Mexican Lagers
We sampled the four best-selling imported Mexican lagers plain and cooked in drunken beans.
Orange Juice
Is the sunny image of our favorite breakfast juice actually just pulp fiction?
Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate
We’d long written off frozen concentrated orange juice as a relic from the 1950s and were shocked to find that we actually liked two of the products.
Supermarket Medium-Roast Coffee
Decades after they convinced Americans to drink ultradark French and Italian roasts, the producers of blackened beans are coming out with lighter options. So ho…
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Sherry
In the test kitchen, we use sherry in a variety of recipes. Does it matter what type and brand you cook with? In a word, yes.
Supermarket Green Tea
The Japanese and Chinese have sipped green tea for more than a millennium. Suddenly, Westerners are drinking it, too. So which tastes best?
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Tomato Juice
We wanted to find a a product that we work well cooked in recipes, that we could also drink straight from the bottle.
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Instant Espresso Powder
Is the right espresso powder the secret to intense chocolate flavor in brownies and other baked goods?
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Decaffeinated Coffees
Has grocery store decaf coffee improved as much as the high-octane stuff in recent years? Or is that asking for the moon?
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Iced Tea
Do specialty packages blended specifically for iced tea really make a better pitcher than a chilled-down version of the old-fashioned stuff?
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Bottled Iced Teas with Lemon
We were looking for iced teas that actually tasted like tea. Could any deliver?
Premium Teas
Supermarket teas have improved in quality; does it still make sense to buy premium teas?
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Orange Liqueurs
For cooking, do you need to spend big bucks for the prestige brands, or will something cheaper work just as well? What about for mixed drinks?
Irish Beer
We tasted seven beers which claim an Irish pedigree to determine if Guinness, the most famous, is also the best. The answer was both yes and no.
Supermarket Black Tea
Which black tea you should buy depends on how you take it—plain or with milk and sugar.
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Hard Apple Cider
We tasted four nationally available hard ciders both plain and cooked in recipes.
Grapefruit Juice
Grapefruit juice runs the gamut in terms of tartness and sweetness. We put five nationally available brands to the test to see if we could find a well-balanced …
Lemonade
A small brand squeezes past the big names.
Bottled Water
Are we out of our minds to pay over 35 cents per glass for bottled water?
Dry Vermouth
Fruity, herbaceous vermouths top our tasting.