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.

I've never heard of chocolate tea before seeing this bottle in a local deli in New York, but since Rob says it's "really good," I  figured it was worth a taste. It actually tastes good, but not much like tea. The chocolate tea is weird because it has the consistency of iced tea, but has a full chocolate flavor. As you would expect, it's sweet  in the way that a chocolate-flavored drink should be. If you see this in a store and you like chocolate, since even though the name sounds weird, it doesn't taste much like tea at all.

It also has an interesting feel-good self-help mantra on the side in case you're feeling motivational when you drink it.

Ozeki Nigori unfiltered sake was introduced to me by my Dad at his favorite sushi restaurant, Johnny's Peking Tokyo. This unfiltered sake is white, and they serve it with cucumber shreds in the glass. It is very smooth, milky, and a little sweet. It does taste similar to clear filtered sake, if you've ever had a good (cold) sake. I even think there's a slight hint of banana flavor. If your only experience with Japanese rice wine is sake bombs, this is not at all the same drink. Forget your preconceived notions of sake, try Ozeki Nigori and I think you will like it.

I tried this mangosteen juice at a Vietnamese sandwich stand near New York's China Town. Mangosteen is easily one of my favorite fruits. It's flavor is so unique it's hard to pinpoint, but it's creamy, cool, & refreshing. The juice is good, sweet and a little bit like pear juice. The only complaints I have is that it's a little too sweet, and it really can't compare to fresh mangosteen.

This is another find from the Vegetarian Festival in Boston. My friends dragged me over to the booth where they were handing out samples, "It's sooo good. You have to try this one." The rest of the drinks from this company, Ajmera Innovations, were good but not really that interesting. The saffron pistachio flavor really stood out as a unique flavor combination, especially for a drink.

The milkshake drink comes in powder form, and says to add milk, but I think they added soymilk to keep it vegan. It's got the texture of a liquidy smoothie, but with small chunks of nuts in it. It has a unique spicy flavor that comes out slowly on the back of your tongue. It starts off as a mild warming sensation, but then makes itself known after a few sips.

If you want an interesting flavored drink, I would definitely try this saffron pistachio milkshake mix. Their website says it's based on an Indian drink called Thandai, and that it can also be used to make ice cream. If you're an ice cream wizard, you should buy this just to make ice cream with it, then send me some. I'm sure it would be delicious.

Hemp is being touted as the miracle plant, and it seems you can make anything out of it, so why not milk? While I have tried hemp seed drinks before, Hemp Bliss is completely and totally different. It's white and has a skim milk-like texture, very thin. The original flavor has a slight grassy flavor, but is very mild. It reminds me somewhat of an oatmeal drink because they're both milky but you can still tell they're made from plants.

I also tried the vanilla flavor, which was a bit thicker than the original hemp milk flavor. The vanilla wasn't very strong, but it was enough to cover up the grassiness. Most people would probably prefer the vanilla over original Hemp Bliss. The chocolate was empty when I got there, so unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try it.

Hemp Bliss is made by Manitoba Harvest, and it's certified organic.

I tried Hemp Bliss at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. I'm not a vegetarian myself, so I was a little skeptical to go and eat dried seaweed and meat substitutes, but the food & drinks and the festival in general ended up being completely awesome. There were only one or two things I didn't like, and the rest were on par or better than the food I eat all the time. This hempmilk was one of my favorite drinks there, but among the mixed fruit juices and wheat grass, there were some other interesting beverages up for tasting as well: Saffron pistachio milkshake mix, Cas Cal fermented sodas, and Sambazon acai juice.

Quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is all the craze in the health food markets recently. It's a South American grain that was called the "Mother Grain" by ancient Incas, and used to be more valuable than gold. These days it's still expensive, but usually cooked similar to rice, or made into a pasta. It's incredibly healthy for you, and tastes pretty good too. That is, until somebody decided to make a drink out of it.

In the store there were two flavor options, both made by Quinoa Gold: Pina Colada, and Dark Berry. Now, I'm not sure what a "dark berry" is, or if that's even a real fruit, but it looked slightly more appetizing than the pale yellow pina colada. I would have much rather tried a "plain" or "original flavor." Already, I'm nervous to open it, because I can see little grain pieces suspended in what looks like a goo.

The smell is pretty bad, but not much different than I expected since I've eaten quinoa before. Imagine a blend of cooked wheat and rice, blended together in water. Now add to that a sickening chemically-soapy berry fruit punch flavor. Almost like a nice bottle of liquid detergent.

Getting past the smell, the first step feels like I'm drinking the blob. The good part is that it tastes better than it smells, but that doesn't say much. It's a slimy concoction, like a mix of soupy jell-o and mucous with small peices of quinoa. I really can't think of anything with that texture. The closest thing I can think of is rice porridge, but Quinoa Gold is more liquidy and it's cold. I'm not sure that the "dark berry" flavor is helping. Which, by the way, is only listed in the ingredients as "natural flavors."

The bottle claims that it is "caffeine-free energy," but I don't buy it. I don't know how someone can down a gloppy bottle of this stuff before going out and feel pumped. I think they mean to say that quinoa is a good carbohydrate. It has a low glycemic index, and any athlete will tell you that you need to eat carbohydrates for sustained energy over long periods. That doesn't give anyone the right to make a drink out of carbs and call it an energy drink.

Quinoa as a "supergrain" is fantastic and healthy when eaten alone or made into pasta, but the Quinoa drink just isn't working.

Kombucha definitely fits the bill of a strange beverage. Pronounced kom-BOO-cha, it is a sweetened tea that is fermented using a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. The fermenting process carbonates it and gives it a trace amount of alcohol. By the way, this colony of 2 billion organisms is alive and growing inside the drink! A handmade tea from China, this tea is renowned for it's health properties to "restore balance and vitality" to your body.

I picked up a few bottles of G.T.'s Kombucha Synergy, which means that it's a blend of 95% raw Kombucha and 5% fruit Juice to review. This version just tastes a bit better than GT's 100% Kombucha. I'll be reviewing the Trilogy flavor, which is raspberry, lemon, and ginger.

When you  get the bottle, it usually has the colony growing at the bottom, so you have to shake it up to get it mixed throughout. Depending on how 'young' the Kombucha is, there will be more or less of these culture strands, since they grow over time. If it's your first time trying Kombucha, I recommend getting one with not much of the culture. Since it is carbonated, don't shake it too hard because it will explode when opening it. This has happened to me.

The smell is very acidic, a lot like vinegar. It's actually almost overwhelmingly acidic, and that cancels out any other smells of the fruit juice. My first impression is that it tastes just like it smells, but also that it is extremely carbonated and sour. It creates a tingling sensation on my tongue that lasts about 5-10 seconds, and leaves an aftertaste like I just ate a slice of lemon. The raspberrry and lemon are evident in this Trilogy, and I'm guessing the ginger just gives it that extra kick of tanginess.

Some funky stuff floating around on the bottom

After about four or five sips, I'm really feeling the carbonation in my stomach and it's making me burp. The strange part is that it's oddly refreshing and I keep going back for more sips. I got lucky with this bottle because there are barely any noticeable strings of the bacteria colony, even though it looked like there was quite a bit on the bottom before I shook it. I've had other bottles with long strings throughout the bottle that are slimy and it makes the drink a little chunky, which is not something I look for in my beverages generally.

For the sake of science, I drank this whole bottle. The company actually recommends drinking only half at a time.  It was hard to get down so much of it, but I actually almost got used to the sour vinegary flavor by the end. Other than the burps and aftertaste, it left me feeling really energetic and refreshed.  It's hard to say whether it was the drink, or the idea of the drink that made me feel that way though.

The label claims that drinking Kombucha supports digestion, metabolism, immune system, anti-aging, and more. It's probiotic and, like Russian kvas, the alcohol from the fermenting process is so small at 0.5%, it's safe for everyone to drink.

The one thing I can say Kombucha would be good for is to detox once in a while. Maybe if you can find a flavor you like, since there is a large variety, you would like to drink it more often. It's worth it for the health benefits and refreshing feeling.

Bonus Kombucha video: Tina Fey does a great job of explaining it:

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

Bossa nova's acai juice has a great berry smell. It's very smooth like a good acai juice should be, and doesn't have any of the brown residue like sambazon acai juice did. The mango is not extremely noticeable, but it does give it an extra sweetness and a bit of a cooling sensation like fresh mango does. It's not bitter at all, and not really too sweet either. The mango does cut some of the acai so you don't get the rich acai flavor that i've had in other pure acai juices. This one is 88% juice, and is sweetened with organic agave nectar, which seems to be the trend these days for sweeteners since it has a relatively neutral taste and none of the bad image that might come with sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

Overall, a very good and refreshing acai juice blend. One of the best I've tasted.