Sugar Plum

Three flavors in, and we were already starting to feel a bit sick. However, we couldn't quit just yet. Coming up was one of the more intriguing flavors on the menu, Sugar Plum. No one really knew what the hell a sugar plum was, except that visions of them were supposed to dance in children's heads. When I was a child, visions of arson danced in my head.

According to Wikipedia, a sugar plum is a small, round candy made of sugar. It sounds nauseatingly sweet. The soda itself smelled like Sweet Tarts. With its faint blue color, it put us in mind of those cheap candy necklaces that you find in bags for $1.50 at the convenience store. Not the worst basis for a soda, it certainly wasn't going to hit the top ten like, say, cola or lemon-lime.

Reactions to the flavor were mixed. It wasn't as insanely over-the-top sweet as the smell suggested. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly faint and just vaguely fruity. Despite the smell, it lacked the bite of Sweet Tarts.

Geoffrey:"Smells like happy drinks, but tastes like Robitussin."

By now, the combined horrors of Jones holiday flavors were beginning to take a toll. Even our most stalwart tasters were beginning to show the strain of consuming what amounted to carbonated space mead. Given enough time, this tasting was bound to wear down our sanity and drive us stark-raving mad. Of course, this had no effect on the Chef. I'm already a complete and total loonbag.

Blueberry Pie

Our next flavor trial came from the Jones Dessert Pack, a set of four holiday-ish flavors based on favorite down-home pies. As I've said before, our experience with pastry-based Jones has been tepid at best. The pumpkin pie analogue from the 2005 Holiday Pack was noted for including the distinct flavor of burned crust, so our tasters were less than enthusiastic to try any of them.

However, the Chef quickly got the slaves- er, tasters back in line by taking one of them out behind the woodpile and whipping him thoroughly. It only took one look at the peon's bleeding back to make the other tasters decide it was in their best interest to try the pie-flavored sodas, burned crust be damned.

Blueberry Pie was chosen as being probably the least offensive of the four. The bright blue color wasn't particularly unappealing, but it gave the distinct impression of Easter egg coloring.

The smell wasn't particularly bad:

Crystal: "Cotton candy - smells like it."

Jen: "Smells like blue pixie sticks."

Dylan: "You can smell the crust and the sugar."

The flavor was another matter...

Geoffrey: "Tastes like Christmas cookie candles smell like they would taste."

Nathan: "Horrendous aftertaste!"

Jen: "The crust aftertaste is nasty."

Applesauce

Applesauce was one of the less offensive-sounding flavors. It sounds like the kind of weird soda Jones would put out during the entire year (this is the company that makes things like Kiwi and Strawberry Lime, after all), not just as a special super-nasty holiday flavor. As I said before, I'm not entirely sure what the heck applesauce has to do with Chaunnukah, either. Hopefully someone can enlighten me.

The soda's color wasn't exactly encouraging, either. It had a weird golden color that you normally only see in two liquids. One of those two is apple juice. The other one isn't.

It really did smell like applesauce (say what you will about Jones - they usually make it authentic). The flavor is best described as really tasting like carbonated applesauce, complete with a taste equivalent of that gribbly, grainy, mushy texture real applesauce has in your mouth. Far from the worst thing in the world, but not exactly something you'd want to drink.

Jen: "Smells like apples. Fizzy oversweet apple juice."

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