Waterloo

Pineapple

We finally got our hands on some Waterloo Pineapple!

2021 has been a big year for new flavors of sparkling water, a legit whirlwind of offerings from the giants in the field: Topo Chico, LaCroix, AHA, even San Pellegrino. And into this sparkling maelstrom, Waterloo has dropped the mic pineapple.

By and large, and much to our pleasant surprise, everyone seems to be upping their flavor game in a real way. It’s been a veritable arms race for who is going to be crowned this year’s Bubble Champion.

In just the past month or so, we had a variety of new launches under a plethora of themes and categories:

San Pellegrino Essenza slipped some sparkling coffee flavors laced with caffeine onto our local grocery shelves when we weren’t looking.

AHA mercilessly cancelled their older Cherry + Coffee and Apple + Ginger, replacing them witth Mango + Black Tea and Raspberry + Acai: calculated creations clearly engineered to enslave your tastebuds.

Midwestern Heavyweight La Croix seems to be anticipating a summer of freedom and fun, and we appreciate their attention to bringing us some much needed liquid beach vibes.  LaCroix assembled a confusing and chaotic (but delicious) seasonally-inspired lineup with Beach Plum, Guava Sao Paulo and Black Razzberry.

Waterloo appears to be on the same page as LaCroix, blessing us with some Big Beach Energy with their new Pineapple.

Of all the new flavors, Waterloo has the simplest and most direct theme of them all: Hot Girl Summer: the sunshiney yellow can and the forbidden fruit of Rupert Holmes’s Escape.

And hallelujah, because we’ve all been waiting for something spirited and tropical after 2020’s summer, which can only be described as Summer of Sadness. Summer of Surprise Weight Gain? It wasn’t our favorite summer, let’s leave it that.

Basically, as the weather warms and the buds are poppin’ from the trees, we can’t open this Waterloo Pineapple fast enough.

Let’s crack it open.

The nose on this is understated, but it smells like a perfect pineapple cubed and packed in plastic at the Whole Foods for $15.  And it’s an honor to pay.

This is the scent of hope. The scent of a pineapple ocean lapping at the pristine beach of our Hot Girl Summer dreams.

Tasting Notes

👙🍍😎

Waterloo delivers. This is giving us everything. There’s a sweet burst at the top of the sip, a luscious and juicy pineapple at the pinnacle of ripeness.

For a second, we’re a little worried: the danger with pineapple in real life is its tendency to veer into the cloying, the sticky, the saccharine: a one-way ticket into overly sweet and one-dimensional.

And for a millisecond or two, it feels like we might be headed tongue-first into some candy pineapple, our once-pristine beach now the aftermath of a children’s birthday party, the sand sticky with sugar underfoot.

But no, after the initial sweet pineapple explosion, the Waterloo Pineapple quickly coalesces into a more acidic, lightly tart and perfectly balanced fruit.

Good pineapple is from the heavens. Tart and sweet. Sharp and light. And like the platonic pineapple you’re always looking for, Waterloo’s sweetness fades at the perfect time into the tangy and refreshing tartness that you get from a real, flawlessly ripened pineapple.

It finishes gently sour, refreshing, only a faint note of sweet pineapple remaining.

Unlike a glass of pineapple juice, you could chug these all day long. (We have been!)

Waterloo seems focused on constantly churning out solo flavors, their Lemon-Lime or fleeting “Summer Berry” notwithstanding (did Summer Berry even exist? We only found it once. Maybe it needed to be forgotten with the rest of last summer).

But that’s not to say solo flavors are disappointing or boring!  In fact, sometimes we are tempted to think that executing one, single nuanced and multi-layered flavor has to be the hardest thing to accomplish in the sparkling water world.

Which would explain why so many sparkling water flavors out there wind up being a mish-mash of a couple different fruits or whatever: that way no one can really tell if any particular flavor is being executed with some degree of aplomb.

Flavor Hand-Waving we like to call it. Otherwise known as the entire LaCroix Curaté line.

Our only note here is that we sort of love Perrier’s Pineapple slightly more than Waterloo’s Pineapple, because Perrier, being sparkling mineral water, has a distinct salinity that really sends us.  The Perrier Pineapple is like a Pineapple Margarita with salt on the rim. But that’s a personal preference and no ding on this one whatsoever.

This Waterloo Pineapple really is like the perfect IG photo where you nail the filter and stick the caption. Main page worthy and sure to garner all the likes.

Press post. 💋✌🏻