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.

Sweet Leaf Pomegranate Green Tea

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

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

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.