Fentimans Mandarin and Seville Orange Jigger

Another one of the fentimans. I have a lot to get through.

Appearance

The soda is a brilliant orange. It's really quite pretty. And, obligatory, the bottle is gorgeous.

Appearance Score

9/10

Taste

The taste is reminiscent of my favorite childhood drink, the "wave bender". A wave bender is orange juice with seltzer or sprite and grenadine. It's delicious, and I make it for myself anytime I have the ingredients. The jigger is very similar to that, with the hint of bitter seltzer and a nice round grenadine-ish start. At the end, though, it tastes more adult and alcoholic. Probably because the ginger in it is fermented. You know. Logically like that. Overall, its excellent.  

Taste Score

8/10 Pretty Good. I like it a lot.

Fentimans Victorian Lemonade

I recently took part in the Reddit Arbitrary Day gift exchange. In this exchange you get the user name and basic information of someone random, and you get to look through their post history and do some stalking and buy them a gift you think they will like. Boy, did I hit the jack pot. My gifter looking through the entire history of my blog and got me 10 Fentimans sodas, in addition to a great book. He got me 6 rose lemonades, probably because I enjoyed the last one so much. 2 Victorian lemonades, and 2 Mandrin and Seville Orange Jiggers. Today I'm gonna review the lemonade, and next week will be the mandrin.

Look at 'em all!

Appearance

The fentimans bottles are nothing if not classy looking. I should start a collection for storing stuff and displaying flowers.

Not shown: my eternal joy and gratitude

Appearance Score

9/10 Man I love their bottles. 

Taste

I was expecting the taste to be almost identical to the rose lemonade. Its not even close actually. The rose lemonade is sweet and light and floral. The Victorian lemonade is a punch to the mouth of flavor. It's like limonata, extremely tart and mature tasting, but more intense. I love all of it. It has a great sweetness that doesn't stick around to long, and the lemon really shines through. It tastes almost fermented so on the front edge of the taste you kind of have an earthy tang on the back of the throat. There is a dusting of pulp in the bottom of the glass too. You can see all the ginger and lemon zest floating around.
Fentimans has made an amazing and complex and interesting product here. Go out and try some.

Taste Score

9/10 Delicious, amazing, I wantmore

Lorina Strawberry

Lorina is a french company established in 1895 best known for it's lemonade. I recieved 3 bottles of Lorina soda for my birthday, so let's try them out.
This is their website. I don't recommend going there, through, because it has very intrusive flash.

Appearance

I like the shape of the bottle. It's very handsome. I'm not the biggest fan of the labeling, it seems due for an update. 

The Strawberry soda has a lovely rose color. I thought it deserved a more sophisticated container.

There we go.

Appearance Score

5/10

Taste

It's not bad. It's not mind blowing, but it's defiantly not bad. It has a nice strawberry flavor. There's a lot of carbonation, but the bubbles are tiny, and they fill your mouth very pleasantly. It's very french tasting. The aftertaste is a little sticky, but not bad.

Taste Score

5/10

Mountain Dew Kick Start

I have in my hands the much anticipated Mountain Dew Kickstart. Or at least I'm told it's much anticipated, in the mainstream soda review blogs. I try to avoid reviewing typical name brands, because everyone's had them, but I feel this is a little special.

Also, this is supposed to be an energy drink. I have a very long 17 hour day of work, science fairs and sport today, and it is currently 8am. I've never had an energy drink before. Let's see how it does.

Appearance

 

 The can is pretty decent. The bright colors caught my eye before I even registered it was the soda I've been looking for.
 It's simple. No obnoxious patterns. I don't like the color match for the citrus at least though.

The Kickstart with my Science. Those be some nice wires!

 Appearance Score

5/10

 Taste

  Ew! It tastes like fresca. I'm not looking forward to it. It's much lighter than other sodas. It doesn't have as strong as a syrup taste. Once I get past the punch-in-the-face fresca taste, I can taste the citrus. It's not that bad of a citrus. But then once you get past the citrus it has a very chemical, chalky after taste.

I'll let you in on a secret. It also tried the fruit punch. The citrus is much better than the fruit punch. I really disliked the fruit punch, maybe 3/10. But the more I drink the Orange citrus the less I dislike it.


 It terms of caffeine I can't really feel the effects. It has 92mg of caffeine, which is more than a coke, but less than a espresso. You figure they might try to pack more in there, but they didn't so it was odd.

Taste Score

6/10. I finished it but I won't drink it again.

Green River

Green River has been around quite a while. It typically rears its head around St. Patrick's day, but if you look hard enough, you can find it year round. Green river has origins in Chicago (shout out) and was originally made by Schoenhofen Brewery during the prohibition.

Appearance

Green River: Holy food dye, Batman!

I like Green River a lot.  The clear bottle provides a nice contrast with the super green soda, and the label is very classic

Appearance Score

6/10

Taste

Green River is the kind of drink you grow up with as a kid. It's sweet, it's simple, it's pretty dang nostalgic. It tastes like lime, but it has a very subtle tartness to it. It doesn't taste like real lime, but it doesn't taste like mike and ikes lime either.

Taste Score

6/10

Dry Juniper Berry Soda

A dry soda paired with an angel food cupcake. Perfection

This week's soda comes from DRY sodas.
Information about them can be found here.
This brand of soda is my go to. They serve them at a local cupcake boutique, and they are uniform excellent.
The company also makes a lime, vanilla bean, cucumber, lavender, and lemon grass.

Appearance

I love how these soda's look. Each flavor is very stylized and minimalist. The juniper berry has little leaves on them. I love the clear label, and I love the strong, simple colors.

Appearance Score

9/10 Clean and Simple

Taste

These sodas in general, and the juniper berry specifically, are very unique in that they have very little sweetness at all. It's a very dry taste, almost bitter. The ingredients are minimalist. It tastes similar to a mildly flavored seltzer water. I love it. It's simple, clean, and incredibly refreshing. The juniper flavor is excellent, almost gin like. Also, where else can you get a juniper berry soda. It's incredibly individual and unique.

Taste Score

8/10 Great, I love it.

Sac Sac Orange

This is another one that I picked up at that one Korean Convenience Store. I'm running low of sodas I haven't tried there.

This week I tried Sac Sac, another Hilariously Named soda. It's by the same brand that makes the Chilsung Cider. More info can be found here.

Appearance

The can is a bit busy for my taste. With it's exploding oranges, and big graphics, and the logo and "new" stamp. The company could chill out a with the graphics. The pin striping in the background is cute. And I like the small cans. It holds just the right amount of soda.

Appeance Score

4/10 Meh

Taste

I really need to stop making assumptions before I drink. I thought this would be a substandard juice drink, like Hi-C punch or something. But its actually really excellent. You crack open the soda and it is Filled with pulp. And not just pulp, but whole segments of orange that you can pop with your teeth, and bits of zest. There is not much carbonation, or at least so minimal that I didn't notice, so all the mouth feel gets to focus on the floaty bits. And aside from the mouth feel, it tasted great. The flavor was light and sweet, a bit nectary. And the pulp and rind gave it a great, clearly-made-of-orange taste. It wasn't like orange juice in heaviness either. It was kind of the consistency of a diluted apple juice in terms of viscosity and taste density, if that makes any sense.

Taste Score

7/10 Absolutely Awesome. If you don't like pulp, you won't like it.

Americana Honey Lime Ginger Ale

I got this soda from a food truck on campus that sells egg sandwiches exclusively.Which, to me, is really exciting, because that means I can get an amazing sandwich and an interesting soda everytime I'm running late to class. But that explains why today's photo is outside.

Americana is the same company that made that Huckleberrry soda that a lot of people really like and I didn't have much taste for. They also sell a Black Cherry and a Root Beer along with a bunch of other brands.
All their sodas can be found here.

Appearance

The bottle is pretty standard. Nice and plain, no distracting, superflousous graphics. Simple and well done.

I had to take off my gloves to take the picture. Regretted it. Happy Winter

Appearance Score

7/10

Taste

Ok, I will admit I was significantly more excited about my sandwich than this soda. Because, come on, my sandwich had hash browns and sun dried tomatoes and amazingness, and I haven't particularly liked this brand of soda in the past.

But it proved me the fool. This soda is actually excellent. This isn't your typical Canada Dry Ginger Ale. The ginger in it is what a fresh honey crisp apple is to a green apple candy.  The ginger is fresh and real tasting. It has an amazing bite to it that almost makes it spicy. The lime in it gives it a good tang that could almost be taken up a notch. The honey adds just a hint of sweet until the very end where it's a bit heavy.

All the flavors are at excellent levels at the very begining of the sip.

My only issue is the carbonation is a bit heavy and made me burp excessively, but that could also be contributed to the fact that I had just scarfed a sandwich 30 seconds previous.

Taste Score

9/10 Excellent, well done, would drink again.

Two Brother French Lemonade

I talking about the history of Two Brothers Brewery last week.
So I'm gonna skip that part

Appearance

Same thing as last week. It was on tap, and it was very cool, but I still can't really rate the apparance of bottle I never saw.

Though the soda itself was clear and very pretty.

Appearance Score

-/10 Unrateable

Taste

I loved this soda. I have a weakness for lemonade, and a carbonated light lemonade is just so much better.
It has an excellent tartness. It has a great lemon balance and it's very light in flavor. It has a bit of an herby aftertaste.So it's wonderful.

Taste Score

9/10 I really need to find this bottled somewhere.

Two Brothers Cinnamon Root Beer

Two Brothers is a microbrewery in Illinois known for it's beers, obviously. I went on a tour of their brewery recently. They also brew two kinds of soda, a Cinnamon Root Beer and a French Lemonade.

More information about the company can be found here.

Appearance

I can't review the appearance of the bottling of this soda because I actually got it on tap. So that's fairly novel and awesome on it's own. It was actually really neat, at the end of the tour everyone got 3 samples of beer free. I requested samples of the soda's instead, and since the bartender was fairly busy and pressed for sample glasses, he just gave me two glasses free.

Notice all the beer in the background

The soda itself is a fairly typical amber rootbeer color. Nothing really remarkable. 

Appearance Score

-/10 I'm calling it unrateable since there's no packaging to score. Though getting it out of a tap is really cool.

Taste

It's a very well done rootbeer. Very carefully made. Everything about it tastes deliberate and intentional. There's definitely notes of cinnamon in it. It kind of tastes like red hot cinnamon. It's a very candy-ish flavor. Not my favorite, but very well done. There's also a well spiced quality about it, with a nutmeg flavor. It has a light carbonation. It could even use some more. Overall, it was a full flavored excellent rootbeer.

Taste Score

8/10 Very good, try to find it.