A Scouting Trip

Much like the baseball scouts who comb the Caribbean and Central and South America for prospects, I thought I should use my time away from the office to do the same. Maybe the nearby Supermercado BM is the beverage world’s San Pedro de Macorís and lurking on its shelves is the next Tony Fernandez of the KBS drink lineup.

So let’s give an undiscovered* soda a chance to show how much pop it’s packing and figure out if it’s on its way to the show.

So step into the box, Jugazzo! Pear, and show us what you’ve got!

That’s a big swing and a miss! You know those tiny European fruit candies you sometimes get from restaurants with your bill as after-dinner mints? It’s like a whole can of that syrup, completely undiluted. Cloyingly sweet with tons of fake fruit flavour. I was done after a sip.

But let’s get a different opinion. Is there anyone out there who is a fan of Jugazzo! Pear?

I rest my case.

If I get a chance tomorrow, our last full day here, I will give another prospect a shot.

*Yes, of course I mean “undiscovered by me and not the people who live here.” I’m no Christopher Columbus.

Drink 10: Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

Hello from Costa Rica! It’s day 5 our 8 days here and I’ve been sick for three of them. Fever-y, achy, wheezy. Today I felt good enough to go on a tour of the amazing Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary but for most of that time I’ve been laid low without much energy.

Considering my symptoms, my first thought, of course, was, “Oh god, it’s malaria,” and then, “Oh god, I’ll have to drink tonic water.” Speaking as someone who has yet to come to grips with mortality, that the prospect of death seemed preferable to having my life saved by tonic water says a lot about how awful I’ve always felt tonic to be. I had to think on what to do. Subsequent investigation leads me to believe that what I actually have is the flu. I have (likely) avoided death this time, but if I want to live through malaria, perhaps I had better give tonic, contrary to my last post, another try. I don’t usually have people around when I’m writing reviews, so my options for multimedia content have been limited. This time, I had someone who could film me while I took my latest first sip. For the first half-second, it was actually pleasant. The same citrusy lilt on the nose as I leaned in for a sip. As it hits the taste buds, that continues but almost immediately it is crowded out by what tastes like a reflux of stomach juices. I’m pretty sure that’s why all tonic water labels have been assigned the colour yellow – orange for orange purple for grape, yellow for bile. Tonic is disgusting, always has been disgusting, and forever more shall be disgusting. I’ve decided to let the malaria take me next time. But is there a way to make it if not palatable then less disgusting? And with the materials we have on hand on this hillside? Let’s take a quick inventory:This might be enough to kill the flavour, or maybe I can use it as a pre-treater to get me into a state where I don’t care how disgusting the taste is. Good theories, but I think I would get in trouble if I wiped out our entire stash of rum. (Travelling to Costa Rica Pro Tip: each adult can bring in 4 litres of booze duty free. More importantly, there are duty free shops in the arrivals area of the San Jose airport that have ridiculous prices. A 4-pack of Centenario 7-yr was $36. At a store in town, one bottle was around $24. You will look like an inveterate lush to your fellow passengers, but you will be so far ahead of them you won’t care.)So rum and tonic and lime? Will that work?Ugh. No. Now it’s citrus-rum barf. But I will choke it down. Firstly because waste should be avoided and secondly because I could still catch malaria. But god I hope not.

Drink 9: Add Rinse Aid

Here is a list of foods and drinks I outright hate:

• Tonic water
• Butternut squash
• Gin
• Club sandwiches made with sliced deli turkey instead of real turkey
• Club sandwiches that are trying to be more than a club sandwich
• Ditto for shrimp cocktails, especially ones made with unethically-sourced shrimp
• Grapefruit

All of them are, to me, irredeemable. They’re trying to be better than something that’s already great, but they’re lesser versions. Here’s a list of food and drinks I absolutely adore:

• Soda water
• Acorn squash
• Vodka
• Club sandwiches that understand that the standard club sandwich cannot be improved upon
• Ditto for shrimp cocktails made with ethically-sourced shrimp
• Any other citrus

If the KBS drink selection included tonic water, I never would have started this project. That’s how much I hate it and why it’s at the top of the list. And it’s why, on a flight a few years ago, my wife held off pointing out that the flight attendant had given me tonic instead of soda until I’d taken my first sip. She wanted to see my reaction.  It’s the small joys that make life richer and I can hardly begrudge Beth’s wanting to see me do this:

https://giphy.com/embed/jDXslO4FU2XQI

via GIPHY

No tonic in the KBS fridges, but there is Fresca.

And that means grapefruit. Ugh. I’ve tried, grapefruit, I’ve tried, but I’m sorry; you and I are just never going to work. So many other people love you that I figure maybe one day I’ll acquire a taste for you. Every now and then when you’re on a fruit plate, I’ll take a slice of you. Maybe that day has finally arrived.

It hasn’t. It never will. You’re still bitter and astringent and unpleasant and why would anyone choose you over an orange? I’ve even tried a pomelo, the gateway grapefruit, and it’s just a milder form of awful.

(Unlike grapefruit, I will never wonder if I’ve acquired a taste for tonic water. I pray that the sip I had on the plane a few years ago is the last one I ever have.)

So Fresca.

I guess I have to do this.

You know what? It’s not actually that grapefruity. It’s mildly astringent and the back of your throat dries out a bit as you swallow, kind of like ginger ale does. But the bitterness is way, way lower than it is with an actual piece of grapefruit or what I imagine Ting to taste like.

…so this is interesting. In this paragraph, I originally wrote that while Fresca wasn’t that grapefruity, it also wasn’t very good. Then I was going to write about the bubbles and I wanted to take a closer look to confirm they’re pretty loose and foamy (They are.), so I poured a second can into a glass, fully intending to dump it down the drain after I looked at the bubbles, But I had a sip. And then another. And another.

You know what? Fresca is not bad. It tastes a little like 7-Up drunk from a glass that didn’t get all the dish soap rinsed off it – I think that’s the combination of aspartame and grapefruit flavour – but it’s not bad. I probably won’t get in the habit of drinking it regularly, but if it’s Fresca or dying of thirst, it looks like this ol’ buckaroo will be sticking around a little longer.

Drink 8: Blowing the Lid Off Big Ginger

My original plan of publishing one review a week seems to have been a little optimistic. At the rate I’m going, I will be finished at some point in my second year at KBS. And that’s only if the drink selection doesn’t grow. This appeared in the fridges a few weeks ago:

I might save that until the very last week, because I’m pretty sure there won’t be another update to KBS Drink Reviews after I suck back that rat poison.

So instead, an old favourite. The taste of sick days and Christmas ryes.

Seriously, is there anyone who doesn’t like this stuff? The tight, pinhead-small, almost foamy head giving way to fat, lazy bubbles. Semi-sweet and the colour of Sauternes but it’s almost like it has tannins as well, the way it leaves the back of your mouth just a little dry. (Hence the name. I’m aware.)

And just a gentle tingle of a burn from the ginger. Not ferocious and spiky like some ginger beers. More like the fuzzy side of a strip of velcro. If Canada Dry ads haven’t pummelled it into your head in the last five years that ginger ale is made of ginger, let me be the one to blow your mind: ginger ale is made of ginger. (Hence the name. Two can play this game!)

Anyway, ginger ale is lovely. Canada Dry ginger ale is the loveliest, although the rye and ginger with homemade ginger ale at Montreal’s Dominion Square Tavern is pretty nifty as well.

With the review out of the way, let me remind you that in my last review I promised that this review, “may just blow up everything you (thought you) knew about the beverage industry.” Well hold onto your hats.

Remember in All the President’s Men how the first court appearance of the Watergate burglars seems at first to be a pretty minor thing? And it was only when Bob Woodward paid a little more attention that things started to unravel?

This is a lot like that. Because buried deep in this seemingly innocuous story about Keuring Green Mountain acquiring Dr Pepper Snapple, lies information that shocked me at the time and continues to shock me today.

They. Own. It. All.

And they have since 1993, when A&W Beverages, which owned Vernors, was folded into Cadbury Schweppes, which had bought Canada Dry in 1986.

(It does occur to me that I might be the only person who didn’t know this. Some people on Reddit figured it out a while ago. But anyone I’ve told about it hasn’t know. Maybe it was so long ago we’ve all forgotten and moved on. A search of newspaper archives from 1993 has turned up nothing about the great ginger ale consolidation.)

Ginger ale, that beloved, quirky anomaly of a beverage has been dragged down to the level of the eyeglass industry and the hegemony of Luxxotica. Worse even than the oligopolistic worlds of rental cars and online booking sites.

Are Boylan and Dr. Brown ginger ale’s Warby Parker and Moscot?

I suppose in this age of relentless consolidation you couldn’t call it unexpected, a song whose final line sums up how I feel about ginger ale right now.

“I can’t believe I’ll never believe in anything again.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOL. Who cares? It’s just fucking ginger ale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I do. But only a little.

Drink #7: Not Worth the Wait

We’re back! My apologies for the extended break. A combination of work and an extended taste- and smell-desensitizing head cold has kept me away longer than I had planned. But things have cleared up a bit both for my inbox and my sinuses, so it’s time to get back to reviewing.

Choosing the next drink was easy this time. The combination of several stretches of mercilessly cold days and a head that may at one point have been 99 and 44/100% pure mucus meant I needed some sunshine and some Vitamin C. So suit up, Everfresh Orange Juice from Concentrate! You’re up to bat.

This is actually about the third time I’ve done a tasting of Everfresh Orange Juice from Concentrate. The first time, in the depths of my cold, I got almost nothing. A bunch of acidity and a little bitterness, but none of the bright, orange-ness you’d expect from orange juice.

To simulate this for yourself, try eating anything while holding your nose. It’s quite amazing how much flavour goes away when you do. In the Walmart test kitchen they had us try chocolate-covered cranberries that way. It was amazing. All texture and a bit of sweetness, which isn’t really affected by smell, but pretty much nothing else. That’s what I was dealing with.

A week and a half and many, many cans of nasal saline later, I tried again.

(I don’t know if any of the non-free WordPress plans have a side note function, but the free one doesn’t, so here’s my side note: Nasal saline spray is the best. I somehow manage to forget that until I’m so deep into a cold that I’m glad Canada now allows assisted dying. Then I joyfully blast rivers of salty relief up one nostril and out the other. And eventually my cold clears up there is no more saline spray in my head, either physically or conceptually. By writing this, hopefully I will remember that nasal irrigation is good to do well before you might catch a cold as well.   I haven’t done extensive research – maybe that’s a new blog – but this is definitely my favourite spray. I’ve tried neti pots and other ones you mix yourself but, honestly, I’m too lazy to boil the water and wait for it to cool so I don’t get brain-infecting amoebae and die, which is reported to be even worse than having a cold.)

With somewhat clearer sinuses the verdict was pretty much the same. Sour, sweet, and a little bitter. I was definitely still feeling a bit congested, so I withheld judgement.

In the meantime, I went to a breakfast presentation from a media vendor that served Minute Maid’s Simply Orange. I am not a juice drinker – in the course of this review, I have probably drunk 4 times the juice I usually drink in a year – but in the interest of research, I tried one. And it was pretty good. It had all the fruity, floral flavours my cold had made it impossible for me to pick up on. My cold, I figured, was over. Time to go back to the office and get back on that Everfresh horse!

This afternoon I popped another Everfresh Orange Juice from Concentrate open and… was my cold back? It tasted pretty much the same as it did last time. But what about the Simply Orange? It didn’t take me long to figure out that Simply Orange is (and states very boldly on its package) not from concentrate, whereas Everfresh Orange Juice from Concentrate most definitely is. So it would seem that the act of concentrating orange juice really serves to dissipate a lot of the flavours.

Did someone say concentrated orange juice? That’s reason enough to post a clip from the greatest movie ever about concentrated orange juice, isn’t it?

I should point out the title of this blog is not “Mike Rips On the KBS Drink Selection,” even though a bunch of reviews have been fairly negative. The next review I’ve got coming up will not only be positive, it may just blow up everything you (thought you) knew about the beverage industry.

Come back soon. If you dare.

Drinks #5 &#6 (but not #7): Not the Colour Correct

Welcome to the KBS Drink Reviews Christmas Special! Am I going crazy and breaking with tradition and reviewing two drinks in one post? Or am I at my desk, running out the clock on this year? Can I get this written and posted before heading out to lunch and not returning until January? The answer lies within!

My plan originally was to have a three-way tasting of all the sparkling waters available in the kitchen. Of all the excessive delights of the KBS beverage selection, having three sparkling water options really is the most delightful.

We’ve got a few San Pellegrinos.

Perrier in bottles…

And cans!

We even have French upstart Badoit, which I’ve only ever seen at airport newsstands.

Just as I was ready to put these bubblers head-to-head-to-head, I discovered that the Badoit wasn’t actually Badoit, it was colour corrects* for a neat project KBS did about a year and a half ago.

*For those who don’t work in advertising, colour corrects are the cleaned up, photogeneic versions of packages we shoot with instead of the ugly, dinged-up, cluttered things you see on shelves.

And if I have learned one thing in my life in advertising, it’s this:

If you drink a colour correct, you will never, ever live it down. 

So the Badoit was off the table. It was going to be the Ali-Frazier of the European sparkling water titans: The Troubles With the Bubbles. The Tizzy of the Fizzies. The Helter Skelter of the Selzters. (And yes, I know there’s a difference between seltzer and sparkling water.)

Perrier vs San Pellegrino. It’s on.

The first thing I notice is the size of the bubbles. Perrier’s are larger and more persistent. San Pellegrino’s are smaller and dissipate very quickly.

I would have expected the smaller bubbles in Pellegrino to make it a tighter, more tingly fizz, but that’s actually how the Perrier feels. Not surprisingly, given how long Perrier’s bubbles stick around, it’s got the longer-lasting presence in the mouth, finishing in what I can only describe as a slightly baking soda-ish finish. The Perrier really a distinct experience. I tasted both bottled and canned Perrier to confirm that it wasn’t exclusive to one format; it wasn’t. The San Pellegrino is much more like water with a few bubbles in it, which is what I prefer. San Pellegrino wins, which is good because I have a case of it at home, ready for holiday entertaining.

I was curious to find out if the baking soda sensation of the Perrier was an accurate description for what I had experienced? Was Perrier more alkaline than San Pellegrino? Baking soda has a pH of 9, so it would raise the alkalinity of plain water. Or maybe what I was tasting was a higher level of dissolved solids in the Perrier. Both seemed possible, so I did some digging online. It turns out that Perrier (pH 5.46, similar to black coffee) is actually quite a bit more acidic than San Pellegrino (pH 7.7, slightly more acidic than pure water). So I’m wrong on that count. And the Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in San Pellegrino (960 mg/l) is more than double what Perrier (475 mg/l) has. So I’m wrong on that count as well.

What can I tell you? Up is down. Down is up. Nobody knows anything and facts are meaningless. How very 2017.

It’s 11:57. I’m proofreading this for 3 minutes and then I’m off to lunch. See you in the new year.

 

Drink 4: Have you ever, like, really looked at your hand?

This week I decided to heal, not harm, my body. After last week’s high-fructose assault, it seemed like the right thing to do.

I don’t usually write these posts immediately after trying a drink. It can take a day or two for my thoughts to organize themselves and become ready to be written down. But not today. Today I’m letting the words fall where they may. I’m just going to be, man.

I just finished a mug of Organic Mother’s Little Helper from David’s Tea. Peppermint, lemongrass, hibiscus, rosehips, chamomile, cornflowers, and valerian root, which the David’s website describes as “nature’s Valium.” I’m not a mother (that I know of) but sometimes you don’t choose the drink. THE DRINK CHOOSES YOU.

It should not surprise anyone who knows me even a little that I am not really the herbal tea type. Or that I find most of the claims herbal teas make to be pretty dubious. But I am feeling this tea. Not necessarily pleasantly feeling it, though. My mind feels a little hazy.  My shoulders are relaxed and not as tense as they’ve been recently. Or maybe they’re just as tense and I just don’t care. Even my breathing feels like it’s slower and heavier. Is this what Valium feels like? Or is this the “added dose of tranquility” from the peppermint, lemongrass, and chamomile? I suspect that Organic Mother’s Little Helper, brewed a little stronger, is what they use for lethal injections.

But at the same time, I’m bouncing my knees around, probably to the annoyance of the people at the desks connected to mine. There’s no caffeine, so I can’t blame that. Or maybe it’s the caffeine from the Mexican Coke I drank at lunch. Maybe this is all some crazy interaction between the valerian and that sweet, pure cane sugar. Maybe our whole universe is just an atom in the thumbnail of a giant? And maybe his whole universe is just an atom as well? Mel Torme. Mel Torme. Meltormeltormeltormelt Or me.

Huh? Wha? I just woke up on an eastbound King streetcar, covered in little soggy bits of cornflower. I’m starting to come down and it’s not pleasant.

(In all honesty, I was feeling a little stoned for a while. In a meeting just now, I confused the words “haemorrhoids” and “steroids” and said, “instant relief for ster-morrhoids,” and then incoherently tried to correct and explain myself.

As for the taste of Organic Mother’s Little Helper, peppermint predominates, followed by lawn clippings and freshly-bagged yard waste.  The mint lingers almost as long as the tea’s way-out psychotropic effect, which is better than having a lingering taste of silage, I guess. Drunk cold, it tastes far, far worse than it does hot.  Just like LSD, once is enough for me.

Drink 3: RIP, My Pancreas

It has been a hectic last little while here at KBS. My intention was to post a new drink every week, but the business of advertising waits for no beverage blog. I actually did all the work for this over the weekend, but as momentum built up to a presentation we gave today, there was simply no time to write it up.

Decorations aside, it’s not really beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Toronto, but I figured with the temperature on Saturday at least getting near 0, it was time for my first hot drink, old favourite that I hadn’t had since forever: hot chocolate.

There will be no fond Dr Pepper-like reminiscences this week because the hot chocolate mix in the office as Carnation Rich and Creamy, not the PC Extra Creamy that was my choice some mumble-mumble-odd years ago when I was young, innocent, and my recreational beverages were more gee-whiz wholesome.

On the back of the pack it says, “A Warm Hug on a Cold Day.” It was a cold-ish day and, being at work on a Saturday, a warm hug sounded pretty good. I wasn’t interested in heating up any milk in the microwave, so, knowing it might not reach max rich-and-creaminess, I went with the hot water on hand. It mixed up impressively smoothly. None of the giant, floating powder pockets I remember having to grind against the side of the mug. Was it possible that instant hot chocolate had made some progress in the many years since I’d last had it? That hope lasted until the first sip and…

Oh god.

Sugar.

It was just sugar.

All I tasted is sweeeeeeet. I could faintly taste the cocoa flavour, but it was mostly just sugar sugar sugar.

I looked right below the “A Warm Hug on a Cold Day” to the ingredient list. First up: sugar. (Which, to be fair, is probably the first ingredient in most hot chocolate mix, as it is in PC Extra-Rich.) Next up: corn syrup. Corn syrup? They can make that into a dry powder? Someone at Carnation thought, “This isn’t sweet enough. We need to add corn syrup”? Yes, it was corn syrup that I was tasting.

Note to self: remember that flavour for later drinks. I’m sure it will reappear.

My Islets of Langerhans started hurting. This wasn’t a warm hug on a cold day; it was getting coshed with a bottle of Bee Hive. For the rest of the time I was at work, it felt like my blood was humming.

And I was disappointed. Where was my warm hug? I’d been hug-blocked by goddamn corn syrup! I was owed a hug and I needed to assemble a crack team to give it to me.

The only reason I knew to assemble this crack team was because I know where to look. When I’m cooking, there are times that I think, “There has to be a better/more reliable way to do this.” There had to be a hot chocolate powder that wouldn’t cause my teeth to melt away like Toht’s face seeing the Ark of the Covenant. So I did what more and more people are doing these days: I looked up what Kenji says.

Kenji is, properly, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. MIT Architecture Grad/Former Cook’s Illustrated Contributor/Chief Culinary Advisor at Seriouseats.com (my first stop for anything cooking-related)/Guy Who Gets To Hang Out WithEveryone I’d Like To Hang Out With/James Beard-Award-Winning Cookbook Author. I don’t want to get too fanboyish so I’ll just say this: if you want to cook better and you want to know why you do the things you do, you need to start following Kenji. If you want to learn about sous vide or pressure cookers, you need to start following Kenji. If you want meticulously tested and validated recipes and techniques and you ever want to make this (and have it turn out):

Someone’s recipe for creamed spinach in the background.

You need to follow Kenji.

So what does Kenji say about hot chocolate? This.

Everything goes into a food processor. (The corn starch helps keep the mix from caking later and adds some creaminess to the final drink.)

(That knife there? That’s a Misen. It’s a great, affordable knife.  Guess who told me about Misen?)

I should have processed it longer to break up some of those larger powder lumps.

Boil some milk.

Stir. Sip.

Slightly lumpier than Carnation, but that’s on me, not the recipe.

Is it sweet? Of course. It’s hot chocolate.

Is it good? Of course. It’s from Kenji.

 

PS I am not a hot chocolate drinker and there’s probably no way I’m using up all of the mix I made. If you work at KBS and you like hot chocolate, you’re in luck. Look for it in the 4th floor kitchen.

 

 

 

 

Drink #2 – Randy Newman and Raid

It was hard deciding what to try for Week 2. Stay in fruits and vegetables? Carbonated? Another favourite? Something I know I hate? Hot beverage? What have I gotten myself into?

­After fretting all week about it, I decided on something I like, but almost never drink: The Doctor.

It’s possible that the last time I had a non-diet version of Dr Pepper (Note the missing period; his doctorate isn’t in punctuation.) was not long after the first time I tried it. In Collingwood for March Break as a kid, everywhere at Blue Mountain was sponsored by Dr Pepper. There were free samples and “I’m a Pepper!” caps everywhere which, to a 10-ish-year-old was pretty much heaven. We may have had a sample at the end of every run.

Part of the reason for the gusto we drank it down that March was because until then, we’d only heard of Dr Pepper. The promo that week might have been part of the Canadian launch; a quick search found nothing about when Dr Pepper set up practice in Canada. But the “I’m a Pepper!” commercials were always on TV.

For years I believed that Randy Newman wrote that. There are certainly lots of websites that would have you believe that. But he didn’t, as this correction in the LA Times shows. It was actually written by Jake Holmes. The confusion arises, I think, because Randy Newman did in fact write a Dr Pepper jingle. In fact, it was one of only two songs he wrote in two and half years.

It was an earlier jingle that he wrote (with Jake Holmes).  Those jingles didn’t feature a pre-“An American Werewolf in London” David Naughton; they featured some of the greatest traditional musicians in America.

 

Dr Pepper was doing branded content before it was called branded content. They even released an album with more versions by Eubie Blake, Anita O’Day, and Grandpa Jones!

Speaking of Grandpa Jones, Mike, can you wrap up this meander through obscure 1970s soft drink jingle history and tell us what it tastes like?

Yes, yes, but first answer me this: who exactly was buying Dr Pepper in 1974 that the then 91-year-old Eubie Blake was the obvious choice for an endorsement? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s all amazing. If the creatives who worked on this had invested their cocaine money in a little startup that was also founded in 1974 instead, they’d be much better off today, but the world would be robbed of a truly wonderful artifact.

Oh right, the review.

The can claims an “Authentic Blend of 23 Flavours.” Now, just as it was back in 1980 (or so), I believe one of those 23 flavours is insecticide. Take a big whiff of a freshly-opened can of Dr Pepper. Now take a big whiff of a freshly-sprayed can of Raid. When you regain consciousness, tell me they aren’t similar. Sure there’s some cherry and maybe a little vanilla (and, supposedly, amaretto, juniper, coriander, and ginger, among others), but mostly, it’s a Raid ‘n Coke. That’s not to say I don’t like it. I really, really like it. Dr Pepper may be one of my favourite pops. And, happily, the diet version is about as close to the original as any I’ve tasted. (And don’t @ me about how artificial sweetener kills people. The nine-million daily calories I’d ingest from chugging down all the full-sugar Dr Pepper I’d have if I could would do me in faster.)

Drink #1 – Beets, Watercress… and Grape Juice?

I made a joke last week that KBS stands for “Krazy Beverage Selection.” (I immediately regretted not writing “Killer Beverage Selection,” but the sad attempt to come up with a name quickly has grown on me.) Whichever it stands for, the fact remains: this agency is lousy with things to drink.

I just went in the kitchen and counted how many different pops, juices, teas, coffees, and miscellaneous drinks are available. 58. Holy shit. That’s nuts.

I had an idea: why don’t I make it my goal to try every single one of them. My beverage FOMO had me worried that my new favourite drink might be right under my nose and I just hadn’t noticed.

Then another idea: why don’t I review every single one of them. I blather on about food and flavour so much; can I actually write about it? Join me as we find out.

I’m going to ease into this with an old favourite: V8. I love V8. I have a case of it at home right now. I cannot sip it. As soon as the can is open, it’s gone in one big swig and I swear I can feel all its vegetableness coursing through me immediately. Like if you pricked my finger a second after I put the can down, V8 would come out.

I’m resisting that urge right now so I can try to appreciate the flavour more. Unfortunately, this is the low-sodium version, so it doesn’t have the sharpness and focus of the real deal. The beets and the watercress are still there, though, and they’re what do it for me. They give it the earthy, slightly floral taste that is so very V8. But overall, the 7 non-tomato vegetables are a bit muted and it tastes a little more like plain tomato juice, a completely inferior beverage.

(Side note: if you are one of those people who likes a nice tomato juice when you’re on an airplane, be forewarned that Air Canada serves tomato “drink” not actual juice. Disappointing, I know.)

Looking at the label, it should really be called V8F1 since white grape juice concentrate is now an ingredient. I have no idea what it’s doing there and no recollection of it being an ingredient before. Then again, I time I usually spend with V8 packaging is the two seconds it takes to drain it, so it might have been there for years without my noticing.

Aha. According to the V8 website, it’s only in the Low Sodium version, perhaps to add flavour in salt’s absence? Another reason to like the original more.

Looking at the V8 website, I also see that this abomination exists:

Ugh. If Campbell’s wants to extend the line, why can’t they give us this, which is available in the US, instead?

My god. If this were available in Canada, I would hoard it like it was the Today Sponge out of fear that it might someday go away. (As it did before. My dad has told me more than once of the glorious days in maybe the early 80s when Clam V8 was available here.)

1 beverage down. 57 more to go. Still trying to decide at what frequency I should post these. Weekly I think, so on or around December 13, 2018 I will have tried all the drinks at KBS. That’s barring, of course, the possibility that other drinks get added or removed. Or that I get fired, which would make this project awkward to complete. I’d find a way, though. The awkward glares of my former coworkers would bounce right off me as I swished another sip of grape crush around in my mouth.