Sound – Rose, Lime, Hibiscus Tea

This isn’t quite the simple sparkling water with flavor—but I’m including it because I’m intrigued. A more complete name might be: Unsweetened Organic Sound Sparkling Water with Tea & Botanicals – Rose, Lime, Hibiscus Tea. It’s from New York, NY, of all places. Ingredients, besides sparkling water include: Rose Extract, Hibiscus Extract, Lime Extract, Citric Acid, Cardamom Extract. That’s a lot—but no “sugar”—no “fruit juice”—so it’s an odd one. The color is an almost cloudy dark brown—you could confuse it with beer. It’s totally delicious. I don’t remember what it cost, now, but probably too much for me (anything but tap water is too pricey for me, these days) but I could make this my regular drink. I can’t put my finger on any one of those flavors, which means they blend really well—you don’t get the potential oppressiveness from hibiscus, or oddness of rose, or the overwhelmingness of lime. Good flavor blending! For some reason (well, partly because I eat no processed sugar and very little even that’s sweet) it tastes sweet to me. I guess that’s part of the magic. The can is something else: simple, small font, red “Sound” is sideways on a flat white “label” which covers the entire silver metal can. And then a bold design of undulating stripes (I can’t really even attempt to describe it—check out their dynamic website) of the colors: red, pink, red, light green, and dark green. Whoever came up with that design had some real design magic in their design box. I’m sure it was either stolen from one of the world’s great museums, or not—in which case it should (or should have) won some kind of award for design—assuming they have awards for that shit—like they do for everything else.

No. 103 – 6.5.25