This Is What I Drink : 29

Sheetz Chocolate-Banana Iced Coffee Drink

This is one of the final holdovers from the State College trip a few weekends ago. You see, Sheetz is one of the major convenience store chains in all of Pennsylvania, but they only start appearing once you get close to central Pennsylvania, otherwise you'd be at a Wawa. The Wawa/Sheetz boundary is nearly as contested and important to Pennsylvania's history as the Mason-Dixon line. Anyway, Sheetz makes its own brand of iced coffee beverage to compete with the Starbuck's Frapuccinos/Rockstar Roasted/Java Monsters of the world.

These kind of canned iced coffee drinks have become a favorite of mine on tour because you can't always get a chilled coffee drink at a rest stop, and these drinks fulfill that wish. I normally would not have stopped for this one, but the private label price ($1.99, not so bad) and the flavor (Chocolate-BANANA) got me to buy it. Banana is capitalized there because it's the wild card here. Chocolate, caramel, vanilla are all pretty common additions to canned coffee, but I have rarely if ever seen banana used. Ultimately though, this becomes the major disappointment of the drink because there really wasn't much banana flavor present. I understand that artificial banana flavor can go in many directions, possibly bad, but I'm always up for the experiment. I love banana flavored Runts and banana flavored Laffy Taffy. I have to say that Sheetz kind of wussed out here. They played it safe, and although the rest of the beverage is pretty decent and might be as good as the competitors at a better price, I bought it because it said banana, and I didn't get banana. Again, it's a pretty good product, but I wish they would have just advertised only a chocolate flavored coffee drink because it would have been more accurate.