Sprite + Tea

A few weeks ago on my usual trip to the grocery store I encountered a stack of 12-packs with this bizarre new flavor from Sprite. Of course I'm not fond of buying an entire 12-pack to try a new flavor I may not like, particularly at today's prices. However, I knew if I waited a bit I'd probably see it in single bottles. Sure enough, on a recent pop into a convenience store I found it. My assumption is that this may be an attempt at something akin to an Arnold Palmer, a drink which is half iced tea and half lemonade. The difference here being that this is carbonated lemon-lime soda. I haven't heard good things about this new drink but I'm going to keep an open mind going into it, especially since I enjoy an Arnold Palmer from time to time.

The ingredients still list high fructose corn syrup and less than 2% natural flavors. Nothing specific about tea in the list of ingredients on the label, but just like regular Sprite it is caffeine free. A slight carbonation release comes from uncapping it and it has a faint hint of an iced tea aroma mixed with a little lemon. The taste is quite strong. I'm not really a tea drinker to discern the subtleties of the range of tea flavors but this seems very heavy handed in a green tea sense. When holding on the front of the tongue I get little to no flavor but the intense tea flavor come on suddenly at the back of the tongue when drinking. The miniscule lemon flavor means this is more like carbonated iced tea than anything else. I'm not a fan of this, but perhaps if you're really into sweetened iced tea you could enjoy it.

Slice Grapefruit Spritz

Slice was originally launched back in 1984 by PepsiCo as a lemon-lime soda. This was meant to replace the aging Teem label discontinued the same year as well as to try to gain market share against competitor's lemon-lime offerings. In time Slice offered a range of fruit flavored sodas, including orange and strawberry. Slice had a narrow share of the soda market in the U.S. and by the 1990's the boast of containing 10% fruit juice was moot since they removed most of the fruit juice from the recipe. The brand would undergo continued evolution in package design, various flavors and even a diet version, but Pepsi would discontinue Slice in the 2000's, most likely in an effort to consolidate some of their labels since Sierra Mist, another Pepsi-owned lemon-lime soda has been released in 1999 and was widely sold by the mid-2000's. New Slice Ventures LLC apparently bought the rights to the Slice brand sometime around 2018 for a relaunch in the U.S. and Canada with fruit-juice sweetened, lower calorie versions of grapefruit, raspberry, cranberry, blackberry, mango, and pineapple. They would launch more traditional Slice flavors in 2022 in orange, cherry, and lemon-lime. Suja Life then enters the picture and buys the rights to Slice and overhauls the recipes to jump on the "gut healthy" soda trend. Unlike the other "gut healthy" sodas I've encountered, these are listed as including "pre-, pro-, and post-biotic" ingredients. 

This can has a citrusy scent, not unlike a mainstream grapefruit soda or Fresca. It also has a very light pink color. I find the flavor a bit funny. While still somewhat citrus, it also has a sort of dull staleness about it. I'm sure the stevia, salt, and fibrous bacteria play into this. Fortunately, its still far from being the worst tasting healthy soda flavors I've tried. I could finish this can but I think the flavor would make it slow going, just taking a nip every 5-10 minutes. Not exactly my kind of taste.

Canada Dry Blackberry Ginger Ale

Canada Dry is a lifelong favorite of mine. In the past several years they've joined the bandwagon of releasing various flavor varieties, both permanent and seasonal. I couldn't find this flavor in anything other than a 2 liter bottle so I grabbed this bottle while I could. Unfortunately, the picture doesn't quite do the color justice. The soda is a transparent, light lilac color which doesn't come through in this image. I think its a good flavor. You'll still get a mostly classic Canada Dry ginger ale flavor, but it comes with a tinge of berry flavor that gives it a nice highlight. The berry taste is strongest in the aftertaste that lingers in the mouth. I think they should have made this flavor more highly available in individual sizes though. 

Bawls Cherry

It's been many years since I reviewed a beverage from Bawls. About the only place I know of that regularly stocks Bawls are the Micro Center stores selling PCs and tech gear. Bawls tends to market itself towards gamers who gravitate towards highly caffeinated sodas for marathon gaming sessions. A sugary cherry smell comes off this bottle. The guarana I think affects the flavor in a negative way. Its obviously a cherry flavor but just doesn't taste all that nice to me. I'll leave this one for the gamers. Bawls has better flavors to choose from. 

Saranac 1888 Shirley Temple

While primarily a beer brewery, Saranac crafts several flavors of sodas as well. Saranac 1888 is owned and operated by the Matt Brewing Company, purportedly the fourth-oldest family-owned brewing company in the U.S. Francis Xavier Matt was a German immigrant to the U.S. in 1880. Having worked at the Rothaus Brewery in Baden, Germany, his skills were applied as a brewmaster for breweries in Utica, New York. He created The West End Brewing Company out of the remnants of the Charles Bierbauer Brewery. Like many breweries in the U.S. during the prohibition era they relied on brewing soft drinks to keep the lights on. Utica Club sodas made by the brewery offered non-alcoholic malt drinks and ginger ale. Post-prohibition, Utica Club became a label for a primary line of beer. The brewery eventually changed names again to the Matt Brewing Company producing beer under the labels Utica Club and Saranac. In 2000, the Saranac label began bottling soft drinks again. 

This soda has a very sugary cherry-pomegranate smell. The flavor is truer to a pomegranate taste, which is much more true to the use of real grenadine used in a true old-fashioned shirley temple. It has a little zing at the end of a swig as well. Decent effort overall.

Sparky's Fresh Draft Root Beer

This root beer comes from Knox Brewing in Pacific Grove, California. Interestingly, among the cane sugar on the label, honey is also listed among the ingredients. There's a crisp, slightly wintergreen scent in this bottle. I find this particular bottle to be a little flat in terms of carbonation but I cannot find a date printed on it. While sweet, this root beer also comes across as a bit medicinal in nature. Nonetheless, it's a decent small batch root beer and at least better than some smaller brand root beers I've had. 

State Fair Kettle Corn

This bottle is from Blue Sun Bottling's lineup of State Fair themed sodas. This is in the same lineage as the State Fair Mini Doughnut soda reviewed in my earlier post. While the Mini Doughnut flavor was a delight, many strange novelty flavors can go awry. Hopefully this one is on the good side, but I get nervous before sipping on some of these inventive selections. 

The drink itself has the amber color of a ginger ale. A whiff from the top of the bottle knocks me back a bit. The aroma from this is very strong. It felt like I'd just stuck my face into an industrial sized popcorn popper. The scent is strongly wired in my brain to summon the images of walking through the halls at the Indiana State Fairgrounds as a kid. I was rarely there for the State Fair itself but there were many other events there year round and the food stands always had plenty of popcorn and hotdogs filling the expo halls with smells. This has a tad different smell though likely because our own fairgrounds didn't make kettle corn at their food counters, but you could get some from food trucks at the State Fair proper. Tasting it, it's just incredible how they can capture such flavors into a soda. It really does taste like a bucket of kettle corn. There's a slightly butteriness, but not sickening like a soda I reviewed once that shall not be spoken of again. There's also a sweet, caramel taste that is very pleasant. I've really got to try to visit these folks on my next trip to Minnesota. Definitely give this a try if you find a bottle. 

Maine Root Ginger Man

A follow up to my first post about Maine Root, found here, this "ginger man" soda is also made with fair trade cane sugar. This should be interesting because the artwork makes me want to think this will be flavored like gingerbread or a ginger snap cookie. But it could end up being more like a ginger beer. A pop of the top quickly reveals the wonderful holiday aroma of gingerbread. I also pick up a faint hint of something along the lines of a molasses or maple syrup. Sadly the taste doesn't quite match the hype of the olfactory sense for me. The taste of gingerbread is present but I find it to be a tad thin and watery. I would have liked for a stronger punch of that gingerbread man flavor which I think could probably still be accomplished with natural flavorings. I hope to continue to find some of Maine Root's drinks to try in the future though. 

Hosmer Mountain Black Cherry

I first introduced readers to Hosmer Mountain Beverages in this previous post where I reviewed their Sarsaparilla. I've come across a bottle of their black cherry soda this time around and I'm always jazzed to taste black cherry sodas. This 12 oz bottle comes in at 180 calories and uses cane sugar. The scent is not very heavy but definitely a black cherry aroma. I like the carbonation level. I think the taste of this is biased a little more toward a traditional cherry soda rather than a black cherry. The flavor is just okay, not as deep and rich as I'd prefer and I find that the finish comes across syrupy like that of a cough syrup. This is pretty disappointing as black cherry sodas go but still good enough to drink without hesitation. 

Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus Zero

This new flavor from Mountain Dew is available in both regular and zero sugar versions. I was only able to secure this bottle of the zero sugar version yesterday. Despite having zero sugar, the bottle still lists 5 calories per serving and still contains caffeine. It has a sort of orange red color reminiscent of gummy worms. When I opened the bottle there was a nice crack of released air and it actually smelled like candy gummy worms. It has a standard amount of carbonation for a Mountain Dew soda. The taste comes across as orange-citrus at first then a taste I would describe as Live Wire blended with cough syrup. Finally, there's a lime flavored finish. I think the non-sugar sweetener affects the flavor too much and would probably be better with the full sugar version. It's not undrinkable but isn't great either. 

Melba's Fixins Coffee Cake

I've been looking forward to tasting this since I came across this bottle a week ago and stuck it in the fridge. This is another interesting flavor out of the Melba's Fixins lineup produced by Rocket Fizz in California. The aroma from this is beguiling... it's a bit nutty and smoky. Perhaps like smoked almonds with a hint of vanilla? The more I inhale it the closer it reminds me to the smell of coffee in a breakfast diner. It has a taste more akin to that of coffee grounds than the sugar and cinnamon coffee cakes I'm accustomed to. I feel like I should be drinking this out of one of those old, stained, white ceramic mugs with the brown pinstripe around the top of the cup that you see in old diners... few of which still seem to exist. It instantly brings me back to those breakfast joints in the 1980's filled early on weekend mornings with the smell of cigarettes and coffee in the air and the occasional whiff of pancakes and maple syrup. I'm going to insist again that the Melba's Fixins flavors are superior to the gross flavors of the Lester's Fixins group. 

O-So Butterscotch Root Beer

Among the many retro soda labels revived and continuing to be produced by Orca Beverage, whose name has come up several times in past posts, is the O-So label. O-So soda began in Chicago, Illinois in 1946 gaining popularity based on their grape flavored soda. The traction they gained grew their network of bottlers as well as the variety of fruit flavors they offered. From what I can surmise, they shuttered production in the early 1990's before the label was picked up by Orca, which operates out of Washington state.

This bottle comes in at 170 calories and is made with cane sugar. Unlike the last butterscotch root beer I had, this one is more root beer scented, but their butterscotch flavoring must be what gives it a slight smokiness. It isn't heavily carbonated but the cap was extremely difficult to twist off and seems to have left some sort of coarse residue around the bottle opening which isn't ideal. While the scent leans more towards a root beer, the taste leans more towards that of butterscotch. I'm not really getting much in the way of the root beer until the aftertaste of a swig. The butterscotch flavoring is adequate but not all that smooth.

Black Bear Orange Soda

Black Bear dates back to 1920 when founder Louis Patmont began bottling spring water in St. Francis, Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee. In 1931 the company was sold to Lucas Unger, who began bottling sodas. Black Bear passed hands again in 1961 which it was bought by the Caruso family, the same family that was known for their Italian-style sodas that later fell under the WBC Sodas of Chicago. The Black Bear bottling facility in Oak Creek, WI closed in 2017 after falling into receivership. Sprecher Brewery of Wisconsin now owns the label and continues to produce Black Bear along with other labels, including their own.

This soda is not made with cane sugar, but glucose syrup and has a very bright orange color. Sadly, the cap on this bottle is a blank. They could have done something cool with a bear silhouette or something. It provides a very traditional orange soda scent. This soda is also frustratingly flat. There's very little carbonation in it despite having just been purchased about a week ago. I'd had higher hopes for this bottle but it did not rise to the occasion. This is a low to middle orange soda so I'd recommend grabbing something else if the option is there. 

Betty Buzz Tonic Water

Actress Blake Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, have a diverse mix of entrepreneurial interests. Ryan is co-owner of Aviation Gin. Blake, for her part, founded Betty Buzz in 2021. Betty Buzz makes a variety of drink mixers, among several flavors are ginger beer, lemon-lime, and a meyer lemon club soda, as well as the tonic water featured here, which probably pairs decently Ryan's gin. Of course Betty Buzz also has an aviation theme to the brand. Now people don't typically drink tonic water straight, it's usually mixed with something. As I'm more interested in reviewing what comes directly out of the bottles and cans on this blog I'll be trying it without mixing so it probably won't be very enjoyable. Tonic water is a carbonated water with quinine in it and was used by soldiers in tropical climates to prevent malaria. It has a bitter taste so is often sweetened or mixed to be more palatable. Tonic water also has another peculiar property in that it will fluoresce under ultraviolet light. 

I quite like the old-fashioned, hand-sized bottles. There is little to no scent from this bottle. Drunk straight, it is very bitter so I can only imagine what it tasted like in Victorian times when it was made in stronger quantities and without sweeteners. This bottle comes sweetened with agave syrup and is still very bitter. Used as a proper mixer this small 9 oz bottle would be able to extend to make two to four cocktails, yet the entire 9 oz is just 50 calories. Not much more to add here other than I recommend blending it with just about anything sweet to cut that harsh bitter taste. 

Sprite Vanilla Frost

Here we have a limited edition flavor from Sprite that was released this past winter. I had picked up a bottle in February but forgot about it in the fridge for a little while, though its still perfectly good. Of course this is a mass produced brand so it uses high fructose corn syrup and weighs in with a 20 oz bottle rather than the 12 oz bottles that are more typical of smaller producers. Opening it releases a powerful vanilla scent. There's no traditional taste of Sprite's lemon-lime blended in here, this tastes like an entirely different drink. It's quite vanilla forward, though not heavy handed or too candy-like. With "frost" in the name, I'd expected something more like that "frost" or "ice" flavoring used in some of the gatorade flavors. Overall, it's nothing to write home about, just sort of "meh". 

Spring Grove Rhu-berry

Another flavor from the Spring Grove lineup... this one a blend of strawberry and rhubarb. This soda is made with cane sugar and is caffeine free. The aroma from this bottle evokes memories of mixing strawberry Kool-aid powder on a hot summer day. There's a healthy amount of carbonation to heighten the taste on the tongue. It tastes strongly of rhubarb, which isn't entirely unlike strawberry. The strawberry taste arises a bit more in the aftertaste. I enjoy the nice little bit of tartness in the finish.

Norka Cherry-Strawberry

As someone who collects some vintage soda advertising, I've been aware of Norka for ages despite never coming across the soda itself to drink. I'd also always sort of overlooked some of their vintage materials when finding them because the style and font in were rather bland and it sounded quite Russian. In fact, there is a place in Russia named Norka, as well as a Russian-Ukranian fairy tale called "The Norka". However, it turns out that Norka Beverages is based in Akron, Ohio and Norka is just Akron spelled backwards... amusingly, something I'd never connected. The Norka Beverage company began in 1924 when Jacob Paquin setup shop. The original Norka soda ceased production in 1962. Michael Considine brought the label back to life in 2015, having previous experience in the beverage industry with Bawls Guarana. 

This bottle comes in at 170 calories, is caffeine free, and sweetened with cane sugar. The aroma is that of a cherry flavored hard candy. The flavor is not what I was expecting. I find that there is a muddled mix of cherry and strawberry flavors at first. This is followed by a short strawberry, but the finish is strongly on the cherry side. Interestingly there's a tart quality about it as well. I find this interesting because so many sodas go the other way and are sickeningly sugary. This has a decent sweetness but brings in a touch of sour that makes the mouth water just a little bit more. 

Jack Black's Blood Red Cola

It has been sometime since I last reviewed a soda from the Jack Black's line up. This brand is made by the Real Soda group, which produces many soda labels. This bottle smells like a number of craft soda maker's colas and the color of the liquid isn't actually blood red either but a very normal amber cola color. I have to say there's nothing remarkable about the flavor. It's a very average cola though I thought the "blood red" aspect in the name might have meant it had a twist to the flavor or they'd at least dyed it red. Its really just a marketing thing and there are better colas that provide more pep than this one. But hey, the cap is kinda cool. 

Flying Cauldron Butterscotch Beer

The folks at Reed's have created this Harry Potter themed butterscotch and cream soda concoction that I guess is supposed to approximate the butter beer popularized by the Harry Potter stories. Both this bottle and the butter beer mentioned are non-alcoholic drinks.

This has a very rich butterscotch scent to it. The scent is much stronger than that from butterscotch root beer's I've tasted. It really reminds me of the butterscotch pudding from my youth. The carbonation is a touch on the lower side, but I find the taste intriguing. It's smooth and buttery. The finish is definitely bringing forth the vanilla cream soda aspect. I'm not sure it would be as rounded without that creaminess so I think it makes for a good combination. The richness and smooth taste make this an excellent choice for an after dinner dessert beverage. 

Jones Soda S'mores

I found this Special Release flavor from Jones Soda on another recent trip. Many flavors from Jones Soda have appeared here before. If you're reading this from a country where S'mores aren't a common thing, a S'more is a dessert usually made when camping while sitting around the campfire but so many people now have fire pits on their patios that its easier to make them at home again. You'll need Graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate. Spear a marshmallow and hold it over the flames to roast it to a golden brown. Place some chocolate on a Graham cracker, followed by the marshmallow, and sandwich on top with another cracker to make a sandwich and pull out the twig or metal spear from the marshmallow. Then enjoy your gooey treat. 

I'm picking up a very strong scent of powdered vanilla from this bottle but not much else. I'm also not seeing, hearing, or tasting much in the way of carbonation. A bit of bubble action appears when taking a swig and that is about all. This soda has a strange flavor, but I wouldn't say it tastes like S'mores. A fresh draw from the bottle gives a not-vanilla, not-chocolate, not-marshmallow taste. It's sweet but almost like a very muted orange at times. I don't even know how to properly classify it. It's like an amalgam of many different flavors that just don't come near the taste of a fireside s'mores treat.