Better Libations | Healthy Drink Reviews

Honest Ade in its natural element - bright friggin' desert sunshine

Hey there, Libation-loving boys and girls!  Today I’m taking advantage of the season by imbibing this new drink from Honest Ade: zero calorie lemonade!  A perfect entry for mid-July.  But don’t think that being a timely flavor is enough to get a free pass from me – regular readers will know that I’ve had many a bone to pick with bottled lemonades in the past.  In particular, anything with a “plastic lemon” concentrate-y flavor will lose big points with me.

Honest’s flavors have always been solid in the past, but this one might be a tall order.  On top of the plastic lemon problem, they only use stevia to sweeten things up.  I admire this from a health standpoint, but lemonade is a drink that traditionally requires massive amounts of sweet real sugar in order to counter the tart lemon.  I dearly want them to pull this off, but my common sense tells me not to get my hopes up…

Enough deliberation, let’s see what they’ve delivered!

Aroma: The lemon juice concentrate and extracts make for a light, pleasing lemon-fresh scent.  It does have a slight concentrate-y dullness to it, though.  It smells like a lemon, but like all bottled lemonades I’ve tried, it lacks that burst of citrus freshness that you smell right when you cut into the real thing.  (First lemonade to pull that off will get a gold star from me.)

Taste: This one’s a poser.  The stevia provides a balanced sense of sweetness that is equal to the tart, astringent lemon taste.  But if you’re familiar with stevia-sweetened drinks, you know that the sense of sweetness comes out more in the aftertaste, a second or two after it hits your tongue.  Which means that you have to take the leap of faith through tart lemon-town before you can discover sweet relief.  This becomes less pronounced as you keep drinking, though, because the sweet stevia taste lingers longer than normal sugar.  Unless you’re one of those who really babies your beverages, the sweetness will still be hanging around from the last drink by the time you go back for more.

So what of the plastic lemon dilemma?  While the taste is very light, the juice in this is indeed from concentrate, and I can taste it.  It’s definitely not as bad as some, but it’s still there.

Overall, the core lemon flavor is pleasing and the light sweetness is enough to refresh, but the concentrate tinge and astringent dryness knock off a couple points.

Health Factor: Honest Tea earns some extra points from me just for the sheer audacity of producing a stevia-sweetened lemonade.  You know they’re serious about their beverage-healthification quest when they attempt to storm the sugary bastion of the lemonade market!  (I know there are at least a couple of “light” or “diet” lemonade options  out there from the big boys, but I surely wouldn’t touch any of them with a ten foot pole.)  Kudos, Honest. 

Overall Rating: 4.0 out of 5 – for an audaciously healthy lemonade.

-Danithius-

User Ratings: (3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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4-Star Reviews, Honest Tea

This infusion comes from the good people at Honest, whom we have come to adore over the years for their healthy, tasty drinks.  This line came out of the blue for me, Danithius was apparently more on the up-and-up with things going on in the world of cacao.  Cherry and chocolate is one of those beloved flavor combinations that conjure childhood memories of eating chocolate cherries until you get sick.  But this tandem of tastes goes well beyond that.  The two are sensually-charged alone, together they create something akin to a ‘flavor explosion’, but less overdone and cliche.

With all the cocoa sediment, this one really needs a good shake.  After a twist of the ‘organic’-emblazoned lid, I get the first lusty aromatic experience.  The cherry cacao scent is strong with this one, at once sharp, sweet and earthy.  A smokey scent is present, but just a hint.  The taste is sweet with a hint of the cherry tartness, and a smooth background flavor of the cacao and chickory.  One might expect this to be thick and creamy, like a chocolate milk, but it has no milk products in it.  It still has a creamy quality to it, with a smokey hint from the roasted ingredients.

It’s like eating chocolate dipped cherries in front of a fire on a moonlit night–inside of a bottle.  Only fifty calories, delicious, a sensory overload and organic/fair trade?  Yeah, that will pass our guidelines.  If this came by the quart, I would chug it straight from the bottle.  Beware chocolate lovers and those with experienced palates, this one will draw you in and leave you wanting more, like a low-calorie, amazing one-night stand.

Score: 5 out of 5. Not your average chocolate beverage, but far above average; and not bad for you.

– WiseGuise

** Danithius Review Rebuttal **

Cherry is the PERFECT flavor to round out Honest Tea’s cacao-drink trio.  The spot-on sweet cherry flavor in this bottle dances beautifully with the cocoa and roasted chicory essences.  This is the perfect flavor to introduce you to the CocoaNova line; it has the familiarity of a cherry cordial and yet feels somehow exotic as you explore the roasty richness of Honest’s cocoa blend.  Another 5.0 in my book!

User Reviews: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea fair trade, organic

Today it’s time to tackle another cacao-infused entry from Honest Tea.  I was a big fan of the Mint Cacao flavor, and I’m anxious to see how the mocha entry measures up.  I’m definitely down with coffee/cocoa combinations, though.  Really, the two flavors are practically made for each other.  The beans themselves go through a very similar process – coffee and cacao beans are both fermented, dried, and roasted in order to yield the tasty, tasty products we all know and love.  (OK, not all coffee beans are fermented.  But typically the good ones are).

Aroma: I shake up the bottle and pop the top.  The deep, heady aroma of melted dark chocolate wafts up to my nose, enticing me to take a sip right away.  I have to restrain myself in order to take another whiff, and this time I can detect the roasted coffee scent mingling pleasantly with the chocolate.   OK, enough smelling!

Taste: There are so many flavors swirling around in this drink.  It does indeed taste chocolatey, but similar to the Mint Cacao flavor, the chocolate in this a raw edge to it.  A tang, a little bite, a tinge of brightness.  That tang actually helps drive the sense of sweetness for the whole drink, aided by a little bit of organic cane sugar.  The full roasty flavor from the coffee, cocoa, and roasted chicory stays with you as the sweetness fades, leaving a warm depth of flavor to keep your tongue company.  I said before that I found my new morning drink of choice in the Mint Cacao flavor, but I’m taking that back.  This is my new morning drink of choice!  (The mint will now be my afternoon refresher of choice).  I don’t think it’s even possible to produce a more perfect morning beverage.  Until they invent a method for juicing rainbows. 

Health Factor: It still amazes me that Honest manages to get such sweetly balanced flavors out of so little sugar.  This 10 ounce bottle packs a mere 13 grams of sugar, and yet it lacks nothing for sweetness.  It has a total calorie count of 50. It passes every BL health-test that we can throw at it with flying colors. 

Overall Rating: 5.0 out of 5

-Danithius-

User Ratings: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea

Honest Tea, Ancient Mayan-Style

Hey there, fellow libation-liberation fighters!  Recently WiseGuise and I were almost giddy to find out that Honest Tea has started producing a cacao-based beverage.  No, not like a hot cocoa or a Yoo-hoo kind of deal.  This is OLD-school chocolate, the way it used to be quaffed by the ancient Mayans!

My ears have been abuzz recently with news about several companies that are putting cacao beans through a process similar to coffee beans, roasting and brewing them to create delicious and healthy choco-drinks.  I’m excited to finally dig into one!

Aroma: I shake up the bottle, pop the top, and inhale deeply.  Fresh mint and sweet chocolate are the first scents to greet me, and as I investigate further I can detect traces of the roast.  It doesn’t smell as deeply-sweet as a normal chocolate drink – it smells more fresh and slightly tangy, like a raw drink as opposed to a refined, sugary one.

Taste: Now that is something.  It is somewhere in the land between a chocolate drink, tea, and coffee.  The warm roasty flavors of the cocoa and chicory root are countered superbly by the cooling peppermint.  This drink has plenty of body and is sweetened juuuust right – definitely one of Honest Tea’s talents.  But don’t go in expecting the creamy-sweet mouthfeel that refined chocolate drinks have.  This is more of a flavorful tonic that could very well replace your daily coffee or tea if you had such a mind. 

Health Factor: This is a great way to access a lot of the antioxidant powers of dark chocolate without OD’ing on sugar.  One bottle of Honest CocoaNova has all the right measurements: 10.1 total ounces, 13 grams of sugar, and 50 calories!  And it’s all organic and fair-trade to boot.  This is the natural, healthful direction that I’d like to see all beverages strive towards. 

Rating:  5.0 out of 5 – I think I found my new morning drink of choice. 

-Danithius-

User Ratings: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea

Stare into the Apple-Jasmine Nexus...

Howdy there, Libationers!  Today I’m getting into the holiday cheer by indulging in Honest Tea’s new line of Kombucha.  (What does that have to do with Christmas?  Well, Jesus was honest, right?  And maybe he likes Kombucha, you don’t know.)

I was excited to see this new step taken by Honest Tea without really even knowing why.  I’ve tried Kombucha once or twice, and the idea of it is interesting to me.  I just didn’t fall in love.  So now it’s nice to see Honest Tea (a brand I already trust to do tea and juices right) taking on the Kombucha dragon.

Honest Kombucha’s tagline is “LIVE, ORGANIC, AND RAW”… sounds like a porno produced by Whole Foods, doesn’t it?  But it really is an interesting concept – the “live” and “raw” come from the live probiotic cultures that are used to make this stuff.  It is actually fermented by those cultures, which gives it both a tangy-sweet taste and various purported health benefits.  So enough talk, let’s crack this open!

Fragrance: Wow, this stuff smells tangy indeed.  It’s like apple juice that’s gone hard – not a bad smell, but pungent and tangy.  (And slightly fizzy).  Here goes nothin’.

Taste: Whoo! Taste bud assault!  It’s such a rush of flavors that it’s difficult to describe.  It has whiplash tang with a subtle sweetness to cushion the blow.  The fizz adds another intriguing element on top of this, making it tingle on the back of your tongue.  Or is that the live probiotic cultures?  I can detect the apple flavor, and it holds up decently well with the pungent kombucha.  The jasmine is detectable as an herbal overtone in the aftertaste.

From a health standpoint, this stuff is golden.  Real probiotic cultures, low sugar (7g per 8 oz serving, which is next to nothing), and real tea and fruit juice.  It also passes the hippie test with flying colors, due to its entirely organic and/or fair-trade ingredient list.  And as for the flavor?  Well, I’m halfway through the bottle, and I’m finding it increasingly addictive.  It’s different, but I like different.  I could really see myself trying the other flavors in the near future…

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 - uber-healthy with a unique (and increasingly addictive) flavor.

-Danithius-

User Ratings: (2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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4-Star Reviews, Honest Tea drink reviews

Yay! Another bad picture!

This may not seem like the Honest truth, but we have not intentionally gone out of our way to review so many HonestTea flavors, it just happened.  They are delicious, healthier and earned their spot on our 2008 Top 10 list.    Another one, which I received for my birthday a few months ago remained at the back of the rotation until recently.  Needing a pick-me-up on this wearisome Friday, out it came from its frigid prison.

I have always found the smell of iced teas to be pleasant, particularly freshly brewed tea.  This comes close, giving off a rich, earthy aroma hinting at the light sweetness.  A wash of chilled tea makes my tongue very happy here, the small amount of sugar keeps from covering up the taste of the tea, but also adds sweetness and cancels the bitterness of the tea leaves.  The lemon is faint, but adds a touch of sour to even out the taste-bud barrage.  This is about as good as it gets coming out of a bottle.

The 16.9 oz tea contains only 85 calories and 22 g of sugar.  For those of you counting, that’s much less than the 39 in 12 oz of Coke, and far less that the 48 g in a 12 oz can of Lipton Brisk Iced Tea.  And it tastes much better.  And for less than two dollars?  If you like iced tea but hate the loads of sugar, this is for you.

Score: 5 out of 5. Hits the spot, and the mark.

– WiseGuise

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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea drink reviews, organic

Hey there, Libationers!  Sorry for our abscence, but WiseGuise and I were attending a prestigious international black-tie beverage gala.  What, you’ve never heard of such a thing?  Well obviously they have to be held with the utmost secrecy – those damn paparazzi would have a field day if they knew about it!

Now it’s time for another entry from Honest Tea.  This sultry bottle of Citrus Spice Decaf caught my eye from the top shelf at the grocery store, and I knew then and there I had to have it!  Sweet citrus and savory spices combined with decaffinated black tea – just looking at it made me all warm and fuzzy.

Aroma – I crack it open and am met with the deep savory smell of cinnamon and cloves with hints of the orange and black tea background.

Taste – The complex splash of orange spice flavor is quickly overpowered by the bitterness of the black tea (or possibly some of the spices).  That bitterness short-circuits my tongue’s flavor receptors for a couple seconds, and then it slowly yields to the longer-lasting clove, cinnamon, and cardamom tastes.  There is a ton of spice in this bottle – you can actually see large bits of it floating everywhere within the glass bottle.

Have you ever tasted straight cinnamon or clove powder?  Sure, they smell great, but if you eat them straight, you’re in for a bitter, nasty surprise.  The sheer amount of spice in this bottle plus the natural bitterness of black tea make for quite a wallop.  Combine that with the overall lack of sugar content (a miniscule 5g per 8oz serving), and you have one seriously bitter brew.  If you like your coffee, tea, and liquor straight up, then you could probably handle it.  If you’re one of those pansies like me who wants a little cream and sugar, you should probably stick with the “just a tad sweet” entries.

To Honest Tea, I would recommend either more sugar to compensate for the bitter flavor, or the addition of other flavors to minimize (or at least compete with) the bitterness.  I know it’s weird to have a healthy drink blog ask for more sugar, but you must remember, we’re all about the perfect combination of health and flavor.

Rating: 2.5/5 – a solid premise, but just too bitter on delivery.

-Danithius-

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2-Star Reviews, Honest Tea drink reviews

Hey ladies and gents, today we have another contender from Honest Ade ready to strut its stuff.  As you can see from the other Honest Tea/Honest Ade reviews, both WiseGuise and I appreciate their efforts toward low-sugar, natural, and eco-friendly beverages.

**Quick rant about Honest Tea**  I think Honest Tea is a great vehicle to deliver the message of “low sugar does not equal low flavor” to the mainstream.  The problem with so many natural, organic, and low-sugar products is that their flavor just plain sucks.  I can understand why a lot of people have grown wary of the “organic” label, or anything that looks like it could be found in a health food store.  People are afraid it will taste bland.  And there’s always the fear that organic products will beat you about the head with environmental messages like so many patchouli-scented hippie sticks, until you are finally forced to join PETA or move to a commune or something.

But Honest Tea handles both of these problems very gracefully.  For one, they have a wide array of solid low-sugar flavors that I believe can wean even hard-core syrup addicts off the Coke bottle.  And second, they handle their organic ingredients and eco-friendly message in a completely non-threatening and un-hippie-fied manner.  Honest Tea’s packaging looks right at home in any drink aisle, anywhere from Whole Foods to your local 7-11.  This is why I’m excited about Honest Tea.  I think they have the power to bring the message of drinking healthy to the masses.  **Rant Complete**

This entry has a nice tangy tropical orange-drink smell to it – not as intense as a 100% juice, of course, but potent nonetheless.  It has a pleasantly mild citrus flavor with slight hints of mango.  Again, I’m impressed at the amount of sweetness they were able to get out of only 12g of sugar per serving.  It is light and refreshing, and definitely chuggable.

I enjoy this flavor, but it lacks the potent punch, the wow factor from some of the other Honest Ades.  It needs a stronger twist of orange or kick of mango – something to really make me jump up and take notice.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for the syrupy-sweet flavor of a 100% orange juice here.  But I think Honest Tea can coax out some more interesting subtleties of the orange-mango combo.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars – a solid, chuggable, natural entry by Honest Tea.

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4-Star Reviews, Honest Tea, Rants

This Honest Tea was donated to our cause by a reader and friend of the BL team, to help expand our catalog of Honest beverages.  Much appreciated.

Now, I feel some trepidation when I see a mild flavor like white tea mixed a much stronger flavor like pomegranate, since it could invariably overwhelm the weaker flavor.  But Honest really seems to know what they’re doing when it comes to flavor mixing.  The pom is toned down enough to let the tea shine through, in both scent and taste.  The acai even peek out from behind the pomegranate, coming with a very mild sweetness after the major flavors play their roles and exit stage down.

At first the 20 g of sugar didn’t seem to lend enough sweetness to the tea until I got a few mouthfuls into the bottle.  It built up a little, and became just right for this flavor blend.  There’s also only 1/8th the caffeine as a cup of coffee, for those watching their intake.  This beverage was a welcome reminder of why I like tea so much, and why I will continue to buy Honest Tea.

Score: 5 out of 5. Mildly sweet with a perfect flavor combination.

– WiseGuise

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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea drink reviews, organic, white tea

Now it’s time to break out a contender that I’ve had rolling around in my fridge for a while now – something from our buddies over at Honest Tea.  That’s right, it’s superfruit punch!  With… yumberry??  Oh come on now, Honest Tea, did you just make that up?  Yumberry? It sounds like the name of some sugary breakfast cereal.  But I digress.

This punchy concoction smells like tart berries but tastes surprisingly sweet, especially considering there are only 24 grams of sugar in this whole 17 oz. bottle.  (Remember kids, a 12-oz can of Coca-Cola boasts about 39 grams all by itself).  This drink commands a perfectly balanced sweet-tart flavor, with exotic hints of the Asian berry extracts.  It is extremely easy to drink – it’s only been a couple minutes since I cracked this open, and already I’m down to the last ounce, wishing I had more.

This is simply a stellar beverage.  It embodies everything that we seek after in healthy drinks – remarkable flavor, low sugar, real natural ingredients, and a mind on the environment, to boot.  Got some money?  Go buy this.

Rating – 5.0 out of 5

-Danithius-

User Reviews: (3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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5-Star Reviews, Honest Tea drink reviews