Fanta Green Apple

Fanta is really getting out of control with their can designs. In the past I have seen graffiti monsters and alien humanoids and now with Green Apple we have William Tell (or to be historically correct it's probably his son Walter) getting an apple (green) shot off his head. The whole can is designed like a big green tree and covered in apples and rubber-tipped arrows. William (or Walter) is even wearing a green apple bowtie. Wild. The fanta logo is also inside a big green apple with a bite out of it. They have really outdone themselves this time and I love it.

The smell lives up to the hype, exactly like green apples. The taste is a little different and is more like red apples. If I had to guess I would say the taste is somewhere between Granny Smith and Fuji. Whether its red or green the soda is really delicious. It's tart and a has a little bit of a sour bite, I like my soda sour so would love some more citric acid taste.

It is light and refreshing, the way you want an apple soda and doesn't have a thick, gluggy feel like some Fanta variants. There isn't much of an aftertaste which isn't really a bad thing. A really solid apple soda that rivals Jones for me. Although this isn't such a big call to make as my Jones experience has been on a downward spiral lately, but more on that another time.

85/100

-DM

Available at Central Grocery.

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.

A&W Cream Soda

A&W cream soda is perfectly ‘ordinary’, not in the negative sense that is sometimes attached to that word but in the sense that it is near indistinguishable from many of the number of other brown cream sodas on the market. Smell-, colour-, and taste-wise there is nothing much to set it apart from the pack, but oh what a pack! Darcy’s recent post on Canada Dry cream soda ranked cream sodas according to colour, with green at the top and brown sitting a respectable second; I agree 100% with his rankings, and if I were to make a list of my own, ranking my favourite types of sodas, cream soda would probably be #1 or #2. So yes, A&W cream soda may be a fairly standard brown cream soda, but brown cream soda on the whole is of a high standard indeed, and this is a very very enjoyable soda.

With all of this in mind, there’s not too much I can say about A&W cream soda. The vanilla is extra-creamy, more so than most other brown cream sodas, which is 10 points in A&W’s favour; their use of high fructose corn syrup, that texture- and taste-ruining sugar replacement (which is apparently linked to some sketchy health concerns, although I’m yet to see conclusive proof of this. The sheer grossness of HFCS I have seen conclusively proved, however, by my own tongue and tastebuds), gets those hard-won points taken right back.

Nice aftertaste that turns slightly nasty after 5 seconds or so, but only slightly. Good level of carbonation, in fact when I first poured it into my glass it had a two-inch ‘head’ that slowly disappeared as I drained the glass of its liquid contents, I meant to take a photo but forgot, very cool. Contains caffeine, comes in an ugly can.

Overall a solid brown cream soda, nothing more, nothing less, nothing wrong with that.

70/100

-LC

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

Schweppes Cream Soda

The simple, appealing can promises a green cream soda and does not disappoint. The smell is delicious- the traditional fizzy, sweet smell of green cream soda- and brought a smile to my face, without even tasting it I knew I was going to enjoy this soda. The liquid is nearly clear with a light green tinge, a pastel green almost, great. The fizz level is perfect, a little bit above average without being over the top.

The flavour is as expected from the smell/colour/can, traditional green cream soda flavour, refreshing, fizzy and creamy, perhaps a little more subtle than some other green cream sodas. There’s a great almost sherbet-esque element to really good green cream sodas that Schweppes totally nail. For those who haven’t had the pleasure that is a glass or can or bottle of green cream soda, it tastes like a creamy lemonade with a kind of floral tang to it as well as an element of Wizz Fizz-type sherbet flavour, good stuff. Pretty much exactly like a green Fizzer, actually.

The aftertaste is quite strong, fine by me though, if Schweppes could find a way to make this flavour last forever I’d be very happy indeed. The sweetness lingers longer than the flavour and the soda suffers for it, I’d much prefer if the sweetness to flavour ratio of this soda were reversed. This also comes in a ‘zero sugar’ version; flavour- and cancer-related reservations aside I think it would be well worth a try.

A good, solid cream soda, not amazing or groundbreaking but has everything I want in a green cream soda, I have drunk it a number of times since the initial review and will continue to.

82/100

-LC

Available at Wellbeing Korean Grocery

Welch's Grape

I think you can really trust a grape company that was founded in a town called Vineland, a magical place where Welch's soda cans grow wild. Whether this is true or not (95% sure it's true) grape soda is always something I look forward to. The dark purple variety of grape isn't one that is too common in Australia with its regular green cousin holding the majority share in our supermarkets (Welch's make a delicious white grape soda too, coming soon). Welch's are pretty famous for their jams too and if they are soda-ish, I definitely want to give them a try.

The can design tells it how it is in more ways than one:

- Big purple grapes cover the whole damn thing

You know you are getting a big purple grape soda.

- They have stamped "Natural and Artificial Flavours" on the front of the can

They aren't even trying to hide that they are using artificial flavours, other soda companies just leave this off and it's assumed that unless you stamp "All Natural" on it then there will be artificial additives. Bold move Welch's.

The colour and smell are a nice strong purple grape flavour, something that I am really fond of, I think because of its minimal use in Australia. I used to like the taste better the first few times I had the drink but it doesn't appeal to me so much anymore (maybe my soda palate has evolved). It is still pretty delicious though, thick and bubblegummy. There is a bit of sourness around too which is really nice.

It's another one of these sodas that needs to be fairly cold not to feel too thick and sweet. I think this could be fixed with smaller, more bitey carbonation as compared to the big bubbles of Welch's. Overall still a delicious soda, it tastes just like that grape roll-out Hubba Bubba tape I remember from my childhood.

68/100

-DM

Available at Wellbeing Korean Grocery and Sugar Station.

Canada Dry Cream Soda

My greatest source of life information, Wikipedia, tells me that this cream soda by Canada Dry is produced in the Middle East and has limited availability in the US, UAE and Kuwait (no mention of extremely limited availability in Australia). Looking at the traffic on this blog we have had one view from Kuwait, so this ones for you. The Canada Dry logo is a horrible creation, a mapped shield with a smarmy red crown sitting on top. This design also includes Cream Soda written in a completely different text sitting below the logo like an afterthought. Another one to be filed under excessive can design, this has a heinous water drip design covering the whole thing, a lot of soda companies reallyt need better logos that they can just plonk in the middle of the can and let that stand on its own.

The smell is that of a strong brown cream soda which works for me because it ranks high on my list of cream soda types:

1. Green Cream Soda
2. Brown Cream Soda
3. Red Cream Soda
4. Yellow Cream Soda
5. Everything Else Cream Soda

The taste is just a pretty average, normal brown cream soda, pretty tasty but nothing amazing. The carbonation feels ok going in bue it hurts my stomach and is a cheap, no return ticket to burp city. This seems to be pretty typical of the cheaper, semi-rip off asian sodas.

The aftertaste fades pretty quickly which I generally think is a good feature but here it adds to the overall blandness of the soda. Later on it left a really bad taste in my throat and it makes me wonder why these really chemically sodas keep getting made when natural flavour, sugar-sweetened sodas exist. Overall it's a decent brown cream soda but nothing above average.

53/100

-DM

Available at Hayat Hypermarket, Brunswick.

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.

Daylesford & Hepburn Springs Organic Cola

I have seen this brand around only a couple of times before, generally at smaller organic-friendly cafes and the like. I picked this one up on a day trip to CERES environmental centre and my skepticism of natural spring water sodas didn't give me high hopes. The cola itself is a really dark black and has that typical kola nut cola smell.

It's taste at first is like a slightly bitter version of Phoenix Cola. It has a crazy amount of carbonation on the way in that makes my lips buzz and tingle which is a really cool feeling. It has some really strong lemon flavour coming through that got more and more apparent the further through the bottle I got. By the end of this soda I would be pushing for this to be renamed to a Lemon Cola, the citrus undertone was that strong. It has a slight citric acid sting too which is always good.

Although this and Phoenix need a bit of work with their organic sodas I am all for supporting them and seeing what they will offer in the future because they both (sensibly) bypass HFCS and the all natural ingredients approach is always good.

I liked the soda more and more as I got further through it but I think it needs to be a bit more smooth and creamy to really make it for me. The lemon cola taste was really cool and I hope someone can nail that idea. I might just have to head down to Daylesford and pick up some patchouli oil and a few of their other flavours.

72/100

-DM

Available at CERES Brunswick East.