Celsius's new Strawberry Passionfruit flavor is here. Is it any good?
Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Celsius was off my energy drink radar for a while.
Co-workers gave it rave reviews. But due to a crippling case of poor brain, I continually opted for cheaper choices when it came to my morning allotment of caffeine. Marked down cans of A-Shoc and Gorgie could only take me so far, however. When Celsius asked if I'd like to review their new flavor -- and some old ones -- I said yes.
The result wasn't anything that redefines the caffeinated genre, but it's pretty solid nonetheless. The latest flavor, Strawberry Passionfruit, edged dangerously toward generic mess but ultimately proved the folks over there know what they're doing.
Let's break that down with a taste test. And, since I've got a bunch of Celsiuses in my fridge (Celsii?), let's run through some other popular flavors and see how they stand up.
Sparkling Strawberry Passionfruit: B
Well, as an avowed hater of artificial passionfruit (and most actual ones), my hope is this leans heavily toward strawberry like in the Kiwi Strawberry version (see below). It pours a classic Celsius neon yellow/green. It smells sweet with just enough of stale rubber passion fruit flavor to make me think I'm not gonna like it.
Fortunately, the strawberry is vibrant enough to wash out the less appealing features of the fruit. It's sweet and crisp, bringing a little more depth than your standard strawberry candy/energy drink. The passion fruit is minimal but does show up toward the end, right as you're getting what would be the "bite near the stem" part of the strawberry on your tongue. It's slightly creamy and a little sloppy and not great, but not bad either.
The crispness of the carbonation snaps that off, leaving you with an easy-to-drink source of caffeine that does seem to wake me up halfway through the can. I'm gonna add a little cold water to it because that's what I typically do with my energy drinks and see how it holds up.
That's a solid addition; some extra hydration that stretches the dense flavor you get from each can of Celsius. It turns down the intensity of the fruit without washing it out -- leaving the strawberry relatively untouched but limiting the scope of the passion fruit I'm not wild about. A can of this, a stack of ice and some cold water in a 30 ounce tumbler and I'm in great shape.
Sparkling Cherry Cola: B+
I understand "sparkling" is a big part of Celsius's identity. I'm also not sure you need it as a descriptor of cherry cola, where bubbles are the default and a lack of carbonation would, for lack of a better word, suck. But it pours like you'd expect, a Coke-ish brown with plenty of bubbles that quickly fizz and recede, casting off a mist of sweet, spiced aromas.
The first sip unveils a little more cherry than you'd get from a typical Cherry Coke or Wild Cherry Pepsi. It's soft and not overpowering, leaving a distinct counterpoint to the carbonation and slight acidity of a cola. That leaves you without some of the nicer pieces of a good craft cola -- you don't quite get that vanilla/nutmeg/cinnamon feeling -- but the cherry is solid enough that it's not a big deal. It's not perfect -- it's a little syrupy and artificial -- but honestly that's par for the course with cherry sodas.
While that leaves it light on the Pepsi angle, it's still easy to drink. It's sweet, but the carbonation helps keep that from feeling cloying. I could use a bit more acidic tang that's a staple of the energy drink landscape, but I get the impression Celsius's whole deal is not feeling like an energy drink, despite the 200 milligrams of caffeine within.
Sparkling Kiwi Strawberry: B
This pours an unnatural neon urine color, which would be concerning if that weren't a base color for many energy drinks. It smells great, fruity and crisp with a steady current of carbonation floating to the top.
The flavor is dense; layers of kiwi and strawberry stacked over each other in a mix that's a bit of a cacophony despite the drink's simplicity. There's more here than you'd expect from a 10 calorie drink, which makes it a bit thicker than most energy drinks. But the strawberry sweetness works with the tang of the kiwi. There's also a minor smokiness -- not overwhelming, but it's there -- that pushes back against that sugar-adjacent flavor.
All in all, it's fine. I tend to thin out my energy drinks with water in the first place, and Celsius works great for this -- strong enough to be stretched to 20 ounces without losing the flavor up front. I wouldn't do that with the cherry cola, but a fruit-based drink is an easy way to slip a little extra hydration into your morning wake-up.
Sparkling Lemon Lime: C
Well, that's not an especially appetizing color. But, again, it's an energy drink. Looking unnatural and vaguely extreme is a feature, not a bug. It smells acidic -- there's a little fruit, but it's got that citric acid sting that will be immediately familiar to anyone who's had a hard seltzer in the last decade.
It's overly sweet and slightly too thick. It's going for Sprite but comes off like someone messed up the calibration on the soda fountain, giving you too much syrup. It's not bad, but it's left tasting like year-old off-brand soda. Like something you'd find buried deep on a Wal-Mart shelf.
The citrus is flat and comes off like a lemon wedge crusted with Splenda. The citric acid is unmistakable, making everything feel cheap. Cutting it with ice and water helps thin out the texture, but the taste remains generic. After handling cherry cola so well I had high hopes for Celsius's 7-up variant. Instead, it tastes like a forgettable hard seltzer. Boo.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Celsius energy drinks over a cold can of Hamm’s?
I'm fully aware the two beverages have very different functions. But in terms of flavor, I'd take the cherry cola and strawberry kiwi over the underrated-but-delicious midwestern beer. The strawberry passion fruit is a maybe. The lemon lime? Nah, I'm good.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Celsius's new Strawberry Passionfruit flavor is here. Is it any good?
