October 22, 2005

Sam Hughes Reviews: Jones Candy Corn Soda

In celebration of my favorite holiday, the Jones Soda company has released four limited edition Halloween sodas sold exclusively through Target. The four flavors here are Candy Corn, Caramel Apple, Strawberry Slime, and Scary Berry Lemonade. Since the last two are just lame remakes of old Jones favorites and the first two are obviously super exciting, I drank the latter sodas first. Unfortunately I had time only to review the candy corn soda.
The packaging hardly differs between all of the cans as each features the classic outline of a Jack O’ Lantern with slightly altered shapes and colors. This strays from Jones’ strategy of packaging as they usually have fan taken photographs on the front of their cans. I can understand this in terms of Halloween packaging though. You don’t want pictures of somebody’s kids sacrificing a goat on a pentagram or a picture of some dude’s wife pleasuring herself with the cross. Despite the fact these are traditional Halloween activities, I’m not sure if the public is quite ready to see them on a soda can. Either way, the packaging gets a solid overall mark.
I opened up the candy corn soda, and boy oh boy is it a doozy! I was filling up my car with antifreeze the other day and I’ll be damned if that liquid isn’t a distant cousin of this soda. This shit looks so bright yellow and radioactive that you’d think you could pour it on four regular turtles and they would turn into wisecracking crime fighters. (PS: Don’t try this. It just pisses the turtles off and makes them smell like candy corn, and it will get you kicked out of the pet store.)
To do a proper taste test, I thought of nothing better than to buy actual candy corn to eat right before and after drinking to really see if we’ve got an accurate soda. So I took a bite of a candy corn, okay, feeling sick. Then I took a swig of the soda, all right, feeling sicker. Then just for kicks and sadomasochistic pleasure I threw in a few pieces of candy corn into the soda. To be honest, I felt a little naughty (and physically ill) after that, but I was sure as hell enjoying myself at the time! It’s as if I fed some bacon to a pig and then made that pig into bacon again and ate some bacon made from that pig. The soda isn’t perfect, but it does a pretty decent job of tasting like candy corn. The bonus points for this soda tasting relatively like candy corn is the vomit factor. If you can eat a bag of candy corn or drink more than eight ounces of this shit (or even, better, do both!) then you truly have an iron stomach and I’d like to see what you could do against Kobayashi at the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. However, if you don’t, there are no losers here because if you vomit it up, it would look awesome. You could puke all over someone’s room and they probably wouldn’t care because they would now have the only glow-in-the-dark room on campus. Truth be told, this soda is disgusting to drink, but I’m extremely glad that it exists. Jones could come out with Birth Fluid soda next year and I’d buy it in a second to at least know what their interpretation of birth fluid flavor was. To sum it up in a few words: taste doesn’t win here with this soda, but fun experimentation does. I can’t drink experimentation though (at least not yet), so this gets poor marks.

3.5/10.

PS: If you have a soda or beverage that you think is worthy of review, tell me about it! I’ll try almost anything!*

*no gay stuff.

3 comments:

RD said...

Sam!

3 quick suggestions since you requested some:

1. Tropicana Peach Orchard Punch. It's a classic case of quantity over quality. I drink insane amounts of it at home because it's a dollar a carton at the local Walmart. I actually find that it tastes better if you drink it from the carton...

2. Republic of Tea's Cedarberg Organic Red Tea (rooibos). Not sure if you're a tea drinker or not, but I'd be interested in what you'd make of this stuff. I used to drink it every morning at work as an alternative to coffee and co-workers told me it smelled like dirt. No sugar or milk, though. That's cheating.

3. Smoothie King's Green Tea Tango. The fact that you are drinking something that is that particular shade of green and that particular consistancy is extremely unnerving. That's all I'm saying.

I've also recently discovered how to consistantly get free smoothies in the DC area so I'm pretty happy about that. Not quite as thrilling as what you folks call grifting, but equally rewarding.

I'm cheering you all on through the magic of the internet and also in the dream world! Take care!

Anonymous said...

omigod so THIS is what i've been missing! all i have to say here is: IRN BRU!
yes.

Anonymous said...

Come back to Scotland and I will personally buy you all a can of Irn Bru to review.