Best of all, they offer these flavours in small single serving packages. One of the biggest problems I have in sampling new flavours of Tang is that I often have to buy a giant bag of the stuff, and if I don’t like this new flavour I’m stuck with a lot of leftovers.
I decided on my recent trip to try and pick up a whole bunch of different flavours and taste test each and every one of them. The original idea was to try them on the trip, but I quickly realised there are just too many flavours, and not enough time on my vacation. So I decided to drink as many flavours as I could there, but would allow myself to take a few home.
I didn’t get to taste each and every flavour offered in the Philippines, but I did taste a lot. I also avoided what I deemed as common flavours that I think I’ve seen in other countries. I’ll be honest, I’ve never drank so much Tang in my life in such a short time, but I’ve also never had some much fun drinking Tang in my life either.
Four Seasons (pineapple, orange, mango, guava)
Colour - An ungodly orange.
Flavour - Imagine a fruit punch, only without any fruit that would give it a red colour. We always associate fruit punch with red, but logically many tropical fruits aren’t actually red, so this makes more sense. The problem with this mix is that the guava flavour dominates, with the other fruits being almost indistinguishable.
Colour - A cloudy yellow.
Flavour - It kind of works. I say kind of because honey is a really hard flavour to get right in powdered drink form. Tang is already very sweet, and while the sweet of this is a little different than classic Tang, I’m not sure I’d call it honey. The lemon is your classic Tang lemon flavour, and it dominates. This basically tastes like a super sweet lemon drink, with an odd flavour I just can’t place, but I guess we can call it honey.
Melon
Colour - A murky orange.
Flavour - I’m not a big fan of melon flavoured candies and treats, with the biggest problem being that they don’t offer the refreshment that real melon provides. I thought that maybe in drink form it might work, but alas there’s one giant problem, it’s too sweet. This is coming from a guy who runs a fairly prolific candy review website too.
Guyabano
Colour - A murky green/yellow white.
Flavour - I should start by saying that I have no recollection of ever eating or drinking anything called guyabano before tasting this. I have sampled many tropical fruits and juices in many parts of the world, so maybe I’ve tried it under a different name. However, based on the flavour of this Tang, I would say that a guyabano tastes kind of like an apple and pear combination. As Tangs go, this one’s not that bad.
Apple Iced Tea
Colour - An appropriately reddish brown.
Flavour - I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a real apple iced tea in my life, so I don’t have anything to compare it to. What I can say is that this starts off with a hint of fake apple, but suddenly it’s stopped with something I can only describe and tea like. Neither flavour really dominates, but they also don’t really blend together very well. I’m thankful that it’s not just fake apple, but I'm not sure about the iced tea. It’s also very sweet for iced tea.
Mixed Berries Lemonade
Colour - A murky purple.
Flavour - I don’t think this really tastes like lemonade, but it does have a hint of berry. It also doesn’t just taste like a berry flavour drink either though. The best way I would describe it is that it tastes like a random berry lollipop made up of that compressed sugar candy. It’s very tasty, but I’m not sure I’d call it refreshing, mostly because it’s super sweet. I actually had to double check the directions to make sure I made it properly, because I was convinced I must have made it with too little water. It’s good, but it’s also a little odd.
Lychee
Colour - A murky white with a hint of pink.
Flavour - Before this day I had never even thought of Tang making a lychee flavoured drink before. Lychee (to someone who was brought up in North America) seemed like a flavour that was too exotic/fancy to make into a flavour of Tang. The thing is, it’s perfect. I’ve had lychee juice in the past, and flavour wise this is super close. The texture of the drink is a little different than lychee juice, but flavour wise it’s really close. It’s probably because lychee are super sweet already, so since Tang is a super sweet drink it just makes sense.
Apple
Colour - Surprisingly similar to real apple juice.
Flavour - In science fiction, food replicators are often described as making food that tastes similar to the real thing only just a little off, and not in the good way. That’s probably how I would describe this apple Tang. Your taste buds just keep hoping that it will taste like apple juice, but it just doesn’t get there.
Grape
Colour - Very, very purple… almost too purple.
Flavour - In the past I would describe the flavour of most Tang flavours to be sweet, maybe even too sweet. While this is a very sweet drink, it also has a slight (very slight) sourness to it as well. It’s very subtle, but it adds a nice counterbalance to the intense sweet flavour. The grape flavour itself tastes nothing like real grapes, but it has that fake grape flavour that I’m so used to by now that it doesn’t bother me that it’s fake.
Strawberry Lemonade
Colour - A murky pink colour, which is fine because it’s lemonade.
Flavour - Just before I took my first sip of this Tang, I wondered if this was going to taste more of lemonade or strawberry. As it turns out, kind of neither. I guess if I had a gun to my head I would say more lemonade, but lemonade with a really strong fruit like flavour that I wouldn’t really describe and strawberry. This is a tough flavour to get right since I’m a big fan of frozen strawberries in my lemonade, so I have some reference for what it should taste like.
Calamansi
Colour - A murky yellow.
Flavour - I have a bit of a beef with Tang, and it’s all about when they choose to make a flavour that’s orange adjacent. I’ve had a few flavours of Tang that are based on fruit that are very close to orange, but slightly different. For the most part I find that the flavour of these Tangs is very similar to their regular orange, only they’re dyed a different colour. This Calaminsi falls right into that category. I find it hard to believe that this is that much different than their regular orange flavour, except for the fact that it’s yellow instead of orange coloured.
Strawberry
Colour - A very bright pink.
Flavour - I’d probably say that this flavour is the least surprising of all the flavours I’ve tasted so far. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not a great thing either. It’s a perfectly fine fake strawberry flavour that works fairly well when it’s a really sweet drink. There’s nothing subtle about the flavour, even opening the package has a strong fake strawberry smell. It’s perfectly fine, but nothing unique about it at all.
Pomelo
Colour - A murky pink with a hint of orange (pretty close to the fruit to be honest).
Flavour - As with the colour, the flavour of this pomelo drink is pretty close to the original. The main difference is the sour/bitter flavour that sometimes happens with some pomelos is totally gone. They got the sweet flavour right, and the basic flavour is there, but I always feel like if I eat too many wedges of pomelo that my tongue might go numb, but I doubt that would happen with this drink. Having said that, this might be the winner for flavour I’d most like to try again in the future.
Orange and Carrot
Colour - Really bright orange.
Flavour - This Tang flavour unfortunately falls into the same category as many other orange based flavours of Tang, in that it generally just tastes like regular orange tang. There might be a slight difference, but I wouldn’t call that difference carrot flavoured. It could be that they’ve added real carrots to this drink, but I doubt it. I’ve only recently discovered carrot juice as a mixer with vegetable juice and one thing carrot juice gives fruit juice is a balance. The balance comes from the fact that carrot juice is not sweet. This Tang as usual is super sweet, so there really isn’t that balance.
After all the drink box would not exist without the bendy straw. The fact that you need a straw that is longer than the box, but also fist neatly at the side of the box as well is an amazing math problem. Not to mention the role these straws play for the sick and elderly that can’t sit up very well to get drinks.
The bendy straw is a miracle of both science and the inventor should get a noble prize. 