Everything is made from corn today and I, for one, am less than impressed. This outrage especially applies to carbonated beverages. I used to be absolutely convinced that the reason why the Coke and Mountain Dew I drink today does not taste as good as the Coke and Mountain Dew I drank as a kid had to do with the delivery system. You see, I was a member of the last generation that got their soft drinks via glass bottles. That one word advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate eventually became the spawn of Satan in the eyes of my taste buds. Okay, you get what I mean by that confusing statement. Almost all carbonated soda I drank before reaching my teenage years came courtesy of a glass bottle. Then came those plastic two liter bottles and flimsy aluminum cans and everything seemed to go downhill. Walgreen’s new Black Cherry Soda has given me pause to reconsider this theory.
Walgreen’s Black Cherry Soda does arrive in a nifty glass bottle so at first upon tasting this gift from the gods on Olympus you may be quick to agree with my hypothesis. The glass does serve it well, but even better is the information that the makers of this product consider so vital they have included on the front label. Beneath the Black Cherry label, which I hope you can see there in the picture to the left, are the words No High Fructose Corn Syrup. The Deerfield Trading Company is responsible for making this black cherry soda and all’s ya need to do to learn why soda doesn’t taste nearly as good today as it did years ago is do a taste comparison between this and any black cherry soda made with corn syrup. I don’t care if you pour the Walgreen’s black cherry soda into a plastic cup and drink the corn syrup version from a glass bottle, you will instantly be transported back to a time when popping off the cap of a Mountain Dew bottle with a hick moonshiner emblazoned upon it was the kind of thing that could make you not even mind that school was just one week away.
The difference is in the sweetening, not the container. After drinking this black cherry soda made with sugar rather than corn syrup I am utterly convinced that we need to take all the corn that is currently going into making soft drinks that are lacking in that je ne sai quoi and put it into making fuel to run cars. Normally, I’m opposed to Bush’s “plan” to solve our energy problem through the use of biofuels since it will only serve to drive up the cost of everything else made with corn, but I figure since so much corn is used in the soda bidness that we can probably offset some of the dangerously high spikes in prices that will leave millions destitute as a result of Bush’s misguided idea to put his trust in corn to solve this nation’s energy needs.
In the meantime, I can recommend Walgreen’s black cherry soda enough. The root beer tastes like what you used to get at an A&W; drive-in, by the way. And if neither of those pops your pimples, they’ve also got cream soda and orange soda.
