Fentimans Curiosity Cola

One day back in 2003 I was wondering through my local Waitrose store when I chanced upon Fentiman's Curiosity Cola, sitting on the shelf in its nice old-style little glass bottle. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I am occasionally a sucker for olde-worlde packaging, so instead of thinking "Oh look, another marketing scheme preying on people's inability to contain their feelings of nostalgia" I actually (being quite bored) thought, "Oh what the hell" and bought a bottle of it. It's not cheap (yes, I shop in Waitrose- so I wasn't expecting it to be). The 275ml bottle cost 99p (Waitrose had a promotion back then where you could get 2 for £1.50 but ...  Read the complete review

As a self confessed cola addict, there are plenty of products out there to keep my addiction well fed; the ubiquitous Coca Cola (allegedly The Real Thing), plenty of Pepsi and an abundance of own-brand fizzes. Add to that the new lemon, lime and vanilla variants, diet drinks and cola flavoured sweets and you would think that the market is pretty much covered. Saturated in fact. Well, so did I, until I came across a whole new player in the cola market whilst on my travels – Fentiman’s Curiosity Cola. I must admit I was curious. How could this intriguingly named drink possible be any different to all the others out there? Well, the basic answer is that this is a ...  Read the complete review

Fentimans Traditional Curiosity Cola is a delicious drink and I just can't get enough of it! Fentimans Traditional Curiosity Cola is a syrupy cola that tastes just perfect. You can taste the caramel (more so than Coca-cola, my 2nd favourite cola) and it's got just the right about of fizz in it. It's not really fizzy like Coca-cola or Pepsi, but it's not flat either, as I said, just the right amount. The drink is botanically brewed, so you need to up end the bottle before opening and pouring to mix that sediment in a bit. This cola comes in a 275ml old style clear glass bottle, which is a bit like a beer bottle, with a screw top lid. All of Fentimans ...  Read the complete review

Fentimans have been making botanically brewed soft drinks since 1905 and are a small company based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyme. Curiosity Cola, one of their sodas comes in bottles of 275ml bottles, and contains 0.5% alcohol, which I found quite interesting. As well as this, Curiosity Cola is botanically brewed using an old recipe from yesteryear. If I remember correctly, the first time I came across this product was early last year at college, for some reason they started selling it in the shop - which is strange for such a hard to find product. When I tried it, I was a bit taken aback, and did not recognise it as cola, it is much different from any others, but you can ...  Read the complete review

I'm a huge fan of the ginger beer equivalent to this, but the cola just didn't work for me in the same way. I suppose it's similar to the beer in that it's really proper, old-fashioned and uncompromising stuff, so it's probably closer to what cola used to be than the caramel-water now served up. And of course cola was originally sold as a medicine! So here the botanicals are quite heavy and you end up with a very deep and sparkly flavour but one that has too much of a herbal taste around the edge for my palate. The fact that it is so authentic probably means that it doesn't pander to the common denominator, so if you like proper cola (the way I ...  Read the complete review