When I was a kid, nothing tasted better than an ice-cold coke in a 16 oz. glass bottle. Coke doesn’t taste the same as it once did. The biggest difference is the use of high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar, but I’m sure they’ve also changed anything else they could get away with to save money.
So how about it? Would you pay a premium price to have a nice 8 pack of 16 oz. glass bottles of coke, made with the same ingredients (including real sugar!), or are you happy with what you get now?
I miss those glass bottle 8 packs. I would pay more for those than for cans anyday, but then again, I think everythiing tastes better in a glass bottle.
But then again, the true orignal Coke contained cocaine, so I suppose I would pay even extra for one of those, just to try it at least. Who knows, I might even get hooked on them, although I suspect that there was very little cocaine present.
There’s a section in the very amusing non-fiction book Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure where he accompanies a Texan down to Mexico on a “Coke run”, which he initially thinks is a drug deal, but turns out to be the guy buying crates of Coke made with sugar, and in glass bottles. So clearly some people go a long way out of their way to get the real old-fashiond stuff.
As far as I can tell from the article in Wikipedia (if anyone trusts it any more), only the US uses high-fructose corn syrup. And in the US the company makes kosher Coke at Passover with real sugar.
Coke is one of my customers. In China it’s no problem to find Coke in bottles. You can get the old fashioned 8 oz (10 oz?) bottles. At work there is a whole refridgerator with *free * chilled Coke (and Sprite).
You can get Coke in glass bottles even in the US - and even with the US recipe that is presumably in it, it still tastes worlds better than when it’s delivered in any other type of container.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week (I think it was Wednesday) about Mexican immigrants in the US and their preference for ‘Mexican’ Coke - because of the sugar differences. But, Coke didn’t traditionally sell that formulation in the US, so people started importing it, which Coke didn’t want because it took away from the local distributors. They have, apparently, started allowing one bottling plant to import some, but only into a couple of markets.
As for me, I drink diet Coke, so it wouldn’t make a difference to me.
I don’t know about the sugar part, but when the holidays roll around I buy those cute little cokes in baby sized bottles for my niece. For one, she’ll actually drink the whole thing instead of leaving it half-finished on my desk or something. Plus, they’re so fucking CUTE! I love those baby cokes!
(Not much of a soft-drink drinker…I usually can’t tell one from the other anyway.)
There’s a little tacqueria(sp?) down the road from where I work that sells half-liter bottles of Mexican Coke. 2 huge fajita tacos and a coke - 5 bucks .
The Dr. Pepper from the plant in Dublin, TX is made with sugar too. An 8 oz. bottle costs about a dollar at area convenience stores.
Just look for the Coke bottles marked Kosher for Passover. They don’t have anything else unusual about the labels – they look like ordinary Coke bottles. If you, like me, have a grocery store chain (Waldbaums, in my case) that is now or was originally owned by a Jewish family, you may have better luck. Waldbaums has a huge Passover section around the holiday, but I think they keep the Kosher Coke with the other sodas. (It probably helps that I live on Long Island.)