Cintron OrangeAde

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.

Hank's Gourmet Root Beer

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.