Soda Review: day 1

Mountain Dew: Voltage

This is apparently one of several varieties of Mountain Dew has released, that dew drinkers can vote on and only one will remain in the end. This one is "charged with raspberry citrus flavor and ginseng". It has low sodium which is encouraging! I hate it when my soda is full of salt.

I have no idea why this is all blue if it supposed to be raspberry flavour? I guess green + red = blue? Does that work? I dunno but anyway this tastes as artificial as it looks. Hard to pin down the smell and flavour but it definitely contains raspberry. Sort of if you combined that weird raspberry soft drink you can get at Burger King sometimes combined with that weird bubblegum flavour soft drink companies seem to like. Lyndal thinks it tastes like Zooper Doopers. It's okay, it doesn't have that weird aftertaste that most other American soda seems to have. I haven't tried US Mountain Dew but this isn't as good as the Australian version. Probably contains one million percent more caffiene though!

Rating: 3 stars
Contains HFCS? Yes

Coca Cola

The bottles in America are really weird! They are a lot shorter and fatter, they look pretty cute. The caps are also really short for some reason. I wonder if they have a greater propensity to fall off than the Australian caps?

Anyway to get to the nutmeat, Coke in America tastes absolutely awful. It tastes like Australian Vanilla Coke, which I hate. It has some sort of really weird flavour that goes along with the Coke. Maybe nutty? Lyndal reckons it tastes like it is full of almonds which sounds about right. Anyway I do not want to drink nutty soda!! Is it the high fructose corn syrup that does this? Lyndal drank the whole thing and reckons that it got better as she went along but I was not tempted to go back to the bottle. Terrible. Thumbs down America!

Rating: 1 star
Contains HFCS? Yes

Vitamin Water: Fruit Punch

Shara bought this because it was the only beverage in the supermarket that had cane sugar rather than HFCS. Anyway it was terrible. Even Kristen who is a big Vitamin Water fan mentioned that this is the worst flavour. It smells and tastes like really bad cherry-flavoured cough syrup. I hate cherry to begin with (I don't understand the American/Australian fascination with the horrible fake cherry flavour that is in everything) but Shara and Lyndal who are exceedingly pro-cherry panned this too. It tastes like a cross between Powerade and something that I can't quite put my finger on. Also the label says it contains less than one percent of fruit juice. Why would you advertise this? Anyway this is bad. Avoid.

Rating: 1 star
Contains HFCS? No

Fatburger Chocolate Shake

Lyndal got this from Fatburger when we went for dinner because the soda was all so weird. Anyway this was great! It was huge and only like three dollars and totally chocolatey and thick. Americans know how to do milkshakes! I might just eat shakes in America. Delicious.

Rating: 5 stars
Contains HFCS? Probably

Sprite

No picture sorry

We got this from the fountain at Fatburger. We had already come to the conclusion that American Coke is totally weird and not to be trusted so I thought Sprite would be a solid alternative. I was mostly wrong. You know how Australian Sprite tastes when you make ice with really weird tasting tap water and then have a glass full of Sprite and ice and all the ice melts and so it tastes like Sprite but with a really weird aftertaste? American Sprite tastes like that ALL THE TIME. So weird. Not sure if this is because they put too much water in the fountain at Fatburger or what. Anyway not as bad as Coke, but I would still choose water over this.

Rating: 2 stars
Contains HFCS? Yes

Nestea (Unsweetened)

No picture sorry

After we had the Sprite we refilled with this. We were hoping that since it isn't soda at all it would be less weird. This was just weird in a totally different way. Nestea is just unsweetened cold Earl Grey tea. That's it. I was assuming it would be like peach or lemon flavoured or something, but nope. Just cold black tea. Kristen said you could put some sugar in it yourself but then it would be cold black tea with sugar granules at the bottom of it. Delicious! Oh wait I mean disgusting. WHY IS THIS A FOUNTAIN OPTION??? IS THIS WHY YOU AMERICANS HATE TEA SO MUCH? The only upside is that since it is cold tea it was reasonably refreshing, if totally gross.

Rating: 1 star
Contains HFCS? No