Refrigerated Lemonade: What's Your Favorite?

Required Eating

Posted by Ed Levine, August 31, 2007 at 7:40 AM

When life gives you lemons ... In the last throes of summer, a man's attention turns to lemonade. Lemonade is considered a summer drink, though I don't understand why. Lemons are grown year-round, according to the USDA. I drink lemonade all year. It's incredibly refreshing and goes with anything from hamburgers to pizza to pastas with tomato-based sauces. But I digress.

We're here to discuss the results of the Serious Eats Lemonade Taste-Off. I must admit I did this one myself. My officemates were simply too busy working on the site to join me on my lemonade quest.

I tasted six lemonades, all plucked from refrigerated cases in two stores, Whole Foods and Fairway.

The results?

Newman's Own Virgin Lemonade
15 percent lemon juice. Newman's Own won a Cook's Illustrated taste test a couple of years ago, and it was certainly very good, but I tasted a little too much lemon pulp and oil. If you like your lemonade slightly acidic, this is the lemonade for you.
Grade: 89
Ingredients: Pure filtered water, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, lemon juice from concentrate, lemon pulp and lemon oil

Tropicana Lemonade
15 percent lemon juice. Tropicana lemonade had a weird unnatural taste, perhaps from the unidentified natural flavors on the ingredient list. It was also too sweet. Shouldn't food manufacturers have to spell out just what natural flavors they use?
Grade: 72
Ingredients: Filtered water, high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, lemon juice concentrate, ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and other natural flavors. 10 percent lemon juice

Simply Lemonade
12 percent lemon juice. Simply Lemonade was a tad too sweet, but it had a nice lemony flavor and balance between sweet and tart.
Grade: 89
Ingredient: Pure filtered water, natural sugar, lemon juice, natural flavors

Sir Real Pure Squeezed Lemonade
15 percent "fresh-squeezed lemon juice." By all rights this should have been the winner. They use fresh-squeezed lemon juice and lots of it, and its ingredient list is refreshingly short (see below). Then why did it have an odd, zesty, acidic aftertaste? Perhaps the fresh-squeezed lemons they juiced weren't very good or ripe.
Grade: 80
Ingredients: Water, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, cane sugar

Odwalla Lemonade
17 percent lemon juice. I really liked this one, but the folks here at Serious Eats world headquarters who tried it thought it was too sweet. I thought it had a nice sweet-tart balance and low acidity.
Grade: 90
Ingredients: Water, cane sugar, lemon juice

Whole Foods 365 Lemonade
I found this lemonade to be the oddest in the bunch. I kept tasting things in the lemonade that weren't listed in the ingredients. I'm sure it was me, but in any case I would not buy this lemonade again.
Grade: 80
Ingredients: Water, sugar, lemon juice

So there you have it. Enjoy either the Newman's Own, Simply Lemonade, or the sweeter Odwalla year-round. There was no clear-cut winner. You'll have to taste all three and tell me which you prefer. The Odwalla is, at $5, the most expensive of the bunch by a fair amount. Although I am usually loathe to admit this, perhaps lemonade is something worth making from scratch. Here's a great recipe from Serious Eats friend Elise Bauer at Simply Recipes.

Photograph from iStockPhoto.com

10 Comments | Tags: lemonade, Serious Eats Taste Tests

10 Comments:

Ed,
What kind of grading system gives "wouldn't buy again" an 80? You actually used a ten-point grading scale (80-90), but "80" sounds much better than "1" on a ten-point scale. Rethink.

gustoct at 10:20AM on 08/31/07

Regarding "Sir Real" lemonade: I think you bought into the hype on this one, Ed. I think it's a tad bit bogus to claim "fresh-squeezed" on a packaged product. I'm not a huge lemonade drinker, but I'd imagine that my definition of "fresh-squeezed lemonade" would mirror that of "fresh-squeezed orange juice." Meaning that it was, best case scenario, squeezed-to-order or, worst case, squeezed earlier that day. I would argue that any drink mass-produced in a facility and shipped to a store and stocked on the shelves loses any claim to being "fresh squeezed." Unless Sir Real is squeezed down the street from the store and delivered that day, it's just plain ol' lemonade.

Adam Kuban at 10:33AM on 08/31/07

I've always been a big Newman's Own fan. Most store-bought lemonades are far too sweet. As for the pulp, I like it except for the last glass in the carton. Then it's too pulpy.

capndesign at 2:08PM on 08/31/07

Wow, I'm surprised Newman's Own has HFCS in it . . . I stay way far away from that stuff. Normally, I'd be as cynical as Adam about Sir Real's "Fresh Squeezed" claim (and, technically, Adam's still right). But I do find it interesting that it's the only one who lists lemon juice before sugar. I like a nice, tart lemonade, so I may give it a try.

The best lemonade I know of though? My own. Fresh squeezed and mixed with sparkling water. With a sprig of rosemary or lavender, whichever's looking spriggier at the moment.

Thanks for the roundup!

swirlingnotions at 3:38PM on 08/31/07

I'm nothing if not cynical, swirlingnotions. Heh. But, yeah, admittedly, if I weren't quibbling with the "fresh-squeezed" label, I'd have to agree that Sir Real's ingredient list looks the best.

Adam Kuban at 4:00PM on 08/31/07

Thanks for the round-up---now I'm convinced to leave to store-bought on the shelf & make Elise's recipe!

JEP at 4:34PM on 08/31/07

Natural Flavors = Fermented Wombat and Cane Toad Toe Jam

Biggest scam in the entire food business. Natural Flavors can be just about anything not outright poisonous.

peekpoke at 5:37PM on 08/31/07

What? No Nantucket Nectars in the mix? It's by far and away the best chilled lemonade I've ever bought.

AdamH at 8:56PM on 08/31/07

Hi Ed,

Thanks for shout out! We have three lemon trees here, 1 regular and 2 Meyer, so we have fresh lemons almost all year round, which is why we end up making so much lemonade from scratch. It's really so easy. To make a quart of lemonade only requires one cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice (2-4 lemons, depending on how big an juicy your lemons are) and 1/2 cup to 1 cup of sugar. If you live in the part of the country where they don't grow lemons, buy them in season (winter), juice them and freeze the juice. We end up freezing a whole bunch of juice in 8 ounce jars, perfect for pulling out when we want to make lemonade during those few months (coming up now) when there are no more ripe lemons on the tree.

That said, I grew up with frozen lemonade from a can. Especially loved the frozen pink lemonade and limeade. Don't know what's in them now (probably a lot of HFCS) but in the 60s, it was pretty much just lemon juice, pulp, sugar, and water.

Of the brands you mentioned above, the one I'm probably most familiar with is Paul Newman's, which I think is pretty good.

Basically anything that uses real lemon juice and not Splenda is a huge leap forward. I seriously think that most of the country believes that Crystal Light is what lemonade is supposed to taste like.

Elise Bauer at 1:36AM on 09/01/07

I would headline Swirl's astute observation that HFCS is an ingredient. As the evidence mounts, this ingedient is a strong candidate to become the next trans fat. With the Newman Brand's impeccable image for higher quality, it is hard to imagine they will not reformulate to drop it as soon as possible rather than tarnish their enviable equity.

EFOpov at 8:37PM on 09/04/07

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