I don’t know where they’ve been hiding this stuff, but Jones sodas might be the best-tasting soft drinks I’ve ever had! I found some in a country gas station store out in the sticks last weekend. It was so good, I had to buy a bunch to take home to my wife. Now, as it turns out, it doesn’t look like our supermarkets carry it, so we have to go searching for a closer place to buy it.
It’s made with pure cane sugar, which means it already tastes better than the rest of the soft drinks made with corn syrup. The flavors I’ve tried are Root Beer, Berry Lemonade (it’s light blue) and Cream Soda (clear). There’s a bottle of Apple in the fridge that I haven’t got to yet. At the store, I also saw an Orange and a Grape, but I didn’t have enough hands to carry them out.
This stuff is great! Especially the Cream Soda. It has the aftertaste of cotton candy. It’s just a little bit fizzy, which is nice.
Jones is the same company that makes those narsty Thanksgiving-food-flavored drinks, too, like Mashed Potatoes & Gravy, Turkey, Stuffing, Brussels Sprouts, etc. I’m not really interested in trying those, but the “normal” flavors are worth telling people about. If you haven’t tried it, go looking until you find some!
For some reason, grocery stores in the town I lived in in South Dakota carried Jones soda a couple of years before it got popular. In the late nineties, we could get a bottle of green apple Jones soda for 50 cents at Ken’s Grocery. We used to buy several bottles and sneak them into the movie theater in the huge pockets of our JNCO jeans. One of my friends loved the cotton candy flavor, which to me tastes like a hellish combination of ass and Donny & Marie Osmond.
Now Jones is available at Starbucks, for like $2.00 a bottle. Walmart sells twelve packs for six or seven bucks. I haven’t drank a whole lot of it since I left SD, since the price is so high.
I’ve only tried one flavor–sugar-free black cherry–so I can’t attest to the superiority of the real-sugar soda over the corn-syrup kind. I did like the black cherry fine, though; it’s my third favorite soda flavor after grape and lemon-lime, and I often wish that a national soda company would make a black cherry flavor.
I saw them today in the Halloween section rather than in the soda section. The licorice ones were in 4-packs of glass bottles, but the candy corn and lemon drop ones were in tiny cans, presumably to be given out to trick-or-treating kids.
It must have been nice to get them for 50 cents. The ones I bought were $1.29 (although it’s about ten years later). My wife looked on their website, and we could order them on the web but they’re even more expensive, and there’s shipping on top of that. We plan to go to Target tomorrow evening to see what they have, then maybe Wal-Mart.
Ah, every year they have a special Thanksgiving set at Target, with flavors like mashed potatoes, turkey and gravy, brussels sprouts, or sweet corn. Every year a friend of mine buys them for me as a joke, and every year I take them to my school and have a tasting party with my students.
Even the mass vomit attack with Brussles Sprouts flavor didn’t stop the kids demanding to try them all.
My wife bought me the Christmas set last year, which is still in my fridge. Maybe I’ll finally break down and drink one tonight – it might not even still be good (I’m not a huge soda drinker!)
If you have Big Lots near you, they have larger individual cans of the main flavors (no holiday gimmicks), for either 60 or 80 cents each (I forget which). That might be a good way to sample flavors if you don’t want to spring for a larger package of cans or bottles.
Jones also makes (made? I haven’t seen it around in awhile) an energy drink of the Red Bull genre called Whoop Ass: I bought it for the awesome graphic design of the packaging, but it also turns out to be the best tasting energy drink I’ve ever had the poor judgment to imbibe!
I got the pie pack for Christmas last year, and it had pecan pie, among others. Unfortunately, I have forgotten about it until now- I wonder if it’s still good.
Try the Valentine’s Day promotional flavors, those are fantastic. Even if you don’t have a valentine, you can just drink them both, like I did.