Found Elderflower

I found this soda at target. It's super hard to find their website through google. But look at the flavors they have on their website! It looks so good! They have juices, and apple cinnamon soda, which I've never seen before. I'm excited, and I have some high expectations

Appearance

This is a handsome bottle. It's perfectly clear and pure. The label is a little hard to read, especially in the super fine print, but it's very graphics design-y and modern. I like it quite a lot.

  Appearance Score

9/10 This is a nice looking bottle

Taste 

It smells a little like the kiddy champagne you have as a kid at thanksgiving. Which bring backs a lot of memories and is pretty nice. The taste is a little... to grating for my taste. The flavor is way bigger and bolder than I though it would be. It's very tart. It's a little nice, but a little like licking a warhead. There's a strong physical reaction to drinking it. The back of the tongue constricts and writhes. It's not bad, I guess as sodas go, but I was expecting a much softer, more delicate taste. The contrast between expected taste and actual is a little off putting.The carbonation is a little harsh and there is a bit of a sticky aftertaste but not too bad.

Taste Score

7/10 A bit harsh, but ok

Joia Sparkling Grapefruit Chamomile and Cardamom

The world is changing, folks. There are interesting forces at work, and those forces are demanding excellent soda. And what a wonderful world there is! I've been noticing tons of new soda microbreweries popping up out of the wood work. Sodas that emphasize natural fruits and no artificial sweeteners. And I am so excited about this!
Today, a bought a soda from Target of all places called Joia. Its a Boundary Waters Brands soda. They come in really cool flavors like Pineapple, Coconut,and Nutmeg, and Ginger, Apricot and Allspice. How interesting is that? I hope to try them all.
Today, I'm trying the Grapefruit, Chamomile and Cardamom soda

Appearance

The bottle is lovely. Perfectly clear with a beautiful soda color fully on display. The label is on clear backing and easy to read against the soda. Its very well designed, and I like it quite a bit

Appearance Score

8/10. Lower score than it could be because this style label is very popular

Taste

This is a delicious soda. The grapefruit is spot on and completely honest. It tastes just like the grapefruit juice at the bottom of your fruit salad bowl. It's sweet and kinda bitter, and fades out to an extremely pleasant and dull after taste. The grapefruit is the main player, but it's matured by the chamomile and cardamom. It's delicious and amazing and I can't wait to try all of the rest.

Taste Score

9/10. I couldn't envision a better grapefruit soda.

Averys Kitty Piddle

Another Rocket Fizz Soda. Avery's soda is playing up the novelty factor with line of Gross Sodas. Described as "SODAsgusting" (harahar). They have other flavors like dog drool, and toxic slime and bug barf. While I find that the novelty sodas don't taste as good as they're more serious counterparts, I'll give this one a shot.

Appearance

I like this label. It's very cute. The clear bottle also displays the beautiful color of the soda.

Appearance Score

7/10

Taste

Sigh. I haven't had a soda I've been crazy about in so long. The orange/pineapple combination seemed so promising. It tastes like a typical orange soda at first. But then the soda has a strong aspartame-y flavor. Its sweet but it coats your tongue. Its aftertaste is not unpleasant. Its like fresca, but not as good as fresca, and that's saying something

Taste Score

4/10 'Cause I really don't like fresca

Dragon Tail Ice Mint Blizzard Energy Drink

This was another one of the Rocket Fizz sodas I tried.  The company that makes them is called Dragon Tail Energy .  I picked it up for the label and the powerful, kick-butt name.

Appearance

Look at this label. Gaze into its depths. Notice its sheen, it's scales. Appreciate the power animal contained within. This is such a cool design. I'm also giving it another point just for the soda's name alone. Ice Mint Blizzard... with Lemon.

Appearance Score

8/10. So cool.

Taste

Hahaha! I laugh at my own assumptions! Aw man what a let down. The soda looks so. cool. And the name makes it sound delicious! It's not though. Pretty disappointingly so. Let me walk you through this. The first sip? Great. It's this neat citrus, berry, energy drink flavor. Kinda red bull-ish. Has a little bite, which is fine.  And you sip it and you're loving it. And then the mint hits. But it's not a good mint. It doesn't flow well with that initial flavor. It's very cold and tastes like crest toothpaste. So you take another sip to wash out the mint after taste but that front of the sip is now tainted by the mint. And it's not pleasant. It tastes like electrified berry toothpaste or after dinner mints. I shudder at the thought a bit

Taste Score

3/10 It might rock someones boat, But it's certainly not mine

Rocket Fizz and the Multitude of Root Beers

So this summer, I've been living in St. Louis, MO. It's a really cool city. The city is a little hive of culture and neat spots to explore. In St. Louis, there is a street called the Delmar Loop. And in the Delmar Loop is a soda store called Rocket Fizz. The store is a chain that produces its own line of soda. It is also, frankly, amazi-balls. They have hundreds of sodas, the vast majority I've never tried before. They also have a wide range of candies and novelties. You know, like rubber chickens, or underpants for your hands, that kind of thing. It's also one of the few places in the state that I've found that sells Irn Bru. Which made me scream a little with excitement when I saw it.

The main display wall of soda

At Rocket Fizz, they have Taste Test Tuesdays where you give them $5 and they give you a little shot of 10 different sodas. Which is just perfect for me! I don't want to drink an entire bottle of a soda I'm not crazy about. And I want to be able to discover new sodas with minimal effort. So yay! This week, their taste test line up was all root beers. Which is not as perfect for me. I mean, I like a root beer now and again. but I'm not crazy about them.

And it turned out, all 10 root beers were pretty comparable. So, this week is gonna work a little differently than normal. Instead of doing 10 different reviews for each of the sodas, I'm gonna give a general overview and point out the notable things among the list.

The sodas that were tried were as follows:

Red Arrow Root Beer

With its strong, simple label

Gene Autry Root Beer

Who is apparently the "Singing Cowboy"?

 Snake River Sarsaparilla

I don't think I like Sarsaparilla. At least not this one.

 Hippo Size Jumbo Root Beer

The Label promised a Big taste. It... certainly had that.

 Anchor Ginger Root Beer

Not gonna lie. Love this label

 The... Judge Wapner Root Beer?

The Taste Test Lady told me Judge Wapner is an old TV judge

 Death Valley Sarsaparilla

I'm also fond of this label

 Dad's Root Beer

One of the more well known brands

 Johnnie Ryan Birch Beer

First of the Birch Beers

 Reading Draft White Birch

The second of the two Birch Beers

All of these sodas tasted fairly equivalent. There was nothing that was undrinkable, but also nothing that knocked my socks off. And this may be because it was a lot of root beer all at once and the tastes blended together from one sip to the next. I was planning on doing the taste test with a traditional amount of rigor, with a cracker and water between each one. But I decide against it, because then I'm the pretentious jerk holding up the line with all my "rigor" .

But, overall. I really liked the label designs for Dad's Root Beer, Anchor Root Beer, Hippo Size Root Beer, Johnnie Ryan Birch Beer,  and the Red Arrow Root Beer. They all get ratings in the 7-9 /10 range.
I didn't particularly care for the label design for the Snake River Sarsaparilla, the Judge Wapner Root Beer, or the Gene Autry Root Beer. They all get generally low ratings in the 2-3/10 range. Do you see that pattern? Personal bias against sodas with people on them, I guess.

All the sodas generally tasted similar. Things that stood out:
-The Anchor Root Beer could have had a way stronger ginger bite and I would have loved it
-The Gene Autry Root Beer left was weird sticky, penny-ish taste on the back sides of my tongue.
-The Death Valley Sarsaparilla was not overly sweet like these kind of sodas usually are, but it was very rooty and medicinal tasting. I didn't like it, but it might be right up another person's alley.
-The other people tasting with me didn't like the Dad's Root Beer's after taste, but I felt that the Dad's would be the best in a root beer float
-The Hippo Size was had most intense and robust flavor of all the other sodas. It was very sweet. It also had a very prominent taste of old wintergreen gum. But it was the favorite of some of the other tasters.
- The White Birch Beer had an amazing color! It had a lovely champagne ascetic.

Isn't that gorgeous!

So. Final verdict. Nothing really amazing. Virgil's is still one of my favorite root beers. But it was really cool to try so many different types. And the store had so many other root beers and birch beers that weren't included. There's a lot more to explore.

Fever Tree Ginger Ale

Appearance

The first thing that stuck out to me was how pretty the bottle was. Its a classy, classy design. The color pallet is subtle and elegant. I love it.

Appearance Score

9/10 It's so pretty

Taste

The soda has a really good ginger bite to it. It tastes rather fresh. It's carbonation is amazingly light and dancing. And it's sweetness is light on the tongue and fades away. It's gorgeously crafted. It feels very deliberately designed.

Taste Score

8/10 A really good example of ginger ale.

Goya Guarana Soda

Appearance

The Goya brand is very common in my region, and all of the labels look very similar thematically. So it's kind of weird to see a label that is normally on cans of beans, on a soda. Overall, I'm not really impressed with it

Appearance Score

4/10 pretty meh about it

Taste

The taste of this one is really interesting and hard to describe. It's like citrus and strawberries. It tastes a little artificial tasting, but overall, not bad. The carbonation is little harsh and the after sweetness is too thick.

Taste Score

 4/10. I've decided I don't like it.