Oh, Lord yes. I love diet birch beer, which is only hard to find if I pass it on the shelf. It’s one of the few carbonated drinks that’ll hold its carbonation fairly well, so I can nurse one for quite a while without it going flat.
My vote is for Cheerwine, which is a caffeinated cherry soda made somewhere in the south. A co-worker and I found it in an antique mall and figured we had to try it. The diet version is pretty good; most fruit-flavored sodas tend to be too sweet for me, but Cheerwine has enough of a bite that it’s tolerable.
I forgot to mention Afri-Cola, a German cola beverage with enough caffeine to perk you right up.
It was a decent tasking cola…not overly carbonated (sort of flat, actually) but quite popular when I was living in Berlin.
On the third page and no one has mentioned a Cherry Phosphate? Or even a LemonLime Phosphate? We had an old time soda fountain well into the sixties and those were my favorites. Description here.
I was curious, so I bought a bottle of this stuff-very strange taste-almost metallic (must be the ferrous sulfate added). Not unpleasant, but really strange:D
Similarly, there was Original New York Seltzer. It stuck around into the nineties but alas is long gone. Seems like yesterday that I had one of those with a sandwich at the Big Apple Deli (Which was really a California made soft drink at an Ohio Deli.).
I remember those! I’d forgotten all about them–when I was a kid that used to be my favorite soda treat, they came in stubby little glass bottles with weird, styrofoam-y labels, and I always went for the vanilla cream. Googling around for more info, I came across this fabulosity
You can get tarragon soda in just about every other corner market here in Little Armenia. And because Little Armenia is also Thai Town, in the other markets you can can get dragon fruit (pitatya), pennywort (boisson au cotyledon), soursop, and various other sodas.
There’s Tahn, which is yogurt, water and a little salt. It’s good but not really a soda. I said it’s good but the only time I had a friend try it, he ran right to the sink and spit it out. They do, however, sell a carbonated version of it. Vile stuff.
