It makes me think of Ribena, which is a British blackcurrant concentrate that is mixed with water to make a drink. I Googled around for a specifically Italian brand of it, and I found a company called Torani that makes a blackcurrant syrup that can be used in the same way. Not an answer, but maybe a starting point.
Brio, which is a brand of chinotto soft drink in Canada.
I’m not quite sure how to describe it when anybody asks. Best I can think of is; it goes down like Coke, but with a gingery aftertaste.
I think it tastes like Vicks Vapor Rub with a touch of rubber cement.
And no, I still don’t care for it. Although I did think Moxie Cherry Cola was pretty good but apparently it’s been discontinued.
Orbitz was a pretty cool soft drink in the 90s. It was a clear drink with balls of colored gelatin spheres suspended in it to look like a lava lamp. The flavors were unusual as well (you can see them on the Wikipedia page). It didn’t take off for a variety of reasons, including being really expensive, hard to find, and not really compatible with vending machines. The only place I remember seeing it was at the mini golf course.
I think it’s bergamot, which is the same flavoring used in Earl Grey tea.
Tarhun (тархун). I’d concur that it’s pretty good.
Canfield’s Diet Cherry Chocolate Fudge. Like drinking a chocolate-covered cherry.
Irish Moss- It’s a non-carbonated drink filled with carageenan. The primary variety is vanilla. Some stores also carry the peanut butter flavor. I think the word that bests describes Irish Moss is “chewy”. I like the vanilla, and am wild about the peanut butter. The rest of my family hates it.
RE Tarragon
I’ve had this from a nearby Russian market. I found it to be like weak, kick-less ginger ale.
Their ginger beer is excellent. Reeds Extra Ginger Brew is the only good ginger beer I can find in my neck of the woods. I tried making my own but it was sorely lacking.
I don’t care for burdock but I quite like sarsaparilla. I have had homemade maple soda that was… interesting.
Oh, and how could one forget about Japanese marble soda? Cool bottle. The one I had tasted kinda like Sprite.
My niece and nephew love Ramune. I think it’s the unique opening procedure that appeals to them. I tried one. It was like bad orange soda that had gone rancid.
Someone I normally count as a friend brought a bought of Kvass over to our Pancake Tuesday dinner. He bought it because he’d never seen a soft drink made from rye breadcrumbs before.
It tasted basically like a soft drink made from rye bread. It had carbonated raisins in it. They were peculiar.
Where do you live? There’s a popular hibiscus soft drink here in the southwest called Jamaica (pronounced huh-MY-cuh).
Thanks! And for my palette as a kid, I would not have known the difference from grape or blackcurrant, so you are probably correct.
We jokingly called it grandma’s KoolAid, but as mentioned, grew to like it.
We have been ordering a dozen sodas at a time from sodapopstop.com and conducting our own taste tests. Mostly cream soda, root beer, and ginger beer, and a few Jones sodas. There are hundreds of sodas to choose from. So far the clear winner is Stewart’s Key Lime, and a couple of root beers. The worst was Aztec Cola. I don’t have the list in front of me, but those are the best/worst.
I occasionally get interesting and odd sodas on my grocery runs. Over the years, I’ve managed to try out a large selection of odd sodas. The Manhattan Special Coffee soda’s kind of tasty although I wouldn’t drink it everyday. I like the Vignette sodas mentioned above specifically because they’re not too sweet. For Fentiman’s, my favorite is a toss up between their shandy and the orange jigger. Cel-ray is reserved for special deli runs. Inca Cola tastes like bubble gum and looks like radioactive pee, but I wouldn’t have a Peruvian meal without it.
There’s a few blueberry sodas out there that are pretty good. I think my favorite so far is Eli’s Blueberry Pop. I just bought a wintermelon drink today. It’s refreshing and sweet. What I wouldn’t give for a sugar cane and kumquat drink right now though.
I own a record store in Wisconsin and i wanted to try to have candy and soda nobody else had or probably never heard of. I imported some soda from Thailand, coconut, aloe vera, guava…flavors werent too strange, but the soda itself freaked me out.
It was pretty much water with chunks of the coconut or aloe just floating around inside. Reminded me of vomit, i could never drink one myself.
I want to know where you found Fentimans because they all look awesome.
Potbelly’s used to carry bottles of Cricket Cola around here, and it was yummy. Now they don’t, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else, which makes me sad.
Woodlake grocery store in Kohler, Wisconsin has it on the shelf.
Kinnie, which tastes like orange soda with a large part of the sweetness removed. I’ve only ever seen it in Malta, but it was delicious.