Trader Joe's Organic Sparkling Apple Cider Drinking Vinegar--Cucumber & Mint

This is, obviously, the shelf-mate to the strawberry/basil version that Nina and I tried last week. We both liked this one better. It's cool and refreshing. I expected to like it less because cucumber isn't a favorite flavor. But it's mild and unobjectionable. The mint, too, is subdued, not shouting its presence. The vinegar component is even less pronounced than in the other variety.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. I think it can be an occasional treat.

Trader Joe's Organic Sparkling Apple Cider Drinking Vinegar--Strawberry & Basil

I passed this by a couple of time because the very idea of "drinking vinegar" seemed like a big bowl of wrong. But I gathered my courage, bought it, and shared the bottle with Nina last night.

Upon unscrewing the cap, the distinctive smell of vinegar hit me immediately, and I was worried that drinking it would be more of the same. It wasn't--not at all. It's a peculiar but pleasantly surprising mismatch. It's mostly just like drinking ordinarily sparkling apple cider, though with more than the usual amount of vinegary sensation, more in the nose than on the tongue.

As for the strawberry and basil, I had to close my eyes with a swig of the cider in my mouth and go on a mental hunt for them. I found them that way, but I never would have noticed them if not for the words on the label.


Will I buy it again? 

No. But it's definitely worth having once.

Trader Joe's Organic No Joke Ginger Juice Shot

This is some serious, wake-you-up, kick-your-butt, take-no-prisoners peppery juice. Between the ginger, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper, it will burn your throat and clear your sinuses. I'm not sure I'd call this a pleasant experience, but it's definitely interesting. It makes the potent Triple Ginger Brew look like Kool-Aid in comparison.


Will I buy it again? 

No. It was far more memorable than the relatively tame turmeric version, but not something I need in my life--especially for $1.99 per shot. But do try it once, then get the t-shirt bragging that you survived it.

Trader Joe's Organic Mighty Turmeric Juice Shot

Wow. $1.99 for two ounces of "juice"--which is actually mostly coconut water. Plus two pieces of plastic added to the landfill, at a time when Trader Joe's says it's committed to reducing the amount of plastic packaging it uses.

It's hard to describe this accurately, because there's so little of it that it was hard to analyze before it was gone. But my overwhelming impression was of the turmeric and black pepper, not the coconut water or lemon juice.


Will I buy it again? 

Absolutely not. This strikes me as a very un-TJ's-like product: Expensive, pointless, and wasteful.

Trader Joe's Organic Cold-Pressed Fruit Stand Juice Beverage

I anticipated liking this new juice. Fruit juice livened up with some salt and cayenne pepper sounded mighty tasty.

I was wrong. The cucumber component is way too strong, and clashes badly with the pineapple. The salt and cayenne pepper are basically MIA. The overall result is just weird and unpleasant.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Sparkling Watermelon Juice

I forgot to take a picture of the box before folding it up for the recycling bin, so I'm stealing this one from Trader Joe's introduction to the product, here.

The juice lives up to TJ's copy. It's delicious and refreshing. It tastes exactly how you would imagine carbonated watermelon juice to taste. You can sense that it has little added other than the bubbles--certainly no extra sugar.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. This is a clear winner.

Trader Joe's Cold Pressed Pineapple Juice

It's excellent pineapple juice, without question. But, absent a side-by-side comparison, I can't tell that it's any better than the excellent TJ's pineapple juice in cartons, and it's a lot more expensive.


Will I buy it again? 

No. Well, I suppose I might buy it once more just to do that comparison, but unless the results really surprise me, I will always pick the carton.

Trader Joe's Organic Cold Pressed Fuji Apple Spiced Cider

I very much enjoyed this, but I don't think it's noticeably different from any number of apple/cinnamon/clove concoctions one can buy this time of year, such as TJ's own Spiced Cider. It is astonishingly sweet--so much so that Nina felt sure it had added sugar, until I checked the label and found none.


Will I buy it again? 

No. It's good, but the price per ounce is just too high to justify.

Trader Joe's To The Power Of Seven Green Organic Juice Blend

The original Power of Seven remains one of my all-time favorite juices. I love it. The only thing that prevents me from always having it on hand is its relatively high cost. So of course I had to try its new sibling, despite misgivings from seeing kale and spinach juices as the first ingredients.

I can instantly discern the apple and celery components, the cucumber with a little more mental probing of my taste buds. I'll just have to take Trader Joe's word for it that there's lemon and ginger. But the dominant flavor is, well, grass clippings, surely coming from the kale and spinach.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I don't hate it, but it feels more like taking medicine than drinking something I enjoy. Who wants to start the day like that?

Trader Joe's Organic Apple Juice

This apple juice is so boring it's sad. It's just lifeless. Drinking it is a reminder of how wonderful the Honey Crisp Apple Cider is. Every fall I stock up on the latter to last me through the rest of the year when it isn't available, but I had run out, so purchased this one instead. Such a disappointment.

Three years ago, I bought TJ's MacIntosh Apple Juice, and contemplated doing a comparison test with this one. I never did, because the discovery of the cider made me want to never buy anything else. Now I'll never complete the test because I don't want this uninteresting juice in my life.


Will I buy it again? 

No. If I can't have the cider, my next choice would be the Flash Pasteurized. I'd pick something other than apple juice before having this again.

Trader Joe's 100% Mango Juice From Carabao Mangoes

I first heard of Carabao mangoes when Trader Joe's came out with Supersweet Dried Carabao Mango. I declared them the best way to eat mangoes ever devised. So when I saw this canned juice from the same variety, I was ready to love it. After all, as I've noted many times before, when Trader Joe's does a single-ingredient juice, as this is, there's a good chance it will be perfectly executed.

Sadly, this isn't. Even more sadly, the problem is obvious, as is a simple solution that could and should have been implemented before putting this on the shelves. It's the can. There's a definitely metallic off-note to this juice. All of TJ's other superb pure juices are in glass bottles. Do the same for this stuff, and I think it would join that pantheon. I don't understand how the TJ's team could have missed this during product development/acquisition.


Will I buy it again? 

No--at least not until they wise up and use bottles instead of cans.

Trader Joe's Cold Pressed Juice--Pomegranate

This is now the third product from Trader Joe's that is pure pomegranate juice, with nothing else added. See here and here for the others. My sense memory isn't keen enough to discern any difference between then when the sampling has been spread across time. They're all superb--exactly what one would want from pomegranate juice. Maybe I'll have to buy a bottle of all three at once and try them simultaneously to discover any differences between them.


Will I buy it again? 

I probably will once, just to make a comparison. But this one is much more expensive per ounce than the others, so other than that it's not likely to be a repeater.

Trader Joe's Sparkling Pressed Apple Juice Beverage

There's nothing special about this. I would much rather pick up a bottle of Welch's or Martinelli's, so that I get the festive satisfaction of uncorking a bottle. These tiny little cans are just kind of sad.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Jalapeno Limeade

Trader Joe's is making a big sales push on this; I've heard promos for it several times on the radio. Apparently its main intended use is as a margarita mixer. Well, I don't make margaritas, so I'm stuck with just drinking it straight.

Which turns out to be a pretty good thing to do. It's completely different from anything else I've ever had. The jalapeno is much stronger than I anticipated, and it's great--bracing, without getting into the "painful" zone. Its pairing with the lime is perfect.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It's not going to be an every day sort of thing, but I'd like to revisit it now and then.

Trader Joe's Calamansi Cooler

Try to read about calamansi and you'll end up more confused than before you started. It seems to also be called calamondin, golden lime, Panama orange, and several other names. It is thought to be a hybrid of mandarin orange and kumquat.

Anyway, its juice, as presented here by Trader Joe's, is pleasant enough. This is not, however, anything like a pure fruit juice, as the "beverage" wording on the can sort of warns you. Water is the first ingredient, followed by sugar, and only then we get to the calamansi puree.

Fortunately, it doesn't taste like overly sweetened glop. It's light, citrusy, refreshing. Both Nina and I thought that it would be improved by light carbonation, though. She said it reminded her most of kumquat, but I don't have enough sense memory of kumquat to have an opinion on that. (In fact, I don't even remember ever having eaten kumquats, but Nina insists that she has seen me do so.)


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Agua Fresca--Pineapple Mango With Natural Mint Flavor

For the most part, this is what you'd expect--good but unremarkable pineapple-mango juice. The surprise comes mostly in the aftertaste, when the shot of mint kicks in, and it works nicely. I don't think I've ever had juice with mint in it before. It's a different experience, well worth trying.


Will I buy it again? 

No. You should definitely try it once, though.

Trader Joe's Organic Agua Fresca--Hibiscus Flavor

The only time I've knowingly had hibiscus was in one of the first products I reviewed when I started this blog in the summer of 2014. It was, to be precise, the fifth review I published here, and the first time I excoriated a TJ's product--Hibiscus Cranberry Juice Blend. That post was also the first time Nina used the term "melted lollipops." Sadly, it was not the last. The Hibiscus Cranberry proved to the first in a long line of awful TJ's juice blends.

Upon tasting this new TJ's product, I was surprised to find a sense memory to the Hibiscus Cranberry. I guess there really was some hibiscus hiding in it underneath all the cranberry, apple, and grape, because I recognized a similar flavor here--but much stronger and more pleasant.

I liked this, but did not love it. I almost always serve a small glass of some variety of TJ's juice with my weekly dinner with Nina. This bottle stretched for three consecutive weeks, because I never felt like drinking any at other times.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Carrot Turmeric Juice Blend

This looks like regular ol' carrot juice, and the first one or two seconds that it's in your mouth, it tastes like regular ol' carrot juice. But then you get socked by the other stuff: black pepper, turmeric, and chili pepper. It's not bowl-you-over peppery, but it's definitely more than I expected.

I liked it at first. Then I set it aside for a week or so before I came back to finish it off, and I didn't like it much. My first sample seemed pleasantly bracing; the second was just jarring. The difference surely has much more to do with me being in some sort of different frame of mind the second time than any intrinsic change in the juice. But the result was that I couldn't bring myself to finish it, quite, and poured the last few ounces down the drain before chucking the bottle into the recycling bag.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Purple Carrot Juice

I knew that purple carrots existed. I did not know that anybody had used them to make juice. But leave it to Trader Joe's!

Even stranger than the color of this juice is its taste. If you had given me a glass of this stuff to drink with no hint about what it was, "carrot" would not have been in my first ten guesses. With almost every swallow I've taken of it, I've tried hard to match the flavor to my lifetime experience of what a carrot tastes like. No success at all. It's much sweeter than I would have imagined carrot juice could be--to the point that on my first sample of it, I walked back to the refrigerator to check the list of ingredients to see whether they had added sugar. Nope.

My best shot at a description is that it's like a beet juice base combined with either cherry or maybe grape. It's not exactly that, but that's what I would end up as my top guess in the blind taste test (with a lot of uncertainty).

Independent of my inability to recognize it, I didn't care for it much.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Beet Strawberry Juice

This is some weird-ass juice.

My history with Trader Joe's beet juice is not good. See here and here. I thought that the addition of strawberry might make this one better.

Nope. The flavors just don't blend well. They clash, competing for attention. When drinking it, I'm constantly aware that there's the strawberry part (good) and the beet part (bad).

The "hint of lemon juice" promised is nowhere to be found. Maybe they added it in with an eyedropper.

Some juice blends I feel uncertain about with the first swallow, but warm up to as I get used to them. This one had the opposite effect. My uncertainty turned more and more to active dislike with each ounce that passed my lips. It felt like a chore to finish the glass, after which I wanted no more of it, ever.


Will I buy it again? 

No.