fizzy dishwater anyone? (Diet Cherry Coke)

Member Name: thebigc1690

Product:	Diet Cherry Coke
Date:	09/06/07 (162 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: no sugar

Disadvantages: tastes terrible

Let me start by saying that I am actually a Pepsi fan and tend not to drink much coke at all although I am a big fan of the full sugar version of cherry coke. The diet version which I am about to review on the other hand is for want of a better word disgusting. Although many diet soft drinks can taste reasonably good it seems when you take the sugar from this one the taste goes with it.

The facts:

For more than a century coca cola has been available in stores across Britain in some format or another, starting of course with the original coke and slowly introducing more variations of the drink. The dreaded diet coke with cherry hit our shelves in 1985 and had its image revamped in early 2005. Coke say they introduced the new flavours such as this one and the coke with lemon, coke with lime and coke with vanilla to keep up with the ever changing soft drinks market in which there were constantly new weird and wonderful flavours arriving. Their attempts to try to lure people who didn’t drink cola drinks in by adding these flavours does not seem to have been a great success, with coke reporting that the sales of the original coke are down it seems to me like the people drinking the new flavoured drinks are just cokes own customers changing their preference rather than new customers coming on board.

My story and opinions:

I tend to stick to my full sugar Pepsi but like everyone I enjoy something a bit different every now and then, usually when I fancy something different it is dr pepper or cherry coke I go for. On a visit to my local spar some time ago it was cherry coke on my mind but as they never had the full sugar version I plumped for the diet version this turned out to be one very big mistake. It was a 2 litre bottle I had purchased and my first drink out of it was before it had had the time to become as cold as I would normally like my soft drinks to be and I thought perhaps this was the reason it tasted so bad.

When not fully chilled it has a very strange taste certainly not a taste of cherry nor of coke, I find it very hard to describe the taste but a bit bitter and somewhat like a warm glass of cheap wine would be the way I could describe it best. Another problem with this drink is the fact that as a lot of diet colas do when it is a bit warm it just seems to turn to froth and not really seem like a liquid at all.

Anyway perhaps all was not lost, maybe with time to go freezing cold and a few ice cubes added this drink might seem much better. Then again maybe not, when you drink it cold at least you can pick out the cherry flavour but not having any sugar instead of making it bland makes it incredibly sweet due to the sweeteners used. For those of you who have ever tried the old style sweeteners for tea and coffee you will understand what I mean. The drink is so sickly sweet and leaves such a filthy film on your teeth after drinking you would swear you were drinking something full of sugar rather than sugar free.

Along with all the other things bad about this drink comes the after taste. It leaves a thoroughly disgusting after taste in your mouth, it tastes a bit like sour milk or maybe natural yogurt that has passed its best but still with that sickly sweet cherry taste attached. Add to that the fact that this drink is not refreshing in the slightest in fact I found myself needing a drink to get over this one it truly is a horrible creation from the coca cola company.

The price:

The price tends to be very similar to that of coke itself, around 45p for a can and £1.30 for a 2 litre bottle. However it can be found on special offer more often that coke probably due to the fact that it doesn’t sell well. It is regularly available on buy one free offers for the 2 litre bottles and can often be found in low priced six packs of cans in asda.

Nutritional info:

Whilst this drink has 0gs of protein, carbohydrate, sodium, fat and only 1kcal per 100ml and as with all diet soft drinks can help dieting as part of a calorie controlled diet it has nothing else going for it and there are much better diet drinks available.

Cocaine:

We shall probably never know for sure if the stories about coke containing cocaine were true or not but it was well documented that the original beverage contained vegetable extracts which were laced with cocaine. Some People thought that this was to make the drink addictive and therefore obviously sales would always be good, others believed that it was an innocent additive that the drink needed to be as special as it was, the majority of people however never believed it was ever in the drink. This was the preferred theory by the makers who stringently denied that their product ever contained cocaine.

Another somewhat scary rumour:

The story goes, once upon a time there was an objection to the use of aspartame to sweeten beverages such as this and although the objection was overruled a small band of people continued their protests for sometime after claiming that aspartame was little more than a poison, a claim which was actually backed up by a few scientists. Aspartame was tested on monkeys in the dose that appeared in soft drinks, 5 of the 7 had grand mal seizures and one died. When the drinks and food company’s that used aspartame to sweeten their products were approached about it they replied only that the additive had been fully checked and had been passed safe however sometime after this the additive aspartame disappeared from a lot of products to be replaced by all sorts of other named sweeteners which the people objecting all claimed was the same additive just with different titles. It was later proved that the makers of the additive aspartame had indeed sold the rights to the product therefore allowing it to be produced under different names. Was this to hide the fact that aspartame was being used and if so why??

To sum up:

All in all this drink was not one for me but it may be enjoyed by others as everyone’s tastes are different. For me it has to be full sugar versions of most soft drinks this one especially. I continue to drink the full sugar cherry coke but will never again try the diet version.

I hope I have included enough info and personal opinion on the drink to help you decide if it is for you and given you all a little something to think about with the rumour.

Thanks for reading!

Summary: a very poor offering from coke with an awful after taste.