I first heard about Mary Jane's Soda online, as a part of the relaxing drinks trend, obviously using the name to relate it's properties to something like a weed soda, even though it contains no marijuana. It's made by The Relaxing Company, which also makes a relaxing tea. Both drinks contain kava extract as the active ingredient. Click "read more" for the full review.

Mary Jane's Soda tastes like a weak cola. it's got a little bit of carbonation, and is sweet like a typical brown soda. As for unique flavors, it tastes a little bit herbal or flowery, maybe similar to china cola or thums up. Based on taste alone, it's a respectable soda but nothing special.

I first drank one at 8:30pm, didn't feel much in the way of relaxation. Drank another at 9:30, and still didn't feel anything, or didn't think so. Since two was the limit on the bottle, I figured it would be enough to feel some kind of effect, so I waited a while. I read online that the effects sometimes take half an hour to take effect, which is why I waited so long in between bottles. If there was any effect after the 2nd bottle, it was indistinguishable from what could have been a placebo effect or me just being a little tired. At 11:00 I went for a third bottle in the name of science. After the third, I could feel some slight tingling sensation, and a very tiny bit of a "heavy arms" feeling, but only when I stayed perfectly still. It was so slight that if I moved or walked around, the feeling was completely gone. I can't honestly say that it felt relaxing at all though, but then again, I wasn't particularly stressed out to begin with either. After going to bed at around 1:00, I had trouble sleeping, but I can't attribute that to the drink either - it could easily just be my overactive mind. I can only safely say that Mary Jane's Soda didn't help me sleep better than usual.

There is one factor that may have interrupted the experiment - I ate a big bowl of noodles for dinner before drinking the soda. The website says to try it on an empty stomach. So, experiment two will be to drink it faster without any food beforehand to see if I can achieve some sort of significant relaxing effect.

Update: I decided to go all the way to test if there was any sort of effect whatsoever, so I drank the remaining bottles (don't try this at home), which was about 6 and I can conclusively say that it doesn't have any significant relaxing effect. If you are looking for a drink that does have noticeable relaxing effects, try Kava Kwik.

Cascal was one of the first booths that caught my eye at the 2010 Boston vegetarian festival. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I know of many non-vegetarian drinks (unless you count drinks made with eggs or milk), but that's beside the point. The Cascal booth was one of the largest, and they were giving away samples of what they called soda, but described like wine.

The people at the booth were using words like "dry, with hints of black currant, " so naturally I was intrigued. They have 5 flavors, which are very different from each other. Overall though, they're lightly fermented, and not too sweet like most sodas. I tried the white, then the brown, then the red (they don't have names, just colors).

The Crisp White is really light and refreshing. The flavor is hard to describe, like fruit juice, but with hints of kombucha. While kombucha is really harsh though, the Cascal isn't harsh at all. The Cascal Fine Dark reminded me a little of kvas, so there must be a similar fermentation process going on there. I like all of these naturally fermented drinks, almost as much as I like real beer.

While I'm not 100% sold on Cascal being compared on par to beer and wine, it does definitely have more complex flavors than pretty much any other sodas I know of. The naturally fermented taste might not be for everyone, but I like it.

Most of the drink reviews on this site are from outside the US, by small companies or even hand-made. But large companies create new drinks with interesting and unique flavors all the time to keep their product line fresh.

I've been doing some traveling and just recently got back to the states, which is why I might not have seen Mountain Dew Voltage before. It's part of Mountain Dew's Dewmocracy movement, where Dew drinkers vote on the flavors they want. Voltage was released in 2008, and is "Charged with Raspberry Citrus Flavor and Ginseng."

To me, it tastes like the standard blue raspberry flavor that I'm used to in candy. There are hints of citrus and ginseng though, which makes the flavor more balanced, downplaying the sweetness a little bit. But who are we kidding here? It's still Mountain Dew and it's super sweet. Overall though, I think it's an OK flavor. It's not better than the original, but I would drink it again.

At the time of this writing, the next Dewmocracy edition Mountain Dew to be released is called White Out. I'll do a review of that if I can get my hands on some.

The first time I saw someone drinking this was with hotpot in Beijing, but it wasn't until I was in a smaller Chinese city outside of the capital that I got a chance to try it. I was walking home late at night, saw it, and bought it on a whim. I was expecting it to be 3 or 4 kuai, the normal price for drinks, especially since I'm a foreigner. But it turned out to be only 1 kuai - that's about 14 cents US.

I tried black currant juice before, which is awesome, so I thought I would like black currant soda too. It smells like dark fruit punch, has a weird berry-fruit punch flavor, and is really fizzy. But there's another side to the story. It has a really chemically taste and a weird minty flavor like toothpaste that lasts in your mouth creating a really bad berry minty flavor combo. I guess you get what you pay for.

This is another milky creamy soft drink from Korea. It's basically Coca-Cola's version of milkis, it tastes pretty much exactly the same and is really good. Mmm who would've thought milk soda would be so tasty?

When I was a kid, I would mix milk with coke and other sodas, to make a kind of cream soda / melted ice cream float kind of drink. It was good, but you had to drink it fast because as I found out, soda and milk don't mix. To prove me wrong, someone finally figured out how to mix milk and soda, and they called it Milkis.

Milkis is a milk soda from Korea made by Lotte described on the label as "New feeling of soda beverage." Milkis tastes a lot like cream soda or Sprite mixed with cream. And even though it's not alcoholic, it tastes kindof like the milk beer I had in Beijing. It's really refreshing, cooling taste. Maybe it also tastes like a melted slushy. Whatever the milky taste reminds you of, I recommend it.

Here's a new weird combination that turns out to be really good. It's bubbly cherry iced tea, called TOT 苏打红茶 suda hong cha (Iced Tea Soda).

On first taste, it's almost like the tea flavor is hidden behind the bubbles, and you feel like you're drinking seltzer water. The tea and cherry flavor is subtle and actually pretty good. I'm not a fan of most bottled iced teas like brisk, but this one is different. It's got a lighter flavor and is not so overpoweringly sweet or artificial tasting as other ones I've tried.

Even weirder than the drink itself is the TOT Iced Tea Soda Commercial (I apologize, that this video might not be available outside China without a proxy). I'm not sure how this sells the drink at all, but here's a recap of the commercial:

It's pronounced T-O-T

Guy: "Why are you going to college all the way in Beijing? You know my test scores aren't high enough to go there with you!"

Four Years Later....

Girl: "Iced Tea Soda, please"

Guy sees her ordering the drink, gets all teary-eyed

Girl sees him, nods slightly

Next thing we know, they're happily ever after, but noone has even drank any of the tea

Obviously, this is marketing at its best. The commercial has nothing to do with TOT or iced tea, or even drinks in general. It suggests that if you buy an iced tea soda at a grocery store, you will find your long lost love. You don't even have to drink it! Unfortunately that didn't happen to me today when I bought mine. Maybe I'll have better luck next time.

Despite the name, this is just your standard lemon-lime soda. It's not a cider at all. What a let-down. It does taste allright  even though it was nothing like what I expected.

Manzana is a soda with a strange orange color for something that supposedly tastes like apple. The name "Manzana" means apple in spanish, and there aren't really any other identifying clues on the bottle besides a cap which has the logo of RC Cola on it and a quote on the side saying "100% Ecuatoriana."

This mystery manzana drink smells a little bit like non-sour "green apple flavor." It's not at all like real apple though, and barely at all even like that fake apple flavor. It's got even a slight tinge of orange flavor, but it really just tastes like pure chemical artificial flavoring similar to a slush puppie or sno-cone.

Ecuadorian Manzana reminds me of apple jacks, which are also orange and taste nothing like apple. Hey, I guess you can ignore the label and drink what you like, but I'll probably be drinking something else.

I heard a lot about Thums Up from my Indian friends all throughout college, but never got a chance to try it until I recently found it in an Indian food specialty shop. After hearing so much praise, I had very high expectations. It looks and tastes like a cola, but it does have a distinct taste from the likes of Coke or Pepsi. It's flavors are more like China Cola, herbal and aromatic, though sweeter and more carbonated.

It may just be my bias knowing it comes from India, but the spices and flavors in it do seem to match the profile of Indian food. According to Wikipedia, it has a taste "reminiscent of betel nut." I don't know what betel nut tastes like but for anyone who does, maybe it gives you a better idea of what I'm talking about. That being said, it is still a cola, and may just be an interesting drink as an alternative to Coke. Its interesting flavors would also make a good mix with rum for a rum and thums up.

Thums Up still comes in a glass bottle with an actual, real bottle cap that you have to use a bottle opener for. What it might lack in convenience, it makes up for in authenticity. Despite the fact that it's made by Coca-Cola, I still give this drink a thumbs up.