Christmas, 2004. I was working in a convenience store and making snide comments to complete strangers in person, when Pepsi Holiday Spice came out. That was the winter that a new catch-phrase was coined. The phrase? "Somebody left another goddamn bottle of Holiday Spice on the counter!"
See Pepsi executives had the ball-drainingly brilliant idea of adding essences of nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger to their drink in order to compete with Coca-Cola, which had been consistently kicking their asses during the Christmas season with nothing but some animated polar bears.
The end result was something that did not taste unlike licking a dirty chalkboard. It wasn't sweet, it was just very dull and stone-tasting. The problem was that people would see it in the coolers, pick up a bottle, buy it, open it in the store, take a swig, placing it down on a counter and leaving the store. We were forever having to pour out nearly full bottles of the crap, making the store smell like somebody had thrown up after a month-long diet of nothing but spice cake and Pepsi.
As proof that a major Pepsi executive's wife/girlfriend/mistress thought up the idea for Pepsi Holiday Spice, the drink returned in 2006, long after I had left the convenience store, but long enough that most people had forgotten how fucking horrible it was. Then, they brought it back AGAIN in 2007 and 2008, but this time after adding some cocoa to the mix as well.
Well, deck my fucking halls. That takes some cajones.
If you remember 1992, you were expecting this one on the list weren't you? Just admit it.
Clear colas are one of those little pop-culture references that we'd all just like to forget about. They aren't practical like bean bag chairs, they aren't pretty like lava lamps and they aren't so utterly stupid that they're charmingly funny like pet rocks (or this website).
They are one of those cultural disasters, a collective Three-Mile Island that many of us still recall deep in the back of our subconscious in the same place we remember Zima, soda with candy suspended in it and the 1980 cast of Saturday Night Live.
A certain amount of space-age wonder had to be projected on Crystal Pepsi (and it's competitor Tab Clear). It was cola, which is normally a dark brown, but it was CLEAR! Do you hear me goddamnit? That shit is clear! I can fucking see through it! Oh my god! It's so fucking amazing! People can think I'm drinking Sprite, but I'm really drinking Pepsi godamnit! This is the greatest fucking achievement in the history of mankind!
Ahem.
So, it's clear cola. Big fucking deal right?
Well, cola, that is Coke, Pepsi, and so on isn't normally clear. It's not like Pepsi just decided to save money on coloring their drink one day. Before they add the color to cola, it's green. No kidding. So, Crystal Pepsi (and Tab Clear) is kind of an achievement, in a way.
Problem is, people just didn't fucking care. If they wanted a Pepsi, they bought a Pepsi. If they wanted a Tab, they had to order something first. Many people didn't care for the taste of the altered drink and it fizzled in less than a year. All that space-age technology lost forever.
Here's what David Novak, the man who unleashed this drink upon an unwitting populace had to say:
"It was a tremendous learning experience. I still think it's the best idea I ever had, and the worst executed. A lot of times as a leader you think, "They don't get it; they don't see my vision." People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right. It would have been nice if I'd made sure the product tasted good. Once you have a great idea and you blow it, you don't get a chance to resurrect it."
Ahh well...at least we still have Crystal Gravy.
Pop-quiz: what human harvested plants-products naturally contain caffeine? The answer: coffee beans, tea leaves, kola nuts and guarana. Each of these are represented in drinks. Coffee and tea are pretty obvious, guarana is used extensively in energy drinks and kola nuts are used in, you guessed it, colas.
With creativity what it is, the mixing and matching of these different caffeine sources are as inevitable as a kid getting hit in the face with a piñata stick at a birthday party. So, it came as no surprise when Coke decided to mix their product with coffee.
The drink, pretentiously named Coca-Cola BlāK, was released in 2006 with a major event at Dundas Square in Toronto, Ontario where they gave free bottles of the stuff to everybody who came within earshot. The only problem is, it tasted like ass. But just because a drink tastes bad doesn't mean it can't be wildly successful. So, why did it fail?
Anderson fucking Cooper happened.
When people see somebody take a sip of a drink and then spit it out in disgust on TV, that's an indication that something is wrong. It's TV, it's the big-leagues out there. You don't spit unless you're absolutely certain you can't go on without spitting.
Coca-Cola BlāK lives on to this day, but not in North America. It survives in France and Central Europe where they presumably haven't found a soft-drink that doesn't taste like day-old coffee and ass.
I've got this brilliant idea! People like sweet stuff, so let's make a sweet drink. We'll make it sweeter than sweet though. We'll make it so fucking sweet that diabetics will need a leg amputated if they so much as touch the bottle. That shit should have so much sugar in it, that you can walk on it. Then we'll make it brightly colored, because kids love bright colors. And after all that, we'll give it a flavor...I guess.
So, here we have Pepsi Blue, considered the worst drink that Pepsi has ever released. So, here's the story. It's 2002, and every soft-drink company from here to Timbuktu is working their asses off trying to make a new drink. Dr Pepper had Red Fusion, Coke had Vanilla, and Pepsi went Blue.
What Blue is, I'm not sure. I wasn't sure when I first tried it, and I don't think I'll ever know. It's an unidentifiable berry flavor, or maybe cotton candy, or both. It doesn't really matter though. We'll just call the flavor 'blue' for the sake of this list. It was also sugary, to the point of almost being a syrup.
The final ingredient is a coloring agent named Blue 1, which in 2002 was actually banned in 11 countries because it wasn't certified as a safe food additive yet.
So, it tastes bad, it's syrupy and it contained an ingredient, which at the time was thought to be potentially unsafe for human consumption. What else could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns your shit green.
Blue 1 doesn't digest well in our systems. When you digest it, it reacts with bile to produce green shit. Green shit isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. Early batches of Frankenberry cereal had a similar problem, when it turned shit bright pink. Green shit is weird, but it's not "holy shit, I might be bleeding internally" bad.
New Coke. Considered one of the largest disasters in the soft-drink industry, it remains a textbook example of what not to do with a classic product. Ok, history lesson time.
In 1983 Coke was suffering. They had lost most of their market to Pepsi and needed to get back those customers to retain their #1 position in the market. The result of weeks of binge-drinking and cocaine was a sweeter formula, which tested well. They decided to move forward with a plan to replace the existing flavor of Coke with the new formula in 1985, just in time for the company's 100-year anniversary.
Initially, the release went well, and Coke sales went up. But then they went up against the Confederates.
Ok, well, maybe it wasn't the Confederates, it was Southerners, and they were pissed about the new flavor. Coca-cola was originally produced and bottled in Atlanta, and they were damned if they were going to let some Yankee change the flavor on them.
Then, out of nowhere: Fidel Castro.
El Presidente himself complained about New Coke. This bears repeating: in the middle of the Cold War, a communist leader was agreeing with American citizens that a flavor of soda sucked. When members from both sides of a major global conflict can put aside their differences for a brief moment to tell you that you've fucked up, you'd better start listening.
Less than three months after New Coke was introduced, the original flavor, now branded Coca-Cola Classic was relaunched. Peter Jennings on ABC News cut away from normal programming to announce this. People were having mass orgies in the streets to celebrate. Well, maybe not that last part, but it was a big fucking deal.
Despite being smacked down by pretty much everybody in existence, New Coke remained in circulation until 2002 (although it's still sold in Samoa for some damned reason), and there's was nothing that Coca-Cola, Bill Cosby or Max Headroom could do to get people to buy it.
The lasting legacy of this truly horrible drink is the fact that it might have been a ruse. Conspiracy theorists, using the same hushed tones that they employ when discussing the Kennedy assassination say that Coca-Cola used New Coke as a way to switch over from using cane sugar in their drinks to high-fructose corn syrup without anybody noticing.
So, what have we learned? Well, don't fuck with people's drinks for one thing. Every year soft-drink companies labor to create new varieties of their classic drinks in hopes of finding something that takes off. Most of the time they fizzle, and sometimes they're so bad that they become legends in their own rights.
