Flavored Bottled Beverage Review

After 13 months, FBBR returns! What has brought us out of our "lost weekend", if you will, is the opportunity to try a new offering of the Nestlé company, SNICKERS chocolate milk. 

Before I go any further, I should note that Snickers is probably my all-time favorite chocolate candy bar. It's reliable, it's filling, it's tasty, it's chewy, it's crunchy, it's sweet and salty and chocolatey and basically perfect.

Snickers chocolate milk is not awful. But it's also none of the things that a Snickers candy bar is. If any of the above descriptions could be applied to Snickers chocolate milk, it would be "reliable". As in, reliably mediocre and underwhelming. It is too watery. It’s too salty. Though it's not the least healthy thing out there, it's loaded with processed sugar and other lab chemicals.

The packaging is effective; it caught my eye. But then, so do disaster videos. So...

What's most offensive about it is that it doesn't even taste like Snickers. The closest comparison is one of those bottled Starbucks frappuccino drinks, except this is worse, and it's not supposed to taste like coffee. I'll continue to love Snickers bars. But Snickers chocolate milk should vanish as quickly as my hunger and irritability does after eating a real Snickers.

Flavor:  1.5/5

Concept:  4/5

Execution:  0.5/5

It is said, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Well, when in Washington... 

Named after the first American president, Washington is the 42nd state admitted to this great Union. Known for producing some of the finest apples, hops, cherries, and apricots in the land, it has also become a leading producer of another hops-like crop, cannabis.

Happy Apple Cannabis Infused Apple Drink is a true delight. Made with cider fresh pressed from 100% Washington apples, as well as THC extracted from 100% Washington-grown, extra fine cannabis, this sparkling beverage is brilliant in its simplicity. It’s purified water, apple juice, cannabis extract, and a few benign preservatives. It’s DELICIOUS. Martinelli’s, already recognized as an FBBR All-Star, should be scared.

I enjoyed this beverage on a cloudless, beautiful, warm Washington summer day, sitting on the back porch of an Airbnb in the Yakima Valley, overlooking a blueberry farm on the Yakima River. Everything was perfect. I was also pleasantly surprised to feel the effects of the 10mg THC within 10 minutes. It was a subtle, calming relaxation. Not so much a “head high”, but rather a light brush stroke of delightful effervescence that washed over my face and lasted maybe 2 hours. The Evergreen State, indeed.

Please, do yourself a favor and try this next time you’re in the PNW. And send me a case of it, too.

Flavor: 5/5

Feel: 5/5

Label Design: 4.5/5

Purchased at: Herban Legends (Seattle, WA)

Cannabis Producer: Knights Hemplar

¡Wepa! ¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Hoy estoy probando Pepsi Mexicana. 

La diferencia principal entre este Pepsi y el regular es que este utiliza el azúcar real, mientras que Pepsi regular utiliza el jarabe de maíz. Y, por supuesto, Pepsi Mexicana se hace en México. Honestamente, no puedo discernir ninguna diferencia entre Pepsi Mexicana y el regular... supongo que eso es algo bueno? Bueno, me gusta Pepsi regular como es, entonces esperaría que me gusta esto también. Y... ¡es bueno!

Y ahora, algunos de mis lemas favoritos de Pepsi de las últimas décadas:

“Pepsi. La elección de una nueva generación”

“La decisión es tuya”

“Ahora mismo”

“La alegría de Pepsi”

Y finalmente...

“Tienes la correcta, nena”

Sabor: 3.5/5

Diseño de la etiqueta: 5/5 (¡Clásico!)

Konnichiwa! Today I’m reviewing the Melon Ramu Bottle. First, what is a Melon Ramu Bottle? If you’re reading this, I trust you’re already familiar with the concepts of “melon” and “bottle”. Ramu in fact refers to Ramune (pronounced ”ra-mun-eh”), a Japanese carbonated soft drink beverage. The word is a rough transliteration of the English word “lemonade”. It’s far from what we recognize as lemonade, though the first incarnation of Ramune, in Kobe, Japan, was a lemon-lime flavor. Now, there are many flavors*.

The melon flavor is alright, though it’s loaded with sugar and has a weird chemical pre-flavor - a slightly less pleasing flavor experience than the bubble gum-flavored fluoride gel treatments I got during visits to the dentist as a boy. What’s a pre-flavor? It’s the opposite of after-taste. The after-taste is pretty good, mostly tasting just like melon soda. It’s odd, though, when a beverage tastes more like what it’s supposed to taste like only after it’s left your palate. Shouldn’t it taste like it tastes when you’re tasting it?

This FBB does get special commendation for being Japanese and having some Japanese letters in the bottle design. Also it was presented very ceremoniously to me by the Good Gentleman, M.B. Horn, Esq. A true and pure delight, indeed.

*Many flavors: Banana, Blueberry, Blue Hawaii, Bubble, Bubble Gum, Candy, Champagne, Cherry, Chili oil, Chocolate, Coconut, Cola, Corn Potage, Cream Stew, Curry, Disco Dance, Flaming, Ginseng, Grape, Green Apple, Green Tea, Kimchi, Kiwi, Lemonade, Lychee, Mango, Melon, Muscat, Mystery, Octopus, Orange, Peach, Pineapple, Plum, Pomelo, Raspberry, Root Beer, Sour, Strawberry, Sweet, Takoyaki, Teriyaki, Vanilla, Wasabi, Watermelon, Yuzu.

Half of those look like some potent strain of cannabis.

Flavor: 1.5/5

After Taste: 4/5

Vague Manga Aesthetic: 4/5

Hello! Happy Spring! 

Splendid Blend Black Tea Infusion is alright. It’s like one of those short-sleeved floral button-down Hawaiian shirts that some bros like to wear - it looks tasty and fun, but then you quickly tire of it and realize that you’ll almost never wear that shirt in public, and even on the rare occasions that you do wear it you’re self-conscious about it because the floral Hawaiian shirt trend was only en vogue for 3 weeks before it actually becomes hot outside and you missed the wave, and now you’re stuck with this garish garment. What you didn’t realize you really wanted was to actually be in Hawaii, eating fresh tropical fruit and sipping cold water. But instead, you got this bottled illusion of vacation from Great Neck.

The beverage actually tastes fine, if not a pinch too sweet. It’s kosher, gluten free, non-GMO, and the bottle gives off major mahalo vibes. It doesn’t smell great, though. Made of black tea, cane sugar, lemon juice, orange juice, and strawberry and raspberry puree, it mostly smells like processed raspberry-lemon concentrate, with some notes of black tea. Somehow it smells “hot”, and I don’t really even know what I mean in saying that.

Like most flavored bottled beverages these days, it’s more refreshing and more easily enjoyed when diluted with some cold water. Which is to say, all I really want is some fresh tropical fruit and a tall glass of cold water.

Flavor: 3/5

Aroma: 1.5/5

Bottle/Label Design: 4/5

Every time I read the brand name Splendid Blend, I think “Splenda”. While that’s not inherently bad, I’m no Splenda fan. Splendid Blend uses no Splenda, and I’ll take that pure cane sugar over the fake stuff any day.

“OH YEAH!”, as made famous by the Kool-Aid man, is the phrase that first entered my mind after my first sip of Joe’s NY Style Lemonade, by Red Jacket. It’s really good. I have nothing bad to say about it. It’s so good that I hereby declare it an FBBR ALL-STAR. Congratulations, and thank you. 

“Joe”, patriarch of the Red Jacket-owning Nicholson family, liked things tart, so they produced the “Joe’s” line of juice blends incorporating fresh lemon juice. They’ve done it so very well. Red Jacket is a family-owned company based in the Finger Lakes area of New York. What started as a small local apple farm in 1958 has steadily expanded into a 600-acre orchard that, in addition to apples, now grows berries, currants, cherries, peaches, plums, and has become the largest apricot orchard on the East Coast of the United States. They also make cold-pressed, delicious juices.

This particular cold-pressed, delicious juice blend is remarkably simple: apples, lemon juice, vitamin C. Das it. Small batch, unfiltered, flash pasteurized, no added sugar or water, not from concentrate, all fresh all natural all goodness. It tastes exactly like what it is - fresh squeezed, unfiltered apple juice mixed with fresh squeezed, unfiltered lemon juice. The ratio of apple:lemon is perfect. It’s sweet and tart, but not too heavily in either direction. 

My only caution would be to enjoy this beverage in moderation, as always. Savor it. Respect the love that went into it. Respect your GI tract. Drinking more than one serving at a time may give you a tummy ache, much in the same way that eating 9 apples at once would. 

Flavor: 5/5

Feel: 5/5

Upstate NY family farm vibe: 5/5

Label design: classic 5/5

OH YEAH: 

IT’S NOT A TOOMAH! Though, according to Merriam-Webster, it may be.  

Turmeric: noun - tur·mer·ic \ˈtər-mə-rik also ˈtü-mə- or ˈtyü-\ 

Pronunciation aside, turmeric, like ginger, is a plant of the family Zingiberaceae. Have fun pronouncing that one, too. Turmeric seems to be having somewhat of a moment right now in health-conscious Americans’ consciousnesses. It’s been around, though, for thousands of years, widely used across Asia and the Middle East for culinary, medicinal, and aesthetic purposes.

Temple Turmeric sources their turmeric from organic, non-GMO Hawaiian family farms on the Big Island. The Strawberry Ginger flavor tastes nothing like strawberry, at all. The ginger and turmeric overpower everything else, which isn’t really a problem, though it sort of tastes like dirt. The real problem is if you don’t shake well, by the time you get to the last 1/3 of the bottle, you’ll be sipping mouthfuls of turmeric sediment which look, taste, and feel like dirt. So hopefully you’re into dirt. The flavor is intense, but doesn’t linger. It has a pleasant aroma, and reminds me of the smell of a yoga studio pre-class, before all the aspiring yogis fill the air with sweat, breath, and flatulence. Crazy that the second listed ingredient is strawberry puree, because, again, this doesn’t smell or taste remotely like strawberry. Also, the second to last ingredient is “Bacillus Coagulans GBI-30 6086″. Also, I just spilled the last 1/4 of the bottle all over my desk. It’s time to go home.

Flavor: 2/5

Feel: 2/5

Vibe: 2.5/5

I wanted to start this post by saying, “Yuck!” or “Nope!”. I wanted to tear this beverage apart, admonish its creators, and explain in great detail the disgust it engenders. I wanted to comment on how the label looks like it’s been splattered with a firm shot of man’s virility juice. Here, have a big gulp of this! 

I wanted to hate this beverage, and had the trash can nearby, prepared for a quick heave or two.

But when I opened my bottle of Yup! Strawberry Milk, all I found was that it’s pretty good. Like, really good. I was a little disappointed to find it’s white, and not pink. I thought sweet, fake strawberry-flavored things are supposed to be pink. But it tastes good, very good. I thought it would be thicker, stickier, heavier, gooier, and feel icky and funky. I thought it would feel like a mouthful of... I was ready to retch. But it’s really good. Not something I’d have with any regularity, but if you’re someone who enjoys sweet, flavored milk beverages, consider Yup! It tastes like (and, is) low-fat milk with strawberry candy flavor, kind of like if strawberry ice cream melted, but was kept in a cooler just above freezing temperature, and was refreshingly liquidy instead of whatever melted ice cream is. Warm goo? Am still talking about ice cream?

The after taste is just milk taste. No weird chemical flavor, which is weird itself, because there are plenty of chemicals in it. But seriously, it tastes great. And it’s a good source of vitamin D, and lactose-free. Yup!

Flavor:  4.5/5

Feel: 4/5

Label Design: 1/5

It’s always a treat walking into my go-to lunch spot and noticing a new flavored, bottled beverage stocked in the cooler.  Some bottles pique my interest more than others, but when I realized that this bottle of beautiful, seafoam green-colored beverage mixed in with the Gatorade section was, in fact, Gatorade itself, I was overcome with curiosity and wonderment.  What IS that?

Gatorade Limon Pepino is perhaps the least Gatorade-like Gatorade flavor I’ve ever tasted.  I don’t dislike Gatorade by any means, but when I thirst for Gatorade, and when I drink Gatorade, I expect it to be a sometimes-overbearing explosion of flavor.  That’s not the case here.  Limon Pepino Gatorade is its own thing.  It’s light, it’s refreshing, and somehow they nailed the flavor.  It tastes like faintly lime-tinged cucumber water.  It’s best served ice-cold, but holds up well at room temperature, too.  People have created Facebook groups and fan pages dedicated to Limon Pepino.  Apparently I’m late to the party, as Maxim devoted an article on their website to the wonders of Limon Pepino nearly 18 months ago.  http://www.maxim.com/entertainment/cult-limon-pepino-gatorade

At the time of writing the Maxim article, the author Max had yet to find this magical unGatorade-like Gatorade sold in NYC.  Well, Max, I found it, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for a single day.  I bought it.  I enjoyed and savored it.  The next day, and each day since, it’s been out of stock.  It’s probably too soon to make a definitive statement on where it stands when compared with other Gatorade flavors, but I’m pretty sure it’s a strong contender for #2, behind the GOAT*, the ever-delicious Citrus Cooler*.

Flavor:  4.5/5

Nuestro Sabor: 4.5/5

After Taste: 4/5

Seafoam:  5/5

Well, this is unusual. It’s unsweetened sparkling tea, and it’s quite tasty. No, really! With each sip, I feel my taste buds begin to recoil in disgust, but then my brain steps in and says, “Yo! Taste buds, bros, you’re only like 10 days old. I’m the brain and I’m 31 and you just don’t know what you don’t know.” I’m paraphrasing. Sound Sparkling Tea (peach & ginger white tea flavor) is dry, but plenty palatable... unlike the unpalatable GuS (Grown-up Soda), which does contain some sugar from fruit juice but still somehow manages to taste and feel drier than licking a piece of dead coral. Or gargling with powdered pumice. Or like when you have some dental work done and the hygienist stuffs a wad of gauze in your mouth and proceeds to blast the air gun on your gums until your whole mouth feels more arid than the Sahara. 

Sound Sparkling Tea, on the other hand, is quite nice. Zero calories (not that I care), zero sugar, no chemical-tasting sweeteners whatsoever. It’s American-made, American-born, certified kosher, non-GMO, gluten free, and created by two devastatingly handsome engineer gentlemen. Their goal all along was to “redefine unsweetened” and prove that unsweetened beverages could still taste good. It IS possible!

Flavor:  3/5

Label design:  3/5

Here we go again.  As of yesterday, Daylight Savings Time has ended for 2015.  Thus begins joylessness, melancholy, despair, and scarcity of sunlight for the next 4+ months.  Must we?  I bought this bottle of Sunkist Pineapple in hopes of clinging to the fading memory of warmer, brighter, longer days.

Daylight Savings Time is a concept imagined by a guy in New Zealand 120 years ago so he’d have more daylight to collect bugs.  The US temporarily adopted DST during World War I in an effort to save fuel, but only for the summer, otherwise farmers would be forced to begin farming in the dark if they were to remain on the same schedule as the rest of the country.  Roughly 30% of the workforce at that time worked in agriculture.  Fast forward about 50 years, to when the federal government officially adopted DST as a yearly summer occurrence beginning in 1966.  Roughly 10% of the workforce at that time worked in agriculture.  Fast forward to today.  Roughly 2% of American workers are farmers.  Roughly 98% of American workers aren’t, and DGAF about farming schedules.  This Kiwi entomologist dude had a great idea to get more daylight out of the tail end of each day, because who does anything productive at 5:30 am, anyway?  Farmers and people training for a marathon (congrats, NYC marathon finishers!).  

Vox published an article about this topic yesterday.  Here it is.  http://www.vox.com/2015/11/1/9640018/daylight-saving-time-year-round

I couldn’t agree more.  Just make Daylight Savings Time all the time.

Also, Sunkist Pineapple tastes pretty good, though I think if Crayola were to name this color, it’d be “Radioactive Yellow”.  BTW, this 20-oz bottle (1 serving) contains 83G OF SUGAR.  It’s 5:30pm and completely dark out already.  March 13, 2016 can’t come soon enough.

Flavor: 4/5

Color: 

Let’s get this out of the way: I do not like Bai5.  I’ve had it once.  I do like blueberries and many blueberry-flavored foods and beverages.  I do not like Bai5 Brasilia Blueberry.  I do not like Bai5.  I’m sure the creators have only positive intentions, noble causes and interesting origin stories.  I do not like Bai5.  I don’t like the name, I don’t like the flavor nor the aftertaste.  I do like that the bottle is sturdy, but not that it’s more plastic.  Bottle sturdiness aside, there’s a difference between lightness and weakness, and to me, Bai5 is weak.  It’s subtle alright, with that subtle Band-Aid taste lingering well after you’ve tried to forget that you sipped it in the first place.  The bottle boasts of featuring their super fruit, “coffeefruit”, which, is a real thing?  My heart is beating faster than before I drank it.  The “5″ refers to 5 calories per serving, but each bottle contains 2 servings.  It’s water and sweetener (erythritol, stevia extract), then 2% juice concentrates, the ever-enigmatic “natural flavors”, and then, finally, “coffeefruit”.  Then some other stuff.  But none of that matters.  It doesn’t matter that it’s vegan or kosher or soy-free or gluten-free or non-GMO.  It doesn’t taste like blueberry, nor does it taste like coffee, nor even stevia.  The side of the label reads, “Juicy flavor that tastes like a rainforest just kissed you on the lips.”  Or, tastes like a doctor’s office just poofed gauze-flavored erythritol mist into your mouth.  Bai5?  No Bai.

Flavor:  Mmeehhh...

After Taste:  ... 

Feel:  Wet

What is this? It looks like if the Green Cross and Nautica decided to market bottled beverages together. It smells sort of like seaweed, which really is probably just green tea. Matcha, which actually is just green tea with some special fancy preparations, is a thing that has been around forever, and has recently gained some popularity in the USA. Unrelated, a Whole Foods store in California was testing out selling “asparagus water” for $6 a bottle earlier this week.  It’s just water with some asparagus stalks in it.

So why sparkling matcha? For science, duh. Motto is produced by The Verto Company in Boston, and claims that one 12oz. bottle of this beverage has the same level of nutrients as 12 (12!) cups of steeped green tea, and the same caffeine levels as 1/3 cup of coffee. Sounds like a healthy alternative. It just tastes... bland. It tastes like leaf powder. It is leaf powder. It’s supposed to invigorate, revitalize, energize.  It’s been said to assist with focus, balance, mental acuity. Can’t it at least taste good? It’s like the plant version of a gamy meat. I tried antelope once and gagged.  Didn’t vomit, but I was close.

Flavor: 1.5/5

Feel: 2/5

It’s been a while, but welcome back to the Flavored Bottled Beverage Review.  I had been hoping to bring FBBR back in a big, loud, colorful, triumphant kind of way.  That may happen yet, but not right now.  So let’s just get to it.

Brooklyn Soda Works’s Apple + Ginger looked so promising and tasty and refreshing in the bottle.  The simple, playful design, the rich colors, the natural ingredients, locally produced, community supported... All of it had my hopes higher than Wayne Brady smoking blunts while suspended midair atop highest peak of the highest mountain of Colorado’s Rockies. **

It’s not that it’s not a tasty beverage.  It’s just that it’s not the continuous flow of apple ginger orgasms I thought it would be.  It’s just freshly pressed apple, ginger, and lemon juice, and sparkling water.  It does taste good, though it’s way more lemon-tasting than anyone would logically expect, given that the image on the front label depicts a detective apple and detective ginger standing around what looks like a spilled vial of squid ink.  Yes, it’s triple filtered.  Yes, it has a relatively short shelf life (and yes, I drank this before the “good ‘til” date).  Yes, NYC, yes design, yes all those things.  

In the end, I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy this beverage again.  However I WOULD gladly accept cases of it for free and write glowingly positive reviews, if someone at Brooklyn Soda Works wants to facilitate that for me.  They’ve got some other interesting varieties I’d like to try, particularly Cucumber, Lime, & Sea Salt, and Plum & Basil.  Let’s go!

Flavor:  3/5

Feel:  not carbonated enough

Label Design:  4.5/5

Shaquille O'Neal.  One of the greatest, silliest, most dominant, most celebrated, most lyrically and rhythmically gifted, exceedingly humble and uniquely talented Irish thespian basketball-playing doctors that the world has ever known.  Never one to settle for mediocrity, Shaq has blessed us mere humans with yet another of his gifts, partnering with Arizona Beverage Company to quench our collective thirst with Shaq Fu Punch.  I decided to try the grape flavor first, as it looked the least disgusting of grape, pineapple, and strawberry punch flavors.  

It straight up tastes like grape candy - cheap, old, crinkly wrapper hard candy, or knock-off grape Fun Dip, or stale grape Nerds, or expired SweeTarts, or melted and refrozen and remelted grape Pop-Ice.  It consists of 10% juice, a surprise to me.  I assumed it was all chemicals.  It's clearly made in 'Murca.  As one can see, AriZona uses tinted bottles to "protect the natural antioxidant properties" of their beverages from light.  As if!  As if light would damage these beverages any more than these beverages would damage your digestive system if you drank this shit with any regularity.  

But, I must give credit where credit is due.  The brilliant performance artist Shaquille O'Neal has once again defied expectation and inspired a generation into believing... something.  I can't figure out what exactly, but his likeness is being used to sell shit candy water in tinted bottles, all across 'Murca.  And 1!

Flavor:  0.5/5

Health Factor:  0.5/5

Kazaam:  5/5

You've waited long enough, so I'll get right to it - Ronnybrook Farms chocolate milk is the best damn chocolate milk I've had.  It easily and rightfully earns the distinction of being an FBBR All-Star.  What's there to say?  It's everything that chocolate milk should be: fresh, rich, smooth, creamy, sweet, and chocolatey.  This cannot be overstated.  Ronnybrook Farms is a family-run business in Ancramdale, NY, in the Hudson Valley.  They treat their prizewinning Holstein cows like their own children.  They inspect and test their milk daily for antibiotics or other impurities, to ensure that what goes in the bottle is only the purest and freshest.  Pasteurized but not homogenized, and obviously organic, The New York Times has referred to Ronnybrook milk as the "Dom Perignon" of dairy.  Call me crazy, but I'm more inclined to think of Dom Perignon as the "Ronnybrook" of Champagnes.  

Flavor:  5/5

Feel:  5/5

Old-school Glass Bottle:  5/5

It's been a while.  I'm thirsty.  I had been putting off trying this bottle of Brighton Beach Black Cherry Soda because, well, it's not Dr. Brown's Black Cherry.  By now we all know that besting Dr. Brown's Black Cherry is a nearly impossible mountain to top, especially if it's in a bottle.  But the facts remained: I was thirsty, I had this flavored, bottled beverage, and I was overdue for a review.  So, while attempting to temper any expectation I had for it, I reached for the Olde Brooklyn.  It is quite good.  Admittedly, I haven't had a Dr. Brown's in months, probably years, and although I love stuff, I remember it being a little too sweet for my palate.  Maybe my tastes have changed?  Fun fact: the average life span of a taste bud is 10 days.  My tastes have, in fact, changed.  Anyway, Olde Brooklyn's Brighton Beach Black Cherry isn't overly sweet like I expected it to be.  It's basically carbonated water, cane sugar, and food coloring.  The label design features an image of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, with a faded vintagey-looking purple font and accents.  It conjures thoughts of the Cracker Barrel... the nice, nostalgic images.  Not the ones where you read a news story about someone's hacked-up body parts being found in a walk-in freezer at a Cracker Barrel.  Not those.  Olde Brooklyn is much better than finding a hacked-up human body in your freezer.  Much better.

Flavor:  4/5

After Taste:  3/5

Label Design: 3.5/5