Aldi’s ginger beer actually tastes like ginger

Ginger ale is a good drink. Everybody likes it. It has a place in everybody’s hearts as a perfect cocktail mixer, a medicinal remedy, and a good drink in its own right. But did you know that there are multiple kinds of ginger ale? Not many people do and content themselves drinking dry ginger ale all the time. Yes, your normal Schweppes or Canada Dry is only the entry level of ginger ale! I bet you haven’t even tried a real, old-style golden ginger ale, have you? Go get yourself a can of Vernor’s and try it. We’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’re back from that ginger-induced blackout period, it’s good, right? It’s really good, and it tastes much more gingery than the Pepsi and Coke owned swill you’re used to. So imagine being someone who ACTUALLY likes the taste of ginger sodas and having to deal with only that junk on the shelves. Yeah, it’s hard. I know, it’s so, so hard. You can stop crying for us now.

But there might be hope on the horizon. Aldi has started selling their own brand of ginger beer, and since we’re dedicated Aldi shoppers, we couldn’t be more excited. Will it be the gingery kick we’ve been missing from our lives?

Mountain Dew Major Melon is the only troop worth supporting

Are Mountain Dew sommeliers a thing? Not even counting limited time ones, there are so many Mountain Dew flavors out in the world you could feasibly make a hobby out of finding Dew pairings with your favorite foods. Would Code Red fit a nice porterhouse, and White Out some salmon? What goes well with Livewire? I have a vintage Code Black II sitting in my cellar – what’s the best occasion to uncork that?

It wouldn’t be an easy job, either, because they’re coming out with new Dew flavors all the time. The latest of which is Major Melon, a “Dew charged with watermelon flavor with other natural flavors”. Watermelon is a path that Mountain Dew hasn’t gone down before. It’s actually one of our favorite flavors, so we were of course very excited to try this one out. Looks aren’t everything, though. Does Major Melon taste as strong as it look? Let’s find out.

New brew Mountain Dew VooDew Two, woohoo?

We like to drink Mountain Dew, but we’re pretty neutral on the regular Mountain Dew itself. Much more interesting is their large selection of flavors – the classics like Game Fuel, LiveWire, Code Red, and so, so many more. Plain Mountain Dew seems flat in comparison. Sure, sometimes there’s nothing you’d like more than the fresh taste of Green, but then you can just have a crisp Sprite or something. Why settle for less? Give me a glass of White Out and I’ll be happ- oh right, they discontinued White Out, and discontinued so many other limited-time flavors because we can have nothing good in the world for more than a moment.

In that vein, Pepsi has seen it fit to bring back the VooDew, the “mystery flavor” soda that was released last year for the Halloween season. With Fall somehow having come back again, VooDew has come with it as surely as the changing colors of the leaves.

The gimmick of VooDew, as we already defined, is that it is a “mystery flavor” which means it doesn’t taste like much at all. Last year it was revealed to be candy corn, an obviously Halloween flavor that is so flavorless that it probably could have been anything. What flavor could it possibly be this year??? Let’s find out!

FOOD: Burger King – Surge

Surge…

Want to impress someone who was born in the 90s? Tell them you have an unopened can of Surge at home. Surge was a somewhat popular citrus soda released from 1997 to 2003 in the United States. Intended to be a competitor to Mountain Dew, it never managed to find a solid market and was eventually discontinued. Dedicated Surge fans didn’t take this sitting down and immediately launched a dedicated campaign to have the drink returned to store shelves.

The campaign has paid off with small victories in the past (namely the introduction of Vault, which was also quickly removed from stores) but their ultimate goal was accomplished in 2015. Surge was released as an internet exclusive on Amazon, and eventually returned to store shelves. It’s since been available pretty consistently since then as a total 90s nostalgia cash-grab. We don’t know if you can still get it in cans or bottles right now, but it’s openly available at any Burger King with a Coke Freestyle machine.

Should they have bothered to bring it back? Let’s find out.

FOOD: Faygo – Rock & Rye, Old Fashioned Root Beer, Ginger Ale

Faygo is one of the strangest oddities of the soda world, perhaps because it’s one of the few sodas that has its own subculture based around it.

This peculiar soda got an early start in 1907. Two baker brothers, Ben and Perry Feigenson, had the idea to turn their cake frosting recipes into sodas. They started out with just three flavors: grape, strawberry, and fruit punch. The first batch of sodas was made in a small bottling plant in Detroit, Michigan, and they were sold off of the back of a horse cart. The sodas proved popular, and their company quickly grew into a local sensation. By the 1950s, they had re-worked the formula to give it a longer lasting shelf life, allowing Faygo to be sold across America.
It’s not unusual that the soda has such a lengthy history: Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi-Cola were all inventions of the late 19th century, and soft drinks and colas were already making a foothold in the world even before that.

Compared to those less regional brands, Faygo is well-known for being both tasty and inexpensive. Though it’s not as complex as some of the more obscure, locally-bound expensive bottled sodas, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of store-brands, which taste decent for about an hour at the most before they go unimpressively flat.
It’s because of its cheapness that the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse was keen to adopt it as their trademark, as they were too poor in their youth to afford any other brand of soda. The “Juggalos”, the term given to the most devoted of ICP fans, have turned the soda pop into a symbol as prominent as their black-and-white face paint. There are contradictory stories as for why the ICP chose Faygo as one of their trademarks, but they have been referencing Faygo in their music ever since their debut album, and there’s certainly no end in sight for their love of the drink.

Despite the group and its fanbase’s full-hearted endorsement, Faygo Beverages, Inc. wants very little to do with them. The company brands its product as a family soda, so it doesn’t have a lot to gain from associating itself with a group that’s labelled by the FBI as a gang. Although the presence of the Insane Clown Posse has turned Faygo into a minor cultural trend, Faygo itself prefers to stick by its tried-and-true marketing strategy – one that doesn’t involve insane clowns.
With this in mind, Faygo is a very region-contained soda that doesn’t have much interest in expanding outwards. Its distribution is sporadic; even though it hails from the Midwest, it can still get hair-pullingly hard to find it in nearby states.

Today we’ll be reviewing the three different varieties of Faygo that we could find: Rock & Rye, Old Fashioned Root Beer, and Ginger Ale. These are some of the more prominent flavors of Faygo available, and some of the most decorated. We looked forward to seeing if these sodas would live up to their hype.