Beverage Reviews

I drink a lot of different beverages, including limited-time gimmick flavours. Interipelli thinks this is funny or distressing depending on the individual beverage. (This does not, however, stop them from recommending I try all kinds of baked goods at the coffee shop.) I may forget an item or two from this list, because quite frankly, Coca-Cola churned out twelve gimmick flavours in as many months at one point and some of them are probably better off forgotten by humanity.

• Coca-Cola Classic: Before I review any other beverages, I need to set the standard. I consider Coca-Cola to be a nice beverage, especially chilled with ice, but not ideal. It's a little too sugary and a little too acidic, without a ton of depth. However, it beats the hell out of the second entry on our list.
• Tab: The one and only time I tried Tab, the iconic American drink, it was as a twelve pack, the only thing available, and I knew from the first can that it was markedly worse than Coca-Cola in every way. It was at once flatter and richer, with a strong aftertaste of sugary children's medicine. It was not good, and I had yet to learn that sometimes, food and beverage waste is a good thing. So I tried to finish the case. I STILL failed. Luckily for me and all of us, so did Tab. It's gone now.
• Coca-Cola Orange Vanilla: And its allegedly different sibling, Orange Cream. The gold standard of soft drinks that are bad for you. A single citrus flavour plus the classic cola flavour tends to always win -- Pepsi Twist was a childhood favourite. Adding vanilla, though, does even more to help this drink out. The only reason i still have a mostly-full case around is because Coke has so much caffeine in it.
• Coca-Cola Vanilla: This is a useful point of comparison to Orange Vanilla. It has a much fuller, more pronounced vanilla flavour than either version of Orange Vanilla. Ultimately, it still loses to the addition of citrus, which tricks your tastebuds into believing you're escaping scurvy and improving your health, but Vanilla Coke is still pretty good. It's also gotten easier to find in Canada, which is nice: I used to think it was better than it was due to its rarity.
• Vitaminwater Zero, standard flavours: The gold standard of soft drinks that are probably not bad for you. Vitaminwater Zero now uses monkfruit as its sweetener, and there's really nothing to object to about that. All of the core flavours, like Acai Blueberry Pomegranate and Orange, are all good, except that Lemonade one. That one is nasty.
• Vitaminwater Zero, Raspberry Chocolate: This should be absolutely disgusting. It isn't. The chocolate flavour is more like a mild cocoa flavour, and the raspberry flavour isn't overpowering. This drink is genuinely smooth, rather than the choke-inducing trap it might sound like.
• 7up Cherry Lime: One of my most recent flavour forays. It was very nice. The Cherry flavour wasn't too strong and since the lime is better than the lemon in 7up, I didn't miss the latter much. I would maybe buy this if there was a zero sugar version without aspartame, in a case.
• Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry: Likely to be a limited edition and possibly exclusively Canadian flavour. But that's fine: all you need is one can. It has a really interesting flavour, initially refreshing at first and then coming on strong with the spice. But overall, the lemon, lime, cranberry and spice don't mix entirely well and it's not something I would seek out or casually drink. Again: it's more interesting than it is good.

To be continued...