jolt - guest post by michael

Michael Lober here. When I was growing up in a small town in the lower Midwest, the principal weekend activity consisted of driving your car (or your parents' car) up and down the main street of the town. It was called cruising. We looped around the library, headed up toward the Wal-Mart, and then turned around in a turnabout by the town diner. Occasionally, when we spotted cars we recognized, we pulled over into the bank parking lot and discussed how there was nothing to do. It was a blast.

In the summer, these cruising sessions lasted upwards of five hours (gas, of course, was much less expensive then), and involved multiple trips to the nearby convenience stores. Mountain Dews were a popular stimulant of choice, but if we needed a real pick-me-up, we reached for cans of Jolt Cola. Jolt based its entire product around its caffeine content; its slogan at the time was "All the sugar and twice the caffeine." When I first consumed it, I feared that I wouldn't be able to sleep for days. But I never usually felt that differently. Its main effect seemed to be more trips than usual to the McDonald's bathroom.

Like most people, I drank Jolt only for the caffeine, not for the taste, which I must have repressed. Lauren, Caroline, Ryan, and I found a bottle in Straubs in St. Louis over the holiday breaks, and I was excited to relive a bit of my adolescence. But, as the saying goes, you can't go home again. I was disappointed to find that Jolt Cola tastes like chemicals with a splash of Coke, and has no more caffeine than coffee. I dig the lightening bolt on the cap and the funky font, but if you're not consuming Jolt while cruising the streets of a small town, then, really, what's the point?

heavy seas - guest post by michael lober

I never paid much attention to bottle caps before I met Lauren. When I was growing up, my mother purchased six packs of bottled soda and hid them in the laundry room. The bottle caps were faded, scuffed, and seemingly recycled -- in other words, nothing much to look at. I went to college in St. Louis, a decidedly Budweiser town. Most parties revolved around coolers packed with canned Bud Lights. Again, bottle caps were either absent or an afterthought.

How times have changed. Now, I scrutinize, seek out, and admire bottle caps weekly with Lauren. I scan the aisles of bodegas and grocery stores, request caps at bars, and even scan street corners for stray crowns. It's gotten to the point where the other night, I had my first dream of bottle caps. I was walking to the subway on my way to work, and right there, next to the subway steps, I spotted the largest bottle cap I'd ever seen. It was red, undented, and as round as a dinner plate. The top read simply, in the same font as a Coke crown: "Large Bottle Cap." After retrieving it, I asked someone if he knew what it was for, and he told me that Fritos now came in capped bottles. I was so eager to tell Lauren about my new chip-bottle cap that I skipped the subway and headed back to the apartment. Unfortunately, as happens in many dreams, I was diverted somewhere along the way and somehow ended up in my hometown. 

So, what's the point of this story? There might not be one, really, except perhaps that bottle caps have thoroughly penetrated my subconscious. Anyway, I might not have been able to give Lauren the large chip bottle cap from my dream, but I recently took a work trip to Washington DC, and snagged her a pirate-themed bottle cap from Heavy Seas beer. As you can see, the bartender badly mangled it. Normally, I'd toss it, but who wouldn't want a skull-and-crossbones crown, even a dented one? 

P.S. Lauren here!  I couldn't let this post go by without telling my absolute favorite pirate joke. (It's terrible. Just go with it.)

"I just found out that there is a new pirate movie coming out. I don't know much about it, except that it's rated Arrrrrr!"

reed's, kombucha wonder drink - guest post by Michael Lober

All right, listen up all you ginger fanatics out there: enough is enough. Don't get me wrong, I like ginger just as much as the next person -- particularly when sushi is involved -- but I don't enjoy it in everything. In fact, I'd go so far to say that I don't enjoy it in most things: burgers, meatloaf, empanadas, ice cream, wine, etc. I understand that ginger is trendy--exotic enough to be hip but not enough to be alienating--and that ginger has made significant inroads with the organic foodie crowd. Fine. Shred it up and sprinkle it on your kale casseroles for all I care, but really, is it a good idea to make it the key ingredient in a soda? I enjoy a good ginger ale every now and then, but most of the time the ginger in these sodas isn't overwhelming. I understand that craft soda manufacturers often try to produce anti-Coca-Colas -- as in, a drink that tastes strong and earthy in such a way as to not seem mass produced -- but there's got to be a better way of doing so than by simply tripling the amount of ginger in the mix.

Reed's has gone one step further: They've based their entire brand around ginger. There are six different flavors of ginger brew put out by Reed's, which, in my opinion, is six too many. The ginger completely overpowers whatever fruit flavor it's mixed with, and the aftertaste isn't sweet like a ginger ale or biting like a root beer but pungent and nasal-cleansing like ginger. I mean, I like ginger in small doses on food that it complements, but I don't fancy the idea of eating (or drinking) entire stalks of the thing. Reed's can lecture me all they want about the health benefits of ginger. That's all fine and good, but when I want straight-up ginger, I'll just, you know, go buy some ginger. The bottle caps are pretty cool, though.

Kombucha Wonder Drink clearly has an inferiority complex. Let's start with the name. Wonder Drink? Seriously? And then there's the price -- $3.50 in my neighborhood, way too much for a bottled soda. Finally, there's the soda itself: Asian-Pear-Ginger soda. Asian pears and ginger taste just fine as a snack, but I don't need them in soda form.

Look, Kombucha Wonder Drink, I understand that you're trying to make a splash in a competitive marketplace; it's hard to compete with the craft soda producers of the world. I get it. But, seriously, everything about your soda makes it seem like you walked into a Whole Foods one day, bought a couple of items on sale, blended them to liquid form, and then charged Whole Food-like prices for the concoction. Good try, but maybe a little less pear and ginger next time. And your bottle cap could use an upgrade. Silver is so 2000s.

thirsty just whistle, vess - guest post by Michael Lober

I grew up in southern Illinois in a family of soda drinkers right when aluminum cans were replacing glass bottles in grocery stores. When I was a child, my mother used to store glass bottles of soda on a shelf in the laundry room of our house, and then return them to the local store (this was pre-Wal Mart in my town) when enough had accumulated. We largely stuck to the standard varieties of Coke, Sprite, and A&W Root Beer, but occasionally we'd spring for a fruit flavor from Vess, the soda company headquartered in nearby St. Louis. Vess was cheaper than the more well-known brands of Coke and Pepsi and, in my mind, much tastier. You could buy a can for a quarter from a vending machine just off the town's main square, and, even though I understand that this is no longer standard practice in our health-conscious world, parents used to bring coolers full of Vess to youth soccer and baseball games. When play concluded, we'd sprint for the coolers on the sidelines, digging deep into the ice for the good flavors -- black cherry, grape, or orange -- while steering clear of the lemon lime and root beer knock offs. The cans had blocky Helvetica type and took on the color of the fruit they represented (red for black cherry, green for lemon lime, etc.). Nothing to write home about and, judging by the bottle cap Lauren found, the crown design wasn't exciting either. But, man, was that soda sweet after an hour of chasing a ball up and down a field.

Several times per year, my family would journey farther south in Illinois to my grandparents' house. In the basement they kept a boxy refrigerator invariably stacked with a variety of odd snacks: push-pops, hickory nuts, and glass bottles of Thirsty? Just Whistle! I loved this soda, not because it was good -- it tasted sort of like an orange popsicle -- but because of its strange name. What did whistling have to do with being thirsty? I didn't have a clue, but I made up a story about a soda vendor at the turn of the century who would deliver bottles of carbonated orange drink to whistling children. I found out later that the soda is actually made by Vess and its name is simply "Whistle," which I found odd because the Vess orange sodas that I drank after youth games weren't called Whistle. Hmmmm. Either way, when Lauren started her blog, I begged her to find a Thirsty? Just Whistle! bottle cap. Vess discontinued bottles a while back, and with them went my childhood. It's good to have these caps as reminders.

manzanita sol - guest post by michael lober

Lauren asked me to do a guest post this week. We both live in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of New York City, and one of the things we enjoy doing occasionally is strolling through grocery stores and mini-marts and taking stock of the packaged food imported from all corners of the globe--powdered milk from Greece, mate from Brazil and, of course, sodas from everywhere. If Lauren weren't interested in the design and packaging of these products, we'd probably stick with plastic bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite like most everyone else; instead, we search for bottles stacked somewhere near the back in their own section of overlooked drinks that look like they've been gathering dust for years. On a recent trip we found bottled sodas from Slovenia, Jordan, and Peru all in the same store!

Yet, as we've learned, searching for these bottled sodas is often more fun than consuming them. In my admittedly limited experience, too many international sodas are overly sweet and leave an aftertaste that coats your entire mouth. Case in point: Manzanita Sol. We found this sparkling apple drink from Mexico in the back freezer of a neighborhood convenience store, and were mildly optimistic, since fruit flavored international sodas usually go down better than colas and, especially, malt sodas. The bottle cap is rather plain--bright red and perhaps reflective of a tropical landscape. But the soda is a sugar overload--a carbonated apple juice concoction with three scoops of sugar mixed in. The experience is akin to drinking an apple-flavored lollipop. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that if you ever see a bottle of this soda sitting forlornly on a rack in the back freezer of your convenience store, well, stick with what you know.