Vita Coco Waters

Is it cold where you are? Are you freezing your butt off, ringing in the New Year like we are in New England, doing all the delightfully quintessential New England activities, like snow shoveling, snow shoveling, or snow shoveling?

Well, I'm offering up a once-in-a-lifetime chance, with this drink. I tried it at a Stop and Shop. It's a little like sticking a coconut up your bum, turning into Marvo for a day, or taking a Hawaiian patterned rubber tube, tying it around your arm to stop the blood flow, and injecting this into your veins.

So this is Vita Coco. Each variety of this is different, and yet, like a horrible episode of Pokemon, somehow, always the same. I tried four different flavors of this in little supermarket shot glasses, here for your enjoyment. First up, the original, Vita Coco pure coconut water. I don't see the appeal in coconut water. In cartoons, it's portrayed as coconut milk, and in real life, it tastes like dirty gourmet water. There's no sweet flavor, just a vaguely milky aftertaste. It's refreshing. It's very refreshing. I'm sure there are nutrients, but I don't see the point in drinking it if there's not a taste that you can also enjoy.
The next flavor I tried was an acai and pomegranate juice. Again, this was very refreshing and quenching, even with the small shot glass/ramekin portion of juice I had, but there was that strange, milky and buttery aftertaste of coconut juice that I got that watered down the acai and pomegranate, which tasted more like a cheap off-brand wine than anything else, a really artificial flavor, like a strange grapey taste that added little else but that sugary flavor that I was looking for in the last one. I liked getting samples at Stop and Shop, though. Maybe I'll wander by the dairy section more often.
The last two flavors weren't as bad as the first two, thank goodness. The pineapple and coconut was refreshing and sweet. The creamy flavor wasn't as strange this time and worked well with the sweet, but slightly bitter flavor of the pineapple, creating a piña colada style of drink that was refreshing but didn't bog me down. I liked it a lot.
The last flavor was also pretty tasty, a peach mango. Unfortunately, it was just sweet. All the flavors seemed to get a little watered down in the process of juggling peach, mango, and coconut, but managed to get "sugar" down rather well. I got hints of each fruit in the drink, but overall, got a lot of sweetness with more coconut than anything else. Not to say that it wasn't good, it just wasn't as vibrant as the pineapple, which was definitely my favorite of them all.