I must say I love those Hawaiian Punch and Wylers drink mixes you add a packet to bottled water and shake.
I was just wondering why they don’t make Cola flavoured drinks like that? Other than there is no market is there a technical reason? I mean you can add water and get Hawaiian punch, Lemonade, Orange drink, Peach Tea, and a host of other flavours.
I’m not necessarily refering to those little packet just any drink mix. Why no cola? or root beer?
Because they’re made with carbonated water.
WAG-cola, root beer, etc don’t taste good without carbonation.
Outleaned at the tape.
Kind of hard to put carbonation in powder form. Flat cola is teh suck.
Foster-Clark, a drink mix brand produced in Malta and widely available in West Africa produces a cola-flavored drink mix.
It is disgusting. Carbonation is what makes cola flavor good.
I actually don’t mind flat diet root beer (cold.)
Wow, they still make Wylers drink mixes?!?! You just gave me a childhood flashback, vintage 1968. That’s about the time they broke onto the scene in the NYC metro area (maybe elsewhere, too) with a big rollout and ad push. But after a few years the ads and the product seemed to fade into oblivion, at least around here.
Well, I guess it wouldn’t be TOO bad if you got a hold of some dry ice, but doing that EVERY time you wanted to use your drink mix would be a little bit of a hassle (and expensive).
Pop Rocks are carbonation in powder form, aren’t they? Is it just that there’s not enough carbonation in a small enough serving of powder? I can see the problem if it would take 1/2 a cup of powder to carbonate 16 ounces of water thoroughly.
Kool-Aid made a root-beer-flavored mix for years, and sold for a short while a Cherry Cracker flavor that combined Pop Rocks and normal drink mix. IIRC the Pop Rocks didn’t really carbonate the water so much as make noise. I do believe Pop Rocks were created in an attempt to make a carbonated drink mix, as an aside.
Currently, Amerilab Tech. makes the classic Fizzies drink tablets, including a root beer flavor; like the Charry Cracker Kool-Aid, though, it doesn’t carbonate the water so much as make noise, and the end result has a bit of that Alka-Seltzer taste to it.
Ah, Fizzies were before my time. One thing I’ve noticed about fizzing tablets and powders, like Airborne or Emergen-C, is that their bubbles seem smaller, on the surface and on the tongue, than the bubbles in soft drinks. I don’t know if that’s intentional or an artifact of the process by which the CO2 is produced/released. But I think that’s why they call themselves “fizzy” or “lightly carbonated” instead of plain old “carbonated”.
I just tried Fizzies for the first time about a month ago; my mom told me about them when I was a kid, describing them as some kind of prehistoric relic like the straws that flavored milk or Koogle, so I was rather surprised to see a point-of-purchase display of them at a restaurant gift shop. The root beer tablets taste vaguely like flat root beer, but visually it’s offputting, like a cloudy cream soda. I haven’t taken the next step, though, and tried popping a tablet in my mouth, which was apparently the “cool kid” way of consuming Fizzies when they were new.
I forgot about Airborne and Emergen-C being similar. I had some Emergen-C a few times (I was at a hotel that put packets of them on my pillow like a mint, oddly) and was underwhelmed by the fizz and bicarbonate taste there, too. I think your observation is right, that the method simply can’t provide enough carbonation. A soda has carbon dioxide dissolved in the water, so there’s quite a bit left to replace that which bubbles out, while the mixes at best will resemble a soda where all of the gas has come out of solution and bubbled out.
Going back to the longer discussion of colas and root beer needing carbonation; while I agree, I do think it’s interesting that both drinks started life as non-carbonated drinks (root tea in the case of root beer), and the general cola and root beer flavors aren’t disagreeable in hard candies, gums, lip balms, medicines, or other products… but when it’s in a drink, we suddenly need bubbles. Fruit drinks are great carbonated or not, so why do these (and other fantasias) need carbonation?
We did Fizzies when we were kids. We didn’t drink much pop so we never knew if the taste was inferior. Plus, the cool factor was through the roof, so who cared?
I always felt Airborne has some carbonation in it after dissolving…but I assume it’s the same acid/baking soda mix like in Alka Seltzer to make it effervesce.
I’ve only had the pink grapefruit favor, so he citrus would provide the acid, I guess…
A citrus hint in root beer would almost certainly make me puke.
While not available as powdered mixes, you can get root beer, cola, and other syrups at your local homebrew store. You can also get them in large quantities at Sam’s and Costco.
Plus, if you’re a home brewer, chances are you have a CO2 tank, in which case you can make carbonated water for pennies. Add your syrup to it, and then you have home made soda.
Your next step, then, would be to make your own syrups, which is really quite simple, too.
Geeze, I remember those ads. “Walk on over to wyler’s.”
Ah I see now, I didn’t get it 'cause actually I’ll drink flat pop, it doesn’t taste bad to me at all
If you’re looking for Wylers check out Walgreens or a dollar store. They sell the Wylers you can put into your bottled water. 8 packets for $1.00
Were Soda Streams ever popular in the US?
I don’t know that they’re popular, but we do have products that are similar, if not that exact brand name. The big difference, though, is that the one’s I’ve seen in the past have two major defects:
[ul]
[li]The CO2 bottle is proprietary and grossly, grossly overpriced versus non-proprietary solutions, and[/li][li]The carbonation isn’t produced under pressure, but only by passing the gas through the water (doesn’t produce as much carbonation).[/li][/ul]
My 20 lb. tank costs $20 to exchange, and will last me a couple of years. That force-carbonates my home brew (when I’m impatient), serves my commercial kegs, and generates about 10 liters of carbonated water per week (and damn, it’s good straight, like fancy “mineral waters”).
My God, I almost want to make it my mission to sell people on the idea of carbonated water as a beverage in its own right.
Carbonated water aka sparkling water is extremely popular as a beverage here. It’s available in all convenience stores and supermarkets.