Cheap pop masquerading as the premium stuff (St Clements Fruits Strawberry and Lime Juice)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	St Clements Fruits Strawberry and Lime Juice
Date:	06/11/09 (13 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you were stuck in a desert with nothing else to drink, this juice is at least 'a liquid'

Disadvantages: The synthetic taste and aftertatse of this so-called 'no artificial flavourings' juice

I only found out afterwards that St Clements Strawberry and Lime fruit drink is made by a Scottish company called A.G. Barr, which is much better known for manufacturing a whole array of cheap fizzy drinks including the infamous 'Irn Bru' - "Scotland's other national drink" - a bright orange, entirely-synthetic type of hopped-up-on-caffeine pop mostly available in Scotland which, ironically enough, several years ago was found to contain a nefarious type of food additive that is particularly and especially bad for people from Scotland. (This has something to do with the increased prevalence of a gene in Scottish people that renders them less able to metabolize the bad additive, if I'm remembering things right). While I quite regularly consume foodstuffs that I know are no good or even actively 'bad' for me the problem I have with Barrs' products is that none of the ones I've tried ever even taste nice, so honestly, what's even the point?

As for not tasting nice, the same goes, of course, for this St Clements fruit drink. In the shop I bought it - which was a 'Morrisons' so with retrospect, of course I should have been extra junk-food-aware - I was seduced by the pale pink, 'healthy looking' colour of the juice that you could see through the transparent plastic bottle, and also the assertion on the label that it was free from artificial flavourings, preservatives or sweeteners. I stress that no matter how healthily coloured the juice appeared to be, I would never have bought this stuff if I had known beforehand it was made by Barrs - a brand synonymous with artificial flavourings and all-round questionable ingredients since time immemorial.

It cost about 70-80p for a bottle of 500ml of this stuff. It's a still drink rather than a fizzy one, and it's a nice and 'thin' juice, not too sweet, but the 'fruit flavouring' tastes synthetic and artificial and gives you a somewhat lingering, unpleasantly strong after taste. So this stuff is not nice to drink. How they managed to make the presumably natural ingredients (I'm assuming that if the flavourings aren't artificial as is stated on the drink's label, they must therefore be natural - unless of course there's some alternate category of food flavouring that I'm not personally aware of) taste like they were artificially synthesised in a chemistry lab somewhere is a mystery. Yet Barrs have done it again, and with this fruit juice have successfully extended their range of cheap and nasty-tasting drinks.

Despite its premium price-bracket, this is nothing but cheap pop, although admittedly it's marketed quite cleverly. Still one to avoid.

Summary: Cheap pop masquerading as the premium stuff