Soda Wrapped
A year in soda drinking
I have no idea how many sodas I drank this year or in what quantity. (I’m sincerely glad that information does not get shared with me by whichever massive data-gathering operation could surely provide it.) A bunch of Diet Coke. Some Fresca and some Cheerwine. A variety of strange impulse buys from corner stores and fancy health shops and vending machines. Some other stuff. In any event, here is my best attempt at a very loose approximation of my highlights of a year in soda, taken from my brain and camera roll and the recycling bin of memory.
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.
Olipop hive, rise up!