SoBe Lean

Product Type:Functional: Energy Drink: Diet; Container: 20 oz glass
BevNET Review: With a bit of mint joining its green tea flavor, this could have been a terrific beverage, if it weren’t for the fact that someone at SoBe appears to be so excited about the taste of their Ace-K/Sucralose sweetener blend that they’re adding it to everything with a heavy, heavy hand. But they’re certainly playing to an established IDEA about tea, one that we learned down South when we’d order a “sweet tea,” take a sip, and have our teeth call the dentist on their own. And the weird thing is, here, the blend tastes mighty sugary, and appears to be one of the best uses of these sweeteners we’ve tasted, and there’s no dental intercession involved. Too bad the nearly colorless straight green tea just doesn’t look that good in the bottle, or else we’d have been compelled to rate it even higher. Definitely worth a try for green tea fans.

Product Type:Functional: Energy Drink: Diet; Container: 20 oz glass
BevNET Review: Cold, this Sucralose/Ace-K sweetened peach bomb is a winner for about 15 ounces, but could there be anything less tasty than the warm end of an artificially-sweetened 20-oz diet iced tea? SoBe has managed to plow a lot of peach – if not tea -- flavor into its vaguely oriental lizard bottle, and the beverage itself looks to be the proper shade of rust. But since we’ve left college, we tend to slow down after chugging the first 12 ounces of anything, and that leaves a tougher slog to get down the end of these 20-oz monsters. Still, it shows some peachy promise, and is worth a try.

Product Type:Functional: Energy Drink: Diet; Container: 20 oz glass
BevNET Review: SoBe manages to pack a fair amount of citrus flavor into its Lean Energy beverage, although not enough to cause a stampede for the cooler. But the Ace-K/Sucralose sweetener blend provides a nice, sweet foil to the sour lemon juice flavor and makes it a little better than most of its competitors. Nevertheless, there’s that generic-orange flavor that plagues so many of these diet drinks, and there also doesn’t seem to be much of that caffeine kick to it that we look for when consuming a drink that’s supposed to give us “energy.” Worth a try if only to see how the sweetener blend can be effective.