Elephant Ginger Beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.