Sometimes Foodie: Organic Berry Lemonade- Wegman's: Cherry Hill, NJ

Organic Berry Lemonade- Wegman's: Cherry Hill, NJ

Return of the black background!

Although I typically drink water throughout the work week, I sometimes switch things up with some fruit juice or lemonade when I need a little pick me up. (Since I don't drink coffee.) I saw this item on sale at Wegman's for .99 cents, and I love strawberry lemonades, so I tossed the container into my cart. I mean, it's just a flavored lemonade lemonade, and it's organic, how could this go wrong?
The packaging is pretty colorful, but all of the font/typeface choices seem unfinished. I'm not sure if it's the font itself, or the kerning, but all of the text has that childish Comic Sans look to it, and it doesn't really work for me. Maybe a nice structured serifed font would have made a nice contract against all of the bright colors and organic illustrations? On the other hand I really like the faux watercolor look that was used for the illustrations, and the layout works well, but those typefaces just aren't doing it for me.

I gently shook the container, to make sure everything was mixed well, and I poured some of the liquid into a glass. The color was a lot darker than I was expecting, and this stuff smelled more like apple concentrate than anything else. Wasn't this supposed to be a berry lemonade? Why is there such a strong apple scent?

I took a sip, and the first thing I noticed was how bitter and tart this lemonade was. I tend to like my lemonades on the tart side, but this was more of a citric acid or concentrated sour flavoring than the natural tang that comes from real lemons. After the shock from the initial bitterness wore off it seemed like this was more of an apple and lemonade mixture than any recognizable berry. It's as if I mixed lemonade and apple juice concentrates together, but it's far more watered down than that.

I checked out the ingredients list,and grape juice was the first thing (other than water) to be listed. What? Grapes? You're not a berry (I think) what are you doing here? Next was cranberry, which explains the dry bitterness that this drink has, but what was really surprising is that apple isn't listed at all. This stuff definitely tastes and smells like apple concentrate, maybe it's in the "organic flavors" section at the very bottom, it has to be in there somewhere.

Even though this container was only .99 cents, as far as berry lemonades go, this was one of the worst I've had. I couldn't detect any berry flavoring in the lemonade itself, and was a lot drier than I ever expected a lemonade to be. I wouldn't buy this again, but if any of you are fans of tart beverages this could be something interesting to try.