The Knowledge for Thirst

Oh Korea, you went and made a milk soda. No one was asking for it. There was no newly-identified market for people who like to drink milk but dislike the pesky health benefits. The streets were not flooded with people shouting for revolution and more cow in their soda. But you went ahead and did it anyway, just so I’d have something weird to drink. I appreciate your enthusiasm, if not your rate of success.

My first thought was that I should not be drinking this, because I really need to cut back on the dairy. It’s no good for my system and causes all kinds of Issues, straight up. But I recognize that the needs of science and blog traffic outweigh the needs of my feeble intestine, so I sallied forth and tried both regular and strawberry Milkis.

The main ingrediments here are milk, sugar and carbonation. I was imagining a taste something like a bubbly condensed milk, but although it’s about as sweet, it’s much thinner and not particularly milk-ish. It’s got a medicinal, Tylenol-y aftertaste that took me right back to my youth. When I was very young I needed to take pills for some random illness, but I had a lot of difficulty actually swallowing the pills. I remember being on some trip when I was really little, and the entire family being mad and stressed at me for not being able to just take the fucking pills like a normal person, and my Grandma crushing them up and mixing then into some orange juice for me. It tasted terrible but it did the trick. Which is probably why I still take all my “medicine” in liquid form.

I emailed my mom to see if she could fill in some background on the dimly-recalled memories this beverage had stirred up. What illness did I have? What were the pills I so desperately needed? Her response:

Yikes! When do you have all of these flashbacks??? We did visit Grandma when she was in Florida but we flew there. You were about 3. We went to Disney for the day too. I also recall mashing pills for you. We gave you pills when your poop was like hard balls.

So it all comes back to my stupid colon, nice. Why couldn’t I just get chocolate Ex-Lax like normal kids. Regardless, I don’t know if any of my recent Issues can be directly attributable to Milkis, but it wasn’t good enough that I’m going to risk it again. Strictly soda for this guy, way healthier on the system.

Let’s say you got a really rock-solid beverage in the market. A distinctive spin on the standard cola formula. A name with personality — a goddamn postgrad degree.

This is Dr Pepper. This is a drink with heritage. Well, chum, that doesn’t cut it anymore. Consumers are all, “Boo-hoo, I’m bored of this bewitching nectar.” So Dr Pepper goes and creates flavor spin-offs to generate excitement and maximize reach. My love for the Dr is so deep-down that I was willing to play ball — even though Red Fusion was a spectacular failure and Cherry Vanilla was basically like licking the floor of a second-run movie theater. But I did it because there was still a little Pepper in there somewhere, tantalizing me.

The latest installment is Dr Pepper Berries & Cream, and it’s not bad. Raspberry is underrepresented in mainstream sodas, and the fakey cream flavor is subtle enough to ignore. One problem: There’s no Dr Pepper in it. That unique vibe is almost entirely absent, and I’m all: Why exactly am I wasting my time with the knockoffs? Daddy wants the original. Sometimes I call myself “Daddy” when crushing a half-finished can of disappointing soda and throwing it, with vigor, at a loved one.

Alright, pursuant to the last post. Judging from some comments and conversations I’ve had since, I’m not the only person who wasn’t aware that Black Cherry Vanilla Coke has been on the market since ~7 months aft. A media brown-out like that means either a) we’re cankles-deep in a viral marketing campaign that has yet to gain momentum, or b) Coke shit its diaper and can’t figure out how to call the nurse. All fat-fingering buttons on the TV remote, all holding it up to their ear, all cantankerous about bad reception during a conversation with a long-dead family pet. Sad. Sad times.

Man, remember when Coke was on the Untouchables stizz? Pepsi’d be coming out with one lame marketing campaign after another, and we’d be all Excuse us, but we’re drinking whatever Cosby’s drinking, next order of business please.

But I guess it’s true that everything good turns sad and crappy eventually (But we at K4t appreciate your continued support!), so it’s no shock Coke is totally junior prom-ing it with the BCV. What I dislike about drinks like this is that they pile on too many flavors: nothing makes a strong impression, it’s all just varying shades of aftertaste. I always feel like some sips are all black cherry, some are more vanilla than anything, and the Coke flavor is buried too far down in all the noise. I spend all my time picking flavors apart and analyzing when I should be chillifying.

It’s too complicated. I can’t traffic with that nonsense, I’m a busy motherfucker. I just wrote “I’m busy motherfucking.” Ha ha. No but serious say hi to your mom for me.

Consumers crave two things: familiarity and novelty. This, of course, presents a challenge to sellers and helps explain why there are so many varieties of toothpaste, soft drinks, detergent or cereal anchored to a handful of famous brand names.

Josh will probably yell at me for posting this because it’s not explicitly about beverages, but I’ve got a bottle of Black Cherry Vanilla Coke in my fridge that I need to review and every time I look at it a little part of me dies. So this article just really speaks to my soul right now, you know? You know.

I’ve been in Indiana for the past week, what’s your excuse? I come back to find the office a complete mess and Gonzalo wearing only what I’m 90% certain are a pair of your tighty whiteys, what’s up. Anyways, shite state of affairs out there, I’m sad to report: there is fuck-all to drink. I know, big surprise in the land where Faygo reigns supreme. Did you know that if you are searching for a good beverage in Indiana, you will actually die of thirst? It is a true fact. This report is basically proof.

Ohana Raspberry Lemonade is measurably terrible and I doubt anyone would disagree, so it’s not worth the ones and zeroes to really get into the whys and wherefores. All that matters is this is a juice that not only has no real juice in it, it doesn’t even have anything approaching fruit flavoring in it. It’s simply the chemical approximations of sweet and sour, delivered with the grace and joy of a metal rasp to the tongue. Nothing good will ever come of the existence of this drink, but that’s fine because no one will ever really like it. It’s not even a minor Baldwin–it’s a guy who lived near the Baldwins, growing up.

Generally, complaining on the internet about a beverage is the surest guarantee of a slew of commenters furiously chiming in to hail said beverage as their all-time favorite. But this can’t possibly be anyone’s favorite, unless it’s the type of thing where they drank it once or twice on a youthful dare, and now that they’re adults the memory has somehow taken on a life of its own, coming to inhabit the kitschy intersection of vague memory and ironic nostalgia.

That intersection actually exists, by the way. It’s in Indiana.

We find ourselves in a strange, backward land today (Korea). We were just recently talking about juices made from vegetables, but come on, aloe? Drinking aloe is surely at least halfway down the crazy hippie scale. Up here we have wheat grass and too much patchouli, and then down a little lower we have aloe juice and colon hydrotherapy, and down here is recycling your own urine.

So: am I scared? Not so much, because according to the label the ingredients go: water, then corn syrup, then aloe. And as any man of science (or God for that matter) will tell you, sugar > [oddball fruit or vegetable] = still potable. So we’re safe. But surprise of surprises, we’re not only safe, we’re also in a sleepy little hamlet I like to call Yumsville.

Yes it turns out aloe juice is delightful. Much lighter than I was expecting, and what’s more it’s clear–not at all semen-y, which is what I thought aloe looked like. (Possibly a negative for you.) It’s also very fruity and it doesn’t taste like vegetables at all. It’s kind of a cross between a purple grape and a lychee flavor. Actually it tastes bizarrely similar to purple Kool-Aid. Me neither.

But man if this had awesome health benefits I would drink it all the day. Sadly there’s no clear science about if aloe is an important part of one’s diet or not. Wikipedia says it may be a remedy for things like coughing and cancer. I definitely did not notice any real coughing or cancer since I drank this! Also aloe is said to have a strong laxative effect. Unfortunately, as you well know, my diet is already heavy on apricots and other dietary fibers, so it would be impossible for me to scientifically measure any improvements in that department. Still, every little bit helps, right? Oh stop, you know it does.

Excellent news for denizens of the Windy Apple: starting next week, K4T will have a bi-weekly column in Time Out Chicago. We’ll be reviewing all the latest beverages as they hit the market and blindly grope their way towards a target demographic.

If you don’t live within fetching distance of a Chicago-area newsie, fret not: the TOC reviews will also eventually appear here as well.

Our first review hits newsstands Wednesday.

Imagine a blueberry pie shaped like a pair of brass knuckles.

I took one sip of this and my brain immediately took me to a place where I was tied to a chair in a dingy back room, being worked over by some mafia bruiser. Except the mafia guy looked exactly like Blackie Lawless. Which, it’s too bad he and I had to be on opposing sides like that, because there are just so many questions I’d always wanted to ask him if we ever met, you know? Blackie fucking Lawless.

Anyways. Blackie was working me over, absolutely tearing into me, one blueberry punch to the gut after another. Just relentless. Blood and sweat and blueberry juice everywhere. A merciless god of glam metal and mafia-dom.

It’s a heavy drink, and it took me to a dark and dangerous place. Blueberry is just trouble, anywhere. There aren’t a lot of blueberry juices and sodas, you’ll notice. It just doesn’t fucking translate, man. It’s too thick and muscular of a flavor. It’s the Scott Caan’s neck of all flora. Some smoothie places will try to sell you on the blueberry-strawberry combo, or blueberry-raspberry. Pay no heed to that nonsense. The blueberry just pounces on any other flavor in there with a nasty tolchok to the gulliver. All you get is blueberry cement forcing its way down your throat. You’re coming up for air after each sip.

There’s some language on the Blue Machine bottle that it’s been carefully formulated to cheer you up if you’re feeling “blue”. This was not the case for me, and I’ve had heck of depression lately. Work stuff, mostly. But these blueberries were just sucking the life force right out of me, and meanwhile I’m in for 30 large to King Diamond, like I need any additional stress.

Yerba mate is a highly caffeinated tea that seems like the type of thing that would be popular in parts of South America or maybe Nepal. Guayaki is marketing it here as a tea-slash-energy drink. The ingredients don’t list any of the ADHD-causing additives normally associated with energy drinks, so that seems to be just a marketing angle, rather than a bold new paradigm shift.

As you know from dealing with me offline, I’m normally a pretty spazzy fellow, so in order to conduct a proper scientific study of yerba mate’s alleged energy drink prowess I purposefully made myself extra tired by staying up late watching Newsradio DVDs. I’ve got this whole thesis I’m working on which details the similarities between Matthew Brock and Buster Bluth. Watch the episode where Matthew drops the pen down his pants before he can hand it to James Caan: tell me those facial expressions and physical mannerisms aren’t complete Buster. Or watch the Halloween party episode and compare Matthew’s motorcycle enthusiast/gay biker situation to the Army uniform Gob puts together for Buster. I think the writers of Arrested Development spent a lot of time around WNYX, that’s all I’m saying. Anyways. I can just put this in a email.

So the next morning I was all set for the experiment. I cracked open the bottle and was greeted with the scent of tea and freshly-cut grass. The scent of health. Taste-wise, it was interesting. It’s clearly not like regular tea: the flavor had a harsh edge to it, but fortunately the mint and cane sugar tempered it nicely.

I wish I could end the review there. Knock off early, get a beer. Maybe watch some more Newsradio. (I’m also putting together a list of Lisa Miller’s top 10 cutest moments (#4: Her lunge across the conference table when Matthew warns Dave to keep his woman from mouthing off).) But I can’t do that, because this is where my experience with yerba mate took a turn for the worse. The horribly worse. This is the first drink I’ve ever had that actually scared me. Well, second, if you count Clamato. You should read the rest of this review like you’re Stone Phillips, if you weren’t already. Daniel Schorr also works.

One thing I should have remembered before I drank this is that I’ve had some weird reactions to non-standard stimulants in the past. Taurine and spirulina are some that come to mind. Right when I was halfway through my yerba, my head started feeling very light and dizzy. And then I felt tingly all over my arms and torso. And then my heart was beating double-time, and my carotid artery was threatening to do an Alien baby thing with my neck. Awsum, totally extreme!

It was just a teensy bit terrifying and I stopped drinking right away. But it was cleary too late, and I was all uncontrollably nervous and jittery and wondering if maybe I was going to have a heart attack, or maybe I already had, and this is what that was? And would I have to go home early, or to the hospital, or would I simply pass out at my desk? (Discovered by my coworkers, I groggily confess to having been felled by some tea.) And the jitteriness just would not go away. It was actually pretty un-fun, and I kept on feeling that way. And I kept feeling that way, and I kept feeling that way. All told it was three solid hours before I felt like things were about back to normal.

But I guess it works! So if I lack the moxie and constitution for large doses of caffeine, at least I’ve still got what it takes to conduct some serious science, which is its own sort of manliness. OK not really.

A while back you had this short-lived but steamy affair with some V8 product and I thought maybe it was the V.Fusion here. (No seriously somebody approved the name “V.Fusion.” That is not a typo.) You were basically jumping up and down and flapping your hands all excitedly, saying “omigod omigod omigod”? Remember?

Anyway I don’t know if it was this stuff or not (maybe it was Splash?) but I decided to pick up a bottle because it was time to get back to the juice. You know. No more soda. No more lies. The real deal. It keeps me sharp [snaps fingers], on the edge [snaps fingers], where I gotta be.

But believe you me I cracked open this stuff with extreme prejudice. V.Fusion [sic] is a fruit and vegetable combo plate, OK? Sure it makes the fruit the hero on the label, but they sneak in — and I am not even kidding — sweet potato, yellow tomatoes (?!), and squash.

Sometimes I try to sell myself on the whole drink-your-vegetables concept, and I pick up the regular V8 and think: You know, this is going to be fine. No, this is good, this is good. This is the start of a whole new me. This is definitely the best way to get tomato and watercress and 2000% of my daily sodium needs in liquid format. And then I take one sip and make a big show of gagging and choking and then scramble around dramatically for the worst vodka ever to mix it with.

So I was all ready to start my shenanigans when I tried the Peach Mango iteration of V.Fusion, but what ho it went down nice and smooth. And although I feel like I semi-detected a smidge of vegetable flavor (or maybe just texture) in there, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t known the ingredients beforehand. It just tasted like your standard multi-fruit juice blend, nothing fancy but a refreshing enough orange-ish mango-esque flavor. EXCEPT! A full serving of vegetables totally snuck into my body, ninja-style! I like tricking my body this way. My body deserves it after all the shit it’s pulled over the years.