Asha Tea Sparkling ginger lemonade: I didn’t know Asha Tea served any non-tea drinks, but they currently have a special sparkling ginger lemonade drink available only available at their Berkeley location. Ginger soda is my favorite drink, so when I saw the sign at the register for this new special, I switched my order to get it. The drink is made from a house made ginger syrup and has a pleasantly potent spicy flavor that stays with you for several minutes even after you’re done. The lemon flavor is milder and has a cooling ef... (read more) 3.5/5.0
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Arctic Ocean Orange soda: Arctic Ocean is a Chinese orange soda that has a neon-yellow color similar to Lemon Gatorade. It’s slightly less sweet than Sunkist or Fanta but has a similar underlying citrus flavor, though milder. It tastes more like tangerine to me than your typical orange soda. As you may expect, its ingredients are just high fructose corn syrup, orange juice, sugar, and water. A decent level of carbonation, with smaller bubbles than Coke soft drinks. Overall, not anything particularly out of the ordinary. 3.0/5.0
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Bickford’s Creamy soda: In hindsight, there were a few warning signs: 1) the label has “with artificial flavors” in fine print, 2) the flavor is creamy soda and not cream soda (I thought maybe it was an Australian thing), and 3) when was the last time you saw a red-colored cream soda? Turns out it’s red because of Red 40, which of course impart no actual taste to the drink (also ironically the packaging states “a century of purity”). What I got instead was an overly sweet, mediocre cream soda. It just goes to show... (read more) 2.0/5.0
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Tominga Melon Cream Soda: Purchased from Galco's in Los Angeles, this Japanese fruit soda is like a carbonated melon-flavored Calpico: intensely sweet and like a liquified starburst with its artificial fruit flavor and atomic green color. It has a slightly milky finish, with a white froth that collects at the top of the bottle. I've never had a soda like it before, and I probably don't want to have a soda like it again. 3.0/5.0
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Roxbury Mountain Maple Maple Lemon Ginger Beer: Soda from farmers market are almost always a gamble. They’re rarely labeled with nutrition facts and sometimes don’t even have an ingredients list. Yet, the mere fact that they’re only available directly from small producers is often appealing enough for me to want to try them. There was no question when I saw this intriguing combination of maple with lemon and ginger. Remarkably, the soda tastes purely of those three flavors and nothing else. The ginger is prominent and spicy, the maple add... (read more) 4.5/5.0
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Kimura Fukumaneki Soda: After having previously reviewed yuzu soda from Kimino (a 5.0!), I looked up other distributors of the fantastic beverage and came across Umami Mart in Oakland. I decided to pay it a visit to see what other tasty snacks it might sell. Umami Mart is a largely sake-focused store that sells a variety of barware and ceramics. In the back of the store is where the snacks are, with products like Japan’s famed KitKat flavors and bags of Umaibo. It’s basically a limited selection of what you can get... (read more) 2.5/5.0
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