Jones Berry Lemonade

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.

Chersi Tarragon Flavored Carbonated Beverage

Possibly distilled in Cherynobl.

Please note that this is Premium Tarragon Flavored Carbonated Beverage.

Everyone was shocked at the color,
they thought the bottle was bright green and had merely created
the illusion of the drink inside being really, really cool looking.

Cole, spit it out in horror? No?
Your nipples tell a different story.

L.J., you're all blurry like you're about to spit it out in horror. No? No?

Well, I guess it's safe...

Chersi Tarragon Flavored Carbonated Beverage

I cracked this open at my last Call of Cthulhu night. Or just before the night began. Everybody laughed at the ridiculous color, comparing it to a cleaning product or mouth wash. Not that mouth wash isn't a cleaning product.

It smelled and tasted like an unsweet cream soda, a watery cream soda with a touch of weeds in it. Beside the highway weeds, I mean. Really watery, really weak. Maybe it's a "trainer" soda that the Russians use to get their kids ready for all that other awful Russian crap.

But mostly it was boring. The tarragon taste wasn't tarragon, just a hint of something chemical/weedish. My gracious host LJ dug out some actual dried tarragon, which didn't taste anything like the Russian soda. Blah. For something that green and that not-American, I was expecting everybody to be rolling on the floor screaming after just one taste. I was expecting fish flavor mixed with urine.

I was disappointed. The hideous kvass I brought to an earlier game set a pretty high bar for foul. Next time, Russia. Next time.

Okay, I cheated:

I looked up the Chersi company to see if they were Russian, Georgian, or what. I didn't want to be fundamentally wrong about where the crap came from. Lo and behold, Chersi is based out of Oceanside, New York. Go figure. It's basically a Russian import company that might import some of the more bizarre flavors and rebrand them. It's unclear. They definitely make some of their more mundane sodas here in the US.

The tarragon in the Tarragon Flavored Carbonated Beverage is listed as coming from "Isreal". That gives conflicting messages. That they made a point of saying the tarragon is from Israel makes me think that this is a Jewish oriented company. But they misspelled Israel, so...

I dunno. All I can say is that I am shocked at the number of American companies that half-masquerade as companies from abroad. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm just sayin'.

These are these crazy Eastern European gelatin things.
They are super sugary, each layer is an obvious flavor
but with a creamy layer dividing it. Weird, weird stuff.

I'd like to dedicate this blog to the memory of Clyde Stennis, without whom I would not be here to write this and most likely you would not be here to read it.

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.

Goya Grape Soda

Goya Grape Soda

Here's a funny lamp and a funny plant
failing to give the bottle scale.

Believe it or not, this is a grimace of pleasure...

...and so is this.
You should see the face I pull in the bathroom.

So I have to get my wife's permission to mention her on this blog. Sometimes I am too flip in the way I talk about her, writing in a way I believe that anyone would realize is "all in good fun". Sadly, good fun is not my wife's way, so we strike Bargains.

To get permission for the previous blog, I had to strike out one phrase and replace it with another. (Note: At this point I in the original version of this entry I refer to the thing she made me strike out, explaining it. She saw THIS post and me me remove it again). More importantly, part of the bargain involved her picking out a soda for me to drink, right now and no fucking around.

Reaching this Bargain wasn't easy, and it involved her getting flustered and calling me a "spucker", but it was finally struck and I drank what was essentially a melted grape popsicle.

How can someone yell "Don't take my picture!"
and suck grape soda out of a bottle at the same time?

Goya Grape Soda smells slightly alcoholic and really, really grapey. The taste, like I said, is more like a melted grape popsicle than any other thing. Mulling it over, I think this not just because of the chemical grape taste, but because of the low carbonation. For a soda, this stuff hardly fizzes. Not that this is bad, it's actually quite good. The lack of fizz lets the sweet come through, and the grape isn't so strong that it has to fight with any of the other qualities.

Why do some flavors of soda suffer so hideously from the foul corn syrup taste? Goya Grape Soda is perfectly tasty. Do colas have a secret weakness when it comes to the sweet of the corn? Is it their Kryptonite?

I'll confess I had some trepidation. Goya isn't known for their delicious sodas as much as their starchy canned goods. But this stuff is good, my wife and I both agree that we'd drink more if given the chance. I'll hunt for another bottle in the canned bean aisle, next time I'm at the supermarket.

The bottle, though, puzzles me. The running theme of the company is Spanish foodstuffs, this bottle bears a single Spanish word, "Refresco". Nothing else on it is in Spanish, and the distributor is listed in Secaucus, New Jersey. Why that single word of Spanish? Is it meant to show the Hispanic Goya buyers that the company is still 'keeping it real'? Is the company trying to lure non-Hispanics in with the exoticism of the language?

Either way, the ink isn't directly printed on the bottle, instead it has little plastic labels stuck to it bearing all the "Refresco" this and "Artificial Flavor" that. I hate that.

Speaking of the label, check out the crazy dithering in that whispy purple band that runs around the outer edge of the graphic. That's crazy. I feel like I'm playing an illustrated text adventure on Commodore 64. And those grapes, they're all semi-transparent. Clearly their not grapes. To tell the truth, this is sort of what I imagined the thing looked like in "The Colour Out of Space". Didn't it lay eggs at one point? Or am I confusing the original story with the Cthulhu Now adventure about the same thing?

Look at that dithering. Look at it, but not too close,
for there lies madness.