampled a Sweet Leaf Black Tea, or maybe it was Earl Grey?, and wrote a review. The review was long, insightful, amusing. No man could have found fault with it, the only woman who could have done so would be my wife. If she had ever had a chance to see it.

Which she did not, for fickle fate flung me far afield from chosen path. That review which I labored over, which I loved, was lost. How? I have no idea. After writing a review I set it aside for a little while, then come back after I've forgotten most of it. I reread it, fix all the spelling errors, remove the accidental curse words, and post it on this blog. This time, however, I couldn't find the review anywhere. Between the initial writing and the second examination it had completely and utterly disappeared. Not even Apple-F could uncover it.

What I now call the Sweet Leaf Curse had struck again. Clearly the puffy cheeked goblinoid on the bottle label was set on my complete and total dissatisfaction.

Still reeling from the hurt of my great loss, I stagger into the living room only to find my semen-thief of a wife glugging her way through one of my cached bottles of sacred Sweet Leaf - a bottle of "Cherry Limeade". Having not been detected due to her haste to deprive me of my sole ambition, I laid her low with a hearty swing of a stout chair. Her skull was so damnably thick I knew the stunning effect of my blow would be short lived, I spirited away the paltry remainder of the Cherry Limeade bottle and concealed it in the refrigerator. Then I hid on the top shelf of our hall closet until after her rage abated and her loss forgotten.

Now, weeks later, I slip to my computer with the precious bottle concealed in the pocket of my cargo shorts. Door closed and braced with a table, I pop open the cap of this nearly lost treasure...

A slightly odd aroma. Something like a public swimming pool full of watermelon juice in use by anthropomorphic lemons from the trailer park side of town. I can't stop smelling it, though, finding in it the forbidden pleasure I might find in sniffing a finger rubbed in nether regions on a hot summer day.

The taste is baffling. The tart aftertaste of lemonade from a cardboard container is all I can remember after the first swig left me totally overwhelmed. I might have blacked out for just a moment. I brace for the second taste, refusing to let it overwhelm my reason - having met it on its own terms and asserted my dominance, I find the taste pleasant. I have its respect now, we can speak together as equals.

Another pull on the bottle reveals myself the victor. Now the Cherry Limeade is working for me, doing what it can to bring me pleasure in the humble manner of bottled beverages. The organic cane sugar is deployed in a manner bereft of the sarcastic grinning so common in other natural drinks, it's an earnest handshake with a friendly smile. The cherry lurks in the background, in the shadows but ready to step forward to help the limeade should it show any sign of difficulty. The "other natural flavors", no doubt, are contributing as well, but most likely as a support role. Maybe caterers.

Inexplicably, when I took that second drink I had a vivid mental image flash through my mind of the place my mother took me to buy my Cub Scout uniform as a child. It was a private home in a run down neighborhood, the garage of the house was densely hung with used Scout uniforms. I can only imagine the pit out back was just as crowded with the naked bodies of the previous owners.

A final toss of the head and the bottle is empty, my day brighter and the world more colorful. I've made a friend this day, and look forward to meeting them again under a more auspicious star. The rest of this enlightening evening will be spent following my treasure map to the concealed sugar maple grove where I buried my bottle of Sweet Tea Original Lemonade. This will be spirited back to the apartment and concealed in a location proof against my wife's crafty fingers and keen nose, and saved for another day.

Jones Berry Lemonade

2009-06-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

Jones Berry Lemonade

There's one of those fancy metal
water flasks in the background. See? I'm hip.

I knew this stuff was trouble the minute me wife took off the cap. A thick roiling blue cloud of berry/bubblegum/champagn horror billowed out and flowed knee deep around the living room, I half expected to see some stupid blue Disney djinni appear. My first wish would've been that I hadn't let my wife buy the Jones Pure Cane Berry Lemonade Soda. The second wish would be for the paradox to go away.

This is a real loser. It's like an American soda tried to imitate the cheap Central American champagne sodas. It did it just about perfectly, which means they copied the "suck" part just as well. Bah. It's slightly lemonadey, which tempers the horrible champagne berry crap. It also helps to take a drink, recoil in horror, put the cap back on and let it sit overnight. Drinking some more the next day you'll find that foamy foam foam aspect of the drink has calmed down.

It's sweet and potent, filling my mouth with a skim coat of sugar scum that makes my teeth vibrate and my gums go numb. I'm wondering if this some side effect of the diabolical "inverted cane sugar". This "inverted" sugar is that same stuff that gave St. Peter all his martyr cavities. (Is it St. Peter? I think he was the guy who was crucified on an upside down cross, right?)

All my complaining aside, the stuff is bearable after it airs out. The berry perfume drops off and the lemonade is allowed to come through. The ingredients are all pretty good, you know things are comparatively healthy when "Natural Flavors" shows up fourth on the list.

I'm embarrassed to say that this is my first Jones drink that I can remember. They aren't terribly common, and are usually sold in four packs, not the sort of thing I buy - I'm a low commitment kind of guy. A few years ago they had that Thanksgiving stunt, where they made sodas that were turkey flavored and the like, sadly I didn't get to try any of those.

So overall, I dunno. I think this is probably a crap flavor from a pretty good company. It's certainly a better "champagne" than most, and certainly healthier. The best part, though, is that it's something I can hold over my wife for a few days, "Honey, I let me pick what we watch on the television because that soda you bought was total crap."

Note: I did the tasting about ago, two full bottles still sit in the refrigerator, waiting for some sucker guest to come and drink them.

Note note: It's been three months and I think there are still two bottles in the refrigerator.

Note note note: Four months, still two bottles in there. That's a horribly long lag between writing and posting this article.

A-Treat Big Blue

2009-06-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

The bottle wears a hall monitor sash.

A-Treat Big Blue Soda

My pal Dino bought this for me. It's from Pennsylvania and is a fond or hated reminder of his childhoood. I can't remember which as it was many months ago that he donated it to The Cause. I finally cracked it open to entertain some house guests, one of whom said that he liked to drink anything that's blue. I opened this stuff up and tried to trick him into taking a berry Jones Soda home which he conveniently forgot. We each had a taste of the A-Treat Big Blue and...

I was shocked.

A-Treat Big Blue is heaven. It's a carbonated, not frozen version of the blue part of the bomb pop. Now I've had people tell me that the blue part of a bomb pop is raspberry, but I've always disagreed. It's far to lemonadey to be something as awful as raspberry. It's its own flavor, unique and wholesome, proudly bearing upon it's head a shining torque crafted from pure delight.

Seriously, folks. A-Treat is great.

I'm a little nervous about the ingredients list. It says it's sweetened with sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup. That speaks to me of something that might be uneven in its sweetness, perfection in one bottle and a horror in the next. Being that this is probably the only bottle that I'll ever have, I guess I can't really complain though I can grow incredibly sad. No more A-Treat breaks my heart.

It's absolutely true that I have not had A-Treat Big Blue at it's Big Blue Best. I think I was given this at Thanksgiving, which means it sat in my room unrefrigerated for six months before I sampled it. Who knows how long it sat in whatever Pennsylvania market Dino bought it in. There was blue sludge in the bottom of the bottle, a sure sign of it being past it's prime. Then I opened it, shared, capped and put it back in the fridge for two weeks before finishing it off to write the article. What I'm having now is pretty flat, and that sucks.

But... it's still really good. Really good. Certainly reason enough to move to Pennsylvania.

Ground Ork

2009-06-02T20:40:00.000-07:00

I assume that's a Warhammer 40K ork.
Hope it's not a cheap gretchin substitute.

Ground Ork

I would like to take this time not to address the amusing misprint on ground pork package, but instead to write about orcs. Briefly and in a poorly realized manner.

Orcs are many things to many people. With the coming of the Lord of the Ring films, they became one specific thing to many more people, and that was my greatest fault with the LotR trilogy. The orcs sucked. They sorely suffered from guy-in-a-mask-on-Star-Trek syndrome.

You want orcs? You want scary fucking orcs that'll make you wet your pants? Rankin and Bass orcs, that's where you go. They're abso-fucking-lutely the most unhuman, evil looking orcs you'll see in moving pictures. They are twisted, stubby limbed, shifty eyed walking mouths full of hatred and teeth, not a guy with a fake vampire fangs and some black face paint. I mean, fuck!, at one point an orc is about to bite off Frodo's head! The live action orcs cannot begin to compare to the animated versions, it's not even a fair comparison.

And as long as I'm here, I'll say the Rankin and Bass dwarves were dwarfier, the elves elfier in the case of wood elves and more majestic in the case of the not-wood elves. The hobbits are more charming, and the trolls about a zillion times more interesting. Hands down.

The Lord of the Ring movies were entertaining, but I honestly believe that the Rankin and Bass films were better at capturing a J.R.R.T. feeling and I could only imagine how much more fantastic they could have been given a gabillion dollars like the Hollywood blockbuster which has, sadly, redefined on-screen fantasy. The Lord of the Ring books weren't about backflips and overdone fighting, and that's about all the LotR live action films were - action films with backflips and incredibly long fight scenes.

So, yeah. All you folks who think the live action version was better can go to hell, and not MY hell as you are completely and utterly foreign to me and I don't want you hanging around for eternity. And those of you who babble on about the greatness of the LotR story and never read the books, and I've met you, can come over here and lick this cat shit stain off my desk as I can't imagine any other possible use I might have for you - unless I was to take a core sample of your stomach fat, mold it into a vagina, microwave it up to body temperature and use it to pleasure myself. That you would let me do that sickens me.

Irn Bru Goth commercial

2009-05-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

So I went here, which took me here, and I found this video. I laughed at it, and so should you.

Pee Cola, just a link

2009-05-21T03:46:00.000-07:00

see more Fail Blog

So my wife sent me this link off of that "Fail Blog". I assume this is real, unlike about a third of the stuff that they show on there, as I also see a picture of an empty bottle here. That last link indicates it's a soda from Ghana. Well, I'm Ghana drink some if I ever find it.

Edit:

Looking at this photo some more, I am a little alarmed at the pop-off appearance of the plastic bottle caps. They don't strike me as firmly affixed.

My real concern is about the bottles full of white liquid. I mean, if the yellow is pee then logically the white is...

Jellybellies: A&W Root Beer and Dr. Pepper

2009-05-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Jellybellies, Soda Flavored

I shouldn't have squeezed the rabbit so hard.

A&W Root Beer Flavored Jellybellies: Holy shit! They taste just like root beer!

Dr. Pepper Flavored Jellybellies: Holy shit! They taste just like Dr. Pepper!

Things that taste like things that taste like other things are funny. So are things that taste like brand name versions of things that taste like other things. I guess these two sentences point more towards the A&W Root Beer candy, as Dr. Pepper doesn't taste like any particular thing that isn't Dr. Pepper.

Anyways, don't do what I did and put twenty of them in your mouth at once. They expand as you chew and get way, way too flavorful to boot. I thought I was going to choke.

Points for each individual jelly bean having the brand name on it.

Wonderfarm's Nuoc Yen Ngan Nhi

2009-05-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

Those are the noises Curly makes when he's slapped by Moe.

The can tried to tear out my throat,
but fastened onto my upper lip instead.

Pray for death.

Imagine a baby vomiting up curdled milk, to which an enterprising entrepenuer adds vanilla and more vomit. That's Wonderfarm's Nuoc Yen Ngan Nhi. Let me add that the baby might have vomited because it had taken a sip out of someone's mint flavored chewing tobacco cup. Just a sip, but enough to add a certain tang of despair and loathsomeness.

My pals Todd and Katherine brought me this stuff from their rolicking trip around Asia. I'm not sure where they actually bought it, but it was made in Malaysia. Lots of drinks are made in Malaysia, I have a whole boxful waiting for my attentions. Them Malaysians sure like to drink awful, awful things.

The magic part of Nuoc Yen Ngan Nhi is revealed by the translation on the reverse of the can: White Fungus Bird's Nest Drink. Yep. I'm down with the fungus part, but the bird's nest part is the novelty.

It's also exceedingly naughty.

These nests are built only in certain caves, which have been traditional collecting sites for hundreds of years. Photos of the caves are impressive, as the collectors have ancient bamboo scaffolds reaching up to the cave roof many stories above, allowing them access to the nests.

Everything I've ever heard about the edible bird's nests says that they are an overharvested resource. There is a traditional schedule of bird's nest collecting. You let the birds build a nest, then you harvest it, and they build another one. Then you harvest that one, after they are through with it. Apparently nowadays greedy bird's nest collectors harvest the second nest immediately, and that nest isn't replaced. A whole generation of birds are lost.

0000026 <- That's where my cat just stepped on the keyboard. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe describes how he thought the bird's nests were formed. He wrote that cave swallows (I think the birds we're talking about are swallows) flew to the sea where they picked the innards out of sea cucumbers. These innards were used to build the nests. The nests are actually made from bird vomit. But from Poe we can take a reasonable guess that the dried innards of sea cucumbers and the bird's nest nests are similar stuff. And both were valuable commodities in the Asian markets, perhaps another reason to confound the two.

But back to the White Fungus Bird's Nest Drink. It's awful. If I was Pym and had drank this stuff, I would shove the white angel aside and embrace the steaming waterfall. They don't mess around with the ingredients. Water, sugar, white fungus, bird's nest. Peering into the murky depths of the glass, I'm not quite sure what's what. I imagine the little white jelly shreds are white fungus, but if so then where is the bird's nest? Part of me vaguely remembers bird's nest soup being compared to shark's fin soup, which might mean that the bird's nest is embodies in the thickness of the drink itself.

Eh. Who knows.

It smells just like it tastes, by the way. I don't think I can finish this stuff. Many drinks I choose not to finish, but this stuff chose for me. I suspect I'll vomit if I try to choke it down, in fact, I'd probably do so if I took another drink. I just tried to fool myself into drinking some more, I picked up the can and started to read it then spun around and grabbed the glass and tried to drink. Sadly, the smell got to my nose before the glass reached my lips and I had to abort.

Back to the can. Right here on the side it says "Under 100% Foreign Processing Technology". Hey Malaysia, have some nationalistic pride. More can looking shows me the address of the company: Trade Ocean Holdings SDN, BHD. 700, Jalan Valdor Dungal, Valdor Industrial Estate, 14200 Sungai Bakap, Penang, Malaysia. First off, arch-villains shouldn't put their addresses on their products, it makes it too easy for James Bond to find your lair. I mean, c'mon, if "Valdor Industrial Estate" isn't an evil lair, what is? I'm just disappointed that the Penang region allowed such a horrible taste to come out of it. I mean, they created Penang curry, and what could be better than that? The manufacturer has a website, www.wonderfarmonline.com. Go there and explode them.

The last bit of information I can garner from the can is that what I drank is about two years old. It looks like it was canned on 03.08.07, which could mean March 8 or September 3 - I don't know which way Malaysia goes on this issue. However, it's good till 02.02.10. That's February 2 no matter where you're from, unless it's Dyslexia-ville. Okay, I'm going to go in the bathroom and try to chug this stuff down. Wish me luck... ...Couldn't do it. Tried to drink, gagged. Poured it into the toilet and peed on it. Go to hell Todd and Katherine.

Like a glass full of jellyfish
cleverly disguised as semen.

Caffeine Free Pepsi, Home-made Jucy Lucy's

2009-05-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

I took this picture for insurance reasons.
I had to prove that dent was there when I received the can.

Caffeine Free Pepsi

Caffeine Free Pepsi reminds me of the Biologic Show comics. You know, the short lived series by Al Columbia who did all those terrifying comics for various compilations like Zero Zero.

The similarity lies in the discovery of the thing. I'd been an Al Columbia fan long before I saw Biologic Show comics for sale, they'd been out of print and impossible to find. I go to Austria on "business" in 1998 or 9 or 2000 or something, and visit a Viennese comic store. There I find Biologic Show comics for sale. "!" I exclaim, and buy doubles so I'll have one to share when I get home.

I get home and find out that these comics were on sale everywhere now. I'd just happened to be someplace far away when they re-entered general circulation with a new print run. Ha. I'd thought that some rare pocket of comics had just miraculously shown up in Vienna, like when I saw all the Polish weight lifter guys wearing Vision Streetwear clothes in Warsaw. That was just a wacky coincidence with discount goods going on sale.

So it was with Caffeine Free Pepsi. I see it on sale while looking for Pepsi Natural, buy a can and take it home, thinking it a rare treat. Later that week I see it everywhere. Ha. Nothing special at all. Just newly distributed.

Anyways, I'm not a big Pepsi fan but I like the Caffeine Free Pepsi. Much more so that I like regular Pepsi, believe it or not. It's different. Or maybe the cans aren't as old and stale. Who knows. It's sweet the way Pepsi is supposed to be sweet, but not chemically tangy like Pepsi usually is. I think I also prefer it to caffeine free Coke, it tastes sweeter and doesn't have as much senseless carbonation.

I drank my first caffeine Pepsi with home-made Jucy Lucy hamburgers, so it was kind of lost in the shuffle. A Jucy Lucy is a Minneapolis delicacy, a hamburger patty stuffed with molten American cheese. It was incredible when I had one at "Matt's Bar", but mine weren't so hot. I couldn't manage to cook them the proper amount of time, I'd either melt the cheese and have a dried out hamburger or a perfectly medium rare burger with a lump of unmelted cheese in the middle.

Then I ate too much and felt sick.

A real Jucy Lucy is crispy on the outside of the patty, soft no the inside, and the cheese center is no longer just cheese. It's a super goop composed of boiling American cheese, melted fat, and blood. It's heaven.

Surprisingly enough I managed to get pretty close to the original by accident. I cooked way too many hamburger patties so I put some in the refrigerator for the next day. These I microwaved and they came out perfect, an almost identical eating experience to a real Jucy Lucy. The microwaved heated up the cheese inside, but didn't overcook the medium-rare meat. Really good, though I'd be embarrassed to have a microwave be a part of my hamburger cooking.

This is a home-made Jucy Lucy. Note the unmelted cheese
and that it's upside down on the plate. I like to think of myself as an
"Outsider Art" style cook.

Goya Jamaican Ginger Ale

2009-04-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Much like in the GTA games, the Spanish hate the Jamaicans.

Goya Jamaican Style Ginger Beer

Oh my god. It's all the burn you can ever want from a ginger beer without any of the good. Tastes like medicine mixed with jalapenos. I think that macaw on the label must have been trained by the Prince of Lies to scream "fahk you! fahk you, Tim!"

Seriously, this is horrible. Who would drink this? I once drank a novelty ginger ale that was formulated to be novelty hot, I'm not sure if it was as bad as this. The worst part is that I'm really thirsty, so I can't stop drinking it. I drink it and it burns and I drink more to quench the burning, which is like that whole quenching-a-fire-with-a-bucket-of-gasoline thing.

Help me.

Hot aside, it still tastes bad. Like discount medicine that your grandmother gives you just because she has it laying around. "Grandma, no! I don't want to take your out-of-date hormone pills!" "Now Tim, if you don't take them they'll just go to waste. Look at the fine tits on your Grandpa, don't you want some of those?"

But that's a wholly different kind of hot.

You get a half whiff of the stuff before the burning starts, and that split second of flavor is awful. Awful awful awful. It's kind of like... Kind of like some sort of cheap fruit drink mixed with alcohol and poison. And hot peppers. They're on the ingredients list.

Do not drink this crap. It goes down bad and burps up bad. I just took a pull and got distracted looking at some render settings, it sat in my mouth too long and it made me cough/gag. My mouth was full of shitwater that I didn't want to spray on my keyboard, so this cough/choke full of moist ginger ale vapors came out my nose. It hurt. Then I swallowed down the rest of the soda, and that hurt too.

Okay, no more. Down the sink and a big glass of water to flush me out.

Yes, most Mexican Coke has corn syrup in it

2009-04-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

So this site linked to one of my posts, a commenter mentioned the rumor that Mexican Coke is now made with corn syrup. I'd like to confirm that rumor, most of the Mexican Coke I've seen over the past seven or eight months is, indeed, made with corn syrup. And beware of the sugared Mexican Coke anyways, it was one of those that set out to wreck my bike and kill me.

I need a Cocta put in my mouth

2009-04-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

You certainly can't say I'm not hopeful.

I've added a "buy Tim stuff from Amazon" button on the left there. Right above the "Share on Facebook" button. You should mash them both down.

Get to work.

You can buy me stuff like this. Don't buy any of the big cases of drinks unless your using a stolen credit card, as the shipping is ludicrously expensive.

A Slurpee trick

2009-04-07T01:11:00.000-07:00

A. Note the Dome on the Mountain Dew Slurpee.

This is a handy trick for easy Slurpee drinking after you've gotten down to about half way through a large sized cup. Eventually the slush level gets low enough that your straw lacks buoyancy/support enough to stick out of the dome. Or at least it doesn't stick out of the dome enough for convenient access.

Rather than removing the lid or engaging in an unnecessary amount of "lip grasping", take the dome and push it down into the cup so that the convexity pops into a concave shape. Voila. You have easy access to the perfectly centered straw, but still have your convenient covering for your remaining drink.

B. Note the "Timulated" dome on this Slurpee.
Mighty convenient, eh?
(Is that a pie on the stove? How old is this photo?)

And your straw is still kept conveniently centered.

Unicorn Chaser, a link, not a review

2009-04-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

The Unicorn Chaser is a hilarious idea from one of my favorite buyin' stuff websites.

Thanks Brian.

Of course, there's a catch...

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Seven

2009-04-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

All Natural Pepsi, meet all natural tile pear.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Seven:

The story so far:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

And now...

So today I ride my bike a long, long way to the one store I KNOW has Pepsi Natural - the Columbus Deli on 18th Avenue and 86th Street. It's cold and my bike has a wonkity-wonkity element to the ride ever since the ugly incident during my first attempt to pick-up some of this alleged wonder drink.

The bike ride is long and cold, but easy. It's all downhill with the wind at my back. All I can think is that the ride back will be colder and more miserable, as it's uphill into the wind. I mosey along and find the place, caddy corner from an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant. I knew it. I was sure it was there the other day during the false start bus trip, and now it's confirmed. All you can eat restaurants are a rarity in NYC, one needs to keep track. And I have been forbidden eating dinner as my wife is getting off work early and wants me to eat with her.

What a horrible, selfish person.

Arrive in the deli, snoop around and grab three bottles of Pepsi Natural. All they have left. Hoorah! They also have what appears to be kvass made from apples, but only in super-mega sized bottles that I am loath to carry uphill and into the wind for a long cold ride on my bike. So those are left behind. I'll always miss you, suspicious russian faux alcoholic apple drink. Another time.

The Middle-Eastern fellow at the counter asked me if I was Muslim, making a little "I'm pretending I have a beard" motion with his hands. I said "No, I just have the dopey beard". Ooh. With that level of suave you'd think I was talking to a pretty girl. My drive to self-deprecation overwhelmed my drive to not offend minority religions. Whoops.

I tool around the area trying to find other drinkable novelties. I pick up an imitation Mountain Dew I think I already have, but couldn't risk NOT having, and a few other bits. Nothing important.

Long, long cold ride up hill into the wind back and...

...taste.

Wow. It's... good. I think. There's a weird tinge in it, something fruity like oranges or apples. The smell is perfect, it's everything Pepsi should smell like. That fruit taste is maddening, the back of the label says that apple juice is present for color but that isn't what I'm tasting.

It's oranges, I swear it. No, apricots. Maybe it's apricots. It's the taste of a marginal citrus fruit that no one sensible every really eats. When that flavor runs out into the light, I get a little suspicious of the whole drink but otherwise it's a good, clean taste. Enjoyable, sweet, and natural tasting. How about that?

.
+-------

Those little marks are from my remaining cat rolling over onto the keyboard when I ate the last bit of asian bakery hotdog bun thing. Poor abused cat, not getting any hotdog to eat.

Yeah, I think it's an apricot flavor. A little bitter, or tart or whatever.

The Pepsi Natural bottle is pretty classy, minimally texted and entirely bare for the upper half. That's how I like my drinks and my women. Wait a minute, there's a relief of a Pepsi logo up at the top, but it's still classy. And the little drink by date is stamped right above that, I guess that's functional classy. Secret classy are the little ring of bumps on the very bottom of the bottle, the pattern is irregular so I sort of wonder if there is some secret purpose to these bumps. I bet they somehow orient the bottle during the manufacturing process to ensure that the "Pepsi Natural" text is printed on the proper side in relation to the relief logo.

The bottle shape is a little sci-fi, a little cartoon-made-real. The color of the Pepsi is a little lighter than your usual, a little browner. Just a shade darker than very strong tea.

So Pepsi Natural medium-rocks. Much much better than regular Pepsi, and better than standard Coke, but NOT better than real sugar Coke.

Edit: A year later I have come to love this stuff. The favorite drink of me and my wife. Of course, they no longer make it, so go to hell Pepsi.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Six

2009-04-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Six:

The crafty Manhattan distribution manager has been out to lunch for six days. I give up. My wife and I bust out the Brooklyn bus map pdf and plan a trip to the other deli that sells Pepsi Natural. A simple bus ride. I call and confirm that they have it in stock.

We set out, it's really cold - our warm day had turned miserable and we are underdressed. Nonetheless, my wife wants ice cream from a chain place on Third Avenue. We walk and walk and don't see it, try to look it up in Google and realize that it must have closed within the past week. Alas. [edit: It didn't, it was just a block further north than we thought it was]. We're hungry so we stop at a family style Italian restaurant, complete with an old guy singing love songs. Sad that these were wasted on a married couple.

We emerge from the restaurant into the thickest fog I can remember seeing in NYC. Visibility peters out at about three blocks, fog horns rumble out on the river. We head home, this is not a good night for adventures that don't involve murder and/or zombies.

...

I made another dream drawing out of one of our cats. It's far too horrible to show, but I'm copyrighting the Pepsi logo I made. It's... unique.

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Five

2009-04-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Five:

I bicycle to the nearer store. Turns out that there is no "Stop One" deli at 72nd and 5th Ave. There's a Russian pharmacy with a name which sounds similar when spoken out loud, but they don't have soft drinks for sale. Or so they claim. If I was a real investigator, I would break into their store room at night, just to be certain. But I'm not.

However, the trip was not without adventure. I picked up a Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi, something I'd never actually seen but had only imagined in my most fantastic dreams (not pictured). I also picked up a Mexican Coke with real sugar, a rarity nowadays.

Then disaster. I quote from my "Facebook" page:

Tim used a his bike spokes to open a bottle of Mexican Coke. While riding. On accident. I could've died.

And the follow up...

I didn't get to enjoy the Coke. It was in a cloth bag, which swung down from my shoulder and caught in the spokes. It was spun with the rotation and jammed up into the front brake, which made my front wheel seize up. As it caught, the cap popped off and a jet of soda shot out of the bag and into the air. Meanwhile, the back tire of the bike lifted high up into the air and my butt left the seat. My legs flailed straight out in a successful effort to keep my balance, which was quite remarkable in itself.

At the peak of my arc, with soda spraying in the air and myself balanced on the handlebars and my butt higher than my head, I looked over at a passing mini-van full of Middle-Eastern men. Our eyes met, theirs were full of horror and sympathy, I suspect mine were already shot through with embarassment.

The caffeine-free Pepsi survived intact.

Yeah, you fucks. Laugh all you like.

Another dream. I'm in a poorly drawn sloop and see a gigantic bottle of Pepsi Natural bobbing on the waves. I heft a harpoon, put my knee in the clumsy cleat, "dart the harp", and then all goes black. I have a vague memory of an ominous voice saying "1d6 investigators per round", but I don't remember what happens next. I think the dream symbolizes that Pepsi Natural is like an ice berg, and 90% of the deliciousness is concealed under the water.

Here's the drawing I made:

1d6 investigators per round

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Four

2009-04-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Four:

At my wit's end, I decide I have no recourse but to invoke a higher power fraught with forbidden knowledge.

I call the Pepsi company that serves New York City. They give me the names of two different distribution managers, one for Manhattan and one for Brooklyn. The Manhattan guy never seems to be in, the Brooklyn folks are very helpful. They give me names and addresses of two different stores that stock Pepsi Natural.

Ah. Pepsi Natural is the name of Pepsi Raw in the US.

One is a short bike ride from my apartment, the other a long slog. We'll see what a new day brings.

Another dream, I drew it out below. I think this one symbolizes my belief that I am hot on the trail of Pepsi Natural. Or that it will be Pepsi's hot new drink. This dream interpretation stuff is pretty easy.

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Three

2009-04-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Three:

While testing a "make your own soft drinks in your office" thing at a friends business, one of his co-workers tells me that the local Whole Foods is selling Pepsi Raw. He's wrong.

I had another dream last night. I won't tell you what happened when the cap came off, I'll just say that it was an erotic combination of sex and murder.

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Two

2009-03-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Two:

I've visited dozens of stores and called many more, no one seems to have ever heard of Pepsi Raw or any all natural Pepsi product. At each turn I am greeted by a lack of understanding, whether due to the fantastic assertion that there is an organic Pepsi product or because most deli workers speak English as a second language I do not know.

My wife hollers at me whenever I try and break away and investigate a new shop, my will is breaking. Does this marvelous thing exist, or is it a hopeful wisp of fantasy? Will I be jostled by a swarthy seaman and wind up dead by poison, a victim of those who wish to keep Pepsi Raw out of the eyes of man?

I had a dream last night, I drew it out:

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

It's a bottle of Pepsi Raw atop a volcano spouting lava. The banner of the top reads "Persevere", there's a bunch of other words but I didn't bother reading them.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry One

2009-03-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry One:

A friend sends me a link to a webpage which mentions the release of Pepsi Raw to a handful of markets in the US. New York City is on the list. I use the marvel of "social networking" to see if any of my Facebook associates have seen the stuff for sale. I'm greeted with derisive jeers, and assurances that Pepsi Raw is only for sale in Europe.

The fools, I'll prove them all wrong.

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

The lucrative world of soda reviewing

2009-03-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

So I just received a check from Google for $107, which means that my blog averages about $25 a month in clicks. Yep, those annoying ads in this blog are finally paying off. As the old joke goes, I need to start one hundred more blogs and I'll be sitting pretty.

Fanta Orange ah la Russia

2009-03-28T13:06:00.001-07:00

I kind of dig that orange slice graphic.

Fanta Orange, Russian

So I fall all over myself singing the praises of sugary soft drinks, as opposed to their corn based cousins. Sugar can do no wrong in my book. Well, this crazy Eastern European Fanta I bought falls flat. Not in a non-carbonated way, but in a flavor way.

I've never been a big Fanta fan, but sometimes when you travel it's all you can get. I've drank enough of the stuff that it doesn't bother me, and I'll even sometimes pick it up on a whim when given other choices. It definitely has a European reputation, and I have a vague memory of some guys I used to play the Palladium RPG with calling me "Eurotrash" when I brought a bottle to their game. I'm not sure if these guys had ever left New York City much less gone to Europe, so that reinforces its Back East reputation.

I'm so unenthused about Fanta that I changed my plans for this review minutes after buying this ginormous bottle of the crap. My plan had been to buy an American bottled Fanta as well, and then taste test the two back to back. Common sense stepped in and declared that this was going to be way too much Fanta, and I shouldn't think about that sort of crap.

So, one huge bottle of Eastern European Fanta. That's what I have. The little sticker says it was imported by "Trilini intarnational Imports..." That's all I can read of their name, as the sticker is rubbed away at that point. Or burned away, or something. Their phone number is (718)437-2700, I'm going to call them and ask what other wonders they import. The best thing about this little white sticker is that it reads "Drink with taste of an orange".

That is pretty much what Fanta is, I cannot deny it. There is definitely a taste of an orange in there. The oddness about this stuff, though, is that it tastes like corn syrup. The sweet is the burned corn husk sweet of Coca Cola. So, Russian Fanta loses big time. How can you screw that up?

Further investigation of the little white sticker tells me that there are a whopping 31 calories per serving, with 20 servings living inside this big old bottle. Europeans certainly are classy folks if they drink their Fanta a third of a cup at a time. This is a soda, not a hard liquor. Wait, Russians don't drink hard liquor in small doses, clearly they flipped their drinking volumes around.

But that little white sticker is where the sanity ends. Everything below is in cartoon Cyrillic, except the actual "Fanta" itself. And the numbers. And the Pepsi Cola logo. Blah blah blah.

So, to wind up: Eastern European Fanta is not much better than US Fanta. And US Fanta is pretty unremarkable, so the idea is not to bother with either. The follow-up thought is to wonder why someone would bother importing this stuff if it's so similar to what we already have?

Edit: Oh neat, there's a little raised star inside the cap. It probably means I just won a zillion rubles.

The bottle text comes out looking like a lonely chat log.

Mountain Dew Slurpee

2009-03-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

The chartreuse, which so becoming on fishing lures,
doesn't quite come through here.

Mountain Dew Slurpee

I used to be a true Mountain Dew fan. I'd drink a can almost every morning before going to school. I'd get a horrible stomach ache, but it was better tasting than the water where I grew up. I'd drink them at night, in the afternoon, whenever and wherever I could get one. In one night of playing Dungeons and Dragons I drank two 2-liters, after everyone left I did this vomit hiccup thing that resulted in Mountain Dew bile rushing up into my sinuses.

I sat for hours, staring into a mirror, weeping Mountain Dew tears which I would gently blot away with a tissue. It hurt a lot.

Today I got home from my two hour commute and was feeling a little wild, what with it being a Tuesday night and my not working the next day. I stop at the 7-11 and buy a plate of nachos and a medium Mountain Dew Slurpee.

I'd not had a taste of Mountain Dew Slurpee since the Bad Days of 7-11 drinks, when the Slurpees all tasted like Sweettarts. I'd had a marvelous Mountain Dew crushed ice thing at a bowling alley in Maine, in 1996, which set a pretty high bar for other icey Dew drinks. In fact, when I returned to that town six years later, I beelined for that same bowling alley only to find out that the slurpee-type machine had long since broken down and been discarded.

The guy behind the counter agreed that the Mountain Dew pseudo-Slurpees had been really good, then we wept in each others arms. It was beautiful.

So I carry my nachos home in my jacket, as its twenty degree outside. The Slurpee I carry in an ungloved hand, gingerly swapping it back and forth when the cold gets too great. At home I get my first taste and...

...it's really good. It has all the wonderful flavor of Mountain Dew, but none of the carbonation. MD does well with it's carbonation, it's an odd thing for it not to be present with the taste. There's some kind of poppy bite there, though, is it possibly to have carbonation magically locked in the icy slush of the Slurpee? Regardless, it doesn't just taste like flat Mountain Dew, and it isn't the horrid Sweettart flavor of six or seven years ago.

The bad news is that I happily pig my way through the Slurpee, feeling a caffeine rush creep up behind my eyeballs. I don't get much caffeine nowadays, so it really kicks me in the ass when I have some. I vibrate my way over to the computer only to find out that I DO work tomorrow, so I'm screwed. I'll be up till 3am, staring goggle-eyed at the ceiling and levitating off the bed at every noise the cats make.

Bah.

But, 7-11 Mountain Dew Slurpee is a go.

I'm gonna give you bums the science on 7-11 nachos, but not today.

Edit: Yes, I was up all night. Asleep maaaaybe at four and was up at six to catch a train.

Stewart's Root Beer

2009-03-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

Stewart, I like you. You're not like the other root beers, here, at the trailer park.

Stewart's Root Beer

I'm a big fan of some of the uber-sweet Stewart's drinks, especially the Cherry Cola and the Dark Cherry. They're mostly syrup and totally rock. The root beer flavor, on the other hand, doesn't particularly rock at all. It's kind of a Disneyland-esque pretend root beer flavor, and acts strangely in the mouth.

Most root beers are a foamy explosion as soon as they hit the tongue, Stewart's Root Beer takes half a beat before it expands. It's a little odd, a little unnerving. The taste is a little off, too. There's not a whole lot of what I would call root beer flavor in there, just a parody of most of the flavor and a weird aftertaste.

The best thing about this particular bottle, though, is that I drank it with my lunch from Five Guys. Five Guys is a really good hamburger chain that has pretty much eclipsed any other hamburger maker in my neighborhood. I'd called my order in to the place, and then called back a few minutes later to change my hamburger to a cheeseburger. When I got home I found a piece of cheese wrapped in tinfoil, separate from my hamburger.

So it might be a little unfair to judge Stewart's Root Beer at this time, as it is being consumed alongside a really good, oniony hamburger.

There's the separately wrapped cheese slice. This photo
is both better arranged and more sanitary
than the first one in this posting.

Missed Connections: Top Pop Cola

2009-03-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

What sort of logic has someone neatly putting the cap
back on an empty soda bottle and then throwing it on the sidewalk?

You: Drunk, abandoned on the sidewalk. Full of the spittle of the person who used and discarded you. Still handsome in your blood spattered blue vest. Uou caught my eye and certainly were "20% More Than 20 Oz" in my book.

Me: Chubby guy with a bad beard, glasses. Spiderman suit. Desperate to top the taste. I walked to all the local delis, but couldn't find hide nor hair of you. Let's get together.

Inca Kola Commercial

2009-03-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

I loathe Inca Kola, but with this commercial it moves from "destroy on sight" to "genteel enemy".

Inca kola spot tv 60's con cesar"mono"altamirano
Uploaded by la_shivi

The image of the guy holding the Inca Kola logo at the end is really striking for some reason. Well, I know the reasons but I'm too lazy to write it out.

And Rob, thanks for the link.

Ubuntu Cola

2009-03-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

Royal mail! Did that Vicountship I ordered finally come through?

Dude, I don't even use a PC.

The British cans use the pamphlet to erect a laager
for defense against the Zulu threat.

Ubuntu Cola, Ubuntu Trading Company
This can of Ubuntu was sent to me by a friend of a friend in Britain. How cool is that? Soft drinks getting mailed to me from across the Atlantic! And for free.

It sat in the refrigerator for a couple of months, I couldn't bring myself to drink it. It's too nice of a thing, this gift from overseas. And it came with a cool fold out pamphlet, informing me the many ways in which Ubuntu helped the world.

Sadly, I lost the pamphlet. I think my wife might have tidied it away, she steadfastly denies it, but does so in a shifty manner indicating to me her possible guilt.

Anyways, Ubuntu is delightful. A joy to sip. It's a very crisp and clean drink, tasting like an amalgam of all the best things of the cola world. It has that light sweetness of Pepsi, but not overly much. It has the good bits of Tab in it, too. Some of the roughneck flavor of RC is in there as well, swaggering quietly in the background but not drawing too much attention to itself.

The stuff is mild and lightly carbonated. There is a very slight ugliness to the initial aftertaste, a mixing of a numb tongue and mud, but it doesn't reappear after the first couple of swigs. Maybe the Ubuntu was just rehydrating the dried foulness already present in my mouth.

It's a Fairtrade product, something which I heartily approve of. According to the can, it "Guarantees a better deal for Third World Producers". There's nothing wrong with that at all. For a few cents more a heck of a difference can be made in someone else's life. That's great. I'll quote the rest of the can:

Ubuntu: "I am because we are"

Through Fairtrade, sugar cane farmers in Malawi and Zambie receive a better deal and a social premium to invest in social, economic, & environmental projects. Plus, we will return one third of our profits into those communities through our Ubuntu Africa program. Visit: www.ubuntu-trading.com

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I approve of all of that sentence. I hate it when ampersands are used unnecessarily. And that last sentence is a little oddly phrased: "...we will return one third of our profits into those communites..." That seems like odd english. Shouldn't it be "return to" the communities? Or "invest into"? Or something?

But then again, this a product of London. They certainly have the upper hand when it comes to good English.

The ingredients list reads:

carbonated water
fairtrade sugar
colours: sulphite ammonia caramel
acidifier: phosphoric acid
preservative: sodium benzoate
flavour: caffeine, natural flavors

96% (excluding water) fairtrade ingredients certified to international fairtrade standards

So listing items with their function is a new one on me. Sulphite Ammonia Caramel lends it the color, eh? We all love the color of ammonia. And caffeine is listed as a flavor? That's a little wacky.

Like I mentioned above, the pamphlet disappeared before the review. In this instance, I don't feel terrible about doing a little research on the website - all I'm doing is replacing the info that came with the can, right? It's not cheating, I swear it.

The first thing I notice is that the http://ubuntu-trading.com/our-fairtrade-cola page says "Each year We'll [sic] give at least 15% of our profits to our Ubuntu Africa Programme". 15% isn't equal to 1/3rd. A discrepancy between the can and the website. Alas. And what's with that royal upper case W on the "We'll"?

Ah, heck with the website. This stuff is really good, and you can drink it with a clean conscience.

Edit: So I found the pamphlet which came with the Ubuntu. Like you might expect, it's touting the good-for-the-worldness of Fairtrade goods. It has a printed excerpt from a blog by an African sugar farmer, he talks about cows. It has a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It mentions Zulu community support. Etc. The most important thing about this is that it turned up in the stamp drawer. My wife's stamp drawer. She seemed embarrassed and claimed to have no idea how it got there, though I will point out that the pamphlet is conveniently stamp book shaped and could easily fool someone not paying attention.

Crafty Ubuntu.

Hurrah! Reinforcements!

Pepsi Raw, I Ain't Had None Yet

2009-03-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

So folks have been emailing me about Pepsi Raw, which is apparently being testmarketed in NYC. As far as I can tell, it's not quite the same as the Pepsi Throwback stuff - the Raw is apparently marketed towards a health conscious crowd.

Again, my hands are tied by my vow to not research things on the internet for fear of having my opinions tainted.

I aim to find some soon, maybe tonight. Or maybe NEVER.

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Virgil's Root Beer

2009-03-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

A regular ol' root beer. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Virgil's Root Beer

Using Natural Ingredients, Brew a Root Beer So Pure, So Rich and Creamy, You'll Swear It's Made in Heaven

Virgil's ain't bad. It tastes natural but not pansy-ish, with a strong taste of cloves which I could only identify after reading the ingredients list. It's apparently made by Reed's, purveyor of evrything I hate - maybe it's only owned by Reed's, because this is good.

It's good. What else can I say?

Root beers are getting hard for me to judge, they all taste so similar.

The Fridge Monkey

2009-03-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

Combining drinking with stacks of glass bottles, brilliant!

The Fridge Monkey

My wife showed me this gimmicky device, I could see the hopeful glint in her eye, right through the email. A good idea, I think, but not for me. I have eigth bazillion bottles in my refrigerator and none of them are the same size, it kind of spoils the trick.

The Ginger People Ginger Beer

2009-03-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

Aw, look at the little dude on the tiger.

The Ginger People Ginger Beer

The bottle art is thoroughly charming, a cute little ginger guy in a turban rides on the back of a tiger. Arcing over the head it reads "A Toast to Your Strength and Vigor". The bottle is suspiciously cloudy, but we are reassured everything is fine at the bottom of the label: "Natural ginger juice gives our ginger beer its uniquely cloudy appearance..." How nice! They knew we'd be concerned but took the time to ease our fears.

The best part is the instruction to "Gently tip to and fro and enjoy". To and fro! I want the copy writer to read me bedtime tales.

I pop the cap with my everpresent Leatherman after realizing it wasn't a twist-off. "Realizing it wasn't a twist-off" is code for "nearly tore my shirt". The first whiff of the ginger beer lifted me off the ground, it smelled like heaven. Like concentrated Canadian made Ting. I literally snorted the CO2 mist drifting out of the can up into my nostrils, there was no visible gas left after I whiffed it all up.

Heaven. Then came the first drink. It's not so much that this stuff is bad as it is that it doesn't measure up to the promise of the label and the smell. It's foamy but not full of carbonated fight, it expands in my mouth and sits there like a big slug. This corpulence is matched in the taste, nothing much happens. It's not a typical ginger taste, not at all. Compared to other ginger beers it's more like a root beer than anything else, this is reflected in the foaminess as well. There's also a hint of something like damp earth, from a forest. Which I guess makes sense, considering that this is made from a root that likes loamy soil.

Which brings me back to the label. The little root guy riding the tiger, I am suspicious of who exactly he is. What root is known for resemblance to a man, eh? Not ginger, but most certainly mandrake. Unless gathered under the most carefully arranged circumstances, mandrake root gives a death wail when pulled from the ground that will strike any hearers dead. DEAD. Furthermore, mandrake can be used to create a homonculus, animating the mandrake into a little person that will do as its master wishes. We are now back to the label, where we see a little animated root man riding a tiger.

The tiger, of course, is the hole in this theory. Unless we have tiny tigers this would mean that root man on the label is actually quite large. Bigger than a person, actuallly. At this point, I'll fall back and blame the disproportinate scale on photoshop trickery.

Ha.

All that said, Ginger People Ginger Beer ain't that great. It's sweet, and leaves a delightful residue on the lips and wherever else you slop it, but otherwise the taste is pretty bland. Sure it's a ginger beer and not a ginger ale, but that ain't no excuse.

Turkey Hill Iced Tea - Lemon Flavored

2009-03-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I seem to have lost the photo I took of the bottle,
here's one swiped off their website. My bottle was this shape,
but the flavor was "Lemon Iced Tea".

Turkey Hill Iced Tea - Lemon Flavored

I've seen Turkey Hill stuff around for some time. They make ice cream, and I believe I've seen Turkey Hill convenience stores in Pennsylvania, I think they had Slurpee type dispensers there, too. In NYC I see the teas in the medium to large sized supermarkets, but had never actually seen anyone drink one till an evening of games at a pal's house.

It was a bad evening, I lost at Power Grid and Around the World in 80 Days.

Early in that dismal evening, a brother-in-law of my host showed up with a bottle of Turkey Hill Iced Tea. Someone said something about him being addicted to the stuff. That sparked my interest and moved the Turkey Hill onto my "acquisitions" list, an item I checked off just today.

My first drink almost made me vomit. Once again, I drank something without reading the fine print on the back instructing me to "shake well". Bah. That first sip was pure, unflavored syrupy sweetness. Horrible.

A good shaking makes the stuff much more bearable, but still not great. Not bad, but not very tea like. It tastes alot like the instant powdered iced teas I grew up with, and that ain't a great thing tea wise. The real pull of this stuff is in the sugar/caffeine rush, I think. Drinking about a cups worth puts me in race car mode. Brrrrrrrummm-bum-bum-bmmmmmmmmm. Honestly, the taste is only about half a pip less good than Snapple Lemon Tea, and it isn't really that it's worse but just different in a slightly less desirable way.

It's much more mellow than Snapple, that's for certain.

The bottle art is pretty tacky, with a poorly drawn polar bear wearing sun glasses and a scarf, hugging himself for warmth. He's there to illustrate that it's "cold fashioned for freshness". On the back they boast that the stuff is kept cold throughout the entire process. Wait, they DON'T say that. The cold part starts at the bottling, it's supposedly kept cold from then on. I confess I was suspicious of any tea that could be made cold.

It's sad to think that in another decade or two it might be in bad taste to use polar bears in advertising.

The side of the bottle has a relief that says "Imported from Lancaster County TM". Trademarked. They trademarked that phrase. That's sort of silly and sad. And I wonder if they sell these same bottles in Lancaster County, where it wasn't imported because it was made there. Maybe I'll call 800-MY-DAIRY and ask.

Anyways, this stuff ain't great but it ain't bad. It's a pretty neutral way to get lots of sugary crap in your body fast. Honestly, I don' really recommend it.

White Rock Ginger Ale

2009-03-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

White Rock and Power Grid share a similar color scheme.

White Rock Ginger Ale

Wow, this is some mundane crap. My first drink tastes like flat carbonated water. I put the cap back on and give it a few light twists, hoping that the stuff has separated in the bottle and needs to be remixed...

...No, it's just awful. The flavor is really weak and all I can really taste is the carbonation. My taste buds don't rebel completely because of the delightful amount of corn syrup, it's still a sugar rush. Basically, it tastes like weaker and slightly sweeter Schweppes.

It has a sideways chemical taste hidden in the carbonation reek. Mixed in there is a flat 7-up taste that isn't all bad. The whole thing ends in a watery aftertaste, not the usual cardboard burn found in ginger drinks.

"Psyche the Goddess of Purity and White Rock's trademark, signifies White Rock's commitment to the upmost quality, purity and refreshment in beverages". Personally, I think Psyche should hit them with a defamation suit, both for being associated with this soft drink and being labeled "the Goddess of Purity". She was no such thing, at least I'm pretty sure she wasn't. I invoke my "no research" rule as an excuse for not coming up with a footnote on this.

Positive things about this drink... Hmmm. It comes in a bottle with the picture of a girl with wings on it, that's a plus. It's not caffeinated. I like that. Simple ingredients list is a plus as well. I bought a quart and not a two liter, that's the best part .

So yeah, White Rock Ginger Ale tastes like a cheap discount soda. Why it was for sale in an upscale New York grocery store, I have no idea. It certainly didn't measure up to its surroundings.

Regatta Ginger Beer

2009-03-01T08:15:00.000-08:00

Boooooring.

Regatta Ginger Beer

There's a lot going on in this ginger beer, it's seemingly sweet at first but that quickly dissipates in the busy melange of spice and flavors. For all the complicated nonsense, it still seems a straightforward taste. You have to listen to hear all the different instruments.

It smells perfect. It smells cold, and gingery, and clean. This level of nose perfection I've only found in Canadian Ting and Australian Bundaberg.

It's not too hot, it doesn't fight on the way down but does tend to simmer in the back of the throat long after the bottle is finished. Such is the nature of ginger and carbonation, though, and I can't find fault with a ginger beer for doing what comes natural to a ginger beer. It's like getting mad at your neighbors dog for barking all night and day until its fed poisoned hamburger.

The funny thing about this, is that it's good but soulless. It's all the good stuff of ginger beer, but none of the bad - no cardboard taste, no overwhelming ginger wackiness. Even the label is a little too well designed, what with its logo of two boats about to crash. It's a little too classy looking.

And the old rule applies: Anything that says 'authentic' on the label, probably isn't authentic. But don't avoid it, it's better than most.

nBn Carbonated Lemonade

2009-02-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

It kind of looks like the credits from a spaghetti western.

In an effort to find some English transliteration of this drink name, I went to the website plastered all over the bottle. I thought that this was the website for the drink, but I actually think it's a Greek dating site. I'm not joking, either, there are pictures of young people all over the site arranged in little "my file" ways. The dead give away was that about half the pictures looked like they'd been pulled off professional model sites, a sure sign that someone is stacking the deck.

Dig the greek dance music, though. And be sure to notice that all of the pictures listed have 0 or 1 viewing, how sad.

I'm gonna call this stuff nBn, for lack of a better way to type it. I'm willing to bet I'm making an ass myself with this simple decision, and that "nBn" is hentai emoticon slang for "I like to be tentacle raped in a bathroom stall". Nonetheless, I'll let it stand so I can get on with this rather unremarkable review - just know I won't go in any bathrooms unarmed.

nBn is a carbonated lemonade. Carbines have a rich history in Greece, most notably being used by the rebels during WWII. How this ties into nBn is probably explained in all the Greekified text on the bottle, but I'm not willing to fuck with my keyboard settings so as to be able to type the stuff into a Google translator. Some mysteries deserve to be kept.

The flavor isn't bad. Again, the Loux drinks scarred me - I'm still trigger shy around Greek drinks even after the heavenly transubstantiation of Stala. It's not bad, but not good. It has the taste of lemon juice concentrate out of a metal can, as opposed to a plastic bottle. I think I'm imagining those terms more than speaking from experience, but they definitely feel right.

Not too sweet for a lemonade, not too sour. It's more like the sour took three steps to the right and became some other slightly challenging flavor, maybe dour instead of sour.

The nBn label design is straight out of 80s Thrasher magazine. A line of cut-out and irregularly reapplied bits of text happily gibber along in Greek, telling me only one thing: Greeks don't have a word for "virtual chat". Take a letter from the French, Greek people, and make up your own words for stuff - that way even your own people don't understand what you're talking about.

Blah blah blah virtual blah blah blah blah virtual chat blah blah...

I have to take a moment and describe my cat. He's sleeping in front of my keyboard while I type, having cat dreams. Violent twitches wrack his little cat body, then like a penitent pleading his case before the Holy Ghost, one little clawed paw reaches up and curls in the air, as if he was begging for forgiveness. Apparently he didn't get it, as the body tics are even more pronounced than before.

When he's like this I can do just about anything to him and he won't wake up. Pry open his eyes, stick a pencil in his mouth, whatever. It's hilarious.

So, nBn isn't bad at all, it's just not as good as Stala. The next time you are plundering the treasures of Greece, pick up a bottle and laugh in their faces when they try to "repatriate" it.

Look at the gunk in the threads of the bottle cap.

Pepsi Throwback

2009-02-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

This isn't your father's Mountain Dew, nor is it that punk kid's,
it's YOUR Mountain Dew. At least judging by the label.
And assuming your about my age.

I've been trained by enough horror movies to know that
a "throwback" is a genetic monstrosity sure to kill
almost everyone in the film.

Okay, so Pepsi is releasing "retro" versions of its soft drinks. These drinks will use sugar instead of corn syrup. It's first mentioned in a bevindustries.com link here:

In the middle of April, PBV also will begin distributing Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, which features those brands formulated with sugar.

There's a very nice write-up on this at bevreview. Smart folks over there. Too bad my "no research" policy prevents me from actually reading their website. This was an okay bit of looking because:

1. It's about something that hasn't actually been released yet.

and

2. Enough people sent me the link that I felt I HAD to look.

Not much else I can add to this. One thing mentioned in the original Bevnet article is that Pepsi has some kind of consumer voting thing for the new Mountain Dew flavors. I'm hoping I can hire some African dictator to come up here and rig the polls so we can get rid of some of those disgusting cartoon flavors they falsely call "Mountain Dew [*]".

It astounds me that companies have people vote for flavors. I've always assumed that this was total crap, even as a kid. As an adult I had it confirmed when I worked on a cereal ad campaign for which the results were determined before the "kids go vote" commercials were even aired. That Bevnet runs an article which states that:

In CSD flavors, PBV will add Mountain Dew Voltage, which was the winning flavor in the brand’s Dewmocracy campaign.

This makes me half wonder if there might not be some legitimacy to the Dewmocracy thing. And if Coke isn't passing bribes to get the worst possible results.

That Pepsi logo looks kind of Mad Maxx, especially with
the dirt on the circle part. I hate the font on
the Mountain Dew "Throwback". I want to put the designer
inside a big inner tube and roll him into a river of lava.

Stala Orange Drink

2009-02-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

This mind bogglingly scary advert was on the outside of the place
I bought the Stala. It's like the Silent Hill franchise
went into pushing ice cream.

Ho hum, another dumb soda.

Those are all mediocre games there on the shelf behind me.
Except Empire Builder and British Rails, I guess.
Crayon train games rock.

Why, this is delightful!

Stala, Gaseous Refreshment

This stuff is so good, that I almost glugged it all down before scrambling to my computer to write a review. It's like the best orange juice in the world and the best soft drink in the world had sex, and not "and they had a baby" sex but "sex on video I downloaded from the internet and my Mom found it and took my internet away and made me see Dr Stan" sex. This stuff is marvelous, incredible, stupendous. I'm falling all over myself trying to think of how describe it. I'm doing other things to myself while I'm thinking of it, but Google will take away my advertising if I get too specific.

I don't think I can really improve on the above description, except to say that in my special case the stuff was also well seasoned with dread. I've had other Greek drinks , specifically from the Loux company, which tasted a lot like a "lou" or however British people spell their toilet abbreviation. Loux made me ill, I was expecting the worst when I drank Stala. So it wasn't just delicious, it was a reprieve.

I take a few more pulls and stare intently at the bottle, I'm feeling for some hidden foulness, some chemical taint deep in the back of the drink. I'd settle for a foul aftertaste, or maybe a loose human tooth rattling around in the bottle. But I ain't getting none of it. Stala is perfect.

Perfect.

The ingredients are: Pure orange juice, Spring water, Sugar, Aromatic flavorings, Citric acid, Benzoic sodium, Sorbic potassium.

My word, what a beautiful ingredients list. It shines like an angel from heaven bearing a pardon from the governor on a plate made of barbecued ribs.

What pushes me even further into the heights of unadulterated joy are two little words on the front of the bottle: "Gaseous Refreshment". It's like being on a date with a beautiful woman who puts in a Three Stooges DVD to "set the mood". A divine drink with a phrase best enjoyed as a verb right there on the label.

After experiencing this drink, I finally understand the movie Rocky I. I understand his pain and I weep.

While trying to get an interesting photo of the my cat
and the bottle together, I tilted the bottle too far back
and all the sticky backwash ran down my arm and onto the floor.
At least I assume that's why the floor under
my computer desk is sticky.

Edit: Since writing this review, I stopped by the Greek grocers and picked up some more Stala for a party. The Stala wasn't half as good on the second go-round, a real disappointment. That said, I'm pretty sure that this was a different batch of the stuff - the refrigerator case had been almost empty the last time I was there and was overflowing on my second visit. Sodas heavy in fruit juice are often a little erratic in flavor, that's the reason Coke and Pepsi are such chemical nightmares - they had to replace seasonal things like lemon juice with chemistry independent of the sun.

Bah.

Day's Cola

2009-02-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

Though you can't see it, there is a top to this bottle.
I swear it. I didn't just saw off the upper half and drink out of
the remainder like a giant plastic chalice with a very rough lip.

Day's Cola

I picked up a 2-liter of Day's Cola at a Russian bakery down off of Avenue Z. The bakery was amazing inside, almost everything there was lopsided and irregular, including the employees. There were beautiful cakes, big and small, in bright primary colors piled with icing, but all very imperfect. I loved it.

I'm not sure why Day's Cola was in this place. I think it was the only soft drink on sale, on a shelf with jam's and preserves. Day's is made in Springfield, Pennsylvania. Why oh why would it show up in a Russian bakery in Brooklyn? I can hardly imagine that this stuff is actually distributed here, as I've never even heard of it before. (edit: Their website says it IS distributed in NYC, and I have the distributors number so I can find some more of their products.) (edit edit: I lost the distributors number.)

So I took the bottle to a friend's home for a day of game playing. It didn't get cracked open till the very end, and it was surprisingly okay. It was refreshing to drink something from an unknown bottler and not have it be "champagne" flavored.

It's a weak cola, kind of like an RC cola cut fifty/fifty with regular Coke. Not very fizzy at all. Pretty unremarkable, but not bad. It lacks the harshness that I find in regular Coke, the burned taste is missing.

The bottle is nice, too. The entire name on the soda reads: Full Flavored Day's Cola, For the Best Since 1946. It also says "Beverages" on the label in a place that doesn't make any sense. Seriously, look at that. It's just a bunch of words that look like they belong on a bottle but don't make any sense.

No joke I can make can possibly improve on this.

The best part, though, is that next to "Large 2 Liter" it says "100% more than 1-Liter". That's hilarious, one of the best things I've ever read on a soda bottle. You can't tell me that the graphic design guy didn't put that on as a joke and the good natured boss decided to keep it. I like these people, I want to move to PA and be their friend.

There's a little confusion about the cap. Written in blue on the cap it says "CRO-PAC,. Worcester, Mass 01603 CT. LIC 251". I can only assume that this is information about the folks who made the cap, and a list of the route the cap took to get here. It started in Worcester, MA, was taken through Connecticut, and entered Long Island City. Ha.

I've been mulling this drink over for a while and decided to make it into a vanilla float. A few scoops of random ice cream and voila, a pretty bad float. The trouble is that the weak carbonation disappears in the vanilla foam. Normally a float takes harsh drinks like Coka and mellows them, this stuff just goes belly up. And then, horror of horrors...

Look at that, it's like separating blood plasma. It's absolutely vile looking, though it tastes fine. What the hell is happening with this stuff? It's like unwholesome magic, and has totally destroyed my interest in drinking Day's Cola.

Yum quickly churns to...

...yuck. It reminds me of something
I hid in my friend Brian's cabinet
in college.

Cintron OrangeAde

2009-02-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

Sympathetic magic says that drinking this
will make my penis long and orange.

If pursued by a police helicopter,
don't stop to drink crappy orangeade.

Cintron OrangeAde

I've always liked Arizona Iced Tea's Orange Drink. I can now pair that phrase with "I've always disliked Cintron OrangeAde".

This stuff sucks. It's thin and watery and leaves a mucusy slime in the back of my throat. It hardly has any taste, but what little orange taste there is in this stuff walks hand in hand with a cheap-metallic tang. It's awful, there's nothing there. And when I say "metallic-tang" I don't mean that in a good way, like on a sex robot.

Cintron OrangeAde is so unremarkable that I'm having trouble of thinking about thing to say about it. Watery, weak, metallic-tang... that about covers it. I think I need to break my rule and look this stuff up.

Well, first off I can tell you that Cintron isn't one of those funny European cars. And the OrangeAde isn't an epic Greek tale. What I can tell you is that, according to the Cintron site:

-OrangeAde is one of the four new innovative flavors of their beverage "family".

It makes me uncomfortable to think of these cans of corn water being part of a family. What sort of family sends their members out to be consumed en masse? Wouldn't "stable" be a better word to describe these flavors in relationship to the company? Like a stable of boxers?

-Cintron OrangeAde uses high fructose corn syrup.

That's almost a given in our soda world, but I only feel it necessary to say this as the company's "about" page has a seemingly fake article boasting that their energy drinks don't use corn syrup. "...ideal for an increasingly health conscious public, CINTRON uses no high fructose corn syrup."

Wait a minute, they say there that the COMPANY doesn't use high fructose corn syrup. It does. I'm drinking it right now. It's the second ingredient on the OrangeAde ingredient list. The company is lying on their about page.

-Cintron uses a series seemingly fake articles article in it's "about" page.

Not only is the article on the about page a lie, but it's a "fake". Two fake headlines top a page, and the article body begins "PHILADELPHIA, PA -- The CINTRON Beverage Group is proud to announce a breakthrough innovation..."

Listing the city and state makes it seem like it's a newspaper account. Boo.

-These deceitful lies are being told by a company founded by "Joe Roberts, Pastor of Holy Spirit Cathedral in Camden, NJ"

For shame. A man of the cloth being dragged into a deceitful mess.

-The "press" section has other apparently fake articles.

Four articles are listed, and only two list sources. The other two are, at best, press releases. Press releases aren't press releases if they are mixed in with legitimate articles, they are fake news items.

-Possibly Cintron wants me to drink and drive.

On their main page they show me a page of mixed drink recipes made with Cintron, this page is right above photos of a boat and a car. While I don't think they want me to drink and drive, they certainly aren't encouraging me to be cautious.

-Cintron approves of gas guzzling SUVs.

And they use a HUMVEE as a mobile billboard. While this is just my personal beef, I think it's pretty awful.

Cranky about all this, I filled out the customer contact form on their website, asking about the High Fructose Corn syrup thing and about the legitimacy of some of their articles. After a week and no response, I called their contact number. No phone tree, no wait, a pleasant woman answered the phone.

I asked about the discrepancy between the website and the stuff they sold, she told me that the website hadn't been updated since they started selling the OrangeAde drinks. Well, they ADVERTISE the drinks on the website, so clearly that ain't logical or true. She told me that the website would be updated in a month, after they had some new pictures to put up.

I asked how long they'd been selling the OrangeAde and she told me about nine months. The can has a copyright date of 2007, for what that's worth, which indicates to me that they've been selling it for over a year.

About a week later I sent the below email, fabricating a "concerned and loyal customer" scenario to see how they would react.

----

Hey there,

I've always been a fan of your drinks and appreciate how they don't have corn syrup in them. I ordered a case of the OrangeAde from the local wholesaler, when it arrived I drank some and realized it had corn syrup.

Your website specifically states that NONE of your drinks have corn syrup. I called your 267 number and inquired, the woman told me that she was "sorry" and that the corn syrup drinks have been on sale for nine months. That's a LIE on your website, a lie that cost me money because now I am stuck with a tremendous amount of corn syrup that I'm going to have to pour down the sink.

I'm really disappointed, I thought your company was small and well run and CARING.

---

I sent the above email in December, it's now February and no response. In December they had told me they were updating the site in about a month, which is also untrue.

To wind up I'll say that I think this stuff tastes like total shit, and they tell lies about it on their website. Boo.

Fentiman's Curiosity Cola

2009-02-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

Molotov cocktail worthy.

Fentiman's Curiosity Cola

According to the neighbors, I was running through the halls without a shirt on, screaming "I want me some sugar". I banged on doors and reached up an older resident's blouse. It took two tazings to bring me down. All that after one sip of Fentiman's Curiosity Cola.

I don't drink grown-up drinks, no alcohol or coffee for me. I suspect that's why I reacted so negatively to Curiosity Cola, a drink even harder than the previous Fentiman's I tried. This stuff tastes like cola flavored cough syrup. No, actually it doesn't. It tastes like I'm at a cheap shit party where someone tried to turn my store-brand imitation King Kola into a mickey by adding a swill of cheap liquor to it.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite exchanges from a W.C. Fields movie:

Nervous Bank Inspector: (About to drink liquor in a sleazy bar) Do you mind if we pull the shades?
W.C. Fields: You can pull anything, this is a regular joint.

That's from The Bank Dick.

Fentiman's looks awesome. Cool-ass bottle, old tymey label but not to the point of cheesiness. Even has a neat looking dog on the neck ring. "Botanically Brewed" in raised letters on the shoulder of the bottle, so the blind know what they are getting into. A... oh, wait a minute. The back label says "Our unique brewing process leaves a sediment - to unlock the natural taste... UP END BEFORE POURING."

That last bit is in all caps, bold, AND underlined. I can't underline things in this blog, so use your imagination.

So I failed to follow instructions, which means I have to give it another taste. Fuck. All right you Fentiman jerks, put shit like that on the cap where we have to see it. I put my thumb over the bottle opening, "up end" it, take a taste, yuck. It tastes exactly the fucking same except that it's about 5% less carbonated than before. Go to hell Fentiman's. This is a disgusting beverage with all the charm of a bright blue energy drink.

Actually, that's what this stuff tastes like. A cola energy drink. A quick read of the ingredients confirms that: guarana extract and some other fake nature sounding crap are listed. So is "Cola Flavour 9594". I've never seen someone list the flavour number. Is that like a Sleep Number from those mattress commercials? Can I please turn my number down to 0000?

I'm a person just like you
But I've got better things to do
Than sit around and fuck my head
Hang out with the living dead
Drink Fentiman's Curiousity Cola
I would rather have ebola
I don't even think about it
Cause it's something that tastes like shit
I've got the straight edge

Bad dog, bad.*

*This is actually a photo from the Ginger Soda bottle.

San Pellegrino Limonata

2009-02-05T06:59:00.000-08:00

Italian soft drinks for sale: Only dropped once.

Right as I drank, I got ninja-starred in the forehead.
The horror.

San Pellegrino Limonata

I had this stuff while over at my pal Dino's for dinner. I think Dino made a sort of beef soup stuff, I forget the classy name for it. Beef bourgnine? Mourgnine? It's something pretty common and I feel like an ass for not remembering. Margarine? Doesn't matter as it was good and not something I'd ever seen anyone make from scratch.

He gave me a "San Pellegrino Limonata" to drink, he'd had a six-pack delivered along with a bunch of stuff from Fresh Direct I think. Or at least from a grocery. I remember because it was a big to-do about the delivery stuff as the van had a break down. Exciting times.

The limonata was classy looking. It had a tear off tin foil top, I hated the waste of it but couldn't help but admit that it's a good idea. Or at least it would be a good idea if this were the sort of soda that was sold out-of-date in discount delis, the sort of drinks that are always covered in dirt and foulness and sticky. This is an Eye-tahlian fancy drink, it'll never see the broken end of the freezer section. The foil, I think, is overkill, just there as a gimmick.

All this classy is reinforced by the tiny little drinkin' hole, more of a sipping hole compared to what I'm accustomed to. The Italians must be half camel.

I like most things that are lemon flavored, but it's an easy thing to mess up. I'd half expected to be poisoned after my first San Pellegrino drink, but was instead pleasantly surprised. Very lemon juicy, not too sweet, but still good. I like ass loads of sugar in my lemonade but was happy with this.

It burps up well, and was lemony enough to make me phlegm up but not so much as to make me miserable.

Stroganoff. That's what Dino made, beef stroganoff.

Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda

2009-02-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

That there's some old New York there for you.

Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda

It'd been a long time since I had Cel-Ray soda. I used to buy the stuff when I first came to NYC, I sort of remember liking it. I also remember it being a lot more common.

The taste has little to do with celery, more like a mix of orange and lemon juice with a slightly burned taste. Not the horrible corn syrup burn, but an honest burned taste. Almost smokey. Sadly, smokey isn't a taste that is that great in a soda.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a celery taste in there. It's more of a celery seed taste, a guerilla taste that runs in and out of detectability, causing mischief and possibly unhappiness. The ingredients list claims there are extract of celery seeds in the hills, and I think I believe 'em.

Mulling it over, I think it tastes like what we called a "suicide" when I was growing up. You'd mix together all the stuff at the fountain, and then drink it. I think I enjoyed this, but maybe I was just caving to peer pressure. I love to cave to peer pressure, it means my peers are paying attention to me.

Cel-Ray burps up like a mild orange soda.

This sad thing was on the counter at the Juniors
where I bought the soda.
I feel like it's a goodbye note from a girlfriend.

I am writing this article at seven AM in Grand Central, waiting for a train. Every time I mistype "soda" my iPhone corrects it to "dog" or "dogs". What does my iPhone know that I don't? Lots of things, like why it such a shitty piece of equipment.

But as a I write, I find myself growing more introspective. I am willing to admit that I cringe a little more at each taste. With this growing snowball of dislike I have also come to realize the secret flavor analog to Cel-Ray soda: Waffle Crisp cereal. There is totally a maple waffle flavor in Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, and nobody likes drinking maple syrup. Not even me. Wait, Captain K'nuckles and Flapjack do, but they're cartoon characters and don't count for as much as real people.

Waffle Crisp + orange juice + celery seeds = Cel-Ray.

Part of me wonders if the can needed a good mix-up before I drank it, or if the flavor is just confusing and broad.

Follow up: I went out an bought some Waffle Crisp. It is totally and completely the same taste, but better because it's not a carbonated drink. And a little not better because it sandpapers off the roof of your mouth..

I suppose Waffle Crisp actually tastes like Cel-Ray,
considereing which came first...

The Original Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea

2009-02-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

The Original Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea

Straight people don't know, what your about

They put you down and shut you out

You give to me a new belief

And soon the world will love you, Sweet Leaf

So I usually stop at a particular grocery store in Brooklyn en route to my monthly Cthulhu game. I buy some genoa salami and cheese, or some fresh pineapple rings, and usually a box of Caffeine Free Coca Cola. The salami and cheese thing is a horrible habit I picked up from a friend who was on Adkins, being that I'm not on Adkin's I just get fat on it instead of turning greasy and wasting away.

It's a good life, though. I had to stop going to the deli for lunch meat because the meat cutters have acted like jack asses in the past and inspired me to a level of retaliatory nastiness that makes me nervous about even entering the store.

The worst part of this regular grocery visit, though, was the recurring frustration of the Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea. The idiot store people put the precious stuff in a refrigerator on the far end of the pay counter, so you don't see the stuff till AFTER you've paid and walked all the way to the exit. For about a year I would shop, pay, take three steps and slap my forehead as I saw the highly desirable bottle with the picture of the little old woman on it.

Till one day. One glorious day, a great day, I notice the stuff before I'm done paying. I put all my crap down on the counter, and fought my way over to the refrigerated cabinet and extracted a single bottle. Victory!

I gloated over my success throughout the entire Call of Cthulhu game session. The bottle sat in my bag, I was saving it for a good day when I could concentrate on it. I also didn't want a big dose of caffeine that particular evening. Good things can wait, right? I got home and put the bottle in the refrigerator, only to have disaster strike in the form of a thirsty and vengeful wife.

A while ago my wife started innocently drinking out of my soda stash as a way of forcing me to consume the sodas faster, and therefore clear out an overcrowded refrigerator shelf. I say innocently, but this was actually a decision arrived at through her native cunning. I'd come home and see another rare soda, perhaps one hand crafted from raw air by Phillipino monks living in Tibet, fallen victim to my wife. The bottle placed on top of the recycling can, or left casually on a table, sure to attract my attention. To protect against these encroachments I "fell back" into a box in my room, hoarding the bottles and cans under a table. Sure, the sodas won't keep as well, but at least they'll stick around long enough to upset me with their horrible taste.

I considered throwing a camouflage tarp over the crates, but I think my wife is happy with simply having driven me out of the refrigerator. Her victory conditions were met.

A few days ago my wife and I were waiting for a bus in Brooklyn. I was telling her about this blog entry, and how she had dashed my long efforts to nab a bottle of Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea. My dearly beloved told me that this drink was not nearly so rare as I thought, and that it could be found in any deli in NYC. I pointed across the street from the bus stop to a convenient deli. She ran in and returned empty handed. Her original statement was amended to "any deli in Manhattan". After our ride we stopped in at a health food store she thought would certainly have the stuff, the joke was on her because it not only didn't have Sweet Leaf anything, but I walked out with five new bottles random fancy sodas. Ha!

On the way out on the bus, I'd spotted a Polish market at Fifth Ave and 18th Street. I ran all the way there, to beat the bus, and had a quick dash through looking for Eastern European sodas. None were to be found, but I did pick up a nice selection of American fancy sodas and an RC - RC is rare in NYC. This place easily had the best soda selection I've seen in NYC. And - lo and behold - there was a row of Sweet Leaf teas. I didn't pick one up because, after all, they are as common as dirt on Manhattan.

So Sweet Leaf, I didn't get a chance to know you. But maybe later. Maybe.

Hank's Gourmet Root Beer

2009-01-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

That dark box in the bottom left is a matchbox embedded
in the table. The restaurant is called Matchbox. Get it?

Genuine Hank's Gourmet Philadelphia Recipe Root Beer

I had Genuine Hank's Gourmet Philadelphia Recipe Root Beer at a fancy schmancy restaurant in Washington DC. We'd been instructed to go to Matchstick, the restaurant, by some smart friends of ours who'd lived in DC long ago. They swore up and down that the place was great, and that I had to try the "mini burgers". They said this because, I think, they knew I liked slider type burgers.

Now to take a moment: Mini-burgers aren't sliders. A slider is like a White Castle burger, it's small and greasy and not just a miniature sized regular hamburger. It's a fundamentally different beast, with one of the most important qualities being the way a slider bun absorbs grease from the meat patty. In a good slider, you can hardly tell where bun stops and meat begins.

So we go to Matchsticks... wait, it was Matchbox. Matchbox. We wait for forty minutes for a table, marveling at the strange suit and tie casual crowd. Most of them seemed to have that desperate affectation of casual money. You know what I mean.

Anyways, forty minutes and we get a table in the top floor area. If you ever go to Matchbox, wander around the place, the interior layout is pretty neat. They basically gutted two side by side buildings and filled them with a totally new configuration of floors. Hardly any interior walls, all just random metal floors.

The menu boasted "Hank's Gourmet Root Beer", the wait said they were out of the bottles but had some sort of generic fountain root beer. He ran to see what sort it was, and returned with a bottle of Hank's. They hadn't sold it for quite some time, but luckily enough he'd found one.

So we ordered some sort of hot pepper pizza and a plate of mini-burgers which turn out to be just that, not sliders. I'd been told they were sliders, by my friends, by the restaurant reviews, by the waiter. I even heard people at other tables referring to them as sliders. They're not, and I got cranky pretty quick. They came with a mound of deep fried onion shreds, what are sometimes called "tobacco fries". Those would've been good but they were lukewarm and stale. Bah. They might've had garlic powder on them.

The pizza was good, when it came out. They had a blend of cheeses on it that was surprisingly reminiscent of St. Louis provel cheese. The pizza made me happy, and it was just as good out of the hotel freezer the next morning.

Oh, the Hank's root beer?

The first sniff of the Hank's was so sweet that my nose got a cavity. It was incredible that a smell could convey "sugar" so powerfully. The taste was nondescript, just sort of blah. I'd go so far as to say it wasn't even really a root beer, just uninspired sugar water. Don't buy it.

Root Beer Makin' Hijinx

2009-01-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Hey look! I got handsome.

So this is a smart guy who tries to make root beer and writes about it on his blog. I won't give the ending away, but notice that I used the word "tries".

Go look.

Fentiman's Botanically Brewed Ginger Beer

2009-01-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

275ml of liquid fun, alcoholic fun.

Look out Tim!

You're about to lose your "X".

Fentiman's Botanically Brewed Ginger Beer

I made a serious mistake with this stuff, it's a half of a percent alcohol and I went ahead and drank some anyways. Half a percent?, I says to myself, why I'm sure I get more alcohol than that when I eat out-of-date food.

But no, this stuff reeked of booze. I took a sip and was overwhelmed by the alcohol-iness of it. I am not a drinkin' man, in fact, I avoid the devil's brew in all its forms. Whether or not this stuff was a half percent alcohol or not is unclear, maybe I'm overly sensitive or maybe their brewing process is uneven. Or maybe they lied so they could sell it in the US, or maybe it yeasted up in the bottle. Who knows. Either way, I drank it and now I'm sullied. Some little guys in hooded sweatshirts are going to come and take away my hooded sweatshirts and scratch up my Minor Threat records.

That'll suck. I'd say as much but my mouth is still numb from the booziness.

My single swig told me a lot. Fentiman's was really severe, not refreshing or pleasant at all. In my iPhone I noted down "Nitvregrwshim". Clearly I was already drunk. It was all burn and no fun, not a great trait for a ginger beer in my mouth. No sweet at all, I guess the accursed little beer yeast beasts had gobbled up all the wholesomeness and turned it into liquid sin.

I took this photo to show the price tag,
but I wound up showing you how natural
that hand position is, instead.

This is one of the first Apple products I've bought that I really hated.

Natakhtari Tarragon Soda

2009-01-07T05:45:00.000-08:00

I've done tarragon and I've done Natakhtari,
this can't be so bad.

Look at that sticker stuck by the opening of the bottle.
Why wouldn't I have picked that off?

And of course...

Natakhtari Tarragon Soda

That last tarragon soda set me up for quite the fall. It wasn't bad, Natakhtari tarragon isn't not the un-opposite. It IS bad. Strong and pushy, a soda that knows what it wants and what it wants ain't discussed at polite dinner tables. The pidgin English on the bottle seems to have been copied from this stuff. Oh, wait a minute. That's the same company, of course they have the same text on the bottle. Duh.

It's thick and flat, not terribly sweet but not anything else. Just sort of neutral sweet-wise, in order that the freaky taste can hold center stage with more authority. It tastes like discount black licorice, like the kind that comes formed into little black halloween decorations and it would never occur to you that it's actually edible. "What, these spider rings are candy? No shit."

It smells more like licorice than anything else, too. None of that pansified watery cream soda taste of the Chersi Terragon soda. This stuff kicks your door in during the middle of the night, flashes its NKVD badge, then takes all your stuff.

Bonus points for the Tarragon using the exact same label as the grape, but just changing the color of the liquid.

Bonus bonus points: I constantly misspell tarragon as "terragon". I think that's some sort of remedial science fiction fan mistake.

Tentacle Grape Soda

2009-01-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

I was sent this link by a well-meaning friend. I'm not certain, but I think he's hitting on me.

Either way, I prefer consensual tentacle sex. And that only with sexy tentacles, not like the poorly drawn specimens featured in the ad.

Writing about hentai sex-anything is difficult, because I have to affect an air of incredulity while pretending that I've never heard of it before. "What? This 'hentai' you speak of consists of sexual drawings of anime type characters? And there's a whole genre of hentai about women being sexually molested by tentacles? Well I never."

Well I never.

This crap does bring up an issue about "collectable" sodas, as this stuff purports to be. It also brings up a question about exactly what flavor is tentacle semen. Sadly, no one seems to bring up any questions about representations of rape, especially within the realm of school girl hentai type porn.

Clearly the novelty soda maker here is trading on a cultural gimmick, something that represents the worst of a particular genre. I'm sure that the maker is not promoting rape, but is so totally accustomed to the term "tentacle rape" that they are immune to any critical thought about it. It's a tongue-in-cheek appeal to the self mocking sense of sarcasm that kids today love.

But man, why does the soda maker have to pick something so incredibly offensive? And the sad thing is that it isn't really funny, it's just a "You remember Transformers?" type joke, just pointing at something that a certain group of people know about and therefore making everyone feel like more of a group through the pointing. "We all know about tentacle rape porn and laugh at the people who look at it."

I dunno. The soda maker'll sell it. The 18-35 crowd will buy it and give it to their friends as joke presents. None of it will get drank but it will instead sit on a shelf next to the ol' anime DVD collection and a half-painted figurine or two. The soda maker'll make some money but not enough to make it worth while, will probably try to branch out into "Lolicon Lolzberry" and etc and be disappointed by the sales.

I'm writing about this in a critical tone, but just the other day I laughed at "rape seed" on an ingredients list. What a dick.

Steaz Organic Sparkling Green Tea Root Beer

2009-01-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

It looks like it has a plastic halo.

Steaz Organic Sparkling Green Tea Root Beer

The bottle front has "root beer" in italics, but I think they meant for it to be in quotes because this sure as hell has nothing to do with root beer. Nothing at all, as far as I can tell. This isn't root beer, it's "root beer" with double air quotes and a sarcastic sneer.

The taste is more of a cream soda. A very rich cream soda, thick and sweet. There is a weedy aftertaste of green tea in there, that's certain. Not the friendly kind of green tea we normally get in the United States, but that foul "real" green tea that they make in Japan.

I've only had "authentic" green tea once. It was a thing they put on for tourists at a temple in Japan, in Kyoto I think. They sat you down and did a whole tea ceremony thing in a temple garden down on the part your not supposed to walk around in. It was great, descending into the forbidden zone, the whole tea bit where they whisk the tea and do other crap to it. It's been a long time, I can barely remember. It was great up to the point where I drank the tea, it was incredibly bitter and thick leaving my mouth awash in misery.

This is THAT kind of green tea, the kind of green tea that's all air quotey "authentic" because the people who invented it drink it. And as a flavor in the Steaz it ain't so bad because it's weak and small, like a little bully hiding behind a big bully. As I choked down my first mouthful I gave that taste a pleasant nod, it was like passing a sworn enemy on the street, but a classy sworn enemy. You nod in recognition, not friendliness.

Steaz gets everything right but the flavor. The bottle has a USDA certified organic sticker, whatever that means. It also has a "fair trade tea" logo, which makes me uneasy because that particular logo has an image of a little person on it, split down the middle into black and white. Each half carries a bowl, so it seems like it's about white people being fair to black people.

Sure, that's what fair trade IS, but I don't like to have it spelled out so clearly. Makes me uncomfortable.

Even the ingredients are spot on: Sparkling Filtered Water, Organic Evaporated Cane Juice, Organic Caramel Color, Natural Flavors, Organic Fair Trade Certified Green Tea, Citric Acid, Ascorbic Acid, Sodium Citrate. Most of the label is adjectives reassuring you that the stuff they are feeding you isn't evil.

And wait a minute, isn't "Organic Evaporated Can Juice" a two dollar way of saying "sugar"?

But like I said, they did it all right and it turned out so bad. And besides that, IT'S NOT ROOT BEER! It's frickin' cream soda. There is not a single damned thing about this that has any thing to do with root beer. Feh. I seriously wonder if there was a mistake at the bottle factory.

The worst thing about this, though, is that my wife gave me a four pack for Xmas. I'll be foisting this off on unwitting guests for weeks to come.

Undrank British Sodas

2009-01-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

Each probably deserves a skull on crossbones on the label.

So an inquisitive Glaswegian was curious about what sort of British sodas I have "on tap", so to speak. Well, here you go.

I have three different "Club" sodas, including a "Rock Shandy", whatever the hell that is. If someone asked what I thought "Rock Shandy" was outside of the context of soda, I'd guess it was a fish. In the context of British soda, I'm still thinking it's fish.

Not looking forward to that one.

I have a red Tizer, which is a year out of date. Apparently they don't make that one anymore. It was sold to me under the counter by some shady folks. That bashful can in the back is a Ribena and on top is a Ben Shaw's Dandelion and Burdock. Finally, a Funky Orange Fanta and a bottle of Lucozade, an energy drink. I hate energy drinks, and I've hate every British soda I've ever tried, so I'm sure that last one will go well.

Some of these might be British and some Irish. All the same thing, right?

Edit: I just realized I also have some British made Fentiman's. Foul, foul stuff.

Niman Ranch St. Louis Style-Pork Ribs

2008-12-29T08:04:00.001-08:00

Pre-cooked AND St. Louis-style? This can't be good.

Niman Ranch St. Louis Style-Pork Ribs

These were a Christmas present. Meat as a Christmas present? Yes, my wife is that incredibly awesome. She transcends all ideas of swellness, of amazingingness. She's also a vegetarian.

That latter part is where the problem started. Vegetarians love things marinating in plastic bags at the health food store. My lovely wife went to a Trader Joe's and saw pork ribs marinating in a plastic bag, and thought of me. A great idea. Tofu is good pre-cooked and marinating in a bag, seitan, and every other vegetarian thing is good marinated in bags. Ribs must be good this way too. She brought them home and hid them.

I found them early, there's only so many places you can hide something in a refrigerator and my wife cleverly went for "in plain sight". When I went hunting for food, I would look right past the ribs. They were label down and looked like a pack of flavored tofu, sort of. Anyways, they were out in front of everything else so I couldn't possibly want them. The delectable treats are half-rotted in the back, waiting for my blind hand to come grasping after them, King Kong style. I pull out moldy grapes, they scream just like Fae Ray.

Is that how you spell Fae Ray? My spell check doesn't think so, but my spell check also fails to alert me when I write "fro" instead of "for".

But I found the ribs by chance, my eyeballs racked focus and I noticed them. Hurrah for me, spoiling Xmas.

The original plan had been for me to have them for Xmas dinner, that changed when we picked up two last minute house guests. I bought a big ham instead, and it was incredible. Heavenly. But that's another story. A happy story.

My wife kept pressuring me to make the ribs, both before and after Xmas, emphasizing that my food hoarding is an exceptionally bad idea and that the ribs will spoil on Jan 30th and 12:01 AM. Today, the 28th, she throws them in the oven as I'm on my way home.

She followed my instructions about how to put the ribs on balled up bits of tin foil, so one side didn't turn to meat slush. She followed the cooking directions for the conventional oven, right there on the package. I get home right as the time is up, I take a taste and they are disgusting.

If God had made Eve out of ribs like these,
Adam would've stuck to pornography.

There is a fundamental lie about "St. Louis-style" barbecued meat, and that is that I don't think there really is such a thing. I'm from St. Louis and ate barbecue with voracious abandon, there were a million different kinds of basted and grilled meat in the city. They were all barbecue, there really wasn't a unifying theme. I mean, there was VINEGAR and KETCHUP barbecue places within miles of each other, if that doesn't speak of an unacceptable level of bbq integration in the city, I don't know what is.

So the Niman Ranch ribs came sealed in a bag, soaking in "St. Louis-style" BBQ sauce. This is a disgusting barbecue sauce, thin and weak and not like anything I had ever eaten in St Louis except maybe a McRib. And the embarrassing thing is that I kind of liked McRibs. This was a foul, non-sauce, not worth covering any meat in, and I did not like it one bit.

I had a bite, it was inedible. Almost inedible. I swallowed it. Of course, I've swallowed rocks and plastic, so maybe I CAN call it inedible. It went in me, though I fought it, and it'll come out of me, and I'll probably have to fight it then too. Call that what you wish. Either way, the test bites were awful.

That steer on the label is so delicious someone ate its eye.

It was a bad situation, the ribs had to be salvaged. I had some Bull's Eye Brown Sugar and Hickory barbecue sauce handy, not as good as Olde Cape Cod, but still pretty high on the store bought sauce list. I basted the ribs, flipped them, let 'em cook, flipped and rebasted. Let 'em cook. A test bite (I mistyped "test" as "teste" on my first pass, how awesome is that? A teste bite.) and I could still taste the disgusting sauce that the ribs came in.

Another baste, then a run in the broiler to candify the sauce. It came out delicious, with only a hint of the foulness hidden within. Now I could tuck into the ribs themselves...

...which heightened the disappointment. The few test bites I'd had were a hint of what I got with the proper meal: grey, bland, greasy meat. It was fall-apart in the way a hamburger falls apart, not the way actual intact meat should. It split with any casual poke of the fork, needing little help from the knife, and the splits were any old random way, not along the grain of the meat.

Ewwww.

These ribs leaked, too. The grey meat wept a clear, yellowish fluid. It pooled in the pan and filled my bowl as I ate. My suspicion is that the ribs were "injected" with some sort of marinade/saline solution. They were that weird and liquidy. This is only conjecture, nowhere on the label does it say that the ribs were treated in any way except for the BBQ sauce soaking.

The BBQ sauce, by the way, has a name - "Mad Will's BBQ Sauce". "Mad Will's" sounds like a discount, urban oriented lawyer service. It also sounds like a nickname for someone who is crazy and therefore shouldn't be allowed to prepare food. William is mad, therefore we should keep him out of the kitchen. We are probably lucky we got off with the stomach churning we got from his sauce, he could have chosen to poison us. I wonder how he prepares food without access to a knife?

So imagine a McRib taste on a public school cafeteria hamburger and you have Niman Ranch ribs as I had them in my kitchen this day, December 28, 2008. I've cooked a enough ribs in my time that I knew I could salvaged these with a coating of candied barbecue sauce. This particular trick can make anything delicious, up to and including the tinfoil that catches the drippings. My delicious band-aid worked, but there was still a jellied scab underneath, and I couldn't forget that. I could see it in the ugly grey meat and taste it in the ugly grey taste.

In fact, the only reason I trooped on through and ate the ribs was because they were from Trader Joe's and therefore very expensive. And that, my friends is some fucked up reasoning.

Bob: Tim, don't eat that sandwich. It's arsenic flavored with real arsenic.

Tim: You mean it's all natural?

Bob: No, I mean you'll die if you eat it.

Tim: Can I trade it for another sandwich which (Pause for laugh at "sandwich which") won't kill me?

Bob: No, the poison sandwich store is closed till Monday.

Tim: I paid eight dollars for this sandwich. I can't throw it away. Do you want it?

Bob: No.

Tim: Well, I guess I have to eat it then. (Tim dies.)

That's why I need a royal taster. Not to detect poison unknown, but to eat poisoned items that I wouldn't be able to bear to let go to waste.

A telling note though, "Niman Ranch" might not be a ranch at all. The package says "Produced especially for and distributed by: Niman Ranch..." That tells me that Niman Ranch is most likely just a label invented to sound all natural. It might be all natural, but it still smacks of a level of corporate fake that I don't approve of.

This whole thing sucks start to finish. The label on the ribs boasts that Niman Ranch is all about things I approve of: No antibiotics ever, no hormones, all vegetarian feed, humanely raised on environmentally sustainable farms... These are all good things. I approve and I want to eat things with these characteristics, but not if they taste like crap. And especially if they don't HAVE to taste like crap.

C'mon folks, shame on me for having a wife who bought pre-cooked ribs soaked in sauce, shame on you for putting out such a crap product geared toward fooling loving wives.

Old Colony Uva

2008-12-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

Lots of enticingly clad girls in roller skates,
and I photograph a stupid soda.

Old Colony UVA

Okay, what the hell is "UVA"? Context makes me guess that it means "grape" or "soda" in Spanish. But if it's Spanish, then why do we have a guy in a tricorn hat on the label? That's old timey English/American colonies crap. I prefer to think of it as an acronym for something science fictiony. The word "Colony" in a sci-fi context always sets my innards to an excited quivering. The worst possible things you can imagine happen on space colonies. The WORST.

Old Colony UVA is not the worst. It's actually pretty good. More popsicle than soda I think, though it is on the foamy end of the carbonation scale. I'd like to know exactly how all these different sorts of carbonation work. You have hard, burning carbonation and foamy, expanding carbonation, and probably a few other kinds but they elude me at the moment. Anyways, this is foamy carbonation, something of which I am normally not a fan.

I don't hold it against O.C.U.V.A., in fact, it helps it out. Somehow makes it sweeter. Refreshing. Nothing nasty about nuthin' in there.

I drank the stuff at a roller derby match. The NYC teams were playing against two visiting teams, one from Canada and the other from I don't know where. I had unknowingly worn the Canadian teams colors, pink and green, and must have seemed a long time fan what with my determined under-dog cheering. One of the Canadians even pointed at me and waved. Anyways, thats why you can see derby stuff in the background, though nothing exciting. (I finally broke down and called my derby pal who told me that the Canadian team was "The New Skids on the Block" from Montreal, a particularly offensive and silly name. They had a lime green and pink flash dance thing, which was sort of funny, though. The Canadians lost after a strong start.)

Drinking something at a derby match doesn't add much to the drink, but it did mean I was with my pal Dino. Dino thought the UVA tasted like Big League Chew, which is not unreasonable. Big League Chew was a favorite gum of mine as a kid, though I preferred the regular pink flavor.

Anyways, the UVA drink isn't as cool as it sounds but it isn't bad at all. Especially for a Dr. Pepper/7up product.

Cool Tommy's Ginger Ale

2008-12-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

The arrow to nowhere.

Knowing it's gonna suck makes it easier.

Cool Tommy's makes a fizzy attempt to escape out my nose.

Cool Tommy's Ginger Ale
Light Rock Beverages, Danbury, CT

Cool Tommy's is mostly carbonation with a touch of flavor and a whole lot of numb. Yes, numb. My first big swig and I could hardly feel my mouth. As I was writing this I emitted a low garbled noise, just to make sure I still could make sound.

Think about eating Pixie Sticks or whatever other granulated sugar you ate as a kid, then taking a drink of soda immediately afterwards. You had that expanding gas thing go off in your mouth as the carbonation met with the granular crap and had a foam party. That's what every drink of Cool Tommy's Ginger Ale tastes like, a foamy party in your mouth. But a sort of boring party where you walk in and no one is particularly friendly, and the people you came to see aren't there.

Fuck that, you say, I think I'll leave. But you can't, as you still have a 20 oz of the "Big 24 oz" to finish. Blech. "24 ox of Thirst Quenching Coolness!!" is the second most important thing on the bottle label, right after the "Cool Tommy's" text with the funny bendy Adobe Illustrator arrow behind it. An double-sided arrow which points at nothing on one end and maybe the bar code with the other.

The bar code is probably the highlight of this design package, I think.

As with all cool things marketed at children, "Cool Tommy's Ginger Ale" appears to come in a regular version and a "battle damage" version. If a Tie Fighter is extra cool bearing the scars of conflict, that clearly applies to beverages as well. A handful of white rub marks travel vertically through the label, the edges of which are peeling and torn. A few random sticky spots testify to friends that didn't make it, exploded en route to the store.

I pour some out in memory of all the "homies" that didn't make it. There, now I'm down to 16 oz of Refreshing Coolness.

Easily the best thing about Cool Tommy's is the price. Fifty cents. Yep, that's right. I didn't think anything in NYC cost fifty cents except air for my bike tires. Fifty cents, that's incredible. How can a deli afford to keep something so cheap on the shelves? One would think that the shelf space itself costs more than fifty cents. When the guy told me the two Cool Tommy bottles I bought were a dollar, I thought I misheard him. It would have been an easy mistake, as a crazy guy in a leg cast was sitting inside the door yelling at everyone, it was hard to focus. Anyway, fifty cents. I didn't even get taxed, which means it was actually something like .465 dollars.

Now with that in mind, that this stuff cost half a dollar, I'm going to say that it isn't that bad. It's probably on par with Schweppes ginger ale, the most common stuff out there. It's a hell of a lot of better than some of the fancy schmancy wannabees I've tried. Especially by the smell, it smells great, much better than it tastes.

It also gets points for making me burp up my White Castles from earlier. Good job, Cool Tommy, good job, but points off for that cheap ginger ale heart burn.

Tymbark Apple-Mint Drink

2008-12-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

Horror or not horror?

Not horror? Crom be praised.

Tymbark, a surprisingly not disgusting apple-mint drink.

Tymbark Apple-Mint Drink

This tiny bottle contains a surprisingly drinkable pseudo-juice. It's awfully syrupy for an apple juice, but I'm not complaining.

It's a cold and tastes clean, but there is something wrong with it. Something missing. The normal bite of apple juice isn't there, I guess. It's just too watery. The mint is pretty subtle, but so is the apple taste so it all evens out to bland water. Yep, it's just cold water with a little bit of appley-mint.

But that's the trick, it mostly tastes like water but it's still syrupy. Syrupy water, that's a good trick. Nicely done.

Looking at the ingredients list there is nothing to indicate any sort of thickener. The actual list is pretty commendable aside from possible corn syrup:

water, apple juice from concentrate (25%), sugar (D), and or glucose/fructose corn syrup (G), acidity regulator (citric acid), natural mint aroma. D,G - depending on the used ingredients.

So maybe the corn syrup thickens it up. That'd make sense. The "D or G" thing is pretty interesting, it makes reading the ingredients into a choose your own adventure. Choose G, flip to page 34 and get diabetes.

And what is "natural mint aroma"? It sure heck tastes like mint, so it's not just aroma. In fact, it tastes more like mint than it smells. Perhaps the crafty Poles are learning the art of misdirection? "No, no, no. I got it. We tell them it smells like mint when it actually tastes like mint, that'll confuse them, eh?" Without a Polish Pope to keep 'em in line, no telling what hijinks they'll get up to.

Of course, I think a German Pope would be better at keeping them under control. Eh? Get it? Eh?

I've always been a fan of the Polish over-sized juice boxes. This is basically the same thing, just in a tiny bottle with a cool pull off cap and a lot more wateriness in it.

Randomly placed stickers are always welcome.

Tizer and Club Diet

2008-12-14T06:22:00.000-08:00

Tizer and Club Diet, a two for one review

Tizer tastes like fermented lime juice. Fermented lime juice which someone thought too weak, so they added beer. That is what Tizer tastes like, and nothing else.

I had this stuff at the Chip Shop, a British style restaurant in Bay Ridge. I'm a big Chip Shop fan, and state with confidence that this is one of the worst things they've ever served me. The Chip Shop menu stated something along the lines of Tizer being a "chemically loaded and flavored soda", yet when the crap arrived at the table the can boasts no artificial "colours", "flavours", or "sweetenours".

Of course, the can also claims "Great taste", so I don't know where to stop believing. If you can't trust socialists, this world has indeed become a dark and awful place.

Now, I've heard some confusing things about Tizer and have trouble confirming or denying what is or isn't truth. I don't, as I've often stated, do any research. This is a little extra confusing, as I don't seem to have a photograph for this Tizer, which I feel was yellowish. (Oh wait, there it is. At the end of the article.) The confusion is that there is something called "Tizer Red" which they no longer make, but I managed to acquire a can of. I think I tried the new Tizer, whatever that may be. Orange. Whatever, it sucked and I'm sure I'll get botulism from the outdated cane of Tizer Red. When I drink it. Which isn't now.

Club Diet, on the other hand, was worse. I thought this was a British made soft drink when I bought it. Instead I learn that the Irish really DO hate the British in ways I can't even begin to imagine.

With my first sip I had to flap my arms like a penguin to shake off the horror. It's terrible, terrible stuff.

I feverishly typed out notes on my stupid iPhone, which claims I wrote down "Need more inbreyigayion." I don't know what that means at all. Information? Carbonation? Or was I temporarily possessed by a Great Race of Yith? I dunno. I do think that this might be the gibberish I would write if I thought my hands were claws.

Club Diet Orange is flat and foul. It has bits of what I presume are orange in it. I mean orange the fruit, not orange the color, though the bits are that too. It also has a lot of "diet" in it, which is always awful.

When I drink a British soft drink, or a soft drink the British have claimed as their own, I expect quality. I expect the sort of drink that King Arthur would give to his trashy wife, or that Robin Hood would give to cottagers. Britain is a land of moustached men smoking in gentleman's clubs, and not the kind of "gentleman's clubs" we have here in the US. It's class all the way. But this crap, is this some sort of World War II hold-out, like that awful yeast paste?

Two dirty "hoes" looking to "party".