Vanilla Coke - the return (plus so much pop it's sickening)

So, anyone who has had the misfortune to dip into this on again-off again
blog may know that the frequent soft drink reviews sprang up as a result of
the withdrawal of Diet Vanilla Coca Cola from UK distribution, my favourite
chemically flavoured carbonated water drink of All Time. After I sourced
the last few bottles I could find in London, from the now closed
convenience store that used to be opposite the Trocadero on Shaftesbury
Avenue, I set off on a quest to try new drinks and new flavours.

Then, in Spring 2013, Coca Cola deigned to reintroduce Vanilla Coke to
Britain. You'd think that this would be a call for celebration, seeing me
throw the parties this year that I didn't for the jubilee or Olympic Games
last year. But no, because those evil capitalist pigs at Coke in their
infinite wisdom have decided not to bring back the Diet version.

So, after being available for over a month, I finally caved in and
bought myself a bottle of full-fat 6-teaspoons-of-refined-sugar tooth decay
that is Coca Cola Vanilla.

Opening the bottle there is a barely traceable whiff of vanilla, but almost
undetectable. I decided to decant a morsel into a plastic cup to see if a
larger surface area would improve the olfactory impact.
A slight increase but still akin to a whiff of perfume brought to you on
the wind from across an industrial estate's car park.

Taste?

I'm one of those people who insists they can tell the difference between
Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi etc. and I have to say I prefer the
chemically sweeter taste of Diet Coke to the sugar version.
In this case it's no different - there's a dark acidity in full fat Coke
that disagrees with my palate and the slight hint of vanilla flavour
doesn't skew the flavour into a favourable direction for me. Similar to the
smell, the vanilla taste is so slight as make me suspect some sort of
homeopathy was in action at Coke HQ.

Whatever, my dreams are dashed, hope is gone, light put out from the world
etc. etc. etc.

I could stomach the stealing of water sources in developing countries for
their sticky fluid, their implicit acceptance of the murder of trade
unionists and various other global corporation-scale crimes, but bringing
back the Vanilla with no Diet option? Sacrilege.

Also - 53g of sugar in a 500ml bottle. 53g! 58% of your RDA! It seems crazy
that this can be sold without being labelled as a poison.

-

My ongoing sampling of fizzy pops is starting to wind down as I come across less examples of thus far unsupped beverages, but here's a quick roundup of ones I've tried in the last year:

                                           
Fentiman's cherry tree cola
A little hiss once the cap is twisted; the smell is very similar to cola bottle chewy sweets, but with a fruity hint. The taste is pretty much that; very nice, though after half the bottle I had an odd, rubbery after taste.

Barr Red Kola
Open it up, and there's a stale boiled sweets smell.
On pour the fizz dissipates quickly. First taste you get that smell again but more fruity, but the taste is only slight, not overpowering,  with a rubbery after taste and a very sugary feel. The fruity taste is garbled, nothing standing out or separately hanging back. I'm not quite sure how this relates to cola, it's a vaguely fruity pop with little distinction.

Free & easy Sarsaparilla
Rooty smell, as in root vegetables. Gross taste, a rubbery, beetrooty sweetness.
Somehow bitter without being bitter? Confusing. 

Pepsi Max Cherry
Faint cherry smell on opening. Has that distinct Pepsi taste beneath a slightly sickly sweet cherry, almost  feeling like it leaves a teeth-coating residue despite the lack of sugar. 

Heritage diet cola
A bit thinner in the colour than most colas, unsurprising for a budget offering. Fairly weak odour, it smells as you'd except. 
Slight taste, a little cloying despite the lack of sugar, it's definitely well below the par of the main contenders, but it's a sliver above most own brand store colas I've tried.

Belvoir ginger beer
Weak flavour but a substantial heat provoked at the back of the throat. The smell is a bit artificial lemon, the flavour doesn't increase later but the heat dies on.

Gusto
Fruity once the top is off,  that remains once decanted into glass, but the taste is altogether somethig else. Bitter sweet, with a taste that seems to come from the roof of the mouth. A sickly sweetness lingers there, but it's hard to place the origins of the bitter flavour, it doesn't have the earthiness found in other kola nut colas.
The blurb is odd. Inspired by a 12th century taoist recipe, but with Amazonian Guarana. As it's 98% apple juice I can see with hindsight that the bitterness comes from the acidity.
Can't see myself ever drinking this again. 

Ginger Grouse 
Nice smell, smooth taste with slight ginger bite. Pleasant but maybe slightly too sweet. Citrus is evident but not overwhelming but the advertised whisky is very hard to detect.

Wychwood Brewery Ginger Beard
Smells like proper beer: bitter and acrid. Tastes like beer too, but milder with a sweet gingery mask over the bitter undertow of the barley malt. This is a beer infused with ginger as opposed to a ginger beer infused with alcohol, but this should be no surprise as it states this on the label. Woe is me and my sweet, sweet tastebuds. 

 Crabbies Strawberry and Lime
So, I like Crabbies ginger beer, but the limited Strawberry & Lime version is absolutely and totally foul, the worst combination of sickly sweet and slimily sour.

Crabbies Orange
Another limited edition of Crabbies, this time the orange flavour is unwholesome but not as immediately foul as the Strawberry and Lime monstrosity.

The flavour of the weak

It’s time for yet another fizzy dip.



Spar, the convenience store chain that have apparently been the official sponsor of ‘European athletics’ since 1996, have their own branded cola range. It seems that their marketing people decided that the nationality of the cola is what entices the consumer, hence their decision to go with “american diet cola” – “real american style, real american taste.”
It’s confusing enough that the label seems to call it american cola diet, but the instance of lower case for american is nearly as confusing as the idea that a cola is able to taste American. They even have a little logo on the bottle with a smidge of what looks like a New York skyline, proclaiming “Authentic American Taste” (this part is all capitals but I’m not going to replicate that here unless absolutely necessary).
They might have a point if the recipe wasn’t all chemicals, but the ingredients are the same as most colas. It does say in the blurb that it’s produced in the UK form cola flavourings imported from the USA. Because we don’t have taste labs in the UK, obviously.
Anyway, their heart’s obviously in roughly the right place as they care enough to include the adult GDAs for calories and salt and such, despite the fact that the levels in the drink are all ‘trace’.



On pouring the drink is fizzy, building a good head that lasts a fair few seconds, and leaving a good numbers of bubbles around the perimeter of the glass for a few minutes after the pour. The smell isn’t strong, giving a faint hint of cola bottle sweets. The taste is also faint, barely registering to the point that you could be forgiven for thinking it was slightly flavoured carbonated water; holding a mouthful before swallowing in an attempt to maximise the flavour makes little difference, if I didn’t already know I was drinking a cola I think it’s possible that I wouldn’t be able to identify what it was, besides it being sweet and not fruity.
In the grand scheme of things it’s hard to decide which is more important – for the cola to have a strong flavour or for that flavour not to be foul, but ultimately if you’re so very close to drinking water the only difference here is the added caffeine. Stereotypically the USA isn’t renowned for it’s subtlety, so attempting to sell this on the back of its american-ness isn’t going to do it any favours.



Spar do a vanilla flavoured version of their cola, though unfortunately only in the sugared variety.
Like the diet, this cola has only a faint whiff once you open the bottle, the vanilla is definitely present but there’s a lot less fizz on the initial pour.
First impressions? These are not the droids you are looking for. Taking a good nosefull at the edge of the glass brings in the kind of vanilla smell that you get with a vanilla coke with vodka, except that the mix has been poured in favour of the vodka leaving the acrid, poison smell of the alcohol tainting the bouquet. Hardly a good start. The first gulp fares no better; the vanilla taste is there, but in an oppressive way, coating the roof of your mouth. It is the vanilla of ice cream, but not some rich Devonshire vanilla ice cream, no, instead it has the taste of the cheapest most synthetic vanilla ice cream you could imagine – the panda cola of vanilla ice cream.


After the first couple of gulps the smell doesn’t lessen; that bitter warning remains suffused within it – “stay away, stay away”. And the taste continues to coat the roof of the mouth, barely lighting upon the tongue as if it works along the lines of a strange, reversed gravity.
It seems more and more likely that this cola was brewed using some dark magic.
Safe to say I’ve not found my diet vanilla Coke substitute in this offering.




As cola variations dwindle I have to diversify. To this end, bring on Idris drink company’s Fiery ginger beer. “Try me if you dare!!” The double exclamation marks clearly point to a beverage even more extreme than Pepsi MAX. Imagine!
Who Idris are I don’t know as it clearly states on the back that Britvic makes the drink. It uses ginger root extract, but is it fierier than other ginger beers? Not being a ginger beer connoisseur I have no idea, but I can at least see if it’s fiery.
So, fizzy on pouring but no head, the odour isn’t immediately noticeable on cracking the can, and the colouring is that of cloudy lemonade. A whiff from the glass brings a hint of ginger, but also a lot of lemon as you may expect what with citric acid being a main ingredient. And what does it taste like? Sweet lemon with a very slight ginger kick that mainly takes effect at the back of throat, lingering long after the swallow and threatening to build like hot spices, but never doing so, in a similar manner to the many moments of tension building in the film The Orphanage that see no release. Is it right to use Spanish cinema references in soft drink articles?
Yes.
If you buy Fiery ginger beer in an attempt to cement your Extreme reputation then you’re likely to be disappointed, I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly resistant to spice and I find this particularly weak.



So, what’s Cherry Diet Coke like? One of Coke’s more enduring flavour experiments, Cherry Coke has been around since 1982, according to Wiki, with the diet variant around since 1986. Cherry happily seems the perfect fruity fit for Coke as it’s sweet enough not to be drowned out and yet retains its particular flavour in the mix.
Pouring acts like Coke, unsurprisingly, producing a fair amount of fizz and an average head before settling down. The smell hits straight away, though, even though the can was cracked a foot away – that unmistakeable, artificial ‘Cherry Drop” twang.
At the lip of the glass the smell is there, and for a fan of cherry-flavoured boiled sweets it’s tantalising. Nothing is given away in the ingredients to hint at where the origin of this nasal sensation is born, but the catch-all term “flavourings” no doubt masks the very same parentage as that of Basset’s Cherry Drops (Wiki search, no I don’t mean “Baroness Cherry Drums”).


And the taste? More fruity than Cokey, though the punch of the cherry is disappointingly subdued compared to the smell that this brown ooze gives off. There’s also a bit of that coating feeling that you rarely get with diet fizzy pop, particularly clinging to the tongue like a second skin. Definitely more viscous than standard Diet Coke, which dribbles down a lot more closely to standard tap water, it’s probably that mysterious chemical that does it.
Not unpleasant then, and a welcome alternative to your common or garden Diet Coke, but definitely not a vanilla beater.
Still, even if Coca Cola are unlikely to win any ethical awards any time soon they can at least bask in the pride of producing one of the most belch-worthy beverages on the shelves. Most gaseous.


Not being a man’s man, I hate ale and beer and this dislike extends to anything sharing the moniker, meaning I tar ginger beer and root beer with the same brush. Whereas the Fiery ginger beer tempted me with a promise of a challenge, root beer I have been recently informed, usually contains some amount of vanilla and so is now naturally tempting.
The Bundaberg Australian Root Beer bottle has an old school beer theme to it, the style of labelling, font, brown glass and the way the kangaroo image is used with the lightburst behind it all conjure a certain association, perhaps making this the tipple for kids to drink so that they feel like grown ups? The liquid isn’t very bubbly and the odour isn’t strong enough to carry; the colouring is very similar to cola and ultimately belongs to the same family of beverages that at one time would have been branded as tonics rather than alternatives to water. Even at the rim of the glass the odour is weak, and reminds me of the mouthwash that they use at the dentists to give you a rinse. It tastes like that to, and is a little thick, definitely leaving a bit of a sweet coating on the back of the tongue as if the sugar decided to hang back after the liquid had made its way to your epiglottis. Definitely not a taste I could get used to as the medicinal quality is never outdone by the sugar, no matter how natural the ingredients or the brewing process are supposed to be. I can detect the liquorice and the vanilla bean to some extent, but not the ginger and I’ve no idea what sarsaparilla or molasses are meant to taste like. Not something to revisit.




My tastes have certainly come a long way in the last decade or so, on from the time when I would refuse vegetables or foods with sauces (which are legion), but this small and unadventurous taste exploration into the world of the pre-prepared Western soft drink proves that I am still quite limited.