Root Beer Slurpee

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.

Mountain Rush

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.

Ralph and Charlie's Green Apple and Kiwi Pineapple Juice

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.

Fanta Orange ah la Russia

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.

Stewart's Root Beer

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.

The Ginger People Ginger Beer

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.

Regatta Ginger Beer

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

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.

Day's Cola

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.

Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda

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...

Old Colony Uva

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

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

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.

Goya Coconut Soda

That's a disconcerting picture
once you take in the background.

Free yellow jaundice in every bottle.

That's the look when the coyote runs off the cliff
and he looks at the camera,
sharing the realization of his
impending demise with the audience.

Goya Coconut Soda

I didn't really want to write up a new soda tonight, but it was either that or watching "Desperate Housewives" with my wife. She insisted I watch it after I'd subjected her to half of a Futurama movie earlier in the day. The two things aren't exactly equal, when she watches "my" television programs she has her laptop to fiddle with, I do not any such luxurious distraction. I sit and keep my eyes on the screen, not wanting to hurt an actor's feelings by letting my attention wander.

In a moment of inspiration, I gave my wife a choice between my watching her television program or my drinking a soda. Her hatred of my soda shelf far outstrips her desire to spend time with me, so here I am with a Goya Coconut Soda.

It tastes a little like suntan lotion, tasty suntan lotion. When I say "tastes a little bit", the emphasis is on the little. There's hardly any taste here at all, it's all just cold and sweet. A little syrupy, too. Goya Coconut Soda has the consistency and carbonation and faint vanilla tinge of a cream soda, but coconuty. And again, it's very very slight.

The barest trace of taste is not a bad thing, in this case. I'm not a big coconut fan, so much more and it would have registered too strongly. I like that it tastes like I'm drinking 7-Up out of the cooler that held my leaky sunscreen. It's a good thing, tastes like a beach without the dead fish and loud radios.

There's a fizzy end to the taste that kind of feels like drinking a sparkling water, that flat carbonation taste that dries off your tongue after a sip. Goya Coconut Soda has that, but its competing with a bit of waxiness.

What the hell is that waxy feeling that some sodas leave in the mouth? I think I've been encountering it mostly in fruit sodas. Is a coconut a fruit or a nut? Either way, I fear this waxy aftertaste - no good can come of it. Oh wait, it's obvious where that taste comes from: They make this stuff out of wax fruit. Duh.

Here's some more of that crazy Goya dithering.

Boylan's Natural Cane Cola

All brown and boring looking.

Boylan's Natural Cane Cola

After the unpleasantness of Boylan's Ginger Ale, I was braced for the worst and that was for the best. The Cane Cola is pretty unremarkable, but by not being as bad as I'd expected it cleverly creates the illusion of it being better than it is. Again, it's an illusion so "attempt to disbelieve".

The smell is like a clean parody of your average cola, like the cola flavored Bottlecaps candy. The taste is alot like King Cola, a watery King Cola. It's not bad, just not that great. Pretty boring, pretty bland. I wouldn't cross the street to buy a bottle of the stuff, though I might do so to pick a discarded bottle up and recycle it.

Cause that's the kind of guy I am. Classy all the way.

What else... It comes in a glass bottle. Glass is made from sand, or at least it used to be. My glasses get scratched by sand, that's part of the reason I avoid the beach... Maybe instead of padding this with useless words I'll just tighten the margins and increase the font size, that always worked in school.

Bahamas VI: Green Power 500 Sports Drink

Who the Hell Goes to the Bahamas? Part Six

There is no green on the Green Power 500 can, unless you squint and shake the can back and forth really fast.

Green Power 500 Sports Drink with Added Chlorella Growth Factor, Vedan Enterprises

Okay, this stuff alarmed me from the minute I laid eyes on it in a run down convenience store in Nassau. Living in New York, I see all sorts of things that bargain seeking store owners pick up for a song, figuring if they sell one then they'll break even. "What? Cow tongue flavored bubble gum? Only a dollar a crate? I'll take it."

Actually, cow tongue flavored bubble gum is kind of a good idea. It has a certain economy to it.

Anyhow, I can't help but feel that this is something dumped on the market. That someone somewhere found out that "Chlorella" actually means "cancer", and "cancer growth factor" just can't be made into a positive no matter how you try. In the name of breaking my own rules, I looked the stuff up and found a page on it here.
"Green Power sport drink is popular in Asian countries, the best drink after sport. If you are interested in our product, please contact with me for further information. Thanks."

At least it isn't a product recall. Snooping around I found out what chlorella is, too. The page boasts that it comes with cell walls broken down because it's impossible for humans to digest it otherwise. Which brings me around to ask what is "Chlorella Growth Factor". What does that mean? Do I have chlorella growing inside of me now? Do I need to stand and open my mouth towards the sun so it can photosynthesize? Are you positive you just didn't misspell cancer?

I bought the stuff as a joke and avoided the punch line as long as I could. I danced and dived and hopped, not wanting to actually drink it. The packaging makes it look like something I should be emptying into a machine, not my body. And not the good kind of vibrating machine, either.

That is the look of someone who was almost hit by a falling safe.
The safe, missing him, splits open
and showers him with 500 Grand bars.
He hates 500 Grand bars, but is still glad the safe
didn't hit him on the head. That is this look.

But I did it. I drank it, or most of it. It wasn't bad at all, almost good. The taste was somewhere between Mello Yello and grapefruit juice, watery and sweet without carbonation. Absolutely none of that energy drink foulness, even if it was energy-drink-dirty-yellow.

Being a product of China, expect your local Wal-Mart to force feed it to you soon.

This says: "Feed to foolish Westerners,
let them ruin their economy, profit, share profit equally,
transform Wal-Marts into conqueror robots."

Bahamas V: Jamaican Ting

Who the Hell Goes to the Bahamas? Part Five

By this point in the trip,
even the palms of my hands were sun-burned.

Ting by Ting, bottled in Jamaica
I bought a bottle of Ting at the same time I bought the other Bahamian sodas I tried out. I hoped to slip it by my wife, but I failed. She instantly detected that I had put a bottle in the basket which we already had in New York. "But honey," pleads I, "but honey, I gots to try it. We're closer to Jamaica so it'll taste different."

Now this is before I had tried both the Jamaican and Canadian versions of Ting Old Jamaican Ginger Beer, which was drastically different between bottlers. So this part one of the two Tings:

It is seriously, seriously grapefruity. I didn't bother to read the label, but dug right in - it was like a kick in the roof of my mouth. A kick, by necessity, expertly aimed by someone with a very small foot. The stuff is described on the bottle as a "carbonated beverage from grapefruit concentrate". They have their version of that sentence all in caps, but I didn't want to shout so I made it lower case.

Anyways, it was powerfully grapefruit. So over the top, I almost couldn't place it at first, thinking that it was lemon. I thought it too sour, my wife thought it salty. Regardless, it had a strong tin-can aftertaste which I associate with made-from-frozen-concentrate orange juice.

Speaking of made from concentrate stuff in the home, is it more environmentally friendly? Sure, it has to be refrigerated, but might that be offset by the amount of energy used to ship an unconcentrated amount of liquid, and the plastic in the container? I hope not, because I hate the stuff.

6% juice, 94% don't worry be happy.

Bahamas I: Ting Old Jamaican Ginger Beer Revisited

Who the hell goes to the Bahamas? Part 1

That flower picture in the background is poised to attack.

So I come before you embarrassed. My wife and I took a trip to the Bahamas. Who the hell goes to the Bahamas, you ask? Well, apparently we do. I'm not proud. It was a last minute decision, we had some flight credits that had to be used immediately or they would be wasted. We found what we thought was a cheap hotel and just did it. Got our tickets and flew out the next day.

We did a "resort vacation", which means that we stayed at a pseudo-Disneyland hotel with a beach and a waterpark. It was better than I thought it would be, and kind of fun. My wife and I tend to take busy vacations, lots of hiking and hustle and bustle. This was supposed to be a relaxing trip, we wanted to see what it was like to sit on a beach for four days and not be full of panic.

Sitting on the beach for four days, by the way, feels like getting the backs of your knees sun burned. And that sucks.

So there we were in the Bahamas, I loaded up on new drinks at a little grocery store and stashed them in the crappy hotel refrigerator, working through them over the course of the trip. The first thing I drank was something I'd already tried once, a Ting Old Jamaican Ginger Beer. I drank it not to review it, but because I was thirsty. Having already written about the stuff once, I thought I'd had it covered - but I was wrong.

I had liked the first Ting Old Jamaican Ginger Beer I tried last month, it was super sweet and got hot only gradually. That "bad boy" was bottled in Canada, what I bought in the Bahamas was bottled in Jamaica. Jamaica is the mother land of ginger beers, a place where sugar historically equals human lives lived in servitude. They take their sugar seriously there, each spoonful in their tea demands an epic poem about wicked plantation owners fleeing across the waves to New Orleans, about the pirates LaFitte smuggling slaves over to Louisiana and Florida.

This is the real deal, thinks I, it will be a sweet tinged with pain and victory, a sweet to remember for my entire life. And... it wasn't. The Jamaican made Ting Ginger Beer wasn't half as sweet as the Canadian version. Without the sweet to conceal, the unpleasant cardboard of the ginger came out and mocked my broken hopes.

Alas, Ting. Why, oh why?

This is not the Ting I had grown to love. My fledgling circus mustache feels betrayed.

Ülker Link Lemon Aromated Soft Drink

Why does the can have to say "refreshing"? Now I feel pressured.

Ülker Link Lemon Aromated Soft Drink

At first drink I wasn't impressed. A very lemony soda, not much else. The waxy aftertaste was less than impressive. But then I looked at the can again, and read that this is a "Lemon Aromated Soft Drink." I love that. What the hell does "aromated" mean? Can I have it done to me when I'm dead? Aromated is a great, great word. All the better in that it doesn't pass spell check.

Look at the funny pull tab. Why can't they make pull tabs proper,
like us Americans? And look at how
they misspell "lemon" half the time.

Speaking of dead things, among the few English words on the can are "Attention!...Keep cool and away from direct sunlight". Just like a corpse, or an undead. I guess an undead is still a corpse, right? Either way, don't let Link Lemon Aromated Soft Drink bite you - zombie bite or vampire bite, neither is good in the long run.


"Lemuel, I think Hank got bit by an Ülker Link Lemon Aromated Soft Drink can during that last supply raid."


"If it's true, then he's dead to us, Zeke. He'll be aromated before sunset. We'll put on a real nice feed for him, and then put him down. Do we have any Olde Cape Cod BBQ Sauce? It goes great with everything."

Even though English is used on half the can for the draw in graphics, the ingredients are listed in Turkish, German, French, and Ancient Greek. Muddling through, I can read that the stuff is 3% "jus de citron", which I assume means fruit juice and not citric acid. Three percent juice is pretty good for any faux juice beverage, good work Ülker. Of course, Coca Cola used to have a small amount of real lemon juice in it too, till they figured out that chemicals gave a more consistent favor.

Honestly, I'm a fan of consistent flavor in my soft drinks. I don't like it when they fuck around with my expectations. If you have a batch that tastes different than the norm, put it in a different colored can and call it "Extreme" or "Original Formula".

Not that I've ever experienced Link Lemon Aromated Soft Drink having any inconsistency in taste. It's always tasted perfectly identical, from the first taste of the single can I drank to the last sip of that same can - of course I've only had one can.

I will drink this soda again, should it be foolish enough to cross my path. However, I kind of hope it stays out of my way.

Sniff...

...and recoil.

Dr. Brown's Cream Soda + Figuring Out BBQ Pork Ribs

The soda's color matches all the old games in the background.

Dr. Brown's Cream Soda

Cream sodas, in my experience, tends towards overly sweet and strong. Dr. Brown's dodges that bullet with a comparatively subtle amount of flavoring. I don't know what "cream" exactly means as a flavor, but Brown's begins in that flavor I know to call cream and wanders over into vanilla aftertaste. I wouldn't know that there was a difference unless the one was so clearly leading into the other.

Dr. Brown's, of course, is a reputable soda maker. Unfortunately, they deviate from the path of righteousness by using "sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup". There really is a variance in the product between batches, I was a fan of their Dark Cherry soda and drank it consistently for about six months. It baffled the mind how one can was perfectly sweet and the next flavored like burned bread.

The stuff is almost always good, even when it's corn syrupy, and that makes me wonder if just the littlest bit of sugar helps offset the corn syrup nasty. That this little bit of sugar helps the medicine taste of corn syrupy go down.

More important than the Dr. Brown's is the dinner I ate alongside it. I was attracted by a massive slab of pork ribs in the meat market, it was huge and gross and beckoned to me. I'd never cooked pork ribs, but I've had people cook them for me and they never turned out. These ribs cost mere pennies, and I took them home. There I looked up an internet recipe, and got to work.

These become...

...fatty, barbecuey perfection. You can see I ate several pieces
before it occured to me to take a photo.

I lightly fried the ribs so there were browned on two sides, then popped them in the 350 degree oven. The ribs filled two casserole dishes. I kept basting and flipping the ribs every twenty minutes, but realized that I was falling into the same nasty trap as all the oven cooked ribs I'd ever had. I'd glaze the top, flip and flip the rib, when I flipped it back all the delicious glazing had melted off in the grease, leaving a white chicken flesh colored rib.

What I figured out, and I'm sure this is obvious to those of you out there who do this sort of thing regularly, is to prop the ribs up on a skinny end. I leaned them against the side of the casserole dish, or tilted them over onto a bit of scrap bone that had come along in the rib packet. This kept the bulk of the surface up and out of the grease, letting the glaze and crust build up properly.

The ribs were amazing, almost as good as my favorite restaurant ribs. I attribute most of that to Old Cape Cod Black Angus BBQ Sauce, which turned into a candy crust with repeated bastings. This is my favorite store bought barbecue sauce anywise, it's good on everything.

I ate the entire batch of ribs in one sitting. Two huge casserole dishes full, chasing it down with Dr. Browns.