Yeah, I enjoyed a good Crystal Pepsi.
Coke Classic uses corn syrup instead of sugar in the United States. Outside of the USA, you can get it with sugar, the way it used to be. Costco and a few other places here in SD sometimes carries Mexican Coke, for those of us who like it that way.
There’s no dispute that the recipe changed at some point, since Coke predated the introduction of HFCS, and HFCS replaced sucrose in Coke at some point I think prior to New Coke.
For a while, IIRC, Pepsi was actually distinguished from Coke by still using sucrose, making it ironically more like “real” Coke. Until the economics of HFCS vs. sucrose caught up to them at least.
Amish root beer - in a big big glass bottle! Lovely!
Crystal Pepsi was explosive, and I don’t mean the taste.
How the heck do you have a ‘craving’ for something that you’ve never had. Especially in the way that you implied. “What did new coke taste like?” would have been a perfectly reasonable question. Why would anybody want to be a failed soda poseur. Jeeze.
But to eulogize departed sodas, I’d like to give a send out to OK soda, which was weird tasting but had a nifty can.
And a phone line. Boy, my 12 year old self thought the phone line was the coolest thing ever.
Oh, has anyone else noticed? Amish girls are HAWT!
I’ve been thinking that for a while. Everyone always talks about what a disaster New Coke was, how it was one of the worst business decisions ever made. But I remember what it was like back then, and I think Coca-Cola was being crazy like a fox. Are we really to believe that a multi-billion dollar company was genuinely planning to shut down its flagship product? Maybe it was just a distraction from the real goal of switching to HFCS, but I think it served a marketing purpose too: They come out with the New Coke that is sweeter and tastes more like Pepsi, and it’s roundly rejected by the market while there were loads of news stories about people hoarding cases of the original formula. Tons of free publicity all highlighting how many people crave the original Coke and hate the Pepsi-analog. Maybe it was just an accident how the publicity turned out – it’s hard to imagine a company signing off on a move that promotes the product but makes the management look like idiots – but I like to think it was inspired marketing.
I like RC Cola.
Bet that would be worth a decent amount to a collect today. Wonder if there’s any New Coke sitting on a rack like an old wine, gathering sentimental value.
I hear there’s a landfill of the stuff next to the old Atari 2600 “E.T” cartridges.
That explains it!
I work in a grocery store, and in the ethic foods section, there is Mexican Coke, except the bottles are really tall, kept warm, and have cheap packaging. Me and the other employees always joke each other about what the difference is, and occassionaly dare each other to drink it (never do, though), since we assumed it was dangerous or undrinkable or something since it wasn’t sold near the other sodas.
Now Rimbo solved the mystery of the Mexican Coke.
Battery acid!
No, wait, all Coke tastes like battery acid. I give up.
I loved OK. So sad when they discontinued it.
It tasted like… I don’t know… a mix between coke and fresca? 3/4 coke and 1/4 fresca? That description probably doesn’t do it justice, but I really liked it.
What does regular Coke taste like?
Ass. That’s what it tasted like. Ass.
There are a bunch of sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, soda stories out there. For example, Irish Dr Pepper.
Supposedly the story behind New Coke was that the market for Coke was getting split because even Coke fans started preferring the taste of Diet Coke. Diet Coke, supposedly, tasted a lot more like Pepsi. So to make New Coke they decided to take their recipe for Diet Coke and replace the artificial sweetener with a real sweetener. Voila.
I’m pretty sure that you can still get coke made with real sugar in states where they produce sugar, i.e. Hawaii and some of the gulf states. It really makes a difference in the flavor. HFCS is making us all huge. Thanks Arthur Daniels Midlan.