Some friends gave me a bottle of spearmint Metromint as a gift. And as it turns out, it was a mean-spirited gift.

Let's look at that bottle. It calls itself "pure, simple mintwater®". What the heck is pure mintwater? Do you go to the local mintwater stream and collect it? Oh, wait, sorry. That should be mintwater®.

With some trepidation, I took a sip. Yuck-o. It's like drinking chewing gum. Why would anybody want this?

But wait, there's more. On the side of the bottle, there's a picture of a thermometer, and the mercury reads −6°, or "extra cool." Whatever that means. The bottle never explains.

On their benefits page, if you click through to "rehydrate", it says that "the good stuff in Metromint gets where it's going quicker, and goes to work faster." Huh? What's the scientific basis for this claim? Quicker than what? And the biggest mystery of them all: What part of Metromint is the "good stuff"? I haven't found it yet.

Whatever. My point is that this stuff is awful. And I'm not the only person who thinks so.