If you're a fan of flavored vodkas and can stand a little fun being poked at you, I recommend this post from the A.V.Club. They reviewed three new flavors of vodka from Three Olives brand, and it's pretty amusing.

The flavors in question are tomato, root beer, and triple shot espresso. Not being a huge vodka fan in the first place, I found this review ,um, not too helpful, but entertaining. In the name of humor, they were a little homophobic, but I tried to remember to take it with a grain of salt.

Apparently, the tomato flavor was the least popular, which sounds reasonable to me. Can anyone find a reason for tomato flavored vodka? It didn't even get great reviews with bloody mary mix. The root beer flavor was deemed "all right', but apparently it went well in a root beer float. The triple shot espresso was by far the favorite. A.V.club also tried it with a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino to raves.

If you have your own personal review of these or any flavored vodkas I'd love to read it. Maybe it'd inspire me to try vodka more often.

I don't actually drink a whole lot of soda, so when I indulge in a bottle of carbonated sugar-y syrup, I want it to be good. I want it to be as bubbly and flavorful as possible, because I sometimes go months between tastes. I was excited to receive this sample pack of Thomas Kemper, mostly because they've recently switched to sweetening their sodas with cane sugar (down with high fructose corn syrup) so there isn't as much guilt in drinking this beverage as with the conventional stuff.

On first taste, the root beer flavor was everything I look for in a soda. Fizzy, strongly flavored and creamy, I was ready to keep on drinking it. However, I was really disappointed by the other two flavors (and I hate saying this, since I really do like the Thomas Kemper company). The Black Cherry lands on the wrong side of the cough syrup divide and the Ginger Ale just doesn't have enough punch. My boyfriend was willing to finish the bottle of Black Cherry, but neither one of us wanted to kill the Ginger Ale. It was sort of disappointing.

Forget pre-mixed rootbeer floats...this nifty little gadget takes floats to the next level.

The Fizz is, essentially, a cheap plastic domed lid with an opening in the middle that holds a straw and is able to suck up liquids without letting them seep out.

As per the video on the item's website, appropriately set to the tune of Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough," the soda enthusiast simply scoops ice cream into the plastic resevoir, screws the lid onto the top of a plastic soda bottle (looks like it has to be plastic, not metal or aluminum), and squeezes the bottle, sucking part of the liquid into the vessel where it mixes with the ice cream for a no-mess float on the go.

This product immediately lost some of its appeal once I realized what it reminds me of: the ACT brand mouthwash that the dentist made me use when I was younger, which also involves squeezing liquid into a plastic resevoir at the top of a bottle.

I immediately thought of using the product to fix a root beer float (probably because that's what the website used as an example, and sometimes I'm easily swayed, especially when it involves refined sugar) but the website offers some other suggestions for flavor combos, including strawberry sherbet/lemon-lime soda, vanilla yogurt/orange soda, or crushed ice and flavored syrup.

If I haven't completely turned you off yet, what do you think? Yay or nay on the soda float-on-the-go?

I am disturbed that the slogan for The Fizz Cup is "Buy it. Try it. Die for it."

The cup makes root beer floats and no matter how good a root beer float is, it is hardly worth dying for.

The Fizz Cup screws onto the top of soda bottles and, using a straw that extends from the bottom of the bottle, though the cup and into your mouth, you can suck the soda up and create an instant root beer float. The advantage of using the cup is that it is highly portable, unlike a traditional homemade float in an open cup. Another selling point, according to the company, "It lets you have fun watching the soda and ice cream mix inside the dome lid, just like a volcano. Experience the science of fizz making with this special treat!"

Is a soda volcano worth dying for? No, and a mentos fountain is probably more exciting. Worth $10 + $6 S&H for a pack of 6? Maybe if you really need to take your floats to go.

I picked this soda, Journey's John Barleycorn's Root Beer, after reading the ingredient label. It said it contained flavoring from malted barley and wintergreen. In addition to both being unusual ingredients in root beer, the two seemed like an unlikely pairing in general.

The first thing I noticed was the relative lack of carbonation in the root beer; it was quite syrupy, actually. The flavor was unusual. The malted barley came through immediately, making it seem much more like beer than root beer, and it finished with the very fresh wintergreen flavor. There was an aftertaste of malt. It really concentrated on the barley/mint combination instead of playing up the spicy sassafras flavor I ordinarily enjoy in root beer. There’s a reason that it’s not a good idea to wait until after you’ve finished you beer to have a breath mint and not have it during: not the best flavor combination.

Yesterday's L.A. Times featured a very detailed article about how craft-brewed sodas are coming into their own in much the same way that micro-brewed beers have. While the article touched on sodas such as Boylan’s Creamy Red Birch Beer complimenting the food at places like The French Laundry, the emphasis was really on appreciating quality soft drinks by themselves. Aside from some interesting opinions of a few soda brewmasters, the article also features an extensive tasting panel of everything from Virgil’s Root Beer to Jamaican Ting (a personal favorite of mine). I also learned that Louisiana’s Abita brewery produces a root beer in addition to their more famous alcoholic brews such as their dark, molasses-y Turbodog.