Cavalcade of Awesome

Happy October, everyone.  How crazy is it that it’s October 2008 already?  I can’t even believe it.  It’s like I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my wife back in January and seeing Meredith and McDreamy break up, have sex, get back together, stop having sex, then completely ignore each other, AGAIN, put me to sleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for 6 months.   I got some catching up to do.

Anyway, now that I’m back, get ready for some hardcore AWESOME to come flying at your eyes like Moe Howard and his index finger.  Stand back and bask in the warm glow of your monitor and let the rays of unfiltered BAD-ASS flow from it into you. No need to fear, AWESOME-tober-fest is here. That’s right, October has begun, and with it brings the first of three themed months on the Cavalcade of Awesome. I love the final three months of the year. I theme the blog for each month. October is Halloween. November is Thanksgiving, or just fall in general. December is glorious, glorious Christmas.  As you can see, I’ve done some redecorating for Halloween.  The decorations are up, what do you think?

The new blog banner up top is an homage to a specific Halloween item I will be reviewing later this month.  It’s something I’ve loved from my youth and just recently acquired thanks to eBay.  From my October blogs of LAST year I’ve been wanting to find and review the items I’m currently speaking of but was unable to find any.  I finally have them and will unleash them on you unsuspecting readers later on.  I’d do it now, but I haven’t actually written the review.  Besides, it’ll work better closer to Halloween.

Anywho, today I’m looking at Halloween sodas.  Several have been released over the years, so I thought I’d take a look at a few.  Some are old, some are new, let’s see if any made me spew.  LOL…that was so awesome that I got that to rhyme.  You may as well stop reading now because the article doesn’t get any better than that.  Seriously, that was the pinnacle of this article.  You have been warned, I can’t top that.

Still reading?  Very good, let’s get started with our first soda…

Jones Halloween Soda 2006: Berried Alive — How kick ass is the name of this soda? Jones Soda releases 6-8 Limited Edition Halloween sodas every year. It’s similar to their Jones Soda Holiday Packs. I think the goal is to take the oddest things about the holiday and make a soda out of them. Berried Alive was released for Halloween 2006 and has a fantastic name, but it’s just Jones Berry Lemonade rebranded for Halloween. In fact, Berried Alive was released as Scary Berry Lemonade the year before.  Jones gets props for the cool new name and the design of their cans. Cool graphics! The flavor is a sour tasting raspberry lemonade. Pretty good, but the sour flavoring leaves a bitter aftertaste like most other sour tasting sodas. Thankfully, the can is small so you don’t have to drink too much of it.

Jones Halloween Soda 2005: Caramel Apple — Here’s where I tend to think Jones is a sadistic S.O.B. This Jones soda was released during Halloween 2005 and it might truly be the most vile liquid I have ever poured down my gullet. Why would anyone in their right mind think this tastes good? I could brew better soda in a used prison toilet. Holy Lord Jesus, get this crap off my desk. EVIL, EVIL CAN!!!!!

Jones Halloween Soda 2007: Gruesome Grape — It’s grape soda. Yep, just grape. Soda. In a can. Very halloweeny.  It’s not even black grape (see next entry).  Jones is on autopilot at this point.

Mountain Dew Pitch Black – This is the Godfather of Halloween themed soft drinks. Originally released during Halloween 2004, this Mountain Dew brought the house against the competition during the spooky season. Today, offshoot flavors of Mountain Dew are nothing new; check out Mt Dew Livewire, Code Red, Game Fuel or the three test market flavors that were released a few months ago. You can even find a Mt Dew flavor called Baja Blast exclusively at Taco Bell. However, in 2004, the release of Mt Dew Pitch Black was akin to a sequel to Gone with the Wind (yes, I realize there was a book sequel, but it was by a different author so that doesn’t count). Pitch Black version 1 tastes awesome. The black grape flavor really enhances the Mt Dew citrus taste. This is my favorite drink of the ones listed here. Hands down, game over.  If I could, I would bathe in it.

Mountain Dew Pitch Black II — What do they say about sequels? By definition, they can never be as good?  Well, for the most part, that’s true. Pitch Black II was released for Halloween 2005 and takes the awesome taste of the original and adds a blast of sour flavoring to the mix. Not sure what the sour was for, and I’m not sure if that was necessary. The taste is still good, but the sourness gives the drink a bitter aftertaste. A good follow-up to the original, but I gotta say the original is better.

Mountain Dew Pitch Black Freeze — Pepsi announced they were not going to release a Pitch Black III for 2006…and there was no rejoicing. What they wound up doing is releasing an ICEE version of the Pitch Black franchise. ICEE has released many frozen versions of Coke and Pepsi products in store snack bars and gas stations. I found this particular flavor at a Target snack bar here in Jax. The ICEE machine is labeled Mountain Dew Pitch Black Freeze, but it’s really Pitch Black II, all frozen up and ready to assault your taste buds and give you massive brain freezes. It’s still really good, in fact, I think Pitch Black II works better as an ICEE than it did as a stand alone drink.  However, this flavor has since gone the way of its brothers.  No Pitch Black in 2007 makes it seem that Pepsi won’t be doing anything with this in the near future.  And there is still no rejoicing.

Now that we have the drinks from Halloween past out of the way, how about Halloween present? I went to Target yesterday and found the 4 new limited edition Jones Halloween sodas for 2008. Here they are.

How cool are these cans? As you can see in the earlier cans, Jones usually puts very cool Jack-O-Lantern faces on the cans but this year they went with monster characters. I absolutely am in love with these cans. The flavors are; Candy Corn (wolfman), Spooookiwi (Frankenstein), Buried Pomegranate (Dracula) and Lemon Drop Dead (mummy).  So cool.  The Candy Corn and Lemon Drop Dead flavors are re-releases as they were released previously, but the Spooookiwi and Buried Pomegranate are brand new.  So how do they taste?  Let’s see:

Buried Pomegranate – Actually pretty good. I like the taste of pomegranate anyway, so this is no surprise. Light fruity taste, and the drink looks like blood (hence Dracula on the can). Very, very good entry by Jones. One thing to note on these sodas is that they all use pure cane sugar as a sweetener which means they are not exactly diet. One of these little 8oz cans has 130 calories in it. That in and of itself is pretty scary.

Spooookiwi – Not bad. Has a very sweet, light kiwi taste. Maybe even a hint of lime, too. Not as good as the pomegranate, but it’s good. It’s not as sweet as I thought it would be, but it’s still too sweet for me.

Lemon Drop Dead – This is essentially a lemonade soda, but it’s pretty good. Nice lemon flavor, not too sweet, not too tart. I like it. Pomegranate is still the best, though.

Candy Corn – Wolfman is my favorite monster, so hopefully candy corn will be bringing it. This is the oddest flavor of the bunch, so I’m a little nervous. Let’s do this. Yikes, this might be as bad as Caramel Apple. Oh, oh sweet mary francis, WTF did they sweeten this with?! It tastes like spoiled maple syrup poured through a dirty sweat sock. That’s terrible. No candy corn I have ever eaten has tasted like that. Oh man, I may have to kill myself to get that taste out of my mouth. Anybody got any turpentine?

So that is your dose of Halloween for this week. Hope you enjoyed it. I have articles coming on books and candy in the next few weeks so stay tuned for week 2 of AWESOME-tober-fest!!!!

Peace Out!

This entry was posted on October 1, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under AWESOME-tober-fest, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda, sodapalooza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.