Sifting through bevy of beverage choices

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“Beverage” is a fine word, with a nice heft to it and a pleasing series of consonants. For short, you can say “bevy.” Or you can be more specific.

These days, however, selecting a liquid refreshment can be a bit overwhelming. The standard stock of carbonated soft drinks — Coke, Pepsi, Mega Jolt — competes with an ever-growing array of alternative beverages whose makeup lies somewhere between fruit juice and soda.

Check out your local convenience store, and you’ll find a Las Vegas of beverages. There’s grape juice and grape-guava medley and grape-guava-grapefruit surprise. There’s chocolate-fudge soda and juice colored the same turquoise blue as the Caribbean sky.

But plain old juice has grown tiresome. Soda, too, has lost the battle with our attention span (roughly four seconds). Besides being boring, it just doesn’t taste good. Bring on the new, our tired taste buds cried. So we did.

What follows is a highly subjective survey of some of the new and unusual comers to the beverage market, with rankings from one to four stars.

SOBE Power, SOBE Energy, SOBE Elixir: ** (two stars)

The modern beverage sells itself with two key ingredients: promises and packaging. As skeptics about the former and suckers for the latter, we came at the SOBE products equally likely to scoff or be sucked in.

Delivered in big glass bottles (20 ounces, about $1 apiece) that clank together pleasingly, covered with their trademark green lizard motif, each SOBE brews contains a potpourri of herby, mineral-type ingredients. Their names tend to sound invented: creatine, taurine, carnitine, arginine, yohimbe.

The orange-carrot Elixir, according to the bottle, contains ingredients that enhance skeletal strength, benefit the nervous system, eliminate fat, build muscle mass and reduce cholesterol. Such promises!

Other flavors, such as Zen Blend and Wisdom, profess to stimulate the brain, fight stress, give focus, and promote a sense of well-being. If everyone imbibed, a lot of psychiatrists would be out of business.

The taste of the SOBE drinks varies from an indeterminate, inoffensive red fruit flavor in Power to the outright offensive Energy, which tastes like every vegetable you hated as a kid.

Pat Welch, of Welch’s Beverage & Tobacco House on Hammond Street, said the SOBE line has been selling well. “People figure it’s a health-food drink, which it is, I guess,” he said. Welch said he drinks SOBE from time to time, but has not noticed any effect on his health.

Hansen’s Energy: *** (three stars)

These slim green-and-black cans (8 ounces, about $1.50) are small enough to fit in your pocket, but they pack a fairly solid nutritive punch.

“This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease,” the can reads, but the self-described “sparkling citrus drink” does offer 100 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamins C, B2, B6, B12 and Niacin.

That’s not bad, and — bonus — the taste isn’t bad either. Hansen’s is refreshing, not sugary, the sour lemon balanced nicely by the lime tang. The “light” carbonation was, to our palate, just right.

Marketed as a “jump start” for draggy afternoons or before important meetings, Hansen’s suggested use is “up to four cans per day.” That would be too much for our taste, and at a buck-and-a-half a can, a pricey habit. But one per week would not raise objections.

The Hansen’s World Wide Web site (www.hansens.com) says that all of the company’s products are caffeine-free, but caffeine is listed as an ingredient in Hansen’s Energy. Go figure.

Fresh Samantha: **** (four stars)

A quick glance at the ingredients and the sell-by dates on these plastic-bottled babies, and you’ll know you’ve got the real deal in health drinks. We’re talking wheat grass, bee pollen, dandelion root, algae. And nary a trace of high-fructose corn syrup. Rare, indeed.

If the texture of tapioca bothers you, Fresh Samantha may, too. As blender freaks who like everything better in liquid form, we had no problem with the pulpy Big Bang/Body Zoom Juice (though we wished it had just one name). With pureed peaches, bananas and Maine blueberries, it was like drinking chilled baby food. And we mean that in a good way.

Other Samantha flavors include Desperately Seeking C, Mango Mama and Raspberry Dream. The latest addition, Super Juice, contains echinacea, the purple cone flower long used by Native Americans for healing. Its creators say it boosts the immune system and fends off colds and flus.

The Three Sisters Cafe in Brewer gets two shipments of the drinks every week from Samantha headquarters in Saco, and they consistently sell out by each delivery date, staff members said. This despite a price tag of about $2.25, or 16 ounces for roughly the cost of a gallon of milk.

Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino: ** (two stars)

It’s not exactly a health drink, but we couldn’t resist the traditional milk-bottle shape and the dreamy, coffee-colored swirls on the label.

Reading the nutrition information, we found a happy surprise: One compact bottle supplies 22 percent of our daily recommended calcium. It’s not a cure-all, but it will help fight bone disease.

Shake this sucker up, pop off the cap, and grip the cool, damp glass. But don’t get too excited. The froth here is limited, and we’d question the use of the word “creamy” in the product description. The thickness is missed — without it, it’s like drinking a melted coffee milkshake.

The coffee flavor is Starbucks, and rich, but it’s not exactly thirst-quenching. If you’re going to spend the money ($1.25 for 9.5 ounces), we’d say suck up the fat grams and get the milkshake.

Orbitz: 0 (a big zero)

Here’s an example of a gimmick-based product, a drink that exists because of a bad idea and the belief that consumers are dumb enough to try anything once. The gimmick here is that the beverages are clear, with neon-colored flavor pellets bobbing around in each futuristic, Jetsons-style bottle.

After using a series of heavy tools, hot water and rags to get the caps off, we were blown back by the thick sugar fog that wafted from the “natural flavored” Orbitz raspberry citrus and vanilla orange. The unpleasantness of the smells doesn’t compare, however, to the unbearable sensation of slippery little balls piling up in the corners of your mouth.

Orbitz might make a good party favor or a lava lamp substitute in a pinch, but it’s certainly nothing you’d want to put in your mouth.

Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Celery Soda: (unrankable; it scared us)

You can tell Dr. Brown’s makes an old-fashioned product (since 1869, to be exact) by the absence of any toll-free phone number or Internet address on the can. Questions? Like maybe, who in the world drinks celery soda? Well, just keep’em to yourself. We’ve got a beverage factory to run.

The zippy fizz in this fully-carbonated soda is somewhat shocking, if you bring it on after a series of slowly oozing health shakes. The smell is overpowering in its celeryness, while the flavor is more of a cream soda base with a vaguely vegetal aftertaste. It’s super-sweet, and most pleasing in its utter randomness. Lettuce-flavored soda, anyone?