I drink a handful of sodas a year, usually diet, and usually opportunistically (on an airplane, or out somewhere where the other beverage choices don’t appeal to me). Volume-wise, I drink more ice water than anything else, though I have half a glass of juice in the morning (usually orange) and a mug of strong coffee, and the occasional glass of wine (or less frequently a beer). If I am in Europe, sometimes I will order whatever the local lemon soda is (regular, not diet), because it actually tastes like lemon and has real lemon juice in it. Why don’t we have real lemon sodas in the U.S.? Once in a blue moon I will have a root beer or ginger beer. Damn, now I am craving a root beer float with Breyer’s vanilla ice ream. Haven’t had one of those in years!
I used to keep a case of Diet Coke under my desk at work and have one with lunch over a big tumbler of ice, for the extra caffeine. But I am pretty sensitive to caffeine, and cut it out maybe 15 years ago. In recent years I have largely lost my taste for soda, although I never drank the vast quantities of it that some people do.
I drink soft drinks daily. If I have something else, it’s usually sweet tea, so also sugary. The exception is nightime. The last hour before sleep, I generally have ice water.
Fresca was the nastiest. It left an irritating coating in the throat.
My mom never had soda in the house, and we rarely went out to eat when I was a kid, I got no allowance, so I rarely if ever had sodas until I earned my own money. But I didn’t find them especially thirst-quenching…I had to drink water for that. Now, I prefer water, coffee or unsweetened iced tea for a beverage…almost never drink soda at all.
I’m kinda surprised at how many people drink Dr. Pepper, because, growing up, that was the soda nobody I knew liked. In high school my older sister had a part-time job with a consumer research agency. She asked me to get a few of my friends together for one of the in-person surveys they were doing. They asked us about sodas and what we liked etc. We all bad-mouthed Dr. Pepper – really ragging on it. At the end of the survey, they gave us little paper cups of the survey sponsor’s product. You guessed it – Dr. Pepper.
At the time they had really cheesy advertising, and it really improved not long after, so my friends and I felt partly responsible.
I lost my taste for it when I was pregnant with my son, 30-odd years ago, and never picked it up again. We were never big soda drinkers in my house growing up…we’d get one teeny-tiny glass (think shot glass size) of root beer on Sundays to go with our popcorn while we watched Mutual of Omaha Animal Kingdom or Wonderful World of Disney.
I will drink flavored seltzer water, but usually it’s iced water or unsweet iced tea for me.
I wonder if it is a taste acquired in childhood? My mother would not countenance it in her house (Empty Calories), and none of my siblings drink it. I remember being embarrassed as a young adult because I didn’t know how push-in drink can tabs worked. I had not had a soda (or a canned beer) since the ring-top era, and very rarely then.