Clear 'N' Natural Kiwi Strawberry Sparkling Water is a sugar-free drink made by the Adirondack Beverage company. How does this taste?

I've tried probably hundreds of sugar-free drink options at this point and they all have their good and bad points. This one is somewhere in the middle. Clearly this isn't fresh kiwi juice. The label says "contains no juice". But it does have natural flavorings. The gentle bubbles add a nice mouth feel to it.

I had this with a sushi dinner and it was definitely MUCH better than just drinking plain water with the meal. Was it better than a comparable Mio or other option? Often that comes down to your individual taste buds. We all have different flavors we like or dislike. For me this was pleasing.

On the grand scale of things, would it be better if it was sweetened with Stevia? Probably, but I knew of few if any drink makers who are going that route. So I definitely consider this FAR better than the other artificial sweetener alternatives.

Should it have no sweetener at all? Again I suppose that depends on your taste buds, but most people would find straight lemon juice to be far too harsh to drink raw, for example. We need at least a little sweetness from somewhere.

The 1 liter bottle we got was 50 cents. So not a lot of money. I drank the entire bottle with my sushi meal. If I had bought a $7.99 bottle of wine that would have been about $2 a glass, so it's definitely a savings in that sense. Water is free :). But I admit I get sick of drinking water all day every day. I like some flavor. So it's good to have options to mix things up.

Absolutely make sure you recycle the plastic bottle. We don't want to be filling our world with plastic waste. Which does bring up an issue - buying drinks this way results in heavy bottles being shipped all over the world and causing pollution and such. So the Mio gets credit in that area, for being a small, light item that's shipped.

So a lot of things to balance here. I appreciate the option. I appreciate the health of the choice, and the flavors. But I wouldn't drink these every day. These would be a special treat for me.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books