I did not really consider reading it for months. And then I did, and like seemingly every other person who has come around to it recently, I suddenly did not want to shut up about Lonesome Dove. God. What a book! There is nothing I can say about it here that has not already been said many times over and far more eloquently. But what I will say is that it gave me a kind of reading experience that I had not had since I was a kid.

That meant reading as soon as I woke up in the morning and reading until I fell asleep that night. I’d find myself thinking about it during the day—annoyed to be away from the book for the purposes of working and socializing and otherwise living. I absolutely had to finish it and was a little scared of what I might find when I did: I kept forcing myself to go slower, reading sentences over and over to appropriately savor them, fighting myself for more time with the characters. Generally, I don’t love mass-market paperbacks for books longer than a few hundred pages; I appreciate a copy that feels a little more proportionate. But the format seemed essential here. Like the person who had it before me, who had so clearly loved it and put it on the sidewalk because he wanted someone else to find it and love it, too, I ended up carrying it with me everywhere. There simply did not feel like any other possibility here.

For two and a half weeks, I did everything with Lonesome Dove. I read it with coffee and water and bourbon and tea and, of course, finally something relevant for the purposes of this newsletter, I read it with soda. And the day after I finished the book, maybe still thinking of Texas, I picked up a Dr Pepper.

This has always been a treat soda for me. I drink just a few per year, but every one feels critical, somehow. When I want a Dr Pepper, however sparingly that might be, I want only a Dr Pepper. I’ve always had a soft spot for its origin story: “He experimented with different flavors and ingredients at odd times,” an early company executive wrote of Charles Alderton inventing the soda as a Waco pharmacist at the Old Corner Drug Store in 1885. Which, of course, is more or less how every soda was invented. The flavor experimentation just went a little further here.

Alderton was more ambitious in this department than other pharmacists of his era, or maybe just more reckless, and he ended up with something that was not a cola or a root beer or a fruit soda or anything recognizable at all, really. How do you describe the taste of Dr Pepper? I can throw out some ideas, I guess, but I know they would only go so far. I can tell you that Alderton’s blend of 23 flavors supposedly includes sarsaparilla, caramel, ginger, and cherry, but that’s not how the final product tastes. If other sodas might evoke a pharmacist carefully measuring out select ingredients, one at a time, Dr Pepper calls to mind someone mashing all the buttons on a fountain at once. But somehow, unbelievably, in a good way.

The Waco that Alderton called home in 1885 was not so far off from parts of Texas that Lonesome Dove’s characters would have passed through in the 1870s. The settings match up well enough: A history of the drink titled The Legend of Dr Pepper / SevenUp, by Jeffrey L. Rondengen, sprinkles its first two chapters with details of gunfights and local prostitution activity. It was very much a soda of the dying Old West. Sipping it now, still wrapped up in the characters of the book that had accompanied me for all those other drinks of the last few weeks, I found myself wondering if Augustus McCrae could have ever tried a Dr Pepper. Alas: There’s just enough of a timeline gap for that to be impossible. Which is a shame, because he would have loved it, I think, but what a gift to have a character that you want to share a soda with.

A group of them instead formed the SaveTabSoda Committee. They have set up a series of campaigns urging Coke to bring back their beloved Tab. But they have also set up something more—a support group, a friendship circle, a regular source of soda conversation. Tab was always more than a drink for them. And now it’s a form of community. It’s been nearly four years since they found each other on social media and formed their committee. They still meet roughly every other week to chat on Zoom.

The group was kind enough to let me join one of those meetings in March. I had a blast. Here’s that conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, for The Soda Fountain.

Emma: Could you each go around and share your name, whatever identifying information you feel comfortable with, and your first memories of Tab?

Adam: I'm Adam Burbach. I'm in Nebraska. I first tried Tab when I was a little kid, and then Tab kind of disappeared when Diet Coke came out where I'm from, so I didn't see it again for a long time, other than on vacation… It showed up here again probably in 2018 or 2019, and so I was super excited when I saw Tab again and started buying it. And of course, it wasn't long after that it was discontinued. So I only got to enjoy it for a short while at the end there.

Trish: Trish Priest, I live in Seattle. I have no idea when I started drinking Tab—I don't remember not drinking Tab. And it became an international symbol for Trish here, when I go into meetings at work, because I would always have a Tab on my desk, or in front of me in the conference room where I was sitting. The company that I work for gives you free soda, but I would bring my own Tab. So, anyway, it's sort of been my identity, until they took it away.

Jenny: I'm Jenny Boyter. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia—I have no influence over Coke, even though they’re right here, but that's all right. I am retired, and when I retired, my staff gave me this big retirement party that was all Tab-themed. It was so great. Like, Tab pictures, they dressed from different eras of Tab and everything, it was hilarious. So definitely, like what Trish said, that's our identity. There's no casual Tab drinkers. Like, that's what you drink. If you drink Tab, you don't go, I mean, I'll have this or that. No. It's always Tab. And I look back in photographs—like, actual pictures—and I see I'll be at a party or wherever, and there's like some kind of Tab container in every picture. So it’s just always been with us.

Joseph: I started drinking Tab in the mid ‘70s, probably around the bicentennial, in 1976. I got it when I went with my father to the American Legion—they always had a refrigerator full of Tabs, which was kind of nice. They didn't have any other soft drinks, and they’d just have Tab, and I've been drinking it ever since. It's been really hard to find—outrageously hard to find. Sometimes, I would have to go three, four months without Tab, just because I couldn't find any in the stores. But I'm a comedian, and I’ve brought Tab to some of my shows, and people took pictures, and they ask me where did I get the Tab from, and they’ve even questioned if it was real. And I’m in Clovis, California.

Missie: My name is Missie Pierce. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Coca-Cola, but currently, I'm in Seattle visiting my son. So when Tab started going out—when they decided they weren't going to have it anymore—I drove all the way to Seattle to pick up about ten 12-packs. I have driven across the country looking for Tab. I guess I started drinking it when it first came out in Atlanta, and I’ve been drinking it ever since. I probably have about, oh, maybe eight cans left.

Emma: Those were some of the next questions I had. How you all reacted when you learned it had been discontinued, whether you tried to start hoarding, what that was like—and then what do you do with your remaining cans? Do any of the others here have any cans left?

Joseph: I have a 12-pack, and it’s stored in the refrigerator.

Jenny: Same, I have a 12-pack, and maybe, like, six cans. And I just drink them on a special occasion—if it's a birthday, or if it's New Year's Eve, or something like that. At first, I got a lot of Tab because my staff was really good, they’d find them in all these obscure places, and you know, Atlanta, I think we had more Tab [than other areas]. After a while, I couldn't find it, but they would find me some. So I had enough Tab. I drink—I did drink—one a day. So I think I had enough for a year and a half to two years, and I thought for sure, they would bring it back by then. So then I started slowing down when I only had a few 12-packs left. So it's very sad. I don't want to get to the last one.

Adam: I have probably 8 to 10 cans left in the refrigerator. I don’t drink them very often—it's been months since I've had one.

Trish: I have three cans left in the refrigerator that I don't really intend to ever drink. I just want to keep them for posterity. I have a ton of empty cans and empty 12-packs that I've hoarded for mementos, or, I don't know what. Once they announced it was gone, I hoarded, but in Seattle, they don't have a lot out. So I was buying it on eBay, and my max price was what I would pay for a very nice bottle of wine, so I was paying up to $100 for a 12-pack.

Emma: So no one’s had the experience of drinking their final one? Everyone still has a little bit left in their stash?

Trish: I drank the last one I’m going to drink until it comes back.

Emma: Was that a special occasion?

Trish: This is the can. [Holds up Tab.] It’s on my desk. It was my birthday.

Emma: Oh, that’s really beautiful.

Missie: When my husband and I used to travel, when you could carry just about anything on the plane with you, his job was to carry one can per day for every day we were going to be gone. So that I could still have my one can a day. I got pretty snarly when I didn't get my one can a day.

Emma: Sounds like a very good husband to come prepared like that.

Adam: And all of us in 2023, we all went to Atlanta and got fresh Tab at World of Coca-Cola. So they had it on the fountain in their tasting room, and we all got a private tour of World of Coca-Cola, and then at the very end of it, we all kind of lined up in front of the Tab fountain and had our fill of Tab.

Emma: Oh, that must have been so special. Which was another one of the things that stood out to me here—that, you know, it sounds like this isn't just sharing some emails, it feels like you've really built a community here, where you're talking about it regularly. What has it been like to build that and to find each other?

Missie: We started out looking for each other, and once you started making comments, if you found somebody with a big cabinet full of Tab, you just had to answer them back and commiserate that we couldn't find it anymore.

Trish: I thought that I was a big fan until I went on to Facebook and found other Tab drinkers. And I was not even close to the max as a fan, and I mean, I had people calling me and giving me condolences when it was discontinued.

Jenny: Same. I got an email that said, I'm sorry for your loss. Like, oh, that's what it felt like. I just really kept thinking they were going to bring it back, bring it back, it's not going to be that long. As soon as I went online, like, What am I going to do? I found Adam and Save Tab Soda, and he had all these things we could do, people we could write to, and I was like, this is great, I’m all about it. So we've been at it ever since.

Emma: Yeah, Adam, it seems like you’ve been remarkably organized in how you've approached this. Is this something you have experience with professionally, running campaigns like this? Or it’s just come naturally?

Adam: Not really. I mean, I’m a product manager, so I work with stakeholders and different people and executives and that sort of thing. But I’ve never really done anything like this before. I think for me, when I saw the press release that it was going to be discontinued, like everybody else, I went online. I was like, There's got to be other people that are upset about this, right? And so I found Facebook, and I saw all these people that were like, It's going away. What are we going to do? And so I just thought—wouldn't it be nice if we just kind of organized ourselves a little bit, instead of a bunch of people that are going, I don't know what to do? Let’s get a group together to figure out what we’re going to do. And so I got the SaveTabSoda domain, and I scheduled a Zoom call, this is back in 2020. I think Trish and Jenny were on it, and we had a group of people that joined and said, What should we do about this? And the rest is kind of history. We've been meeting regularly ever since then as we kind of plan our different events.

When the group visited World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, they all met for a Tab-themed party at Jenny’s house, complete with Tab cookies and Tab decor. (Missy brought a 12-pack.) They drew a dozen Tab lovers from all over the country.

Emma: Going off of that, what is it about Tab that you think inspires this kind of love and passion? You're having people on these Zooms every month for it, years after it's been out of production, and you're traveling across the country for it. What is it about Tab?

Missie: The unique taste.

Adam: There’s nothing else like it.

Jenny: We’ve tried all different sodas and everything. Just nothing tastes like it at all. When you get to taste it, you're gonna love it, you are. It's a strong taste, but not—it's just, I don't know, there's just something about it that's just so delicious. And even when I drink it, a two-year-old can that’s expired, it still tastes better than anything I've been buying just to have a soda.

Trish: It's also the only soda that has saccharin as the main sweetener, which I love. I think the other thing is that we all started—or at least a lot of us started—when it was the only diet soda, the only diet cola, out there. Before Diet Coke. And we got attached to it, and then Diet Coke came out, and it’s not the same.

Jenny: It’s terrible, actually. I'll never forget the first time I drank a Diet Coke. I've probably told everybody the story—we were at a party, and of course, I'm drinking Tab in there, and somebody had a Diet Coke, and I'm like, something new, you know? And it tasted to me like if you had a regular Coke with ice in it and the ice melted. That’s what Diet Coke tastes like. I was like, This is terrible. I felt bad for Coke, because I was like—are they going to sell this stuff? It’s awful! And here’s Tab, this tangy, zesty amazing taste, and then this terrible thing. But they pushed it, they advertised it, and people bought it, and they didn’t put Tab out there. So there was nothing else for people to drink, and they were like, Okay, I guess I’m a Diet Coke drinker. I don’t know. It’s very sad.

Missie: Many of our group call Coke on a daily basis to tell them to please bring it back. And bless his heart, my husband has even been making phone calls, too. So we have two a day that we make.

The group has written open letters to Coca-Cola, done surveys to measure how much people might buy if they only had the chance, and installed billboards around Atlanta. “We kind of started off with, like, ‘Let's just tell them we're out here, there's a lot of us, we want it back,’ and we've kind of morphed that a little bit into, ‘There's a valid business reason for bringing Tab back,’” Adam says. “There's an untapped market.” There have been a few hints of promise: Coke still makes Tab merch (including a jacket included by the brand in a recent giveaway) and featured the soda in a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Last year, Coke CEO James Quincey mentioned how often he’s asked to revive Tab in an interview on CNBC. “It seems like they’ve opened the door to the idea,” Adam says. They hope their campaigns might help push it through.

Emma: When you were talking about your stashes—for those of you who have it in your fridge, is it like in the back of the fridge, or is it something you see every time you open it? Does it feel sad to see it there, or is it more of a sense of happiness that it's still there, even if it's just a few cans?

Jenny: It’s comforting. I have it in a downstairs refrigerator, so I don’t see it all the time, it’s for my extra stuff, but—it’s sort of both. Comforting, I still have it, but also, I want to have more.

Missie: Mine's in the back of the fridge, so that only I know that it's there. My grandchildren don't get it.

Joseph: I have mine with other discontinued sodas like Sierra Mist and Hires Root Beer.

Adam: I’m kind of like Jenny, I've got a second refrigerator downstairs, and I just keep soda in there, and, you know, extra stuff in the freezer, so I've got a row of Tab next to all of the other sodas that I drink.

Emma: I like to think that I would like it. Hopefully, I get a chance to find out.

Jenny: I hope so, too. You would.

We may never learn what Charles Leiper Grigg was thinking when he developed his signature beverage in the 1920s and '30s. “It’s a mystery,” a company spokesman once told the Pensacola News-Journal. “How it came to be called Seven-Up is anybody’s guess,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1986. “Grigg died before telling posterity what he had in mind.” There are plenty of theories.1 Some are better than others. But there is no definitive answer.

There is, however, a second thing you will learn while researching the origin of the name 7Up, and this is that it was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.

It’s everywhere. This is on Wikipedia. It’s on Snopes. They ran it once in TIME. Look at in this article published by McGill University. There is seemingly no debate about the fact that it was first named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. (And it did contain a bit of real, honest-to-god, mood-enhancing lithium, at least until the FDA banned it from soft drinks after World War II.) The claim pops up in every piece of writing about the soda’s name. Grigg launched the drink in Missouri in the late 1920s, and he’d renamed it 7Up by the middle of the 1930s, but its early years were seemingly definitively spent as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.

Which struck me as insane.

Come on. Think about that for a minute. It’s a terrible name! That’s eleven syllables! And in an era where soda was frequently ordered at a counter out loud—there was real value in a catchy name. You’re telling me someone decided in that context to call their drink Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Absolutely not. I could entertain the idea that all of these words showed up on the bottle. But as the name itself? No. There wasn’t even a convenient way to shorten it: All you’d be left with is the way-too-generic-to-be-of-use “lemon-lime soda.” It didn’t make sense even with the context that Grigg had apparently wised up and renamed it a few years later. The man was a serial beverage entrepreneur, and his first two soft drinks were both orange sodas, the first called Whistle and the second called Howdy. Those are both pretty great names! As is 7Up! You want me to believe the guy behind those zingy handles also named a drink Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? This is the claim in seemingly every bit of writing about this soda. And yet!

I felt in my bones it was wrong. So off I went to see if there was any proof that Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was actually the original name of 7Up.

My starting point was the archive at my beloved Newspapers.com. And it turns out there were many, many, many articles from the 1970s to the 1990s about how B-LLL-LS was the original 7Up. Yet none had clear sourcing. This was, it seemed, the sort of claim that gets repeated often enough to become accepted as fact. The American people have apparently been asking for decades why 7Up is called 7Up, only to learn there is no good answer here, but there is a fun tidbit about it originally being called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Every story about the history of the drink included a cursory mention of this history. None of them explained it.

Time for me to go backwards. I narrowed my search window from 1925 to 1960. That would give me advertisements and articles alike from the period in which the drink was (supposedly) actually named this, along with the decades right after, which might give some hint as to the origin of the claim. It seemed like a safe bet to find something.

And do you want to guess how many times “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” appears from 1925 to 1960 in the tens of thousands of newspapers housed on Newspapers.com?

Zero.

Which, you know, this archive is not exhaustive, and the name being absent from their records certainly does not mean it was never used. But it had me feeling pretty good about my theory! Forget articles. There are a lot of ads in those newspapers. And there was not one for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Not a stray mention? Even as fine print in some ad copy? Suspicious.

It had me thinking maybe, just maybe, from the very beginning, it had in fact been called 7Up (or Seven Up or 7-Up or Seven-Up). So I narrowed my search window again, now to just 1928 to 1932, and I searched for any mention of “7Up soda” or “seven up soda” or “7-Up soda” or “seven-up soda.”2 The general consensus from those popular histories was that it had been officially renamed in 1936. But I wanted to look a few years prior. I wanted to go as close to the beginning as possible. And I found…

Plenty of examples of the soda being advertised as 7 Up or 7-Up. AS EARLY AS 1930! With, yes, mentions of it being lithiated and including lemon. The most common full name seemed to be “7-Up Lemon Soda.” But there was nothing about the style of the label. No one mentioned lime. There were not eleven syllables. There was some extra information here, sure, but it seemed an awful lot to me like 7 Up had always been 7 Up.

It all left me one place left to look. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

WELL WELL WELL.

Do you want to guess how many trademark filings there were for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Come on. You know. That’s right. None! The corporate entity that became the 7 Up Company never filed anything for Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Neither did anyone else. There is no indication that anyone had designs on selling a product with this language. And do you want to guess when Charles Leiper Grigg filed his first application for “Seven Up”?

October 4, 1928, with a note that it had been in use for his carbonated, nonalcoholic soft drink since August 7, 1928. Months before it was popularly launched in 1929. When it was still in testing. From the very beginning. Our friend Charles Leiper Grigg tinkered with formulas and imprints and marketing strategies. But he did not seem to waver on the name. This drink was born Seven Up. No lithiated. No lemon. No lime. Just Seven Up.

(Even though it was also described as “Seven-Up” in the initial trademark filing, and the first logo illustration a few years later was for “7Up.” The style questions have been there from the beginning, too.)

The answer had been there all along, open to anyone with the same weird, obsessive drive that had captured me. (Which presumably is not many people, but it’s at least a few, as evidenced by this excellent paper I later found from Bob Brown and Bill Lockart at the Society for Historical Archaeology, which has far more detailed research than my own cursory dip but ends in the same place.) Yet the myth of Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda still lived for decades.

Much like me, Brown and Lockart could not find any evidence of the name showing up in any capacity from before 1960. The name seemingly did not exist at all outside of its own legend. Brown and Lockart’s first sighting of it came in a 1967 newspaper article about the history of 7Up, where it was described by a veteran company executive (who, crucially, was hired early on but still after this supposed renaming would have occurred), a detail about the company before he worked there he now was relaying decades later.

It’s not hard to see how this could be a good story. “You know, at the beginning, it was Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda,” a coworker says. “And then after a few years, we realized that was crazy, so now it’s 7Up.” You could indeed find all of those individual adjectives in the early days of the soda: It was a lithiated lemon-lime soda that Grigg had originally hoped to sell with “bib labels” draped over the bottle rather than pasted on. The description was accurate. But the idea of it as a name was not. That gets held on to for decades, maybe remembered incorrectly, shifting a little, and then eventually gets repeated to a reporter for a retrospective. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it was a simple mistake. Maybe it was the reporter who got it wrong. But it made it into that one article in the Oshkosh Northwestern, and that was enough to give it life for decades, a throwaway bit of story color that eventually calcified into fact.

But if you are ever at a party, or in a trivia contest, or whatever other social environment this could possibly come up, and someone tells you 7Up was originally Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, you have a response. “Actually,” you can say, “I subscribe to a newsletter run by a girl who is clearly pretty demented, and she learned that’s not true.”

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No fountain represents that sense of freedom like the Coca-Cola Freestyle.

For the uninitiated, Coke Freestyle machines offer touch screens with a frankly bonkers selection of flavors. What might be standalone drinks on other machines are gateways to entire universes here. Pressing “Diet Coke” does not give you Diet Coke: No, it gives you access to every imaginable flavor of Diet Coke, with the basics available, of course, but also some otherwise unavailable for purchase. Cherry. Vanilla. Cherry Vanilla. Orange Vanilla. Ginger Lemon. Ginger Lime. It’s obscene! And repeat that with Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Mr. Pibb.1 Hundreds of sodas! (…and lemonades, and sparkling waters, and…) If a regular soda fountain represents freedom by giving you exactly what you want, just how you want it, Coke Freestyle represents freedom by giving you something you never knew could exist. Like an ice-cold Strawberry Orange Mello Yello Zero Sugar.2

A later edition of this newsletter might be devoted to all those possibilities, or to something about the origin story of the machine, which involves both the design company behind Ferrari and the guy who invented the Segway. (Really! Not kidding!) But this one is devoted to a different aspect of Coke Freestyle.

The interactive map of machine locations on their official website.

Coca-Cola keeps a record of every Freestyle machine. I’m so glad they share it publicly. Is this map current? I’m not sure. (I suspect not!) But I’m not interested in it as a faithful, up-to-date accounting of every single machine, so much as a loose chronicle of the kinds of places that have these machines. Where can we find the freedom promised by Coca-Cola Freestyle? Think beyond the fast-food chains and movie theaters: I’m talking government buildings, corporate headquarters, international locations. Who craves these demented soda experiences, or believes their employees crave them, or their customers? That’s what I wanted to know. And the map delivered.

Which Federal Reserve Banks Have Coke Freestyle Machines?

Let’s jump right in. I live in Washington, D.C., which means that when I typed my own address into the map, I was greeted by nearby Freestyle machines in a variety of fast casual restaurants, a hospital cafeteria, and the Federal Reserve.3 Which is just one of those things that happen when you live here, but still, the disclosure of this initially struck me as… wrong? like publishing government secrets? or maybe not illicit but inappropriate? like revealing something intimate about Jerome Powell? Even though, obviously, it’s none of the above. It’s fine! This is a soda machine in a workplace cafeteria. (Why shouldn’t we know if the people setting interest rates have Strawberry Pibb Zero?) But it did get me thinking. So the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in D.C. has Coke Freestyle.

What about the 12 regional banks? All of them? None?

I figured it would be one or the other. Coke Freestyle for everyone or for no one. A nationwide institutional policy when it comes to fountain access to Barq’s Zero Sugar Vanilla Root Beer. And I was wrong. Only two of the regional banks! Boston and Philadelphia. Nowhere else! Fed employees in Cleveland must head to the nearest Wendy’s. (Don’t worry: They have five Wendy’s with Coke Freestyles within five miles.) Fed employees in St. Louis must go to the nearest White Castle. (Again, don’t worry: They have six White Castles with Coke Freestyles within five miles.) There is no on-demand Lime Fanta in the walls of the Federal Reserve Banks in Richmond, or Chicago, or Dallas, or Minneapolis.

But, some of you are surely thinking, is there not a Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta?

Yeah. There is. And even there, Coca-Cola’s hometown, the city where they piloted the machines back in 2009, there is no Coke Freestyle. (There are at least two on the same block as the Atlanta Fed—one in a fried chicken place and one in a hotel.) Unbelievable.

May the employees in Boston and Philadelphia get themselves a nice Pineapple Sprite, or Tropical Coke, or Orange Vanilla Hi-C, and know just how lucky they are.

How Many Coke Freestyle Machines Are at Coca-Cola Headquarters in Atlanta?

I sat with this question for a while before I looked it up. I’m not talking about the public World of Coke, but the large, multi-building corporate HQ near Georgia Tech. With a few thousand employees on-site… presumably several cafeteria settings… surely other sources of soda… I guessed there would be 10 to 15 Coke Freestyles. There would have to be some! But I assumed that most of the Coke available would be from well-stocked fridges, or standard fountains, or vending machines. It’s a workplace. (I’m assuming the online map shows only normal, full-service machines that any employee can use, and not any others they have for the purposes of testing or R&D.) A dozen or so, I figured, would be just about right.

No! Coke HQ has 21. (That’s 10 in the North Avenue Tower, 8 in the USA Building, and 3 in the Technical Engineering Center.) At first, I felt naive: OBVIOUSLY, Coca-Cola HQ has more than a dozen Coke Freestyle machines! And then I felt grateful, for the knowledge that Coca-Cola apparently believes the optimal placement of Coke Freestyle machines in a large office building is one per two or three floors, as evidenced by the fact that the North Avenue Tower has one each on the 4th, 6th, 8th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 18th, 20th, 22nd and 23rd floors. What a thing to know.

How Far Do You Have to Get from Pepsi Headquarters to Find a Coke Freestyle?

Just over two miles. (You will find one inside the nearest movie theater, followed closely by machines in a Wendy’s, a Burger King’s and a Popeye’s, respectively.) And, yes, Pepsi does have its own answer to Coke Freestyle: That would be Pepsi Spire, which even has its own map of machine locations, though it’s rather janky.

What Other Federal Government Buildings Have Coke Freestyles?

There’s one in the Senate Carryout, one in the House of Representatives Café in Longworth, and one in the White House Mess. I have to assume this means that just two branches of government may have unfettered access to Crème Soda Coke at a time.

Where Are Our National Coke Freestyle Deserts?

Here’s something I did not expect to find in playing with this map. It’s pretty hard to find a a place in this country that is not within 75 miles of a Coke Freestyle! Cody, Wyoming? They have one in a Wendy’s. Gilman City, Missouri? Dairy Queen. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico? You have to drive an hour, but then you’ll hit a Jack in the Box, plus a Five Guys. Alliance, Nebraska? Start driving and you’ll eventually get to a movie theater. Mobridge, South Dakota? Dairy Queen. Alpine, Texas? Again, drive an hour, but then you come to a Kwik Stop. You get the picture. If you are within a reasonable drive of a town with ~5,000 people, you probably have a Coke Freestyle.

Which makes sense. It’s not all Federal Reserve Banks and AMC Theaters. Otherwise isolated stretches of highway will eventually have one Subway or Burger King, which generally means, nowadays, a Coke Freestyle. (Or at least a claim to one—whether that is a functioning machine still available to the general public is another question.) Those fast-food joints cover a lot. But there is one exception.

Alaska.

The map claims they have no Coke Freestyle in Anchorage. None in Fairbanks. None in Juneau. None in Sitka. It truly is the last frontier (for deranged soda combinations). The fast-food locations up here sadly do not seem to have Freestyle.

May every Alaskan one day be able to dream of a fountain Zero Sugar Vanilla Fanta.

(By comparison, Hawaii is positively awash in Coke Freestyle, machines for days. And yes, I also checked U.S. territories, and while there are none in Guam or American Samoa, there are two in the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

Can You Describe the International Footprint of Coke Freestyle?

Many in Canada. Essentially none that I could see in Asia, South America, Oceania or Africa. And the ones in Europe are heavily concentrated in American chains like Five Guys and Burger Kings, which creates delightful screenshots like this one, from Paris.

Where Is the Only Coke Freestyle Machine in Zurich?

The FIFA Museum, where you can learn about the beautiful game, and then drink a beautiful Grape Sprite Zero Sugar.

Did You Learn Anything Else of Note About Coke Freestyle Locations?

They have the machines at Disneyland. Law firms. Hospital cafeterias. Theme parks. Colleges. The Exxon station right before you hit the Lincoln Tunnel. There are so many places you can go in this country, small towns and big cities and the highway rest stops in between, and nearly all of them will have a way to put you in reach of a touch screen promising the soda of your dreams.

(Alaska, Guam and American Samoa excluded, obviously, as discussed.)

I missed you guys! Sorry for that unexpected long time away. A brief catchup for anyone who might be interested: In the last 11 months, I got my job back at Sports Illustrated, was very grateful to return to writing about some great subjects, landed a book deal with my pal Jordan, and then actually wrote the book! (Stay tuned. It’s a photographic history of women’s hoops, which is a total dream project, but I did manage to include one relevant soda…) I also spent three weeks in there going across the country and back alone via Amtrak. (I drank soooo many Diet Cokes in the observation car.) And now it’s back to soda writing. If you have ideas or suggestions, please, hit me up! Cheers.

The giddy, delirious stupidity of the whole thing is a perfect match for the experience of drinking a lot of Baja Blast.

It’s also, of course, a joke about what it takes to get a lot of Baja Blast. For years, Mountain Dew’s collaboration with Taco Bell was available only in the restaurant, a drink meant to be consumed in context. If you wanted more than could fit in a regular cup—if you dreamed of having a 2-liter bottle—too bad. The Blast flowed only from the fountains of the Bell. (For the uninitiated, it’s smoother than a regular Mountain Dew, with a jolt of what it calls “tropical lime flavor,” though I’ve always found that description lacking: The taste is tropical more so than lime, I think, juuuust this side of too sweet. It’s a beautiful shade of turquoise and is also, by far, my favorite Mountain Dew.) But its distribution has changed over the last decade, with Baja Blast available seasonally in stores like Walmart, and the July ’23 TikTok’s comments are full of people saying as much: You don’t have to do this. You can just go buy a 12-pack somewhere. You can even get it year-round at some places in Canada. Which is all true. (Even the part about Canada.) But it strikes me as completely beside the point. You could pick up some cans of Baja Blast during the summer months at Costco. But should you? No! You should seek it in its natural habitat. It is not just a drink that happened to be born via corporate partnership with Taco Bell. It’s very much a drink of Taco Bell, shaped by its environment, meant to be poured from the fountain.

But 2024 is the 20th anniversary of Baja Blast—or, in corporate parlance, the 20th Bajaversary—and it’s brought the soda wide release as a permanent retail offering. Since January 2, you have been able to enter anywhere you might buy a soda and exit with a bottle of Baja Blast, no longer required to wait for a limited spring or summer drop to find it outside a fountain at Taco Bell. Which should be great for anyone who loves Baja Blast—like, say, me.

So why do I feel so conflicted about it?

It’s impossible for me to think of Taco Bell without Baja Blast or vice versa. I’m not old enough to remember the former without the latter, and I cannot process a world in which the latter might have existed without the former. It’s hard to imagine any counterfactual for a pairing so perfect. Mountain Dew and Taco Bell: twin institutional pillars of a certain animated-neon-dirtbag vibe. They’re meant for each other. Maybe the most I can say is that if Taco Bell had not been the brand to pioneer commercials featuring a talking dog, Mountain Dew surely would have been the one to try it instead. (And, really, Mountain Dew eventually kind of did it anyway, with that Super Bowl commercial featuring a talking puppy-monkey-baby.) These are two sides of the same gonzo coin. Mountain Dew is the only mainstream soda brand that could make a bright turquoise drink advertised as “like drinking a real hurricane.” Taco Bell is the only restaurant that could sell a bright turquoise drink advertised as “like drinking a real hurricane.” It’s a match.

Or as Pepsi-Cola North America’s former chief marketing officer Dave Burwick told QSR Magazine1 when Baja Blast debuted in 2004:

“Over the years, Taco Bell has helped grow the Mountain Dew brand to the point where Taco Bell customers and Mountain Dew drinkers have become kindred spirits. They are active, energetic, and constantly looking for something they can call their own.”

What a beautifully corporate way of saying, Here’s a drink engineered for high-energy weirdos. “Kindred spirits”! Indeed. But his larger point stands. Mountain Dew’s parent company, Pepsi, had been a Taco Bell partner since the 1970s, and Mountain Dew specifically was a favorite of Bell clientele. The QSR article notes that Taco Bell customers were one-and-a-half times more likely to drink Mountain Dew than the average American in 2004. But the motivation for Baja Blast was deeper than just that customer overlap. Both sides had reason for interest in trying something new. Mountain Dew had only just begun experimenting with alternate flavors—dropping Code Red (cherry) in 2001 and limited-edition LiveWire (orange) in 2003—and was curious about new ways to expand that catalog. Meanwhile, Taco Bell wanted to boost flagging beverage sales at the drive-thru, which made up an increasingly large portion of the business yet saw fewer orders of fountain drinks.

So the two parties decided they would do something drastic.

They would make a Mountain Dew people could get only at Taco Bell.

“By inventing Mountain Dew Baja Blast, Taco Bell is dangling something new, something daring, something you can’t get anywhere else,” Ken Hoffman wrote in his Drive-Thru Gourmet column in August 20042. “It’s the first soft drink that’s playing hard to get.”

It was, indeed, the first time an international beverage company and a fast-food chain partnered for an exclusive soda designed to match the menu that would not be sold elsewhere. And the rest is history. Baja Blast gained something like a cult following, then a meme following, then an enormous mainstream following. In 2008, four years after its release, it was still growing faster than any other drink option at Taco Bell. It’s only gotten bigger since.

That popularity is partially just because it’s good. You might love Baja Blast even if you’re not a Mountain Dew-head. The lime flavor isn’t too obvious—I mean, Mountain Dew is citrus-y to begin with, anyway—but it works to cut the sweetness of the original. All due respect to the corporate tagline, I don’t think Baja Blast is like drinking a real hurricane. It’s more like being at the pool; it’s fun, laidback, not too intense. And the rest of its popularity feels almost self-evident. Come on: It’s an unnaturally turquoise soda with a silly name designed to be sold at Taco Bell! It’s a joke, until it isn’t, and it hits whether you think it’s an ironic choice or a totally serious one.

But a key part of that is “designed to be sold at Taco Bell.” That’s what makes the whole thing go. It’s a corporate partnership, a marketing concept, yes, but it’s one that works; the idea of these two together is obvious and funny and stupid in the best way. Mountain Dew has tried to replicate that relationship. The last few years have brought Mountain Dew Southern Shock at Bojangles, Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning at KFC, Mountain Dew Legend at Buffalo Wild Wings, Mountain Dew “Dewgarita” at Red Lobster, Mountain Dew Vibe at Which Wich?, Mountain Dew Dark Berry Bash at Applebee’s. Some of these actually taste pretty good. But none of them work for me on a conceptual level. Read that list again! Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning at KFC? Mountain Dew “Dewgarita” at Red Lobster?? Mountain Dew Dark Berry Bash at Applebee’s??? That is a fake corporate synergy idea from an episode of 30 Rock. That is not a Mountain Dew flavor with an existential purpose. It’s not a drink with a sense of place. Compare that to Baja Blast. It’s a soda that could spring into creation only at Taco Bell and, in my mind, can unlock its true potential only at Taco Bell. I do not have to question its purpose. I understand it intimately.

But in the summer of 2014, for its 10th anniversary, Baja Blast was sold in stores for the first time, part of a promo called “Baja or Bust.” (If you are not versed in the wonderfully dumb promotional language of Mountain Dew, get ready, because this paragraph is full of it.) The release of cans and bottles was deemed a success and repeated in 2015. To get back in stores the next year, however, Baja Blast would have to win the DEWcision election in 2016, intended to decide which limited-edition retail flavor would become permanent. (Do note that DEWcision [2016] differs from DEWmocracy [2008].) “Long-time Baja Blast fans had waited for this moment to come and took it to the next level,” reads the Baja Blast page of the Mountain Dew Wiki. Alas! Those long-time fans lost out to fans of Mountain Dew Pitch Black. This meant Baja Blast would not come back to stores until 2018, but it’s been an annual drop ever since, its releases growing steadily more extreme. The last few years have brought splashy campaigns—100 Days of Baja in 2021, The Lost Treasures of Baja Island in ‘22, Summer of Baja Blast in ‘23—with a slew of limited-release flavors: Baja Flash, Baja Punch, Baja Mango Gem, Baja Gold, Baja Blast ENERGY, Baja Deep Dive, Baja Caribbean Splash, Baja Passionfruit Punch. It’s an exhausting list that speaks for itself. Mountain Dew took Baja Blast and tried going bigger, weirder, fruitier, more caffeinated, more alcoholic, more exclusive. It had just one place left to go.

So now, for the Bajaversary, we have received the traditional 20th anniversary gift: permanent wide release of the original soda in cans and bottles in stores. (With the caveat that “permanent” can mean any number of things in the Mountain Dew promotional universe—permanent, or available for a few years, or perhaps for just one year.) I had never previously sought Baja Blast outside Taco Bell. The limited drops were never appealing to me; I didn’t want to bother with calendars and online supply trackers when I could just check the location of the nearest Taco Bell. I didn’t want cans in my fridge. This wasn’t a home soda. It was a treat, meant to come from the fountain, probably with friends, maybe late at night. I didn’t think I’d want it any other way.

But earlier this week, I walked into a CVS. They had 12-packs of Baja Blast cans; I settled on a pair of 20-oz bottles, one regular, one zero sugar.

It tasted great. It was missing something.

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Many, many, many 3:15 p.m. desk Diet Cokes: This is the ideal time for a desk Diet Coke. It’s fine to have one earlier or later. But to really be a desk Diet Coke, to live up to everything the name suggests, to break up the monotony or soothe the stress or provide the final jolt of the work day? It’s gotta be 3:15.

This pair of Swiss sodas a friend and I pulled out of the fridge at a bratwurst place in Zurich: I like to plan ahead for travel. But there’s something to be said for just reaching into a fridge somewhere new and grabbing a drink that looks good and getting to surprise yourself with it. These were not the only sodas I tried on this trip to Switzerland and Germany. But they were my favorites—picked out on a whim with absolutely zero knowledge of what they were or where they were from and, as it happens, both pretty good! (Turns out Gazosa is a carbonated lemonade and Pepita is a grapefruit soda kind of like Fresca.) I honestly cannot remember which of these was mine. We shared them, which, of course, was the best part and the whole point.

Sierra Mist (or Starry?) in the Camden Yards press box: Pepsi did such an incredible job replacing Sierra Mist with Starry this year that it was all but impossible to find any trace of the former by, like, February. (Starry officially rolled out on January 1.) Such is the power of hitting different. But there is one place I could reliably find Sierra Mist throughout 2023: The press box at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The concessions stands on the concourse, naturally, all switched to Starry. Yet the press box soda machine remained Sierra Mist, all the way through to October, whether because of neglect or simple oversight or some particular individual employee preference. I drank it at every game I attended. And I did wonder: Is this actually Sierra Mist? Or is it Starry? Maybe they’ve changed out the soda itself without replacing the label on the machine and I just don’t have a distinguished enough palate to tell the difference. I think Starry tastes a little bit sharper, a little more discernibly citrus-y, than Sierra Mist ever did. But how much Sierra Mist did I really drink when it was widely available? (Almost none.) Why am I so sure I can tell the difference now? Am I being swayed by the packaging? falling victim to the power of marketing? I see the brighter colors, the bolder font, the modern aesthetic of Starry and just assume it should taste a little more vibrant? How much should I really trust myself here? This old press box soda machine claims to be Sierra Mist. But is it?

On more than one occasion, I considered grabbing a Starry from the concourse and a Sierra Mist from the box and drinking them side by side to make a final determination. But I never did. I think it’s for the best.

A 12-pack of Fresca some friends sent me as a surprise during a really bad week in the spring: The perfect gift at the perfect time. More healing than anything else could have been.

This Mountain Dew: I first read this Emily Dickinson poem in high school: “…Inebriate of air - am I - / And Debauchee of Dew - / Reeling – thro' endless summer days – / From inns of molten Blue…” and obviously, immediately, I thought of Mountain Dew. The phrase “Debauchee of Dew” burned itself in my mind. I am sorry to say it became my primary association with Emily Dickinson. Inebriate of air am I and Debauchee of Dew! That is, I guess, a fair description of how it feels to be intoxicated by the power of natural beauty. But it’s an exact, pitch-perfect rendering of how it feels to drink a Mountain Dew. This is it! The sweet, blurry thrill of that caffeinated rush: Emily, my girl, you nailed it. I’m not a regular Dew debaucher; I’ll have maybe two or three a year, at most, saved for moments when it feels like absolutely no other soda will do. I reach for a Mountain Dew only when it calls to me. And this is how it feels every time. Inebriate of air am I and Debauchee of Dew.

But I discovered something this summer. Emily Dickinson did not just tap into the essence of Mountain Dew some eighty years before its birth. No, she specifically tapped into the essence of Mountain Dew Summer Freeze, a disturbingly blue limited edition flavor that came out this summer, tasting kind of like melted popsicles, way too sweet yet also just right, somehow. A liquor never brewed? PepsiCo has now brewed it! Inebriate of air - am I - / And Debauchee of Dew - / Reeling – thro' endless summer days – / From inns of molten blue Mountain Dew Summer Freeze.

An embarrassing number of Olipops: I live directly across the street from a store that devotes a frankly insane amount of refrigerated shelf space to Olipop. It’s sold at a ridiculous mark-up—seemingly deliberately set to discourage any reasonable person from regularly buying it—but, obviously, that has not stopped me. I have bought so much Olipop this year. I can mentally cast pretty much any time I enter or exit my apartment as an occasion to stop in and get an Olipop. I am not sure it is better than any of the other prebiotic / probiotic sodas that are suddenly all over the place. But this has become my default choice by virtue of proximity. Every day can be an Olipop day. If you’re just delusional enough and have zero sense of the value of $2.99.

A loose flavor ranking: ginger lemon, cherry vanilla, Doctor Goodwin (a very decent riff on Dr Pepper), cherry cola, orange squeeze (shockingly good for an orange soda!), crisp apple, lemon lime, cream soda, classic root beer, tropical punch (too sweet), classic grape.

A Cheerwine on a pond in upstate New York in July: Delightful.

A Diet Coke from a Dairy Queen drive-thru in Iowa: I haven’t owned a car since college. I live in D.C., where I walk and take public transit everywhere, and so it’s been years since driving has been a regular part of my daily life. Which means I now romanticize it enough that I genuinely love getting to rent a car for a work trip or whatever. At the end of August, I was in Iowa for a few days, and my last afternoon was completely free. I got in the rental car, picked a direction and a radio station, and I stopped at the first drive-thru I saw. I ordered a Diet Coke. The windows stayed down, and I sipped as I drove for an hour, on a road that looked exactly like any county highway I’d ever driven at home and also somehow like nowhere I’d ever seen before. It was perfect.

Some non-soda-related writing from this year: I know, sorry, this is not the purpose of this newsletter, but I figured I might as well. My favorite piece of 2023 was something I’d wanted to do for *years*: I finally profiled Joey Chestnut. I also really enjoyed digging into the rise (and potential fall) of pitch framing and talking to baseball’s official scorekeepers about how to score new rules. The Women’s College World Series was a blast, and so was everything I did with March Madness, including pieces on South Carolina, Iowa and LSU. And I absolutely loved profiling the Orioles’ clubhouse manager.

I was wrong! Cinnamon Coke is now gone and does not seem to be coming back. There was no official announcement, but we have now seen multiple holiday seasons without it on the shelves, which means blogs have begun assuming its demise. (In the United States, that is. Cinnamon Coke seemed to have a longer run in Europe, where it debuted before coming to the U.S., and where it remained available at least in the Czech Republic through 2022. I hope this guy who tweeted about drinking one at a McDonald’s in Prague last year had a great time.) This is a bummer for me and my long-term dreams of seasonal soda, obviously, but it’s more than that.

The death of cinnamon Coke leaves a gaping hole in the mainstream holiday soda landscape!

It means that virtually every remaining holiday soda on the market is cranberry. Yes, I know there are smaller, specialty sodas with more niche holiday flavors, which is lovely. But in terms of national sodas you can pick up at any supermarket in December? All cranberry! Which is… fine. I get it from a business perspective: Cranberry is similar enough to pre-existing fruit flavors that it’s already familiar to consumers and probably easy to produce. It’s holiday-ish without being too aggressive about the whole thing. There’s a lot to like about cranberry! But what a sad, monotonous holiday soda world it is when cranberry makes up every offering. Whither the cinnamon? (Dr Pepper… this seems like it could be up your alley.) What about ginger? (You can make a ginger Coke on a freestyle machine!) Think of all the pointless, weird holiday products that flood grocery shelves in December. Is there really no corporation using that as a reason to sell a (probably terrible) peppermint soda??? Instead, we have only cranberry—simple, practical, safe cranberry.

Which does not mean cranberry is bad. It can actually be quite good! As seen in the following holiday soda review:

Winter Spiced Cranberry Sprite: So I quite like this. But I really, really want to love it, and I can’t. It delivers on the cranberry, which goes nicely with Sprite, a pleasant fruity note to pair with the zingy base. Yet where is the promised winter spice??? There’s the slightest hint of flavor here. Maybe someone whispered the word “ginger” in the bottling facility while it was being made. (Is that even the spice they were going for? I can’t tell! The marketing copy describes it only as a “blend of spices.”) The result is just fine. But there was a real opportunity for something a little more exciting here! Alas.

Cranberry ginger ale: I picked up a Canada Dry here, but I feel like all the ginger ale brands go in on cranberry now, Schweppes, Reed’s, whatever generic is at your grocery store. I do not drink too much ginger ale generally. (Unless I’m sick or on a plane.) But I love cranberry ginger ale. It has exactly the right level of sweetness. The first time I had it was as a freshman at a college pre-game. (The other benefit of cranberry ginger ale: Great mixer!) And I went out to buy some for myself the very next day. It was the first time in my life I’d gone to got a 2-liter bottle of soda for no one other than me and no reason other than wanting to drink a lot of soda. (The night before had ensured I was not interested in drinking anything other than soda for the immediate future.2) “This is amazing,” I remember thinking as I brought it back to my dorm room. “This is the freedom afforded by college. You can just go out and buy yourself a party-sized bottle of seasonal soda without explaining yourself to anyone. This is what adulthood is all about.”

I stand by that.

Regular Coke in a Christmas can: “This is not a holiday soda,” you might be saying. “In fact, you just addressed the fact that there is no holiday Coke, not since the demise of our dearly departed cinnamon, and what you are showing us here is just regular Coke in a Christmas can.” That is true! But I have good reason for including it—a can design critique. This looks fine. Appropriately festive. Coke and Santa go way back. Coke even helped create our modern idea of Santa. I get it! And he does look very charming on this can. But come on. Coke has an even better wintry mascot. Return to the cans with the polar bears! These were so charming. So were these. I realize Coke has moved away from the polar bear a bit in recent years. (This New Yorker article from 2014, headlined “Should the Polar Bear Still Sell Coca-Cola?,” includes this incredible quote: “When people think of polar bears, they are thinking of a drowning polar bear—and that is not a happy polar bear.”) But speaking strictly in terms of can design? The polar bear is just so cute. It offers so many possibilities. It’s wintry but is not tied to a specific holiday, it’s nostalgic, it’s adorable. It’s perfect.

Coca-Cola, I beg you, if you will not bring back cinnamon Coke, please at least bring back a seasonal polar bear can.

Enjoy whatever cranberry sodas you might drink in the next few weeks. And thank you so much to everyone who weighed in last week about why they drink 1.5 L Diet Cokes!!! So fascinating to learn about your world.

But all Diet Cokes are not created equal. This is a diverse population. If you think a Diet Coke is a Diet Coke, let me tell you, there are more Diet Cokes in heaven and Earth, buddy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. This is my attempt at classifying them.

A few general rules: Cans are superior to bottles (feel colder, better showcase for carbonation, delightful staccato one-two-three of the pop-top, etc.), and glass bottles are far superior to plastic bottles. But no Diet Coke is bad. Each has its virtues. Every Diet Coke is beautiful in its own way. And here they are.

Regular Can (12 oz.)—The standard. It’s perfect in every way. I’m not even going to try to describe its excellence—like trying to share the wonder of the moon through a photo taken on an iPhone—but I will note that among the millions of objects in the various collections of the Smithsonian, our national attempt to capture history and science and culture, there are two items related to the term “Diet Coke.” Both are 12-oz. cans.1 Which is, of course, the right choice.

Mini Can (7.5 oz.)—Even as someone whose default position on Diet Coke is “more,” I love the mini cans. They’re just so damn cute. And I think there’s an important principle at play here besides: The best sip of Diet Coke is always the first one. Sometimes, all I really want sometimes is the zip and possibility of that first magical sip, and a mini can is small enough that the whole thing feels rather spiritually close to the first sip. The mini can’s purpose is not utility. Its purpose is delight. This is a Diet Coke built for want rather than need, in other words, and isn’t it important to have that sometimes? (Also, neither here nor there, but it’s easily the best can option for making a mixed drink.)

Tall Boy (16 oz.)—I mostly love this as a sign of American initiative. “What if Diet Coke in a can, but more?” This is the opposite of the mini can not just in stature but in function. If the mini can is about joy, wonder, cuteness—the tall boy is about practicality. It knows its purpose and serves it well. There is no pretense here. Just honest work. The tall boy is for the most 3 p.m. on a Wednesday of all 3 p.m.s on Wednesdays. Its only failing is that it’s not more widely available.

Glass Bottle—I’m grouping all glass bottles together, regardless of size, because the glass bottle isn’t really defined by its volume. (Though, for what it’s worth, I really only see the 8 oz. bottle nowadays.) No, the glass bottle is defined by its spirit. It’s a throwback, a classic, a rare treat. Which is also its problem. If I’m seeking out an old-school glass bottle specifically to serve as a little gift to myself? I don’t want a Diet Coke! I want a regular Coke. (Preferably a Mexican Coke, if I can swing it.) The glass bottle clashes with soul of a Diet Coke—everyday, convenient, ubiquitous. It’s better than its plastic brethren in just about every way. But at its core, the glass bottle about putting in the effort to seek a bit of indulgence, and if I’m putting in that effort, I want to indulge more. I apologize to the glass bottle for punishing it for its ambition. But I must.

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Standard Plastic Bottle (20 oz.)—I know there are people out there who are regular plastic bottle drinkers, and I do not begrudge them it, but look: The plastic bottle is an inferior drinking experience to the can. It just is! Yes, the bottle has its virtues, namely portability and the previously mentioned key advantage of “more Diet Coke.” But it doesn’t stay cold to the touch. It doesn’t feel like it enhances the carbonation. It doesn’t fit in the hand the same way, and it isn’t as instantly recognizable as the iconic silver of the standard can, and there is no opportunity to admire a cool lip gloss imprint left on the rim. Twisting off a plastic lid has none of the ceremony of popping open a can. When do I drink a standard plastic bottle? When I have no other good choices. When I’m at a poorly stocked gas station or, like, a CVS. When it’s the only thing around. The plastic bottle does its job. But it’s not a job for which I have much use.

Rather Svelte Plastic Bottle (16.9 oz.)—I love when a place stocks both 16.9 oz’ers and 20 oz’ers and puts them next to one another. Just some light bottle-body-shaming. And my apologies to the standard option, but 16.9 oz is a more reasonable size for a single drink, and its bottle just looks… better. Shapelier. There’s a certain economy to its curves. At risk of endorsing unrealistic beauty standards for our beloved Diet Cokes, I have to say I see what corporate was after with the younger, more petite model, and if given the choice, I will almost always take a 16.9 oz’er.

1.25L Plastic Bottle—I am honestly not sure why this exists. Sincerely: I would love to see whatever market research led Coca-Cola to a plastic bottle that’s bigger than a typical person would drink in a sitting yet not big enough to be the beverage anchor of a party! What is the use case for this? Let’s ignore the existence of cans for a moment. If you want to personally drink a reasonable-ish amount of soda without it going flat, you’re getting a smaller bottle. If you want something to share, or you personally do not care about potential flatness and want something to stash away for a glass at a time, you’re getting a 2L. (It’s the value buy!) Who is buying the 1.25L? Why? I’m picturing someone rolling up to an intimate gathering with one like it’s a bottle of wine to present to the host.

If you know anything at all about this—have you bought a 1.25L bottle of Diet Coke?—please email me at emma.baccellieri@gmail.com, or leave it in the comments.

2L Plastic Bottle—Here’s a shameful thing to confess as a soda newsletter operator: I kind of love a flat Diet Coke. It’s not a worse drinking experience so much as simply a different one. The soda poured from a 2L is almost necessarily going to end up flat. It’s not “good,” in a technical sense, not crisp or fizzy or any of the adjectives used in soda advertising copy. It’s less stimulating. Easy. Familiar. I like to think of it as gentle rather than as weak. Which is not what I want from a soda I get to revive me on a weekday afternoon or provide refreshment on a hot day. But it is perfect for the context of Diet Coke that comes in a 2L. This is soda that’s meant to be shared. You don’t seek it out. It just comes to you. A 2L is meant to be poured into plastic cups and passed around. It’s the soda of a grade-school party, or a picnic, or a visit from my grandfather. It’s the soda of a basement or a barbecue. A 2L is not about the quality of the soda (bad). It’s about communion. And I love it.

Apologies for the unexpected two months off here. Got caught up with the MLB playoffs and then with assorted personal and professional disasters of varying importance 🙃. Finally, some quick housekeeping regarding my last edition. Beloved friend and SodaHead Anna K. pointed out that I failed to mention a crucial fact about Fresca: It was Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite soda! He even had a Fresca fountain installed in the White House!! (The first time Fresca was mentioned in the pages of SI was actually on a tour of the White House bowling alley in 1968—“Cases of empty Coke and Fresca bottles are stacked outside the door.”) (The second time Fresca was mentioned in the pages of SI was when Joe Torre recommended it as part of a healthy diet in 1971.) Thank you for keeping me honest.

None of these is foreign to my fridge, but it’s rare for all three to be in there at once, which got me weirdly excited to structure my night of work around a narrative arc of Diet Coke. (Excited enough to get them all out of the fridge for a picture first, anyway.) (It probably goes without saying that I was at the point of working intently on something for long enough to be fully deranged in all other aspects of my life.) I figured I’d start with the regular DC, savor the tall boy over the course of the night, and turn to the mini glass bottle as a reward to provide one final boost once the end was in sight. What actually happened was I started drinking the tall boy, got too absorbed in my work and let it sit out and get flat, and later chugged the regular DC. I somehow did not have to stay up all night, and the mini glass bottle is still in my fridge, waiting for me. Anyway! That is not what this newsletter is about.

No, this newsletter is about the perfect time to drink a Fresca, and why that time ended last weekend.

I’m a longtime FrescaHead. For the uninitiated, the soda is citrus-y, but not in a lemon-lime-forward way: Fresca doesn’t have the zip of a Sprite or Mountain Dew or Starry or anything in that extended family. Instead, the carbonation here is lighter, and the main citrus flavor is grapefruit. That makes it a generally smoother and more pleasant drinking experience, I think. It’s zero-calorie and was traditionally marketed as a diet drink; they no longer really emphasize this, but they have introduced a bunch of visual cues to make you think it might be a seltzer if you don’t know better, including separating the word “sparkling” from “soda water” and styling it in a flowy cursive. This was part of a redesign a few years ago that made the can look vaguely European. I am not a fan. Reject modernity, embrace tradition!

New(ish) can aside, I remain a devoted Fresca fan, and I’ve realized something over the last few years. This is the ideal summer soda.

Any ice-cold soda can be great in the summer, obviously: The refreshment is a virtue of temperature as much as flavor. But there’s something about the agreeable, just-sweet-enough buzz of a Fresca—the idea that in a matter of thirst-quenching seconds, you could easily slam the whole thing back, though of course you won’t—that feels especially well-suited to the season. If citrus sodas generally have a summery connotation, I still think Fresca has one that you don’t see in Sprite or Starry, which feel season-independent to me: It’s the sweetness, I think? Leading with grapefruit rather than a more high-powered note such as lemon or lime makes Fresca seem more refreshing, less aggressive. And it turns out I’m not alone in feeling this way! Fresca’s entire initial marketing campaign was based around the idea that it was ultra-cool and refreshing. Take a look from 1966:

Kudos to the copywriter here: “Fresca is the new cold drink with the frosty, cold taste. And, of course, it’s sugar-free. How refreshing is Fresca? This refreshing: icy, biting, bold, cold, frosty, wintry, shivering, shuddering, springy, sparkling, chilling, lively, light, brisk, bubbling, nearly freezing, and almost shocking.” I would use, like, five of these 17 descriptors to characterize a Fresca today. But I get the vision. “Try the frosty taste of Fresca,” the ad finishes. “It’s a blizzard.” The perfect answer for a hot summer day.

I had a Fresca outside this weekend—temperature in the high 70s, sun bearing down, still very much like summer but with the light shifted just enough to hint at fall—and realized it might be the last one for the season. This was the perfect way to drink it, I figured, up on my rooftop while that still felt decently seasonally appropriate. Icy, biting, bold, cold, frosty, wintry, shivering, shuddering, springy, sparkling, chilling, lively, light, brisk, bubbling, nearly freezing, but not at all shocking. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

All of which is to say that I do not generally have strong feelings about plane soda. Maybe I’ll ask for a Diet Coke, or for some water, or for nothing at all. It can result in a perfectly enjoyable Diet Coke! (Which, yes, I know, is especially fizzy and can be a pain to pour in the air.) But there is no great attachment to this particular soda experience for me. In my pantheon of Diet Cokes—one at the movie theater on a hot day, one sipped languidly on a road trip, one from a McDonald’s—I have not set aside space for one consumed on an airplane. It’s fine! That’s all.

Except that every once in a while, in spite of the great, empty flatness of regular travel—perhaps because of the great, empty flatness of regular travel—I get on a plane and feel miserable. I want to be anywhere else. Nothing is wrong, other than everything. It’s a dumb, inchoate, childish feeling, and I know it, which makes it even worse. And then I order a ginger ale.

It’s a classic plane drink, and a classic sick drink, too. Those reputations are braided together: A ginger ale is a sign of comfort, of soothing your stomach and your nerves, which makes it a natural choice for an environment that’s fundamentally unnatural. (Even for regular travelers.) Yet there’s actually very little to recommend it in this role. There’s essentially no real ginger in a typical ginger ale. For as long as it’s enjoyed this reputation as an offer of standard, automatic comfort, on par with Saltine crackers and staying home to watch The Price Is Right, there’s virtually nothing behind it.

And I think I like it more for this. A ginger ale reminds me not so much of being sick as it does being cared for. It’s not the idea that it will actually do anything. It’s the idea that it’s a small, shared ritual, about as universal as any soda experience can be, just buying you a minute to stop and think. It’s an invitation to let yourself feel bad for a moment. It’s also an invitation to believe that you will eventually feel better. If it’s a communal delusion, it’s a pretty nice one, I think.

I ordered a ginger ale on a flight this week. And you know what? It worked.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, SodaHeads, and if you’re traveling, I hope you don’t need a ginger ale. If you do, I hope it works.

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The easiest place to start is the fact that it’s cherry-flavored. But the cherry is more prominent than in, say, a Cherry Coke, except saying that invokes a kind of syrupy, cloying sweetness, and that’s all wrong here. In fact, one of Cheerwine’s virtues is that it manages to be fruit-forward without being overly sweet at all, I think. The cherry flavor is a little subtler, a little darker. It’s a bit closer to black cherry. Just… not. “It’s got a depth of flavor with this cherry beginning and a root-y ending—almost like a cross between Cherry Coke and Dr Pepper, but better, obviously,” the chef Vivian Howard told Eater in 2017. It’s not quite like a root beer. But I know exactly what she means by “root-y,” though I struggle to think of how I would define that in my own terms, and I do feel the two flavors are more blended than that quote might suggest. In any event, Howard was right about the fact that it’s better than anything that might be comparable. And Cheerwine’s best feature isn’t the flavor profile, anyway. It’s the carbonation. This is where it really separates itself: It’s noticeably bubblier than most other sodas, and when I think of cracking open a can, I think not of the cherry-ish-root-y taste but of the perfect, decadent fizz. You can hear a Cheerwine.

I don’t want to play favorites too much here on The Soda Fountain—I’m here because I love a great many types of soda!—but Cheerwine is, well, my favorite. It always has been. I love the versatility of Diet Coke, the zip of ginger ale enjoyed on a plane, the relief of a Fresca on a hot day. None of them touch Cheerwine for me.

If you know anything about Cheerwine, and nothing about me, this is probably enough for you to guess that I grew up in North Carolina. It’s a product of the Carolina Beverage Company, a name that more or less gives the game away here, and it’s based in Salisbury, N.C., where Cheerwine was created in 1917. Which, for much of the soda’s existence, meant that it was moderately to very hard to find Cheerwine anywhere besides North Carolina and other parts of the Southeastern U.S.2

But this has changed. Cheerwine began expanding its footprint in 2011, thanks to a distribution deal with Pepsi, and it’s become far more broadly available over the last decade. If still not commonly accessible nationwide, it’s at least a hell of a lot easier to track down, no matter where you are. I now live in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen Cheerwine for sale here not only in glass bottles in speciality stores but also in 12-packs of cans in regular groceries. And, sure, D.C. isn’t that far from Carolina Beverage Company HQ. But considering that it used to be all but impossible to find cans outside of the Carolinas and Georgia—that’s a big change.

Which, in theory, should be a dream scenario for me, a person who spent her formative years guzzling Cheerwine and has since moved away but would like to continue enjoying it and ensuring its existence for years to come. In theory! And yet.

I’ve found myself pulling back from Cheerwine whenever I see it anywhere other than North Carolina. At first, I wondered if this was some kind of small-minded provincialism on my part, a weird, aimless purity test. It’s silly. I love Cheerwine. I miss having it as regularly as I did for more or less the entirety of my childhood and young adulthood. I should want to pick one up whenever I have the chance! There is no real coherent principle behind my discomfort here. But it’s proved curiously strong. My love of Cheerwine is more conditional than I’d figured: It’s my favorite soda everywhere, all the time, but I only want to drink it at home.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. (More than I should probably admit to, considering that all of that thinking has yet to result in a definitive, fully-formed answer.) I guess what it comes down to is this: I like a sense of place. I like the idea that some kind of texture, some friction, can still exist on the national map. I realize this can be something of a pointless virtue to endorse in and of itself: I get that regional products might increasingly anachronistic, or even kind of self-indulgent, when the internet just ends up flattening everything, anyway. But it’s nice to have a sense of where you are.3 This means I like regional sodas in general. I love having a Big Red in Texas, or a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray in New York4, and I’ve never had a Moxie while in New England, but I know I’d love to try one. I like to pop open a can and understand exactly where I am.

Each of those regional sodas is somebody’s favorite, I’m sure. But Cheerwine is mine. There’s no grand connection passed down through generations here: My parents moved to North Carolina in 1999, with me and my sister in preschool, and I later found Cheerwine as I might have any preteen obsession. But this one stuck. More than any other soda for me, Cheerwine comes with a host of memories and experiences that I find impossible to separate from the taste (or the carbonation). Each individual can is braided with the taste of however many hundreds of past ones enjoyed on patio tables and in cupholders and passed between hands. If “comfort soda” feels like a misnomer for a drink whose biggest selling point is its audible, frenetic bubbliness, well, it’s comfort to me. And I do miss it. But isn’t it nice to have something to miss? It offers a bigger, more expansive definition of home than you find attached to any one building or city or state, and besides, it offers something to come home to. I drink only a handful of Cheerwines each year now. And every one tastes perfect.

To everyone who subscribed after the first issue of The Soda Fountain last week — thank you so much! Not to get too sappy about this, but I really did start this project just for me, and I had no clue if anyone would have any interest in reading about soda. It was genuinely touching to see that so many of you did. I have some ideas lined up, but if you have a favorite soda or soda experience or soda mystery for me to solve (?!?!), lemme know. Comments are open for all my fellow enthusiasts. Have a good weekend! And if you’re in North Carolina, drink a Cheerwine for me.

“Why does Coca-Cola taste so good at McDonald’s?”

A loaded question! Which—McDonald’s is of course going to publicly grant the premise that its Coke is exceptionally good. Duh. But that premise goes way beyond official corporate documentation. It’s everywhere. (Like, really, everywhere.) “Here’s why McDonald’s Diet Coke tastes so good” has gained the kind of recycled-internet-churn status of, I don’t know, “Here’s the order of the Star Wars movies.” When the internet eventually dies, I tend to believe there will still be a lonely bot answering and reanswering this question, programmed to believe it has thus captured the spirit of humanity: Why does McDonald’s Diet Coke taste so good? 

And here is where I tell you that I considered myself a truther on this point for a long time.

The first time I remember having this argument was in high school. McDonald’s Diet Coke tastes great in the way that any fountain Diet Coke tastes great, I’d say. McDonald’s Diet Coke tastes extra-great because you’re associating it with the experience of getting a treat from McDonald’s. I’d grant that it was probably better on the margins—that pre-chilling the syrup and using the slightly wider straw really did mean something. But I would not say that any given McDonald’s Diet Coke ended up that much better than any other fountain Diet Coke. There were simply too many other confounding variables: There’s a lot that makes this a great Diet Coke! They always give you a lot of ice, and you’re pairing it with hot, salty food that perfectly compliments a soda. That makes you think you’re drinking something with the power to transcend the normal standards of the beverage. But you’re not. My high-school contrarianism and stubbornness played a contributing role here, I’m sure. But I also felt I was onto something. A McDonald’s Diet Coke was wonderful. Guess what? So were a lot of other fountain Diet Cokes that I was lucky enough to drink!

Which held just fine until, eventually, I had to begrudgingly give up my stance.

A few years ago, I moved to an apartment right around the corner from a McDonald’s. I’ve bought relatively few meals in my time here. (Almost none of them in daylight and / or sober.) But I’ve gotten many, many, many Diet Cokes, at all hours of the day, in all manner of situations. There’s not much that can serve as either salve or celebration or simple pick-me-up for $1.39. But there’s a McDonald’s Diet Coke. My block also has a deli, plus a grocery store, and there are lots of decent or better options for a soda nearby. Still: I kept turning to the McDonald’s Diet Coke. And at a certain point, after drinking enough of them, with and without food, in times of joy and times of distress, in the hottest points of summer and dreariest months of winter, I realized I had changed my mind: It is better. It simply is.

I spent most of the last two weeks in Europe, which no one wants to hear about, but I passed an embarrassing portion of the flight home thinking about getting a McDonald’s Diet Coke. (Yes, I understand there are McDonald’s locations in every country I visited. [I checked out a McDonald’s in Italy and another in Slovenia; I wanted to try the pistachio McFlurry in Venice, but, alas, the ice cream machine was broken, which felt oddly touching. The human condition knows no borders…] But that part of Europe is Coke Zero territory, not Diet Coke, and it’s certainly not a place to get a cup the size of my head loaded with ice, a critical part of the experience for me.) I’d tried a handful of fun international sodas while abroad. But I knew what I wanted to symbolize coming home. 

The first thing I drank when I returned to the U.S. was a McDonald’s Diet Coke. And you know what? It was perfect.

Okay! This is The Soda Fountain. I’ve been feeling very nostalgic lately about the internet of decades past: I miss dipping into meandering personal blogs, stumbling onto weird hobbyist communities, that kind of thing. So I finally decided to do something with that feeling by starting a project that hit those same notes for me—small-scale, kinda weird, deliberately not productive or professionalized. Welcome to my soda newsletter. I’m going to define that pretty broadly—think more ruminating on various soda drinking experiences, less soda reviews, but I’ll probably have some of both. (Plus other stuff? There are no rules here!) It’s free, with something new roughly every week. If you like my writing about other subjects—like baseball—you might like this. If you have no idea who I am, but you like soda, you might like this, too. And if you have thoughts, ideas, recommendations, etc., please share!  

Have a good weekend. (Maybe with a McDonald’s Diet Coke, even.)