100 Plus

The can is absolutely gorgeous. The silvery-white background sits perfectly with the green, red and blue of the design, which is simple, bold and eye-catching. I think that this is the best can design I’ve seen so far in my time as a soda reviewer/consumer. 100 Plus is made by F&N, who have given the world Groovy Grape, Cool Ice Cream Soda, and I’m pretty sure Groovy Taste root beer as well; quite a track record, which is unfortunately horrifically derailed by 100 plus, a terrible soda with a taste that’s as bad as its can design is good. Alarm bells should’ve sounded at the fact that 100 plus is touted as ‘isotonic’ and is marketed as a soda for athletes, like a carbonated Gatorade or something, but I was blind to these somewhat obvious signs and as a result had sky-high expectations.

The smell of 100 plus is like a weak, cheap orange soda. The liquid is clear, with a low level of fizz (although it is carbonated). The taste is pure filth, the disgusting taste of orange sports drinks the world over, perhaps I should’ve been expecting this but the can threw me off and had me anticipating a real winner. The taste is almost completely in the aftertaste, which swells up just after the drink enters/leaves your mouth, and climbs to a sour, foul-tasting crescendo before subsiding again after five or six seconds. I could only handle half a dozen sips of 100 Plus. I poured the rest down the sink, and can’t help but feel that I’ve been literally flooding this city’s rivers with second-rate sodas for the last couple of months, and that surely this has to have some sort of ill effect on the marine life who, I’d be willing to bet, no doubt find 100 plus, Limca, Thums Up etc as foul as I do.

Don’t let the can fool you, 100 Plus is disgusting. I guess if someone can convince themselves that soda and sport are a logical combination, or that soda can be ‘good for you’, they can probably convince themselves that 100 Plus doesn’t taste worse than almost anything they’ve ever drunk, but I hate sport and I hate 100 plus.

4/100

-LC

Available at Minh Phat, Richmond.

IRN BRU

Pronounced ‘Iron Brew’, big in Scotland where it was originally produced as an alternate to beer for the nation’s steelworkers. Funnily enough, IRN BRU now enjoys a reputation as the hangover drink of choice in its country of origin, so I guess IRN BRU and alcohol have to a certain extent kissed and made up.

On cracking the can, you are greeted with a Delicious bubble-gum-esque smell. The colour is somewhere between Fanta and brown cream-soda, leaning towards the Fanta side of things, which is inconsistent with the smell and kind of confusing. The soda is very, very fizzy.

The tagline “Unique Blend of Mixed fruit Flavours” coupled with the athletic-looking can design had me prepared for a Mountain Dew meets Gatorade type drink. The very minimal/watery aftertaste had me at first struggling to put my finger on just what IRN BRU tasted like. I guess it’s mainly orange-based, with a slightly Mountain Dew-esque ‘unspecified citrus flavour’ element to it, and a creaminess that’s not quite vanilla, but is very light and kind of tastes like a weak banana flavour- I think this is the bubblegum I smelled at the beginning. A fairly hard soda to describe, while it does have elements of a number of other flavours/sodas it’s pretty unique I guess. Not amazing, fairly refreshing and not thick at all (which I was somehow expecting it to be, I think because of the energy drink-ish can).

While there is no immediate aftertaste, the IRN BRU did leave a taste in my mouth that I noticed a minute or so after finishing a can, nothing terrible, just a reminder that I’d recently consumed a soda and that this soda was vaguely orange-flavoured.

Strangely enough, the bubbles I can see sitting in the soda while in the glass don’t seem to be making it to my mouth- it’s as if somehow they’re managing to escape between somewhere between leaving the glass and entering my mouth, the drink seems almost flat until after it is swallowed, when a bubble or two that were too slow to escape, make one final last-ditch effort to exit my mouth, resulting in a tiny bit of ‘after-fizz’ just after swallowing. Fairly strange and frustrating, I can see the bubbles sitting right there, I’ve never experienced this sensation before.

Apparently caffeinated but my can didn’t say so?

I can’t decide where I stand on IRN BRU. It’s fairly light and refreshing which is almost always a positive thing, and the flavour is fairly unique if not overly exciting. The weird sensation with the bubbles/fizz is kind of off-putting. I feel like IRN BRU is something that everyone just has to try for themselves to see whether or not they like it. Although I’ve given it a fairly low score, I’ll probably give IRN-BRU another try sometime soon.

63/100

-LC

Available at Leo's Fine Food and Wine, Kew.

Crush Orange

The bottle is a beautiful dark amber in colour, shaped like a rocketship or a building out of The Jetsons or something- retro-futuristic, very very nice. Sadly the tacky Crush logo is slapped right in the middle, almost but not quite ruining the rest. Like Thums up, Limca, EGB, and possibly a bunch of others, this bottle is Indian in origin and of the ‘drink and return’-type. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, from what I understand once the soda is drunk the bottle is returned to where it was purchased to be sent back to the company, where it is cleaned and refilled. Often the bottle will show evidence of multiple uses in the form of scuffs etc, pretty cool. I always feel bad after drinking one of these and having nowhere to return it to. Yes I recycle it, but that’s nothing compared to the kind of recycling that it would have in store for it if consumed in India- while here it will be washed, melted down with a bunch of other glass bottles and other assorted rubbish and turned into god knows what post-consumer piece of garbage, in its homeland it would be washed, refilled, recapped and put straight back onto the shelf.

The soda itself is very orange, Fanta-coloured I guess, and smells pretty similar. Pleasantly fizzy. The taste surprised me- I was expecting to write a sentence-long review that either said ‘tastes like Fanta’ (thus awarding the drink a score somewhere between 60 and 70) or ‘tastes like Pakola Orange’ (giving the drink 7 or even a zero for the added lack of originality)- Crush Orange, however, sits somewhere in the middle of those too, although thankfully more like Fanta than Pakola Orange.

The initial taste of the drink is fairly flat and a leaning towards that of an orange sports drink (though heavily carbonated) or cheap supermarket orange soda, however the sweet lemony aftertaste (which kicks in pretty quickly, depending on how fast you swallow) is delicious, and saves the drink from being yet another sub-par entry to the orange soda market (which, to be honest, has got to be nearing saturation point). The aftertaste is slightly bitter, which is a negative in this case, and in most cases in fact. A bottle-full disappeared pretty quickly, I didn’t moan with pleasure after every mouthful but it went down pretty smooth and was refreshing and light.

Overall not too bad, I wouldn’t go seeking it out but if you stumble across it somewhere (and that somewhere doesn’t sell Pakola Ice Cream Soda) then by all means give it a go.

Post-review research led me to discover that Crush do a bunch of other flavours including, aside from more the traditional ones, blue raspberry, chocolate(!!), ‘fruity red’, sour peach, strawberries and cream, wild cherry and loads of other flavours. Expect to see more from Crush on these pages very soon.

58/100

-LC

Available at Hayat Hypermarket, Brunswick.

Pakola Orange

Pakola Cream Soda is probably my favourite soda of all time. See elsewhere on this blog for a full review, but basically it’s a delicious blending of traditional Cream Soda with the floral taste of rose water, a really really great soda.

This offering, however, shares little with Pakola Cream Soda, and aside from a pleasant level of fizz I can find nothing to recommend Pakola Orange, a huge disappointment.

The smell of the soda is strong, like orange medicine. The can is very orange, and the soda is the same colour. The soda tastes a lot like how it smells, pretty much just a strong, sickly orange-flavour, more in line with medicine/multi-vitamins than other orange drinks. The texture is similarly unappealing, slightly gritty, like powdered sports-drink. Not only is the taste of the drink disgusting, but it leaves a gross feeling on the tongue. The aftertaste lasts for far too long, although to be honest the taste is so bad that every moment it sticks around after swallowing is pure agony.

I only finished a third of the can, and would’ve drunk even less if I hadn’t been planning on reviewing it.

7/100

-LC

Available at Hayat Hypermarket, Brunswick.