Also Orange soda. Sunkist got into the soda game in the 70’s, there was orange Crush before that, which I think is still around. Fanta and Shasta both make orange soda too.
You should try lemon Italian soda - they have several varieties in Whole Foods. It’s good and lemony and not too sweet at all.
On the West Coast, you can still find Squirt everywhere. I used to drink it quite often but not so much anymore (along with all other sugared pops). Squirt’s old classic formula had real cane sugar, grapefruit juice, and bits of grapefruit pulp.
President’s Choice has a number of interesting soft drink flavours. I especially like the mango, lychee, passion fruit, and grapefruit flavours.
I remember Squirt, Fresca, and (briefly) Kickapoo Joy Juice from my younger days. My favourite was Collins Mix drunk straight up as a soft drink, but after years of being bottled in soft drink sized-bottles and with a soft drink price, this was eventually rebottled and repriced as a cocktail mix at four or five times the price. Other than an occasional sighting of Fresca, haven’t seen any of them on the shelves here for years. A local wholesale outlet that caters to corner stores and other small retailers has a surprising variety of small regional brands of soft drink with uncommon flavours, though. Checking out local Mom & Pop stores may turn up a wider variety of flavours than in big chains.
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Gotcha covered. Nice catch, Askance. Thanks.
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Plus it’s not widely available. In every single convenience store here, there are at least 3 major brands of lemon drinks-- sodas and more. You have to search it out in specialty stores back home, at least as far as I can recall.
This is another one of those regional things - in Texas, Squirt is very common. Orangina, OTOH…
I’m still confused. Sprite, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, and Mello Yello are all lemon-ish drinks. They’re not very good, and they’re not very lemony, but lemon is the major attempted flavor.
I think grapefruit soda is awesome.
They’re officially lemon-lime flavored drinks (except Mellow/Yellow which is defined as a “Citrus” drink like Mountain Dew). Pure lemon flavored drinks are rare. Not that any soda really has the flavor it stated.
Even Jones Soda, famed for such flavors as Turkey with Gravy doesn’t produce a pure lemon soda.
Malta. It is the drink of the Gods.
A&W restaurants are in Thailand too, along with KFC and Pizza Hut. It just so happens the parent comany is the local unit of Yum, called Yum International or something like that. A&W in cans are also in the stores.
I recall one mini-detective puzzle in which a waiter was revealed as the bad guy because he had tried to say he knew someone had ordered the sarsparilla because he was confused which drink was the root beer and which the sarsparilla, so he stuck his thumb in and tasted the sarsparilla. (He was trying to frame someone, and for reasons I don’t remember, drinking the sarsparilla would have killed his alibi.) The detective said the waiter could not have told the difference and so must be lying.
I love looking at the unusual sodas when I go to BevMo. I don’t buy any of them because I don’t like carbonation, but I’m often tempted.
Squirt is easily available in any Chicago megamart, as is the Coke-owned basically-Diet-Squirt Fresca (which I have started to buy regularly).
Dandelion & Burdock is the nearest thing to root beer in the UK. I haven’t seen it for years in my area, but I’m told it’s still available in Northern England.
I had an English roommate back in grad school and he hated root beer. Said it tasted like cough syrup, which I came to understand later wasn’t that uncommon in England. The story goes that here in the states they made cough syrup taste like root beer to get the kids to drink it. Root beer evidently didn’t make it over to England till after root beer flavored cough syrup, so kids their grew up associating root beer with cough medicine.
And who came up with Irn-Bru? Now that’s truly a disgusting soft drink.
Deadpool approves!
Coca-Cola makes Kinley Bitter Lemon which is part of a line of soft drinks sold mainly in Israel and Eastern Europe. I sampled it when I visited Coke’s Ice Station Cool (now Club Cool) store at Epcot and thought it was quite good. (It especially hit the spot on a humid day in Florida.) However, beyond Coke’s merchandise stores at Epcot or in Las Vegas or at their headquarters in Atlanta, Kinley Lemon is not available in the US.
Kickapoo Joy Juice (I believe it’s a defictionalised product from L’il Abner comics?) is available in Malaysia, of all places. It tastes like Mountain Dew.
A&W Root Beer is made in Singapore and there are A&W restaurants in Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia, and as GreedySmurf points out, Sarsparilla is readily available from pretty much any supermarket or convenience store in Australia. In fact, it’s actually easier to get than Root Beer.
Definitely. If you’ve ever had a lemon soda, you wouldn’t call Sprite, 7-up, or Mt Dew lemon. Mello Yello might come vaguely close, but I can’t remember it very well.
It’s like saying that the normal brands of ginger ale sold in the states is supposed to taste like ginger the same way ginger beer is. I didn’t even know ginger ale was supposed to taste like ginger until I had ginger beer. And I’d brewed pieces of ginger root in hot water as well as eaten them straight before that point.
This post reminded me of Krest Bitter Lemon, which is sold all over East Africa. The first time I had this drink was in Uganda and I thought to myself, “Wow, lemony!” After you’ve had it, Sprite and 7-up don’t taste much like lemon at all.
I just saw a can of Big Red in a convenience store cooler yesterday, so they’re still making that stuff.
Remember Fanta? It’s still around. There’s a bunch of different fruit flavors. I never liked it myself.
Does Orange Crush seem watered down? I loved them as a kid. Now I can’t taste much orange flavor.
I make my own soda with Sprite and orange juice.