Being Puerto Rican and living in New York, I’ve had many Champagne Colas ,which is what Wikipedia calls it, but I’ve always referred to it as Kola Champagne. It is very, very sweet. What flaovors it? For sure there’s plenty of sugar but there are other flavors there. The closest I can explain it is spicy cream soda.
Have you tried it? What flavor would you call it?
I believe part of the flavor is chicle? “Bubblegum flavor” is the flavor of chicle; once upon a time, bubblegum was made from chicle, hence, chiclets.
Colombiana is a chicle-flavored soda.
Too late to edit: I’m not a huge fan, its just soooo sweet. My favorite, if I can find it, is Coco Rico, the Puerto Rican coconut soda.
Bubble Gum! That’s it exactly. Now. . . what flavors bubble gum?
I like Mancanita, which I believe is apple flavored-- and very sweet.
Yea this^
This flavor is popular locally and it tastes like cloying sweet, kinda bubble gumish and every brand is different.
Although Golden Champagne tastes more like bubble gum than Kola Champagne. Kola is more root beer-y. Golden is straight up sugar syrup.
I always thought Kola Champagne soda was originally from El Salvador. There are at least two brands I can think of that have the map of El Salvador on the label, one of them being Kola Shampan. They both taste fairly similar, like a very sweet blend of apple and cream soda. It’s hard for me to describe.
As I said, “bubblegum” is the flavor of chicle, which is a tree sap.
Sidral is also apple-flavor and not quite so sweet. Mexican, I think. Tamarind is also good because the sour cuts through the sweet. The Jamaican soda Ting is grapefruitish, and the exception to all these supersweet carribean sodas
hmmm… turns out I’m a bit of a latino/Carribean soda connoisseur, lol. Funny because I only drink soda rarely.
Who here likes Manhattan Special? (ultrasweet espresso soda).
Hard to describe other than sweet. I must say, though, that the Jamaican version of Kola Champagne was different than the version I grew up with (in Puerto Rico). The version in Trinidad is closer (at least the Ginseng/Kola Champagne flavor).
I do love it. That and malta (and guaraná) are my weaknesses. Yes, I have a very sweet tooth.
We need a totally different thread on ‘bubble gum flavor’ as I do not believe rubber tastes like bubble gum.
I like Kola. It tastes like Irn Bru to me.
Understandable since chicle and rubber are two different things.
From that Wiki: By the 1960s, most chewing gum companies had switched from using chicle to butadiene-based synthetic rubber which was cheaper to manufacture. The only U.S. gum companies still using chicle are Glee Gum, Simply Gum, and Tree Hugger Gum.[5]
Right. The taste we call bubblegum is called bubblegum because the first commercial bubblegum manufactured by Adams tasted like that because it was made of sweetened chicle and that’s what chicle tastes like. Today, bubbegums are artificially flavored for the most part, or maybe some use natural extract flavorings, I don’t know. But the point is, they originally did not have added flavor. They just tasted like chicle and that’s what we called “bubblegum” flavor.
Similarly, the flavor we call “root beer” is the result of using sassafrass or sasparilla to flavor beverages. even though today those are not normally used in making root beer, it is still correct to say the “root beer flavor” is the flavor of sasparilla and/or sassafrass.
I don’t think so. Chiclet is used, or was used, for texture. The flavor is added. As all chewing gum was originally made from chiclet, a latex, and was not bubble gum flavored.
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