22 January 2012

Sobe V Water - Shield, Lemon & Lime (Tesco) [By @NLi10]


Usually when I pick up multiple flavours of the same drink I do a joint review, but this one is a bit different so will come in two parts. This is part 2 - part 1 was on Thursday!

Having picked this up as the plus one to a special offer of a drink I'd found disappointing I wasn't holding out much hope for this. I'm not even sure why I picked up this flavour to be honest! The previous drink had been deep in colour and slight in taste and lemonade style drinks that are flat are something that it's hard to get right.

I picked this up after returning late from work instead of making a cup of tea, I figured it was easier and frankly cutting back on caffeinated drinks is probably wise. I did my usual web surfing and video watching at the computer and barely even registered the fact that I was drinking it. And after a short while it struck me why - this is fundamentally Pocari Sweat! I didn't write the entry for that product, mainly because it's one of those odd things that I'm a little evangelical about - I can't get enough of this stuff!

Don't get me wrong though, this Sobe Shield isn't Pocari Sweat, it doesn't have the smoothness and I think it's a note or two less sweet, but it's pretty close and doesn't have to be bought from import shops which is a bonus. Given the choice I'd happily choose the original over this every time, but I'll certainly pick this up again.

I'm not sure how you'd describe the taste of this other than unsweetened lemonade with the sourness tuned down - and flat. The aftertaste is possibly a little flat for my liking, but that really is nitpicking. Oddly this contains lemon, lime and chilli flavourings and several natural herbal extracts (echinacea and astragalus) AND zinc sulphate which suggest that Britvic has put a lot of thought into the health angle for these drinks (for people who don't go on PubMed and check on the efficacy of these things as part of their jobs anyway...).

When a new range is launched I tend to either like or dislike the whole thing, but with these V Water things they produced one disappointing weak cordial, and one surprisingly nice delicate lemon drink. That's not a terrible strike rate if you ask me.

But oh - what is this - there are SIX flavours... and two energy drinks? I'm not sure I can risk that...
By NLi10

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