Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind, daa daaaa da da daaa daaa da daaa daa da da da AULD LANG SYNE!
After what I hope was a wonderful Christmas for all of you, it’s time now to dust off that outfit you’ve been saving all year, raid the cupboards for any leftover booze and try and pretend to give even the slightest of shites that it’s New Year’s Eve!
Poor old New Year, forever in the shadow of that other, more universally celebrated holiday on the 25th, despite (in my opinion) being a different box of spiders altogether. From what I have experienced there seems to be a 3 way split in terms of people’s plans in the dying hours of the calendar year, 1/3 will be going out to get unreasonably drunk, end up in a rammed nightclub and wonder why the taxis home are charging £20 per mile, another 1/3 will be throwing house parties to save money, but spending precious time babysitting sozzled obscure relatives and friends that weren’t interesting enough to be invited round for Christmas, and finally we have those who sit and watch Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, wait for the clock to strike 12, wish whomever is still awake a “Happy New Year” and then piss off to bed.
Unashamedly, I shall be going with the first option, no wonder I’ve hated every New Year’s Day for the last 6 years. Anyway, before embarrassing my fiancee and drowning myself in copious amounts of John Smith’s Extra Smooth, I thought it would be wise to line the old stomach with a selection of various edible horrors that were gifted to me for Christmas on purpose so I’d have to sit here and review them. Thank you, John.
So, before it gets too late to do my hair, let’s begin with a takeaway staple, a delicious pizza!
Actually it’s more a collection of gummy sweets positioned in such a way as to form an abstract artist’s version of a pizza, or a complete mess, either one. Where to begin with this one? I guess we can start from the crusts and work our way inwards…
Crust: Supposed to be a banana gum thing but it tastes of so little you’d think you were chewing plain gelatine, it has about the right texture. Absolutely vile, but who cares about crusts, right?
Topping: A very tasteless gummy bear, blackberry and raspberry shaped gummies that are passable owing to the fact there’s actual flavour there and then a ghastly strawberry lace that could be a cattle tendon, and finally a fried egg that just tastes like it’s somehow chemically bonded with the polythene wrapper and become plastic in and of itself. How in the fuck can you get gummy fried eggs wrong?
Pizza Gummies: Without a shadow of a doubt the best things on the platter, really nice soft gums with plenty of sweetness. Doesn’t make up for the fact that they look like open wounds oozing with blood, pus and carbuncles, or that everything else in the box has been dreadful.
To think this was made by Chupa Chups, definitely an example of how you should never venture outside your field of expertise, like that time 3 years ago I stopped doing game reviews and started reviewing bad junk food, and look at me now with a disgusting jelly pizza and no friends.
Ending on a positive note, top marks for the cardboard box, it’s like takeaway for rats and other small rodents… actually this isn’t good enough even for them, forget that.
Jameson’s Raspberry Ruffles
It’s like my mind has been read this Christmas, these things have caught my eye everytime I’ve shopped around for review material and I always find myself saying “I’ll get to you one day”, and here they are, large as life for my New Year extravaganza.
Raspberry Ruffles are produced by our old friends at Tangerine, best known for Refreshers, Fruit Salad and Flumps to name a few. The Jameson’s brand has existed since the 1930s and to my knowledge has only 2 extant products, the other being the lesser spotted chocolate caramels.
So it’s an oldie, but is it a goldie? Well, considering these contain coconut, I have a feeling that I’m about to piss all over the legacy of a classic confection.
Aughh god… dessicated coconut entering every nook and cranny in my mouth, help. The raspberry flavouring is just making it worse because it’s such an odd combination with the dark chocolate, I know it’s been around a long time and a lot of people enjoy it, but no, the raspberry tastes so artificial and I just can’t hack the coconut. I tried, honest.
Brain Licker
Christ on a unicycle it’s been a while since I reviewed crap like this. There’s not really a lot to be said, you take the top off, roll it around your tongue and the pure concentrated MDMA of primary schools comes seeping out, except it doesn’t really because to get anything at all out of this you need to squeeze the bottle.
What flavour? Blue raspberry apparently, but who really cares, it could be any flavour, they’d all taste just the same.
It’s just another one of those bizarre devices for children to ingest pure sugar like those terrible Vimto Sprays, I’m not entirely sure where it gets its name from, it hardly exhibits many aesthetic traits of a brain, and ironically, you’d have to have a severely damaged cerebrum to allow your kids anywhere near this. What a load of bollocks.
I can’t take it anymore, all this tripe is driving me insane, I need to get to the pub as soon as possible to cleanse myself of these rotten products, I guess I could always pre-drink? Yeah! It’d be like being 18 again!
EXCEPT NO! ALL I HAVE IS ALCOHOL-FREE BEER.
NoN aLcOhOlIc BeEr WHAT?!
Let’s send our prayers to the great placebo deity in the sky and hope these ridiculous concoctions can at least make me feel a bit more jovial, at the very least they have to taste nice.
First up and flying the German tricolour is Erdinger Alkoholfrei, now to get around the fact that it’s lost a very key ingredient, it markets itself as a “Refreshing Isotonic Drink”, what? You mean like Lucozade?! It even says on the back “provides the body with essential nutrients”, so does that mean if we strip away the alcohol from beer, what we get is actually a beverage beneficial to health? Shut up.
As for the taste, it’s almost disappointing that I can’t complain, it’s so close to regular Erdinger, which in itself is fantastic, I can’t believe I’m actually liking this, probably one of the biggest surprises ever.
I know it’s not 100% alcohol-free, it has an ABV of less than 0.5%, so you could get drunk on this after about 20 bottles, so if you want the experience of a good few pints without any side effects, then grab yourself a crate of these and wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life
Now to finish up, we’ve got one more and this one’s brewed a little closer to home.
St. Peter’s Without is a 0.0% ABV beverage, most other “alcohol free” drinks like the Erdinger above can only claim “lower than 0.5%” so how did this Suffolk brewery do it? The process is a secret, but their success is phenomenal, 200,000 SPW bottles a month were being produced in 2016, and they even had talks with JD Wetherspoon which as we all know is a night out’s Mecca. For a non-alcoholic beer, that’s quite an achievement considering the amount of ridicule this type of drink gets.
So does any of what I just said back up my tasting experience? No, not really.
The bitterness of the citrus aftertaste just doesn’t do it for me, it’s like if someone dropped lemon meringue pie into your beer, and of course that’d be a good thing if it were any other drink but here it just doesn’t work, not for my tastes at least. It also smells really funky, I can’t explain it, the only way you’d understand is if you were sat here with me, but considering the drinks I’ve got on offer, that’s unlikely.
The Erdinger is far superior, but I always appreciate an English brewery trying their hardest and making something that does well, obviously I’m in the minority here.
Well, that’s all he wrote, I’m done. I hope you enjoyed this and indeed all of my articles through 2017, whatever you’re doing tonight have a bloody good one, stay safe and I’ll be back with you all in 2018.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
SQ 2 