The Best Store-Bought Lemonade: Our Taste Test Results

Lemonade, by definition, is simply a mixture of sugar, water and lemon juice. Thanks to the wonders of food manufacturing, a boatload of foreign ingredients have made their way into lemonade bottles over the years in the form of familiar suspects like high fructose corn syrup, but also some pretty sketchy ingredients you'd never expect to find in a beverage. Can you say "glycerol ester of wood resin?" (Seriously, that's in one of the lemonades we tested.)

Classic lemonade couldn't be much easier to make -- unless of course you eliminated the whole process of squeezing dozens of lemons. The only way to avoid the squeezing is to buy the store-bought kind, so we decided to conduct a blind taste test of 11 major store-bought lemonades to find which comes closest to the real thing. Some were almost unidentifiable as lemonade, while others reminded us of the homemade stuff.

Who came out on top? Check out the slideshow below.

As always, this taste test was in no way influenced or sponsored by the brands included.