Sometimes Foodie: Familiar, Yet Different

Canada Dry Green Tea Ginger Ale - ShopRite

Another April impulse buy. I normally don't go to ShopRite, because I'm cheap and prefer Aldi, but during the early days of home quarantine I had a hard time getting groceries delivered to the house, and my ex and his daughter were into things like Mountain Dew and Mio water enhancers, so I sewed a few masks and braved the stores to make a massive grocery run for the household.

Along with essentials, I grabbed this, and a few other random items thinking they'd be fun to review, after all I'd have so much free time at home that I could get back into blogging again...(poor, naïve, past-me had such good intentions.) Now here I am, 5 months later, fingers crossed it's good!

When opened, this stuff smells really sweet, almost syrupy-so. I can still smell the ginger ale, but there's this odd sweetness there that doesn't remind me of green tea, but it is familiar. I can't quite place it.

You know what, maybe it is green tea after all, but not in the traditional sense. This stuff smells like Arizona tall-can green tea. Which isn't a bad thing, but not really what I expected. When I first heard of the combination of green tea and ginger ale I thought it sounded so light and refreshing, but in actuality, this is anything but.

In all fairness, it's been a while since I've had normal Ginger Ale, I usually drink Ginger Beer, and the last "normal" ginger ale I tried was the Canada Dry BOLD one that turned out to be pretty weak sauce.

So maybe I was barking up the wrong flavor-tree, but I took a sip of this stuff and it tastes so sweet, and syrupy, that it almost feels wrong. Like hummingbird nectar, or something meant to be mixed with ginger beer, or tonic or something. It's not bad, but nothing I would want to drink a big glass of without any kind of mixer.

Initially, this tastes like normal, sweet, ginger ale, but the after taste is just...odd. Whatever sweetener Arizona uses for their cans is definitely in there somewhere, because this gives me an artificial honey-like flavoring that I used to love when I was younger, but now as a 33-year old lady, it just doesn't have the same appeal.

Even though this stuff claims to have all these antioxidant benefits thanks to the amount of green tea in it, I find it hard to find the tea's flavor in all this. Towards the very end, you can detect a little bit of tea, but all the ginger and sugar masks the majority of it's light and subtle flavoring.

I find myself nursing my glass for this review, and wishing I had a glass of water as a chaser. Again, that's just my personal take on this, and I don't drink all that much soda anymore so maybe I just lost my tolerance. That said, take my review with a grain of salt. If you love Arizona iced tea, you'll probably love this stuff. Me? I'm trying to figure out what I could possibly mix this with to make it more palatable for my tastes. Maybe booze? I'm not a big drinker, but this need something bold, or spicy, to cut through the syrupy sweetness.