New Atlas Beverage Co.» blueberry

Black Currant Juice

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:56:54 +0000

This Black Currant Juice drink comes from Connecticut, where I picked it up in a local grocery store. It's a dark juice, and very strong smell, a lot like concord grape, and similar almost to wine. The taste is very much like a dark purple grape juice. There are slight tannins, but overall it's a very smooth drink.

It only has 3 ingredients: water, black currant juice (from concentrate), and fructose. But it's only 22% juice. How can that be? I'm not sure, maybe that means it's only 22% concentrate, with the water as the majority of the other 78%. If you know how they calculate the percentage of juice, please leave a comment. Regardless, this leads me to imagine that straight-up black currant juice is probably either bitter or sour - which is why cranberry juice is usually sold as a juice blend. The water and sugar really easily cut that though if it's the case, because it's actually very good.

Black currant is a small black fruit very high in antioxidants and vitamins, including Vitamin C. It has four times the Vitamin C of oranges, and twice as many antioxidants as blueberries. I think that qualifies it as a superfruit. It comes from Europe, and is working on making a comeback in the United States where it was banned in the past because of a threat to the logging industry. It is still banned in some states.

The black currant juice I tried was made by Currant Affair. You can visit their website at www.ConnecticutCurrant.com

Chinese Wild Blueberry Juice

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:45:25 +0000

This blueberry drink comes from China, and is actually a specialty of Inner Mongolia. It's called Ye Lao Da, which roughly translates to "Very Wild." There's a long story on the label about how the wild blueberries are hand-selected from the primordial forests in the mountains.

This drink is actually more blueberries than blueberry juice. It's deep purple, and has a ton of little blueberries floating in it. These Chinese blueberries aren't exactly the same as the standard North American variety, they're a little bit bigger and look almost like small grapes.

It smells kinda like blueberry jam or blueberry syrup, but the juice is not thick or syrupy like I thought it would be. It seemed like it would be a jar of preserved blueberries, but it really is drinkable. The berries are small and not at all firm. They're so soft and break really easily when I bite on them.

Drinking it, you get about 6 per sip, and while the juice is sweet, the berries break with a hint of sourness. It's not like there are a bunch of berries at the top either; they're all the way through. They definitely didn't skimp on the blueberries. Juice here even seems like almost an afterthought.

This is almost more like a berry snack than a blueberrie drink, but the berries are so soft, you don't have to chew. You can literally drink them down if you want to. I'd imagine you'd be pretty full after drinking the whole thing. It is tasty though.