Gross Food Week #6: Nexcite

I suppose I've developed a little reputation for myself. The Huffington Post described us as "no holds barred," while my own family took the more direct approach and wondered if we weren't "pushing the line." Frankly, I just like to think of myself as the girl who tried all of the carbonated sexual aphrodisiacs the world has to offer. Simple pleasures, that's what defines me.
This particular beverage came to the United States by way of hatred and copyright infringement in equal doses. Nexcite, a whimsical Swedish penis pumper, is a soda designed to provide a proprietary formula of herbal extracts and caffeine with which will fuel your manbits like no other. Like no other, I say! And because it was fifty cents on clearance and had a rabbit on the label, I tried it for you today. The soda is Viagra blue and smells like an energy drink, if an energy drink was consumed by a toddler and vacated with 50% more melted blue Jolly Ranchers than it originally contained.
It just leads me to wonder, why oh, why would the manufacturers of this drink make it bright blue and candy-scented? With its cute bunny logo, it's just asking to be guzzled by a small child. Or worse yet, it's all getting clearer to me now. With its emasculating smell and antifreeze pallor, it's the perfect way to get a little kink into the bedroom by tricking your man into thinking he's about to down a shot of Prestone. The five supplements, not to be confused with the fifty ways to leave your lover, which yours will undoubtedly do after watching you wince this down, are as follows: Yerba mate, an herb traditionally used in hot tea, which everyone knows makes you look brooding and sensitive, damiana, nature's off-brand Viagra, illegal in Louisiana, ginseng and guarana, everyone's favorite acid-flavored energy drink supplement, and last but not least, schizandra. This is not a Mary Sue-esque Final Fantasy character as I initially thought. It's a Chinese berry that aids in soothing the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. How sexy is that?
Nexcite tastes like the darker side of liquified cotton candy and green tea mixed together at a frat party. It's both bitter and overly sweetened and as a flavor best described as being throat-punched by a lime, with a potently sour aftertaste like a Warhead. Extremely sugary, in a weird way that sticks to your gums and works its way into the crannies of your mouth, like sexual harassment for your teeth. It numbed my taste buds for a good ten seconds after each sip, which I suppose aids in diffusing some sexual tension if you're not sure of, how shall we put it, the provenance of some particular after-dinner treats you may partake in. This'll fix you good. In regards to the state of my sexual performance prior to and after consuming this drink, I can't tell you if it helped. I was too busy looking slack-jawed at the recommendation on the side of the bottle: "As a supplement, drink 1-8 bottles a day." Holy crap, Nexcite, I'm a woman, not a machine. Here's to drinks directly fueling the sex working industry, one male gigolo at a time.

Gross Food Week #3: Jeff's Chocolate Soda

Guys, I just discovered instagram. And you know what else I discovered? Jeff's Chocolate Soda. And you know what else I just discovered, today? The futility of mankind and the heartbreaking realization that we're all doomed, man, you know? Probably as a result of this soda's existence. All three are connected. Come, let's take a journey.
Jeff's Chocolate Soda, found in a Stop and Stop but easily purchased at www.getcreamed.net, the only non-porn website on the planet with an extremely porn-like name, is the end of mankind. Nowhere else can a label entice you with 50's style clip art graphics and brutally pervert you with a singular message. Get creamed. And by all means, the package warns you, do not shake this beverage. Why that is is not explicitly stated, but I think we can all figure out the rest.
The chocolate soda is 97% fat free and 99% flavor free, too, and allows you to get your daily recommended value of authentic Tootsie Roll flavor without compromising your lack of dignity. The soda smells like marshmallow cream and is a little salty, a scent that, combined with its visual euphemisms, makes this feel like an episode of dirty Blue's Clues. Luckily, this off scent disappears quickly after opening the bottle and does not translate to the drink's flavor. It has a thick texture that straddles a line between saliva and whipping cream- not quite solid, but nearing dangerous levels of mucus. It comes out of the bottle matte brown with a few runny bubbles on its surface. It's not a very appealing beverage for this and many other reasons.
I will give it this; for a soda containing one gram of fat, it certainly packs an enjoyable and authentic Dutch chocolate flavor. It is fair, simple, and immediately chocolatey- again, much like a Tootsie Roll. That's presumably also where the 48 grams of sugar (per 12 ounces) come in. With a soda like that, who needs enemies? This is a scant 5 grams of sugar away from beating out Sunkist as the world's worst soda, according to Men's Health. If poor Paula Deen wasn't already diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, one or two of these would have easily done the trick.
Unfortunately, I can't say I'm impressed. This soda's future is bleak if the company thinks it can ride with the big boys successfully on sugar and catcalls alone. For the sake of my health and my sense of humor, Miss Love and I will be sticking with something lighter and will likely find a more satisfying way to get creamed without all that fluff.

Marley's Mellow Mood Relaxation Drink

Believe it or not, this drink wasn't created or endorsed by John Grogan's loveable yellow laborador. I know, I was disappointed, too. For those of you who are into Marley, though, the Bob one, this drink might come as a pleasant surprise. Marley's Mellow Mood Relaxation boasts yet another way to get your sleep on. Because nothing relaxes you like a tie-dyed assault of colors, and 29 grams of sugar per can, right? Jah, mon, and that's all you'll hear from me.
The can boasts a lofty goal of considering this a dietary supplement, like a Flintstones multi-vitamin. While I'm sure there's at least one person out there who is actively making this a part of their day-to-day routine, the vast majority of you can stop holding your breath. There are better relaxation supplements out there, and I doubt any of them taste like home-fermented fruit leather. The drink says it's berry flavored, but tastes more like berries that have been sun-dried with every intent of being made into macro granola but were sadly forgotten in a head shop for a few months. There's a raisiny note to this, and it's fairly strong, persistent flavor that lingers throughout each sip. I'm no stranger to slightly medicinal flavors in energy or relaxation drinks, but this gave the beverage a synthetic and creepy edge that inspired me to go through my Stranger Danger checklist one more time. It tastes like bottled mall incense, the kind that comes packaged with a free angry warrior statue.
It's lightly carbonated and has a watery, floral flavor with a medicinal bite against the fermented berries scent, but holds very little appeal for me as it lacks the fresh flavors of most fruit-flavored sodas. Its flavor does mirror its mission statement in that it is a fairly murky, lazy soda, but unfortunately, that translates to a dismal drink. Color me affected by my own childhood, but drinking it left me with unpleasant memories of taking cherry Robutussin when I was sick. I immediately regretted the two sips I took, as I wasn't so much relaxed as I was sluggish after trying a little of this and aching from the sugar. Every time you drink this beverage, a dentist earns a $20,000 bonus. This might work if you've had a tough day playing Ultimate and need a break, but nevermore, Tuff Gong, nevermore. I may have got the beverage, but I didn't get no ecstasy, not in the slightest.

Maine Root Pumpkin Pie Soda

I can't quite tell what this soda's angle is. It was put out on the shelves after Halloween, yet has a jack-o-lantern on it. Because I totally didn't find this until after Halloween, I'm going to say that this is for Thanksgiving, for the college student stranded by themselves over break with little else to eat on the holiday except for this soda and McDonald's and day-old bakery rolls. Forever alone.

This makes for a depressing Thanksgiving, if you're drinking it for its intended purpose. I've tolerated selections from Maine Root in the past, and have enjoyed their stranger selection of flavors. This was a new one in the supermarket. Unfortunately, there are some flavors that just shouldn't be incarnated into carbonated form. Jones has exhausted that list to the point of insipid novelty, and now Maine Root is jumping on the bandwagon with their pumpkin pie soda. Even the kitten was kind of skeptical.

A few years ago I totally "wasn't" into Harry Potter and I "didn't" go to three of the midnight book releases and "never" cried at the end of the seventh book. Now I'm over that noise despite seeing some of my old high school friends totally cosplaying the crap out of those books, but was piqued by this soda as a result of a years-old curiosity surrounding the omnipresent pumpkin juice in the book series. I was hoping this would be quenching, rich, and almost vegetal in flavor with a deep underlying spiciness and sweet hint of brown sugar. It was basically all of that, reversed.

Imagine the weak, generic scent of a votive candle- the vague mishmosh of spices that somehow loosely translates to the flavors of fall and appeals to the sensibilities of people who consider Jersey Shore quality theatrics. That's what this taste like. It's overly sugared and smells synthetic, and completely lacks pumpkin. The sugar content in this is through the roof. It tastes closer to some of the pumpkin-shaped candies of the season than it tastes like its gourd brethren. And let's be serious- simply saturating it with an asston of orange food coloring doesn't make it taste more like pumpkin. Keepitcoming Love liked this soda because it did have a persistent and strong fresh nutmeg and cinnamon stick flavor, slightly sticky, dry texture included, but I wasn't sold on its weak flavor. I can't enjoy anything that wins the first place slot in the Family Feud question, "Soda that best resembles a Yankee Candle."

Chubby Kids Soda: Cream Scream and Grape

Why don’t we all just acknowledge the elephant in the room and get the obvious over with. Yes, it’s a soda called a Chubby; and yes, a chubby is a synonym for the erection of a penis. Let’s all take a few moments to laugh at the picture of me holding these sodas in suggestive fashions.

Oh hey guys look; he’s holding 2 Chubbies at his crotch! It’s like he’s suggesting they’re dicks or something. Wow, a penis joke! This website is awesome, it’s got informative food reviews and penis jokes!

Anyways, I think we’ve had enough fun at the expense of my hilarious photo and get on with the review. I saw these on the shelf of the local Stop & Shop and thought of the hilarity factor and since they were only 50 cents each, I couldn’t afford not to buy them. I think if there is anything that the people at Chubby got right with this drink it would be creating as good of a gimmick as the people in the Insane Clown Posse had. They proudly display a picture of a portly cartoon child on the front the bottle almost like a surgeon general’s warning to those who want to drink it. “If you drink this colorful fruity soda, you’ll become a cartoon caricature of a fat kid”. So soft drinks make you fat… it’s a magical miracle.

Chubby Soda is a brand that is very popular in Trinidad and Tobago; it’s one of those countries that you hear about in middle school geography textbooks or in a vacation brochure but doesn’t really contribute to our everyday lives or major news. I guess the country’s real contribution to the world is Chubby Soda.

The first flavor I tried was the Grape. In a word it was just plain awful. It tasted like something that FEMA would have gave to Hurricane Katrina victims. Imagine government subsidized grape soda and you’ve got it. And the government soda was probably come in these small packages too. Don’t want the Katrina victims to be too happy with the grape soda that is provided by taxpayer money. Then they’ll never go back to living their old productive lives, they’ll just chill out in the superdome and drink grape soda all day. This soda also went flat really quickly. Within minutes of opening it the carbonation was gone and all that was left was a badly flavored grape flavored drink. Maybe grape drank is just more appealing to more people.

The other flavor was Chubby Cream Scream. I guess this was supposed to be their version of cream soda. The cool thing about this flavor was that it didn’t taste like what regular white people cream soda taste like and this really caught me by surprise. This had a much sweeter and candy taste to it. It was more like a cotton candy flavored soda than vanilla cream. The odd taste was one that would probably take some getting used to. This one however held onto its carbonation for a long time. I had left this bottle in my car for probably a week and it was still carbonated, once again… fucking miracles. All in all these 2 drinks were interesting and if they paint a correct picture of Trinidad and Tobago, I’d probably want to vacation there, but not to the parts where they only have Chubby Grape.

Thomas Kemper Blood Orange Soda

I know this is more a propos to Halloween festivities rather than Christmas/Hanukkah times, but WHATEVA, I DO WHAT I WANT.

I'm an out of control teen.

What we have here is Thomas Kemper soda, of the blood orange variety. I'm a serious beverage hipster. If I drank beer, I'm sure I'd only want microbrews. Like beer, I tend to favor the obscure and smaller soda companies with more unique flavors. This was a pretty vivacious looking soda, with all the energy of the drink focused on the color with minimal labeling in colors that either matched or accented it.I took this in my laboratory. It's pronounced lahbohratoree.

Naturally, I expected this to be vibrant and sunny, like its namesake fruit, with a twinge of a macabre pucker thrown in for good measure. After all, it is a blood orange. But instead, it was a flavor concentrating heavily on the acerbic with little homage paid to the fruit it represented. What should have been casually tart was bitterly acidic, and if anything, it tasted more like orange-flavored Jell-O ("with carrots inside," said Keepitcoming) with a tang at the end. A slightly herbal, cloying flavor, perhaps from the honey, provided the base sweetness in this soda.I wish this hadn't proposed so much in its appearance. We'd left it in the fridge as a treat because it was so pretty and fire-colored, and quaffing it just seemed like a letdown. This goes squarely into the category of "things that look pretty but are not good to eat," and joins an ignoble list of animal shaped marshmallows, marzipan fruit hunks, gigantic lollipops, and mockolate rabbits.

Hot Lips Pear Soda

They used to call me "Hot Lips" in high school.

Okay, I can't even take that one seriously.

Just the fact that there's a soda out in this world called "Hot Lips" allows me to bring that seldom used phrase out of my traditional application (addressing masseuses) and into the actual world. It might be more satisfying than those deep tissue kneads and the happy endings, too.

For a soda with four ingredients, I've never had a more satisfying and flavorful beverage. It does what commercial drinks and LOGO have been striving for for ages- puts the fruit front and center. This wasn't even my favorite of their sodas, but we drank up their others before we even had a chance to photograph them, and the pear looked the most dramatic against tweed.In order to better facilitate my drinking experience, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I took a plane out West a few weeks ago for the sole purpose of breaking into the Harry and David factory and nabbing a few of their pears, which I then took home and pureed through a sieve a couple of times before achieving the perfect pear juice. That was mixed with some carbonated Voss water I'd had lounging around, and was poured together for comparison with the Hot Lips soda.While the aforementioned event never happened, the Hot Lips end of the deal couldn't have been closer to the truth. These sodas are pure, and not in a Facebook quiz resulting in 58% purity or a high school "virgin", but genuinely pure. They taste like the fruit they represent. Mired in a society whose latest and greatest culinary births involved blue raspberry and the Blackjack taco, that's a big fucking deal. In the case of the pear, it wasn't cloudy as Food Junk's soda had been, but was still lip-smackingly good and smooth in the mouth. The pear was mellow with a slightly citrine flavor. After drinking, my only two wishes were that the carbonation was a tad higher, going from gentle bubbles to more of a bite, and that the soda came in large 7-11 jugs. My third wish was for a small harem of puppies, but even the charm of Hot Lips can't grant that.

I'm saving my last bottle of this like I'd save a 1968 Chateau D'Yquem. I'm probably going to bring it out at my winter gala if I feel the crowd is right, or perhaps get Keepitcoming a half case as an early Christmas gift. These are well worth the cost and fantastic for any soda connoisseur.

Rosé VIgnette Wine Country Soda

Here's another wine soda from Vignette Wine Country Sodas, a Rosé variety. Just from looking at the bottle alone, it has a nice blush and a sweet fade. For the sake of the review, I'm going to assume the flavors are reminiscent of a white Zin, as this is from California and that's the typical grape Rosé is made from.White Zin is the bitch grape of a lot of drinkers. It's sweet, colorful, and a little shallow- the babysitter you'd be happy to watch your kids. But like that bubbly personality, it comes as a turn off to most. It's not as sophisticated as white Burgundy or Riesling and doesn't fall into the category of dessert wine, making it often inappropriately sweet for many diner's palates. But let's not bleed the vat too quickly. The white Zin is fruity and summery and highly appropriate for a hot day, and while it's no Donnhoff for the discerning drinker, it's a smooth alternative to the more expensive wines and blends seamlessly in say, a kegger at a state university or a party in the Midwest.So how does this rank up? Unfortunately, not as delightful as you might think. The soda is scented like a powdery strawberry eraser, though nowhere near as impermanent, and even smells a lot like a tart sparkling cranberry juice.And that's exactly how it tastes. It's a very sweet and approachable drink, but when push comes to shove, like the white Zin itself, I'm not very impressed with the flavor.

Fizzies Root Beer Drink Tablets

Fleeper and I are trying these after finding them in her bread container in the middle of the night. Her mom is always buying her strange shit and it's relatively awesome.

Fizzies label themselves as "effervescent" tablets. I don't know if that means they're one molecule away from being ecstasy, like how margarine is one molecule away from being plastic or some shit, or if they're just inexplicably flamboyant. Either way, they look like giant horse pills, the rectal kind, or Alka Seltzer, and come in wrappers that make them easily mistakable for condoms. Yummy.I want a condom called "Fizzies," by the way. Put it on my freaking Amazon wish list, fer cryin' out loud.

Anyhoo, Fizzard the Wizard tells me some magic spell that makes it root beer. I have a sneaking feeling the spell is "sodium bicarbonate," but who am I to judge? And I'll be damned, it fizzes and starts turning the color urine, first healthy pee, and then infected, bender at an opium den, haven't had a drink in days, urine. We'll find out if it turns into root beer. Boy, Fizzard, you are magic. And also addicted to Fizzies, apparently, to the point of anonymous cock-sucking dependency for a fix. On the FAQ page, it asks, "Is it possible to get addicted to Fizzies?" to which Fizzard replies, "No, Fizzies are not habit-forming, unless you're a wizard like me." Yeah, like a crack wizard. Shit, man!The tablet takes a while to dissolve, maybe roughly a minute or two, and then it's basically done. It spews out a nice foam that does actually look like soda, and dissolves pretty well. And it does taste like root beer. Granted, that root beer is the type from Chuck E. Cheese's and is laced with the souls of small children and pedophilic mice, and also tastes watered down and terrible, but damn it, it's root beer and I drank it. It's very sweet and not very fizzy. If I had to choose a soda to take my virginity, it would be this soda. It's gentle. Blue Razz probably rapes in the night.

SodaStream Penguin

It sat in my room, just staring. One cold, gimlet eye, a sleek body with fins that slip out of your fingers. A sharp, pointed beak. The potential to explode.For about a week before opening the SodaStream Penguin, I was terrified. It wasn't that I was afraid of exploding my dorm room and the surrounding dorms, or afraid of screwing up the machine, or afraid of failing my family in bringing them cost-effective, tasty beverages, but the penguin was judging me. I wasn't worthy of its presence.

Just opening the Penguin, I felt like my dorm's property value went up. This thing belongs in a hotel. It's all curves and no angles and has a stainless steel chamber and comes with carafes. Where the hell do you see carafes in a dorm? I threw out my plastic Fiestaware and Dixie cups and embraced the new era with this, my cold, chilly lover.So, the logistics. The Penguin comes with carbon dioxide, which is inert, so the possibility of me making a flamethrower was out of the question. It's extremely easy to assemble. I'm sure a real penguin could do it if it had opposable thumbs, too. It comes with that and the carafes, and SodaStream also sent over 19 flavors, too, for me to try out.The usage is also really facile. It's just a matter of filling up the carafe and releasing the carbon dioxide into the glass, and then mixing in whatever flavor you want. I'm not sure if the carafes are the ideal beverage containers for me, personally- while they are sleek, they're a little bulky and pretty heavy, and I can't see myself carrying them around and using them in any other setting than at home as a regular drinking receptacle.I couldn't try all 19 flavors on my own, so I enlisted the help of Swagger to taste test and tackle the beast. We took these photos in the dorm kitchen and tried it all out. So we already knew that it was really easy to use, but how did the flavors taste? We tried 9 of the flavors, to give you a broad spectrum of what they're like.(clockwise: energy, orange mango, fountain mist, root beer, Pete's Choice)Fountain Mist was SodaStream's personal version of Mountain Dew, and it was pretty good. It was definitely the same color as Mountain Dew, and the flavor was pretty accurate. It had a nice lemon and lime flavor, and we liked it. 6

Orange was definitely our favorite flavor out of all of them. It had a clean, crisp taste, and just felt fresher than some of the other ones. It was really sweet, but not too sweet so as to make you feel like your teeth are rotting out. It tasted like the candy jelly slices I eat at Passover. A definite winner, and better than some of the orange sodas you can get in stores. 10

With the orange, we also had orange mango. The flavor was a little more subtle than the orange, but the mango was mellow and tasty. I thought this one was tasty, but perhaps a little too sweet on the tooth. Still a definite winner, and especially nice for those of us who like strange soda flavors! 8

Next, we tried the lemonade. This was another favorite, because it tasted just like my local soda company's lemonade equivalent, a gassosa. The lemon flavor isn't bitter at all and is, like the mango, a little more subtle. This can also be remedied if one likes more or less flavor, because you can add syrup to taste. I personally preferred the little, one serving bottles for easier clean up and mixing, but it's all a matter of preference. 9After that was the Pete's Choice. This one was a little strange. As Swagger so eloquently put it, "Dr. Pepper has his doctorate in soda making, Mr. Pibb has his bachelor's, and Pete didn't get his GED." This wasn't our favorite. The syrup was black, and the flavor was just off. 2

Root beer was up next. Root beer is also an easy flavor to screw up, but SodaStream pulled this one off really well. The flavor has just a hint of vanilla, and is really frothy and refreshing. I could see this making an excellent root beer float. 9Finishing up the sodas was the energy flavor. This is basically the equivalent of a Red Bull, and it tasted identical. Unfortunately, nobody likes Red Bull because it tastes like robot piss. It was still a valiant effort on the part of the flavor as far as accuracy went, and it did end up giving us energy to lift microwaves, so it had its merits. 3

After those, we tried the MyWater flavor essences, which are additives to the sparkling waters that you can use as flavor syrups. They're highly concentrated, so a very small amount goes a long way. We tried the berry first, and it was medicinal and didn't taste like berries at all, or might have tasted like the chemical equivalent of berry flavor. It was not tasty and even when titrated with other flavors, was still easy to detect. 0

The orange flavor fared much better. While I definitely lean towards the side of sweeter drinks, this was refreshing, like going to a hotel and drinking the water with the orange slices in it. It was just enough of a hint of orange for me to want to drink more, and the carbonation was nice and bubbly. A nice alternative to the orange soda, and the presentation is very classy. 7With the presentation and ease of the machine itself, and flavors, I think it's a nice addition to a home where people drink a lot of soda. I know I'll get a lot of usage out of this machine. I think it's great for parties, and is a fun novelty item for families to own. If the price is daunting, make tabs of your soda intake with cans and see if it's worth the amount you regularly spend. I rated based on the flavors and presentation.

The Penguin waits.

Maine Root Blueberry Soda

While cooking dinner with a friend of mine, Pengu, a few nights ago, she pulled out a surprise for me- some strange soda she'd found at the supermarket, and she said, who better to share it with than a foodie? We decided to do a taste test of it with dinner and post our findings with today's review. (No lightbox, this was at her house!)Both of us agreed that the soda was very tasty, which is quite a rare find in most blueberry flavored confections. Usually, it's overlooked as a flavor entirely, or so artificially mimicked that the flavor is lost, and it just tastes icky. However, this flavor was deep and rich, but the texture of the soda was lighter, like a seltzer, and didn't have any of the corn syrup to bog it down.The bubbles were big in this one, and with the other soda we had that night, we noticed that this one was much less subtle. The flavor was intense without being heavy on the palate, and it carried the natural, earthy flavors of blueberry along with a little cane sugar to balance it out. It was a great tasting drink that we both agreed was a keeper for future dinner parties! What's the most unusual soda you've ever tried? (For me, it's that tofurkey and gravy Jones!)

Asian EXTRAVAGANZA! Part 1: Drinks

Okay, so a little background. My friend Swagger and I went out yesterday on a delightful quest for an Ocean State Job Lot, which turned into a huge adventure finding and retrieving items from an Asian Grocery.

We got some beverages first, for review. I'll be doing it all in part by cuisine. We found dollar store beverages and Asian things to show you today.

First up was the Wang Dream aloe juice. After giggling profusely at the funny name, we took a sip. The texture is very strange. It's a very thick juice, and the texture is only comparable to drinking melted Jell-O. At first taste, it tasted like apple-scented shampoo would taste like. On the second round, it developed a muscat-like taste, and the little beads of aloe tasted much better. It was, in all, a really refreshing drink and not horrible for costing $1.70. The texture is a little off-putting, though. I kept expecting it to develop a skin on top, like its Jell-o imitation.

5/10- OKAY

We also found a treat I'd been dying to try, but hadn't really wanted to order online: soda for weeaboos, AKA ramune. The ramune was immensely fun to open, like a grenade launcher, and I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I got the marble down and the soda tried to explode all over my hands.

Unfortunately, the taste was really disappointing. We had the choice of original, melon, Hawaiian blue, and strawberry, and chose strawberry. Swagger said the Japanese don't like things too sweet, and it was evident in the taste. If anything, the ramune tasted like watery and minimally flavored seltzer. If that was strawberry flavored, plain must be really gross. A huge disappointment, even if the packaging was awesome. We loved the Engrish on the label, too. "Enjoy pop soda!"

4/10- DISAPPOINTING

That was it for the Asian beverages, as we'd already stocked up on discounted sodas at an Aldi and Ocean State Job Lot before. Onto the discounted stuff. We bought two sodas from a company called "Snow," advertising crisp, minty beverages, and one ominously nomikered Java Pop.

The "Icy Green Tea- Light" Snow pop thing was nothing special in the way of bottle mechanics, like the ramune, and it was encouraged to serve "ice cold". Okay. So we put our ice batons and waited. We took a sip.

The smell was intense, like we'd just sauntered into a Colgate factory on a hot day. It looked like beer, and tasted like sparkling Listerine. There was no green tea flavor at all. We now understand why these were three for a buck. They were loaded with sugar, 35 grams a bottle, but had no sugary or sweet taste to speak of, and were horrible. We spat them out and dumped the remainder of the soda in the yard.

0/10- INEDIBLE

Okay, so after that astronomical failure, we popped open the Whiteout Peach flavor. Not looking good so far, Swagger said. So we opened it, poured it into our glasses with ice batons, and waited. Took a sip. Again, we hated it. Just spitting out the drink made me feel much better.

I don't know what was wrong with these two beverages, aside from the glaringly obvious fact that we bought them from a dollar store. But the Whiteout peach was exactly the same. There was no peach taste to find, it smelled like toothpaste, and was sugary on the label, but had no sugar to be found. These just sucked, completely.

0/10- INEDIBLE

I'm not proud to do it, but I have to give the Snow Pops my first zeroes. We spit them out. They were horrific.

Last up was the ever-intriguing Java Pop, in vanilla flavor. It boasted being all organic, all seeing, all knowing, with pure sugar cane.

We opened it and poured it into the bottle. It had a sickly sweet flavor of sugar and vanilla, like snorting powdered sugar. Upon trying it, we smacked our lips a little, probably trying to see if they stuck together. It did taste like vanilla coffee, that was accurate. In fact, if you condensed it, it would probably taste even better sans bubbles. But this combination was just gross. Soda and coffee is really disgusting. And the sugar this one had almost negated the fact that it was organic. Just disappointing.

1/10- GROSS