Mirthful's Comestibles

Well, you know. I’ll try anything once (almost, I mean, I wouldn’t try cyanide).

Nose: Suprise, it smells of ginger! And fizzy sweets.

Palate: Well, ginger, naturally. Rather pleasant than otherwise. Oddly enough, I think it’s got something of a cola flavour as well.

Comments: I guess it contains real ginger, because after only a few sips I can feel the ginger “hotness” as a lingering sensation. But it’s not unpleasant, and though it’s a bit too sweet for me on its own, I think I could quite happily use it in some sort of longdrink in the summer. But then it might be easier to just use non-alcoholic ginger beer. Especially because of the small print.

For more than 200 years Crabbies has followed a secret recipe, the steeped ginger is combined with quality ingredients and matured for 8 weeks.

Well, I can tell you something right off: They haven’t been following the exact same secret recipe for 200 years, that’s for sure. How do I know? I quote:

Contains Sulphites and contains Sugar and Sweeteners.

See that last bit there? Sweeteners? They weren’t around 200 years ago.

Word on the net says it’s aspartame, but it’s all one, I don’t do sweeteners. Haven’t you hear? They’re fattening. They also increase the risk of heart disease. I’d much rather just reduce my sugar intake, thank you very much.

So, you know… Score? Well, if you check my explanation of my scoring, I do take into account whether I’d actually want to drink the stuff again. And that leaves us, at the best, here:

4-4.5       Drinkable, but I wouldn’t pay for a(nother) dram.

But the TOTALLY UNECCESSARY additon of sweeteners in an otherwise quite appealing product actually annoys me. It really annoys me. Which means we’re around here, I think:

1-1.5       Not nice. I take it as a personal affront that someone even bottled this.

Sorry about that. Do a rethink and come back to me when you’ve come to your senses about the sweeteners and we might even reach the 6s or 7s. As it is, though:

Score: 1 out of 10

(Be glad it isn’t worse, I’m not entirely convinced aspartame doesn’t qualify as poison.)

Afripac

Well. 60 dalassis for one liter, how bad could it be?

Nose: Paint thinner. Spice, lots of it, unspecified. Varnish. More spice. Still unspecified.

Palate: Well, you wouldn’t drink it after having nosed it unless it said specifically that it was whisky. However, it tastes excactly how it smells. Is that a sign of quality? Perhaps not, when it smells like this…

Score: Uhm. 0.5 out of 10. Don’t buy this, get in touch and I’ll give you a sample…

We picked up a bottle of Prazdņičoje bezalkogoļnoje in Riga. It’s Russian bubbly, if that’s not immediately obvious. Very expensive Russian bubbly. It cost all of 0.99 lat, on special offer at Rimi – 1 lat being approximately the same as 1.25 GBP. Or thereabouts. Well nigh ruined us, in other words.

I don’t quite know what I expected, I actually dared to hope it would be kind of nice, as we drank several bottles of the Riga bubbly while there and that was – for the price (some 2 lat, mostly) – rather nice. Dryish, at least.

This, however…

Nose: Honey and lemon sherbet filling. Rasberry soda pop.

Palate: Much of the same. Though the bubbles are visibly present, they don’t make a lot of themselves in the mouth.

Comments: Much too sweet for me, and not very wine-like at all. I would certainly not serve this with children present, as it’s almost impossible to differentiate it from a non-alcholic soft drink. On the other hand, I guess I wouldn’t serve it at all. I doubt we’ll finish the bottle.