A Splash In Your Face

I like juice. My go to beverage when I’m not drinking water is to grab a bottle of some juice or another and suck it down while I’m working on website stuff. I’m not a big soda person anymore, and over the last couple of years I’ve pulled back on my caffeine intake as well, so that’s left juice as my beverage vice of choice. Because of that, I try to track down anything sweet, fruity, and vaguely healthy that I can grab, and that led me over to Izze and their line of sparkling beverages.

Sparkling juices aren’t anything new. We’ve had bottles of sparkling apple cider and sparkling grape juice for decades now, a nice thing to pull out when you have someone that wants to celebrate a special occasion but who doesn’t (or can’t) drink alcohol. But more recently sparkling juices have gone more mainstream, with new varieties, from new makers (like Izze) bringing out a wider variety of flavors to drink. And when I saw a display of various flavors at my local grocery store, I knew I had to do a taste test of everything on offer to see how they all stacked up:

Sparkling Clementine

In fairness, this is one of two flavors from Izze that I have tried before. Any place where you can find Izze generally has Clementine on offer. It’s fruity, bubbly, with that strong citrus flavor that can only come from orange. It’s potent, but not overpowering, and it makes a great introductory flavor for the brand. That’s why it’s everywhere: there’s no better baseline flavor for the company than Sparkling Clementine.

And it’s good. It’s not too mild, with that strong, orange flavor. But because it’s a sparkling juice, in the vein of all their other products, it doesn’t have that usual thickness of proper orange juice. No pulp, no viscosity. It’s a light, flavorful, sparkling beverage, and it works. Of course, it’s also just orange flavor so it’s not really all that surprising either. But if you want a solid, middle of the road, juice flavor, Sparkling Clementine works really well.

Sparkling Blackberry

On the other hand, Sparkling Blackberry is pretty boring. It’s another one of those “default” flavors you’ll regularly see. It invites you in with the promise of berries, fizz, and pop, but what you really get is a beverage that sits somewhere between apple and grape, as basic and unfrivolous as you could get. It’s not bad, bear in mind, but there’s nothing surprising about this flavor beyond the fact that it really doesn’t taste like blackberries at all.

Honestly, there’s a much better flavor of berry juice that Izze makes, even if it wasn’t offered at the story I went to: Sparkling Pomegranate. It has that same berry pop, but it’s brighter, with a much more tart flavor to it. It’s bold and juicy and feels like a much better showcase for what these juices could be than Sparkling Blackberry. It’s actually a go to of mine whenever I find it, and it is still being made (I checked the Izze website just to be sure) so, clearly, if you have a choice between the two, go with the pomegranate flavor instead. Or, some of the other flavors further down this list.

Sparkling Strawberry

Strawberry flavor can be hit or miss. Strawberries on their own are often hit or miss as well, either being super sweet and full of flavor or way too light and bland. Izze’s juice hits a fairly solid middle zone, being not too sweet or strong, but certainly not as light as you might expect from the fresh fruits they’re based on. Like with the Clementine, the Strawberry flavor is that right zone where you get crisp and refreshing flavor without it invoking all the parts of a strawberry you don’t want.

The upside is that this is a light and tasty juice with a sweet berry pop. The downside is that the berry is subtle and maybe plays a little safe, giving off vibes more akin to apple-strawberry than proper strawberry flavor all on its own. It’s not bad, and its crisp flavor is really refreshing. But in the same way that the Sparkling Blackberry doesn’t really evoke blackberries the way you’d like, this strawberry flavor feels more like a mix than a pure delight.

Sparkling Mango

This one, though, was really bad. Mangos are a strange fruit. I love them, but I had to admit that you need to get a good mango to really delight in their flavors. A good mango is sweet, soft, and full of tangy citrus flavor. A bad mango is too soft, too fleshy, and vaguely tastes of feet. And that’s the problem with the Sparkling Mango variety: it tastes like it’s made from lesser mangos and, thus, kind of tastes like feet.

Its base is clearly the citrus style of Sparkling Clementine, but with a bit of mango flavor thrown in. Like with Clementine (and the other juices from Izze), it’s not sweet or saccharine, so its consistency is pretty good. But while the body of the juice is good, its flavor is bad. It tastes like orange up front, but then the mango comes in and it adds this really gross aftertaste. It’s strong, with a thick tinge that, well, has a very strong foot flavor. I don’t want to taste feet, and yet, that’s what this juice tasted like. Of all the flavors I tried for this, the Mango is only one I wouldn’t ever grab again.

Sparkling Peach

Thankfully we then end on a high note. All of my complaints about the juices above can be tossed aside because Sparkling Peach hits it right out of the park. It’s light and sweet and tasty, but above all it tastes like peach. Not apple-peach, not pear-peach, not any other combination you could think of. This is peach, through and through, and I happen to really love peach so this was exactly what I was looking for.

The flavor is tangy and strong. It’s very peach forward, in just the way you expect. It’s not too strong, nor tart, so it hits the palate just right. It has all that crispy, bubbly goodness I want from an Izze drink, and it doesn’t feel like it compromises at all to get there. In much the same way that I will always grab a Sparkling Pomegranate whenever I’d see one, because it has that perfect, bold, satisfying flavor I want, Sparking Peach does that for, well, peach flavor. It’s about as good of a sparkling peach drink as you could ever get. It’s really great.