LaCroix

Black Razzberry

Black Razzberry is the third and final offering in LaCroix’s new 2021 trinity of “summer” flavors, along with Beach Plum and Guava São Paulo.

This new LaCroix lineup is a real thinker, the titles of each flavor densely packed with confusing wordplay, the can art exploring new modes of expression for LaCroix’s questionable aesthetic.

Black Razzberry is perhaps the strangest one, even though it seems straightforward and innocuous at first glance.

Spelling raspberry with two Zs is pretty played out at this point, as a way of indicating that your raspberry flavor isn’t some run of the mill raspberry. No, with two Zs, this raspberry is zany! Full of pizzazz and razzmatazz.

This isn’t even LaCroix’s first Razz Rodeo, having renamed Cran-Raspberry to Razz-Cranberry about a year ago.  That must have been market research to see if “Razz” sells.

(Never mind that the established technical definition of a Razzberry is the farting sound your lips make when you press your mouth against someone else’s stomach and blow. Also, definitions.net helpfully notes that the numerical value of Razzberry in Chaldean Numerology is 2, whereas in Pythagorean Numerology it’s 4. The mysteries of Razzberry!)

But anyway, LaCroix doesn’t just want you to know that they’ve got a zany-ass (azz?) razzberry, they want you to know that they’ve got a zany-ass Jazzberry.

They try to establish this reading of Razz/Jazz by depicting a stream of musical notation coming from some stock-photo clump of berries, each music note made of blackberries and raspberries, the stems literally stems.

And as LaCroix says of Black Razzberry on their website: “An innocently sweet twist that Makes [sic] your taste buds sing !!”, and reiterates in a lilting refrain on the box: “…makes your tastebuds sing !!”

All of this musical allusion really forces the question: why didn’t they just call this Jazzberry in the first place?

Well, our guess is that they did plan on calling this Jazzberry until some zoomer intern gently pointed out that “Black Jazzberry” was gonna get LaCroix cancelled in the year 2021.

Unfortunately, though, they had already done up all the graphic design.  So rather than re-do that work (as if we can call what LaCroix’s graphic designers do “work”), they changed the J to an R and shipped it out.

Also, apparently Crayola already has a breakfast cereal(?!!) called Jazzberry.  So maybe LaCroix wanted to avoid any confusion.

Either way, we’re going to ignore how hard LaCroix wants us to read this as “Black Jazzberry,” because LaCroix’s deep Wisconsin roots preclude them from ever making anything genuinely jazzy anyway.

Instead, we’ll assume that the music LaCroix wants us to hear in our head and on our taste buds is something more midwestern. Like Don Henley.

Out on the road today, we saw a LaCroix sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside our head said “Don’t look back, you can never look back.”

Ok!  With that firmly in your head now, let’s drink this.

On first crack of the can, the nose is similar to the LaCroix Berry, although crisper, cleaner, less fruit on the bottom, with a tang of green apple and a slight whiff of…bubblegum.

Tasting Notes

🎷🎶🤷🏻‍♀️

Black Razzberry is really good. It’s a bright, tangy berry, closer to blackberry than LaCroix managed to get with the Mure Pepino. It’s not quite as blackberry-y as bubly’s blackberry, but maybe that’s ok because, again, this isn’t blackberry, it’s Black Razzberry.

While the Black Raspberry is an actual fruit (as opposed to the Blue Raspberry), we think LaCroix uses those two Zs so that this doesn’t have to taste like any particular berry. It’s not a blackberry, it’s not a raspberry, it’s not a black raspberry, it’s all and none of them at the same time. We do detect some notes of blueberry in here too.

Why, in 30 years of existence, has LaCroix never committed to a single, specific berry flavor? They’ve given us the generic Berry, the Razz-Cranberry, the Múre Pepino, and now the Black Razzberry, but never a simple, solo berry.

In a world with Boylan Raspberry, Waterloo Blueberry, and bubly Blackberry, we have to assume either LaCroix just can’t pull off a convincing single berry flavor for some reason, or they made so much Mixed Berry “essence” in 1991 that they’re still trying to use up their supply.

This ever-morphing cascade of vague berries all of the sudden coalesces into a bubblegum overload!

We’ve pondered the mysteries of bubblegum flavor many times over here in The Bubbleverse, but the common thread has always been that it appears in watermelon flavors. We’ve never encountered the phantom bubblegum in a berry flavor before! This is exciting.

It’s exciting but also strange, because it seems like the secret to bubblegum flavor is a melange of various fruit esters like banana, pineapple, cherry, etc. combined with something slightly minty. No blackberries or raspberries in that list.

Some bubblegum experts claim that strawberry is a dominant note.  Are we to assume LaCroix snuck a strawberry into this Razzberry?

We really can’t taste anything in the Razzberry resembling a strawberry, though. So perhaps where LaCroix’s flavor chemists have repeatedly failed to create a convincing single berry, they have stumbled upon a brand new bubblegum formulation.

The Black Razzberry winds up being one of the more confounding LaCroix flavors, both in flavor and in life. We really like this one, but we’ll pick the Guava São Paulo or the Beach Plum over the Razzberry at the end of the day.

Thus concludes our LaCroix Summer of Fun 2021, catch you in the fall when LaCroix releases Plum-kin Spice, Apple Great Barrington, and Black Acornzz.

I can see you
Your pamplemousse shining in the sun
You got the pop tab down and the
Taste buds singing
I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong
After the LaCroixs of summer have gone