AHA Sparkling Water Reviews

We put off trying the AHA Apple + Ginger for a long time.

We appreciate apples as a fruit, and definitely appreciate apples in theory, with their long mythological history and crazy biology. But apple drinks are another story.

While we might appreciate a little cider here and there, either mulled or hard and dry, apple juice is often so cloying and best left in kindergarten.

However, we have sworn a solemn and sacred vow to leave no can uncracked in the bubbleverse, so sooner or later we knew we’d have to sip this one. And to be fair, we’ve had the same experience with almost every AHA flavor: first we look askance, sometimes at the flavor combo (cherry coffee?), always at the Coca Cola provenance, but then we try it, and we’re somehow always surprised that it’s…really good.

So, like John Chapman leaving his family farm in Massachusetts, we’re donning our burlap, putting a pan on our head, and setting off to seed the bubbleverse.

Our first morning in apple territory, we awaken to a verdant, juicy-sweet Minute Maid mist rising from the pristine hills and valleys of the young american continent the can. Bracing ourselves for the journey ahead, we wax our boots in anticipation of having to forge this deep river of juice.

Thankfully though, the sun rises through the canopy, burning off the haze. Further sniffs reveal a more pleasant & softer nose, notes of piquant cider.

Tasting Notes

🍎🍺👣🍂

As we walk, each sip reveals the contours of the landscape: subtle, rolling hills of apple cider, gently sour creeks, dark thickets of ginger.

Michael Pollan proposed, and Howard Means reluctantly agreed, that Johnny Appleseed’s true role on the colonial frontier was priming unsettled lands for the coming alcoholic frenzy that would arrive with the pioneers.

In that weird liminal zone between puritanical civilization and native american genocide, all manner of religious revivalists, land speculators, wildmen, squatters, and farmers fueled their bizarre & ritualistic expansion of empire with the strongest apple hooch.

So it’s fitting that AHA’s apple sparkling water tastes like cider, we guess is what we’re saying.

At first, the cidery sip is almost overwhelming, juice box flashbacks in technicolor sparkles. It’s the robust, can-tastes-you vibe that has, against all odds, made AHA so endearing to us.

But by mid-can, something rich and evocative and decidedly more grown up has happened. You’re ready to heat this up and dunk a powdered donut right in. It’s cozy fall foliage in hazy, liquified focus.

But remember, we left New England and their genteel ciders in search of something less tamed. And as the night falls on the little apple nursery that we hacked out of primeval forest, we hear the howling of the ginger in the distance.

Now, you might have got some idea in your head that this ginger was going to be weak, judging by the depiction of ginger on the can. Seriously, are those potato chips? Did we walk all the way to Idaho and become Johnny Potatoseed? Did the AHA graphic designers just search for “ginger clip art” and call it a day?

Whatever’s happening on the label is not happening inside, though. This is a fresh, spicy ginger, sending rootlets and tendrils over the wall of the orchard to entwine and strangle the apples.

But instead of strangling, we actually get a picturesque ginger wilderness surrounding our apple-sod cabin, a ginger root spliced on our honeycrisp sapling, blossoming on a virgin prairie.

If only America herself had turned out like this.

This is probably the most outrageous watermelon flavor out there in the bubbleverse.  It’s like drinking a Jolly Rancher.  It’s like you’ve been cordially invited to attend the christening of Princess Bubblegum’s Skittle love child.

While most sparkling water brands try to achieve #nofilter flavors, hewing as close as possible to the real fruit (or herb) in question, AHA is unafraid to go extreme.  Their waters taste like their graphic design: bold, saturated, high-contrast cartoon fruits, in ALL CAPS.

Despite the fact that we like to think we have delicate palates here at the bubbleverse, AHA never fails to hook us somehow.  Not terribly surprising though, because these are made by the flavor sorcerers at Coca-Cola, highly skilled in the dark arts of compulsive quaffing.

Tasting Notes

From the first crack of the can, the nose tells you you’re about to taste the rainbow, and the rainbow is going to taste you, ready or not.

The candymelon is the first to arrive on the tongue, a tsunami of childhood flashbacks.  There really is some kind of strong bubblegum note here.  It’s not overt, but when you’re really trying to pay attention to the watermelon flavor, it morphs into bubblegum unexpectedly. 

Which got us thinking, what flavor is bubblegum exactly anyway?  Bubblegum is, of course, the quintessential chimera of the 20th century better-living-through-chemistry modernist dystopia, so fittingly, it’s not a flavor per se, it’s more of a complex of flavor-invoking molecules like methyl salicylate, ethyl butyrate, benzyl acetate, etc.  Given the intentional artificiality of AHA’s watermelon, it’s not surprising it veers into this venn diagram of flavors.  

So anyway, we’re here, awash in nostalgia, lost in the candyverse, when something unexpected happens: the lime arrives.  And this is a true lime flavor, sour and pithy.  It cuts through the haze of artifice, somehow pulling the watermelon with it into reality.  All of a sudden everything tastes real again, and you’re left wondering if you somehow hallucinated everything before this moment.

This movement results in a really beautiful afterglow: this bubbler lingers in your mouth in a subtle, complex, and delicious way.

While (for us at least) this might be a little too wild of a ride to make into a daily go-to, it is compelling and we still kind of want another one, even while we’re still feeling relief that we finally finished the can.

And of course, we have delicate sensibilities here.  If you’re looking for a stronger flavor, whether because you’re trying to find the best sparkling water to replace soda, or you just prefer to get punched in the mouth by fruit and living on the edge in general, this could quickly become a favorite of yours.

In our Waterloo Lemon-Lime review, we waxed poetic about the love affair between lemons & limes. Perhaps we waxed a little too poetic, because we now believe that the truest twin flames in the citrusverse are Orange + Grapefruit.

This one snuck up on us: at first we thought it was a pleasant enough addition to our grapefruit rotation. But over time we noticed ourselves reaching for it more & more, until we discovered it had firmly rooted itself deep in our bubblebrain.

Much like grapefruit and oranges, our brains have now become citrus hybrids, part flesh + neurons, part orange + grapefruit. We weep whenever we see the empty hole on the AHA shelf where this should be.

Like a cordyceps mushroom, this sparkling water has buried a spore deep in our hearts, controlling our thoughts, enticing us to climb to the canopy of the sparkling forest, latch our jaws firmly into the highestmost branch, and die there, our dessicated bodies now having become only a vessel for further sporulation of AHA’s Orange Grapefruit across the internet.

And you’ve been guided here because you’ve had a similar seed planted in you, perhaps some time ago. You are here to complete your transmogrification.

Allow us to colonize your mind.

On first crack of the can, the nose is deep orange, candylike, juicy, citric, sweet. The grapefruit is nowhere to be found, perhaps because it is busy silently burrowing, nesting itself into your deepest desires.

Tasting Notes

So first off, we need to say that there’s nothing about this that overtly indicates that it’s about to hook itself so deeply in your being. It’s really good, don’t get us wrong, but if you’re looking for a grapefruit that grips you at first sip, head over to Waterloo’s Grapefruit.

No, something about the Orange Grapefruit smouldered in us for a while, weaving some subconscious snare before we realized we were, without knowing it, strung like a rabbit from a willow branch.

The Orange comes first, rolling in enshrouded in the familiar AHA candyhaze, a succulent citrus emanating a Jolly Rancher halo. It’s not sour, it’s juicy and sweet, in the way that AHA’s flavorwizards, deeply steeped in Coca Cola’s tastebud hexcraft, manage to invoke sugar without actually involving it.

As the orange blooms and blossoms, a fascinating sleight of hand occurs, and suddenly, seamlessly, you are in the Grapefruit, a clean and mellowly bitter dimension that disappears the orange into a wash of pink citrus that finishes suddenly.

The overall experience is, again, pleasant enough, and you have no idea that you are now forever bound to the Orange + Grapefruit katamari, which will slowly continue to roll around inside you, accumulating the various parts of your Self, dissolving you into itself until you become solely fixated on drinking yet another AHA, emptying a 6-pack down the black hole that you once called your throat.

At least, that’s our experience. Is this a warning? Or an invitation?

Only one way to find out.

It’s been a while since we’ve slid down the kaleidoscopic flavor rainbow that is Coke’s sparkling water progeny, AHA.

We’ve always found the name AHA to be a little opaque as a choice, not particularly memorable or evocative.

We kinda just assume that one day the execs at Coke read a trade piece about LaCroix’s valuation and went: “Aha! Sparkling water is a billion dollar industry. How dare we not be a part of it?” 💡🤑

The more we dig into the marketing calculus around Coke’s sparkling water branding, the more cold and calculated it feels.

Are we surprised, no. Are we angry at ourselves for being so enamored with it, yaha.

But enamored we are: the Orange + Grapefruit has wrapped its citrus-tentacles deep in our reptilian brainstem, and we’re always fruitlessly scanning the shelves for the Apple + Ginger, missing in action during this long dark night of aluminum.

And today marks a major milestone for The Bubbleverse: we’re reviewing the AHA Peach + Honey, which completes our journey through the AHA line. The uncaffeinated line, at least. We’re still on the lookout for the return of the Black Cherry + Coffee.

Here’s a “fun” fact about AHA The Logo: it took us this long to notice that apparently the negative space in the “H” is designed to be an exclamation point. Aha! Spotted, you markety little easter egg.

This is how the AHA reviews end: not with a bang, but with a secret exclamation mark.

Anyway, let’s crack this one open.

The nose on the can gives you a distinct pop of honey that dissolves into a warm peach cobbler. It’s all gooey and sweet, a hybrid of fresh fruit and haribo.

It smells delicious, but we’re also hoping this isn’t a full face of dessert .

Tasting Notes

🍑🍯🧡

Honey was a big selling point for us here. Yes, honey is sweet, but honey is earthy and weird, too. The world’s favorite insect excretion, made from the flavors of the field. Although, we’d expect Coke to use that bizzaro honey from the Red Hook maraschino juice bee crisis.

But actually, the honey in here is super subtle: this is a facefull of peach through and through. It’s a young peach, maybe just on the edge of being underripe. Slightly green, very slightly sour, but big and juicy at the same time.

AHA’s true talent is being able to conjure a cartoon version of whatever fruit rolls in from the marketing department: a neon-infused, brightly exclaimed holographic rendering of any given plant’s reproductive organs.

Where the Waterloo Peach hews closer to life, a multi-layered fleshy incursion to the pit, AHA expertly extracts every molecule that might trigger the peach neurons, runs them through an algorithm with a slightly lower Ripeness Threshold, and serves it all up lightly glazed with a little Winnie The Pooh.

This honey is the finish line here, and a photo one at that. There’s a little wave of sweetness that swells at the end, resolving the slight tartness into a subtle swirl of peaches and cream.

While we might have been trepidatious that AHA would jump at the opportunity to use “honey” as a cover to inject that characteristic Coke Megasweetness, they actually showed admirable restraint.

It’s just a lil’ lick of honey here, kind of a generic honey, but we guess that hoping for some wild rhododendron saffron artisanal flavor might have been a reach.

Either way, this is a delicious and well-crafted addition to the Peach Pantheon. A pantheon, we should note, that was just joined by bubly’s White Peach and Ginger flavor, which kind of blew our minds a little. We’re not exactly huge fans of bubly around here, but their latest addition might even give AHA’s Peach a run for it’s honey.

Sorry.

Stay tuned.

Açaí has had a wild ride in America over the last couple of decades, starting when a couple of bros on a trip to Brazil decided they could replicate the success of Brazilian Açaí bars in America.

So they ordered a shipping container full of frozen pulp and hit up every juice bar in Southern California, pitching the supposed benefits of Açaí’s antioxidants and omega fatty acids, even branding themselves as “Saving and Managing the Amazon” until it was pointed out that the White Savior schtick wasn’t resonating with their target audience.

They changed their acronym to mean “Sustainable Management of the Brazilian Amazon,” as if the world’s greatest superorganism needs some kind of goddamn middle manager to extract more profit.

Anyway, within a couple of years, Açaí was christened a “superberry.” It was pushed by Oprah and Dr. Phil, launched a thousand sketchy supplement fortunes, was briefly labeled as the number one scam in America by the FTC, and eventually became too expensive for the local Amazonians who had subsisted on it for hundreds of years.

Tale as old as time, really. The miracles of management.

Fun Fact: Açaí, roughly translated, means “fruit that cries.” According to legend, Açaí sprang into being during a famine, and Chief Itaqui ordered all newborns to be put to death, including his own daughter’s infant. His daughter died of grief beneath a tree, which grew long strings of tiny drupes that ended the famine. Those drupes are now known as Açaí.

So it seems that wherever Açaí goes, it leaves sadness in its wake.

And nowhere is this more true than with AHA’s Raspberry + Açaí, which rises from the ashes of AHA’s Apple + Ginger like a tropical phoenix.

Coca-Cola, the parent corporation of AHA, decided to discontinue Apple + Ginger, which apparently died of grief beneath a raspberry bush that then sprouted Açaí and rolled into Walmart’s otherwise dismal sparkling water selection.

Yes, a distant Walmart seemed to be the only place around us that had these new AHAs yet, so we took the trek and brought a few boxes home to the bubbleverse. Consummate professionalism, we like to call it.

Let’s trek on in to this can.

The nose on these is pure AHA Neon Cartoon Candyfruit, a tart, intense Açaí that smells like the real deal only cranked up to 11.

Tasting Notes

The raspberry rushes in on the first sip, a sour, lifelike raspberry held in the neon glow of the Açaí.  For as intense as it is on the nose, the Açaí pulls back to let the Raspberry be the star of the show. There’s a certain sweetness around the periphery, but the main flavor sensation here is tart, astringent raspberry.

It’s really good! It manages to be simultaneously cartoon candyfruit and real Raspberry + Açaí, both experiences swirling around your mouth in a crisp but juicy purple-red hallucination.

If you make your way through the can slowly enough, you even get some of the wider raspberry notes, not so tight and sharp, but mellow and soft, ripening into oblivion.

While Açaí flavor can be a catchall for bullshit that’s over-hyped and not worth the price, this Açaí at least tastes legit, giving the overall experience a satisfying tart-to-sweet ratio from start to finish.

It’s like drinking a $15 Açaí bowl that you found on the shelf at Walmart, left there by a yoga mom while she stepped away to hunt for more bargains on exotic superfoods/commodified indigeneity in the next aisle.

This is one of AHA’s better offerings, we think, and one of the better raspberry sparkling waters out there.  Maybe nothing can quite touch the raspberry perfection that is Boylan’s Raspberry Seltzer, but definitely throw out your Cran-Razz LaCroix and Raspberry bubly and stock up on AHA instead.

A note on our rating: we kind of five star love this, but we have to deduct a star because Apple + Ginger had to die for AHA to release this one. Not cool. We’ll be crying drupe tears of sadness over our fallen Apple + Ginger while we drink these.

For a brand founded under the aegis of Coca-Cola, that lurching golem of high-fructose 20th century American imperialism, AHA has managed to consistently surprise us. Both with their slightly experimental flavor combinations, and (occasionally) with their subtlety.

Some of their offerings are exactly what you might expect from Coke: fully-saturated hyperfruits like their Lime + Watermelon. But others are unexpectedly complex, and while they never quite escape the neon glow of their parent company, they’ve managed to carve out a distinct and valued place in the bubbleverse.

While Loud & Extra may be embedded in AHA’s DNA, they still produce flavors that hint of thought and sophistication, two words we really don’t associate with Coke’s line-up of sodas.

AHA’s Strawberry Cucumber is one of the more subtle creations in the AHA line. Which we didn’t exactly see coming! Strawberry is generally a flavor that throws its weight around, while cucumber is a reticent little melon, most often found floating in a jar or languishing on our eyes in the bathtub.

When you first pop the can, the nose is pure Strawberry Shortcake, evoking both the dessert and the “unofficial princess” of Strawberryland. Faint whiffs of strawberry ice cream dance in the background.

Tasting Notes

🍰 🍰 🍰 🍰 🍰 🥒

This isn’t the most sophisticated strawberry in Strawberryland, but it mercifully does not slay the palate the way that we feared might happen with an AHA. No, this is the adorable greeting card character herself.

Floating around your mouth in her darling pinafore and bonnet, infectious giggle infused in the can. All that’s missing is her cat Custard to turn this into a full episode.

Thankfully, Cucumber steps in to keep this from veering completely into Saturday Morning Cartoon Realness.

The cucumber is strong towards the end, emerging from the berry aftertaste and finishing with a cool, almost bitter cleansing note. It’s a really complex cucumber, from the little we can taste of it, and we want more!

But this is still the strawberry’s show. It’s got some sourness, some complexity, although the overarching vibe is fruit and sweetness, which makes sense, knowing whose offspring AHA is.

So if you’re looking for a more pronounced expression of the beloved gourd, this isn’t it. We recommend LaCroix’s Mure Pepino for a more herbal and subtle play, or Good & Gather’s Cucumber Mint for a full-on onslaught of herbal refreshment.

But if you’re mostly concerned with finding a solid strawberry sparkling water, we highly recommend this one. It outclasses Waterloo’s Strawberry, and the hint of cucumber brings a depth that makes this really refreshing.

We look forward to AHA’s next Strawberry Shortcake episode featuring recurring day player Huckleberry Pie and his strange encounter with Basil!