Wow! What a thread!!
I remember in the '50's my dad holding up a glass bottle of Coca-Cola and impressively informing me that you could buy a bottle of this anywhere in the world, and it would always taste exactly the same. In those days I loved Coca-Cola. Sometimes we'd drink Pepsi, and it was pretty good, but nothing could beat the flavor of Coca-Cola. About that time Shasta came along with their "cheap" pops, and their cola flavor was despicable.
As time went on, Coke started not tasting the same as it did. I sometimes suspicion that "New Coke" was brought out just to deplete any supplies of "real" Coke, so that when "New Coke" went bust, they could introduce "real" Coke again which really was not the same anymore. Drinking Coke after eating certain foods used to taste a certain way drinking it after eating, but no longer had the same after taste. I suspect they used some sort of herbal flavoring rather than the expensive extract from coca leaves. I still laugh these days when I see "Original Formula" on a Coke can, since the first coke was sold in a syrupy form (that people discovered tasted pretty good if they mixed in seltzer water with it) and originally contained caffeine, cocaine and codeine (the codeine being there to take the "edge" off the cocaine part).
The story I heard was that cocaine leaves were imported by the Federal Government, were reduced down to a baser molecule called ecgonine to be then syntesized back into pharmaceutical cocaine. The Coca-cola company was then allowed to have the coca leaves from which they extracted the flavor to mix with flavor from cola nuts. Naturally, there are many variants of the cocaine molecule in the coca leaves, such as cinnamyl cocaine, isopropyl cocaine (i think it was) and others. By reducing them all to ecgonine, the base molecule, it could then be synthesized into pure Cocaine (either the hydrochloride used in Europe, or the sulphate used in America).
So these days, I think Pepsi totally sucks, as does Coca Cola. They both have little if any resemblance to what I distinctly remember back in the '50's. Actually, they now remind me of what Shasta cola used to taste like in the '50's or early '60's.
With that said, we have tried carbonizing Kool aid a few times using a CO2 cartridge in one of those seltzer bottles (which also could be used with N20 for whipping cream). Back in the '60's, we sometimes discharged the N20 cartridge into an empty seltzer bottle, and then sucked out the contents through the seltzer bottle nozzle!
Anyway, the only pop I drink now is Virgil's micro brewed Root Beer. Hard to find, comes in 4-packs and is very expensive but is made with real sugar instead of corn syrup and tastes absolutely refreshing.
doc
