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We all love sodas ... with the possible exception of when we brush our teeth and immediately thereafter drink some Diet Coke (inadvertently creating a taste in our mouth similar to that of shampoo mixed with battery acid).

Still, the good stuff can become expensive, especially if you tend to go through the stuff like it was oxygen molecules and you’re buried alive. Budget-wise, you will find you’re spending more on soft drinks than gasoline and it gets you just about as far; what can you do? Is there no hope but to gain some self control and try to curtail your soda habit?

Yeah, right. The obvious answer is, of course, to start buying cheaper pop. Some innovative soda substitutes have been waiting for you on your grocer’s shelves, abandoned and alone. But the kick is they’re generally half the price of the brand name sodas! And for good reason, as you’re about to find out.

As part of our site’s ongoing dedication to customer service, we are proud to provide the world’s first taste test of the off-brand sodas. Some of the grocery stores listed below may or may not be available in your particular neck of the woods, but our high soda budget prevented us from flying around to various parts of the country to sample the local pop. If you’re significantly intrigued by any of the following, however, you’re more than welcome to travel to the West Coast and give any of them a shot. May the least worst man win!

Albertson’s Black Cherry

Smooth as a cloud, as flavorful as something with a lot of flavor, Albertson’s Black Cherry was the first contestant on our chopping block. With the help of my trained staff of qualified researchers - who mainly consisted of my friend, Merritt, who is a diabetic and was risking his life drinking so many crappy sodas (but for so great a cause!) - we evaluated the drinks in terms of cost, flavor, aftertaste, scent, consistency, bottle design, and overall, on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being absolutely vile and 10 being the regular flavor of the name-brand soda or energy drink quality). Our results were as follows for Albertson’s Black Cherry:

Cost: 8. $1.29 for a six-pack, or only $.21 ½ cents a can. A good deal.

Flavor: 6. It was pretty good in terms of how it actually tasted at first, seeming to generate a fairly accurate representation of cherries. However…

Aftertaste: 4. The aftertaste wasn’t that great. It tasted flat, and had little bite. You had to keep drinking it in order to get the full effect (maybe that’s Albertson’s intention, however).

Scent: 8. It smelled like cherries. Not bad.

Consistency: 4. Very flat-not a lot of fizz. And this was right out of the can.

Bottle design: 7. A cheerful font coupled with a good contrast of color. I would buy this based on the look alone.

Overall: 6. A decent competitor to regular black cherry drinks, the let-down of the aftertaste is cancelled out by the low cost.

Sam’s Choice Mountain Lightning

Available at Wal Mart, Mountain Lightning is the low-cost equivalent of Mountain Dew. But since Mountain Dew is my favorite pop by a mile, the bar was set pretty high. Let’s see how it measured up.

Cost: 8. $.25 cents a can in the Wal-Mart lobby vending machine. A good deal for a can of pop, but not for this particular pop.

Flavor: 5. From start to finish is aftertaste, like you’re not really drinking it in real time. It tastes like chemicals, and has very high citric acid levels with low caffeine levels. That being said, it wasn’t too bad.

Aftertaste: 4. The citrus really kicks in and leaves a fruity aftertaste. Not very good.

Scent: 7. It generally smelled Mountain Dew-esque.

Consistency: 6. Pretty fizzy. Maybe a little too fizzy.

Bottle design: 8. It really grabs your attention with the lightning bolts, though it is a naked rip-off of Mountain Dew’s color scheme.

Overall: 5. The bar is set pretty high here, and this is probably as good as anyone who isn’t Mountain Dew can ‘dew.’

Albertson’s Citrus Sling

We think Citrus Sling is trying to be Squirt or Fresca, though the taste is so much unlike either of those drinks it’s kind of hard to tell. A hint for all you Midwest types: Albertsons is known as “Jewel” out there. Same store, different name.

Cost: 4. $.89 cents for a 2-liter. Not great since brand-name drinks are usually $.99 for the same thing.

Flavor: 2. Very poor imitation, this tastes like a carbonated lemonade. Merritt called it ‘Citrus Rubber Band’ and thought that was very amusing.

Aftertaste: 2. Gross from start to finish, afterwards, and everything in between.

Scent: 4. Kind of weird, it would make you cautious to drink this.

Consistency: 3. Extremely flat, this lacked in fizz consistency-wise but tried to make up for it in taste by blasting you with the watered-down citrus flavor.

Bottle design: 3. Pretty boring. The colors are weak and there isn’t a lot of contrast. You could easily miss this in the grocery store-it doesn’t jump off the shelf, begging to be purchased.

Overall: 4. A poor imitation of whatever it’s trying to imitate. When you can’t even tell what that something is, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Big K’s Red Crème Soda

Available at Smith’s Food and Drug (although I take it it is also available at K-Mart given the name?), this was a tasty little number. Big fans of Barq’s beverages, especially their very tasty Red Crème Soda flavor, we had pretty high expectations for any competitor. Surprisingly, Smith’s did pretty good.

Cost: 9. On sale for $.69 for a 2-liter.

Flavor: 9. Surprisingly good. It certainly didn’t have the ‘bite’ that Barq’s products are famous for, but the flavor was spot-on.

Aftertaste: 7. Good, which is saying a lot in this group. It has a consistent taste, both initially and aftertaste-wise.

Scent: 10. Smells exactly like the original. Someone did their homework.

Consistency: 7. Again, not as much ‘bark/bite’ effect as the original, but certainly not as flat as the others we’ve sampled so far.

Bottle design: 2. Extremely poor. It doesn’t help that half the bottle is in Spanish and you have to turn it around to get the English translation. If you’re not keen enough to think to turn the label around, you’d never know what this is unless you were bilingual. You come to America, you learn the language. Simple as that!

Overall: 8. A worthy replacement, especially given the low price and the fact that 2-liter Barqs are either non-existent or difficult to find.

Sam’s Cola

I’m not a big fan of Coke/Pepsi in the first place; they taste like generic syrup-flavored colas to me. But even I know the Real Thing (though by far not my favorite) is much better than this. I know Wal Mart has done more for the low-income families in this country than almost anyone, but they really should be ashamed of themselves for this creation.

Cost: 8. $.25 cents a can in the Wal Mart Lobby.

Flavor: 4. It somewhat tastes like Coke while it’s in your mouth, but once you swallow…

Aftertaste: 1. It becomes completely vile. An awful aftertaste that will have you reaching for something, anything else, to cleanse your palette. We would have spit it out if we hadn’t already swallowed it.

Scent: 8. Smells pretty much like Coke.

Consistency: 3. Exists in a dimension somewhere between flat and fizzy.

Bottle design: 5. Eh, it’s OK. Strong, 'sexy,' colors, it seems to be fusing both the red from Coke and the Blue from Pepsi.

Overall: 3. A decent smell and an OK bottle do not a pleasurable beverage experience make.

Big K Citrus Drop

Another Big K product, Citrus Drop has the distinction of being the only soda in the group with its own catch phrase (“Pop the Drop”). This is obviously a take-off on “Do the Dew” from Mountain Dew, but still, you’ve got to hand it to them.

Cost: 4. $.79 for a 2-liter, but brand name Mountain Dew is still generally only $.99 a 2-liter.

Flavor: 6. Tasted more like Mountain Dew than Mountain Lightning did, for sure. But it’s still not Mountain Dew.

Aftertaste: 6. It tastes about the same going down as it does going in.

Scent: 8. Smells like Mountain Dew. Probably feels like Mountain Dew if you were to pour it on your head.

Consistency: 7. Still more flat than Mountain Dew, it was probably a tad bit better than Mountain Lightning.

Bottle design: 8. Really good. Nice clean lines, good use of color, uncluttered design scheme. A winning label.

Overall: 6. Better than Mountain Lightning, but still not the “Dew.” Bonus points for the “Pop the Drop” phrase. We enjoyed the neon-like quality to the beverage itself-it seemed nuclear. Merritt wanted me to add that the drink cointains brominated vegetable oil, yet is not a significant source of saturated fat, which is nice.

Albertsons Dr. Bold

Courtesy of Albertsons, Dr. Bold has perhaps the greatest name of a soda ever, with the possible exception of a drink called “Dr. Smooth” which Fred Meyer used to have prior to its leaving my state and becoming the pale imitation, Smith’s Marketplace. A Dr. Pepper homage, it doesn’t entirely live up to its name.

Cost: 6. On sale for $.69 a 2-liter.

Flavor: 8. It’s actually pretty close. I was surprised.

Aftertaste: 8. Decent aftertaste-no weird mystery flavors like the other drinks.

Scent: 9. Smells almost exactly like it. I thought we could trick people into thinking this was Dr. Pepper if you served it with ice.

Consistency: 5. Flat-ola.

Bottle design: 10. Perfect bottle design-I would and did buy this for the label.

Overall: 10. Normally this would get about a 6 or so, but it gets 4 bonus points for the name, which is far better than Dr. Pepper. Who really wants to drink something that has ‘pepper’ in the title? No, no. It needs to be something more Bold. Dr. Bold. Shaken, but not stirred. This truly is a drink deserving of its own line of action movies.

THE WINNER

Dr. Bold. For the name.

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By Christian Hoopes

Featured Blogger

AmericanInventorSpot.com

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