Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Celsius was off my energy drink radar for a while.
Co-workers gave it rave reviews. But due to a crippling case of poor brain, I continually opted for cheaper choices when it came to my morning allotment of caffeine. Marked down cans of A-Shoc and Gorgie could only take me so far, however. When Celsius asked if I’d like to review their new flavor — and some old ones — I said yes.
The result wasn’t anything that redefines the caffeinated genre, but it’s pretty solid nonetheless. The latest flavor, Strawberry Passionfruit, edged dangerously toward generic mess but ultimately proved the folks over there know what they’re doing.
Let’s break that down with a taste test. And, since I’ve got a bunch of Celsiuses in my fridge (Celsii?), let’s run through some other popular flavors and see how they stand up.
Well, as an avowed hater of artificial passionfruit (and most actual ones), my hope is this leans heavily toward strawberry like in the Kiwi Strawberry version (see below). It pours a classic Celsius neon yellow/green. It smells sweet with just enough of stale rubber passion fruit flavor to make me think I’m not gonna like it.
Fortunately, the strawberry is vibrant enough to wash out the less appealing features of the fruit. It’s sweet and crisp, bringing a little more depth than your standard strawberry candy/energy drink. The passion fruit is minimal but does show up toward the end, right as you’re getting what would be the “bite near the stem” part of the strawberry on your tongue. It’s slightly creamy and a little sloppy and not great, but not bad either.
The crispness of the carbonation snaps that off, leaving you with an easy-to-drink source of caffeine that does seem to wake me up halfway through the can. I’m gonna add a little cold water to it because that’s what I typically do with my energy drinks and see how it holds up.
That’s a solid addition; some extra hydration that stretches the dense flavor you get from each can of Celsius. It turns down the intensity of the fruit without washing it out — leaving the strawberry relatively untouched but limiting the scope of the passion fruit I’m not wild about. A can of this, a stack of ice and some cold water in a 30 ounce tumbler and I’m in great shape.
I understand “sparkling” is a big part of Celsius’s identity. I’m also not sure you need it as a descriptor of cherry cola, where bubbles are the default and a lack of carbonation would, for lack of a better word, suck. But it pours like you’d expect, a Coke-ish brown with plenty of bubbles that quickly fizz and recede, casting off a mist of sweet, spiced aromas.
The first sip unveils a little more cherry than you’d get from a typical Cherry Coke or Wild Cherry Pepsi. It’s soft and not overpowering, leaving a distinct counterpoint to the carbonation and slight acidity of a cola. That leaves you without some of the nicer pieces of a good craft cola — you don’t quite get that vanilla/nutmeg/cinnamon feeling — but the cherry is solid enough that it’s not a big deal. It’s not perfect — it’s a little syrupy and artificial — but honestly that’s par for the course with cherry sodas.
While that leaves it light on the Pepsi angle, it’s still easy to drink. It’s sweet, but the carbonation helps keep that from feeling cloying. I could use a bit more acidic tang that’s a staple of the energy drink landscape, but I get the impre