Let me preface this by saying that I really, really, wanted to like City Water Hard Seltzer. It’s made locally here near Chicago by the Solemn Oath brewery out of Naperville, and I’m always a fan of supporting the local businesses, but I’m not sure if we just got a bad batch, or if the mixed berry flavor was the wrong one to go with, but it was not a hit among my group of friends.
City Water Hard Seltzer 1st Impressions – Blind Taste Test
The first time I tried City Water Hard Seltzer was at our Friendsgiving event last November (2019). I had purchased a bunch of different flavors and brands of hard seltzers so that we could all do a hard seltzer blind taste test to determine which brand and/or flavor tasted the best, without knowing what we were drinking.
I’ve been a huge fan of White Claw since it began to get popular last summer, but I wanted to see if there were other brands out there that were better, which is where the idea for the blind taste test was born.
If you want to read about what went down at the blind taste test, you can click the links back to that article, but for now I just want to focus on City Water Hard Seltzer, their mixed berry flavor in particular.
I went to Whole Foods on the very first day that City Water was going to be available in stores. And after a few minutes of searching the liquor area I finally found their six packs.
I was instantly disappointed that they did not have a variety pack of the different flavors, so I was forced to buy a six-pack of a single flavor… and in this case I went with mixed berry.
I chose the mixed berry flavor because most of the other hard seltzer brands had some sort of berry flavor among their variety packs, and I wanted to make sure that the blind taste test included different brands with similar flavors.
And unfortunately for City Water, it ranked dead last out of all of the different brands and flavors that we tried.
Upon everyone’s first sip there was that cringy face you make when you sip something that just tastes bad.
None of the other seltzer brands or flavors caused people to make that face, but the City Water was unanimous as being the worst tasting out of all of them.
It’s hard to deny that it was bad when all 10 people at our party had the same reaction… and even a few other people I had try them afterwards didn’t care for them.
But I wanted to give them another shot, so a few months later (today, as I’m writing this) I’ve decided to redo my impressions for the Antifoodie YouTube channel to see if maybe the blind taste test was flawed back in November.
City Water Mixed Berry – Second Impressions
So I put a couple months between the first taste test and the second one, and honestly… unfortunately, I can say that it’s still not very good.
It’s not quite as bad as I remember it being that first time, but I still couldn’t bring myself to finish the entire can. It has like a subtle beery aftertaste and not very much mixed berry flavor. It was almost like a watered down Bud Light with just a super small hint of flavor. I would say that Bud Light Lime is better than this and I don’t even like beer.
I’m hoping that maybe some of the other flavors are a bit better, but with the lack of a variety 6-pack, I can’t bring myself to just flat out buy 6 of each of the other flavors to try, but if anyone has had all the flavors, please let me know in the comments what you thought was the best.
I really did want to like this hard seltzer, but I just can’t get into it. It doesn’t taste like the hard seltzer I’m used to, and it doesn’t have the flavor that I want.
It’s not nearly as bad as that Four Loko Hard Seltzer though, so I would definitely choose this over that if I had to choose, but it would not be at the top of any of my lists.
Have you tried a bunch of different hard seltzers? Let us know in the comments what your favorites are so we can give them a try. Small batch, big batch, doesn’t mater… just let me know and I’ll see if I can find them near me to try out.
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