Nantucket Nectar Grapeade

My favorite Nantucket Nectar is their Grapeade, which doesn't nutritionally really qualify as Nectar or Juice. Grapeade is more like "punch juice," which is what MGDub's not so little cousins would call it. I actually like a lot of their juice products having consumed more than my per capita share of Nantucket Nectars in college: Orange Mango, Cranberry Apple, Half & Half and nearly every other fruit/lemonade/ice tea combo they come up with.

Thinking about Nantucket Nectars is a trip down college meal plan memory lane. As I've mentioned before, I was on the highest meal plan (20 meals a week) for all four years...a "lifer." I'll spare you from an in depth discussion about all the nuances of the meal plan system [which, by the way, I mastered by my second semester], but here are the essentials: I almost never ate breakfast so my breakfast meal credit translated into a dollar denominated snack credit which I would use during the evening hours, after 8pm.

The campus snack bars, which were really QSRs or Quick Service Restaurants, all stocked Nantucket Nectars partially because Tom&Tom were both alums; the cool celebrated hip entrepreneurial kind rather than the old stodgy irrelevant to thirsty college students kind. Unfortunately, the campus snack bar student workers would stock the fridges with the following sub par methodology: open any three boxes from the basement storage area and stock fridge. The problem was, rather than stocking the fridge with a variety of flavors, if the three boxes were Cranberry Apple, Cranberry and Grape Juice, that's all you got until they sold out so I would hoard my favorite flavors whenever they were available. [Note: They got better about stocking a variety of flavors toward my senior year with the introduction of a new Nantucket Nectars display case.]

At any given point my freshman year, chances were a bottle of Grapeade resided in the dorm fridge I shared with my roommate with my stash of Grapeade bottles hitting 6-8 at various points in time. One of my friends, having witnessed my obscene Grapeade stash, ridiculed my love of Grapeade until one fateful night. I’d snagged three bottles of Grapeade that night when I spied his brown paper bag filled with his snack bar loot and innocently asked, “Hey, what did you get?” He hemmed and hawed and avoided the question until he finally revealed they he too had three bottles of Grapeade in his brown paper bag. Harrumph…

Sadly, Grapeade was near impossible to find at any campus snack bar after my freshman year. Grapeade became a rare treat once I had to use my "flex points" or god forbid, cash to buy them at the campus market and other non snack bar vendors. Turns out, my coworkers Nina and Steve also enjoy Grapeade and occasionally we’ll come across some Nantucket Nectars leftover from catered lunch meetings. One time, I specifically went into the conference room after a meeting to scavenge a Grapeade, but was unsuccessful. Five minutes later, Steve saunters by my office brandishing a bottle of Grapeade. I exclaimed, “I was just in there looking for that, where did you find it? Are there anymore?” Steve was duly rewarded for his meticulous search and rescue effort finding the Grapeade buried in the ice. However, he was nice enough to share his Grapeade with me. Having declared my undying eternal love for Grapead, I'm thinking I might splurge and just buy one next time I'm out and about.