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What’s Your Favorite Fruit Flavored Soda?

American Polymath’s panel of experts have spent the past month rotting the teeth out of their heads, revisiting all of their favorite fruit flavored sodas.

Welch’s Grape Soda
Welch's Grape. Don't mess with the originals.
-Dominick Desjardins

A Treat’s Blue Raspberry
August 1991. My mom took my brother and me to a baseball clinic being put on by the great Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the eccentric Sox lefty who always won 17 games and spent much of his major league career thinking of ways to piss off Don Zimmer. Lee adopted Vermont as his home following his 1982 retirement.

We brought our gloves to the gathering, but it turned out there was no reason to. Bill must have been feeling old that afternoon. The “Spaceman,” along with his longtime running crew of Bernie Carbo, Dalton Jones, and Rodney Scott, lectured the 300 of us on how the game wasn’t played right anymore. I don’t recall the specifics of why that was the case, only that Lee concluded his speech by talking about the wooded area surrounding the field. He said back in his youth, if he wanted to cut down those trees, he wouldn’t use a chainsaw. He would have used an ax. Lee sprinkled this life-lesson with references to Carbo’s large belly. The “Spaceman” dismissed us after signing a few gloves and a few more forearms.

A bit disappointed by the baseball clinic, my mom treated my brother and me to sodas out of a Winooski corner store. In the bowels of a well-aged walk-in cooler sat two alien twenty ounce bottles of blue soda-pop. The labels said “A Treat: Blue Raspberry, Allentown, Pennsylvania.” I recall squealing with glee at the sight of the blue soda and punching the bags of Wise potato chips on the adjacent shelf, Clubber Lang style. My dad let me watch Rocky III earlier in the summer. For the next few months, I reacted to anything that excited me like I was Mr. T letting loose on the Italian Stallion. While I was pummeling the store’s merchandise, my brother retrieved the sodas and handed them to our mother. She placed them on the clear plastic top of the front counter. Visible through the plastic were all the bad checks passed at the store in the last year.

“You sure you want your kids drinking this,” the man behind the counter in the zubaz Miami Dolphins windbreaker asked my mom. She didn’t respond.

“Stuff looks like windshield wiper fluid. I wouldn’t drink it,” he told her as he rang them up. Mom handed him a dollar and told him he didn’t have to drink it, so he should keep his comments to himself. Then and now, she doesn’t take shit from anyone, especially if the situation involves her kids.

I guzzled my blue raspberry soda in the span of the Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Lovin,’” the first song that came on the radio during the car ride home. It tasted like a melted Flavor-Ice. My brother nursed his over the course of the day, finishing the drops in the bottle’s four feet right before he went to bed.

As of August 23, 2009, I haven’t seen another A Treat Blue Raspberry in a convenience store cooler, just pictures of them online. I’m considering a trip to Allentown (Where They’re Closing All the Factories Down) to find myself another bottle.
-Clayton Trutor

Rondo Cola
The dearly departed Rondo Cola was one hell of a citrus beverage. Mountain Dew totally ripped off Rondo’s marketing strategy. For decades, the Dew was a sipping soda for hillbillies tired of drinking white lightning. All of a sudden in the 90s, Mountain Dew decided it was the most extreme drink on the market, perfect for snowboarders, gutter punks, and kids who took Godsmack seriously. All that Mountain Dew swagger was stolen from Rondo. In the early 80s, Rondo put out these high-powered kung-fu filled advertisements, showing how consumption of their lemon zesty soda would improve an individual’s martial arts abilities. Every fifteen year old wildman I knew drank Rondo Cola, wished they belonged to Cobra Kai, and owned a copy of Judas Priest’s British Steel.
-Francis Lilley

Lemon Sundrop
Though I haven't had it in years, I'm feeling nostalgic for lemon Sundrop, in a can. I grew just outside Six Mile, South Carolina, population 500. Downtown was a two-mile strip that in the mid-90s still had all the clichés of small town life: the Hendricks Brothers’ gas station and auto repair on one end and the new elementary school on the other. Between them were the post office, the old elementary school, the Baptist church, the fire station/community rec center (where elementary school birthday parties were held, and where in the sixth grade I first slow-danced with a girl to Garth Brooks' "Shameless"), and Lisa's video store/tanning salon/pool hall. Before we were old enough to drive elsewhere, my neighbor Henry and I used to ride our bikes in and loiter around town. The gas station had a bargain bin of cheap sodas - RC Cola, Sundrop, and Cheerwine. 35 cents a can. I drank many cans of Sundrop in the dull and wondrous summers of my youth.
-Jon Sealy

Clicquot Club Raspberry Soda
I was one of the last kids to drink Clicquot Club Raspberry Soda. In 1965 Canada Dry sold off all product surplus and shut down Clicquot. Friggin’ Canucks! Clicquot came in a clear 12 ounce heavy glass bottle with white painted lettering and an image of the Eskimo Boy, the Clicquot mascot. You needed a bottle cap opener to get to the red nectar made from the finest ingredients. Henry Millis, who founded the company in 1881, insisted always, always on the best Jamaican ginger, the best Cuban sugar, ingredients that would be good enough for his friends. Clicquot Club Raspberry Soda was just that: the best tasting, fruity soda you ever drank! Pure carbonated raspberries. By the 1950s, Clicquot was so popular that there were more than 100 bottling plants across the USA. The original plant in Millis (Yes! named after Henry), Massachusetts survives today. Its sand colored tile smoke stack still proudly proclaims, “Clicquot,” in a vertical salute to a great American soda.
-Barry Trutor

A&W Cream Soda
Late in the summer of 1991 I drank A&W Cream Soda until I puked. This on a Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona and I was fifteen, spending several weeks working for a Habitat-for-Humanity-like workteam building houses. Actually, I was either tearing shingles off houses in the 110 degree heat or carting wheel barrow loads of trash to a Dumpster. I wasn't skilled, and it wasn't a pretty sight. But about three weeks in--three weeks in of hydrating with well water and the occasional envelope of powdered Gatorade--a friend and I got to a store outside the rez where we proceeded to down six A&Ws each in quick and ugly succession. And then I spewed. And that was sort of a metaphor, I thought later, about greed and middle-class indulgence. But at the time, all I thought was how cold the soda went down, and how, even with my workboots splattered, I would do it again.
-Mark Powell

Welch’s “Sparkling Grape” Soda
Oddly enough, my favorite fruit flavored soda is tied to the dentist and a weird family quirk. To start with the latter, no one in my family cares for mint. On both sides of the family, everyone considers it a high crime to mix chocolate and mint. Given that, everything from our choice of toothpaste flavor to Girl Scout cookies reflects our collective aversion towards mint. Granted, disliking mint is hardly as inconvenient as, say, being a vegetarian and so for the most part, the family quirk remains little more than a fun fact.

Yet this otherwise harmless family oddity poses a problem when attempting to convince a ten-year-old girl to submit to a yearly teeth cleaning at the dentist. Absolutely nothing could convince me to open my mouth only to have the dentist slather on mint flavored polish. Except possibly grape flavored polish. All I can say is that the introduction of “fun flavored” polishes at the dentist’s office when I was ten years old most definitely corresponded with a decrease in the amount of finger biting.

Having discovered the wonders of a quick and painless visit to the dentist at an impressionable age, grape became my flavor of choice for anything. Bubblegum, Jolly Ranchers and, of course, soda now had to be bursting with artificial grape flavoring.  Purple packaging was a plus. In that light, Welch’s “Sparkling Grape” soda fit the bill perfectly. And while my soda appreciation eventually grew to include Coke and Sprite, nothing can beat opening a can of Welch’s soda and feeling instantly connected to my family. I also can’t deny the evil satisfaction I still harbor for being that child at the dentist’s office.
-Jocelyn Rousey

In The Syrup Room
In New Bedford my brother and I visited a mill where fruit sodas had once been made. He was looking for a new location for his vintage clothing shop because the building his shop had occupied for two years (also a mill) would soon be razed to make room for a Home Depot. He's attracted to the redbrick mills of New Bedford for the same reason he's attracted to vintage clothing: in a world of "screens" and cold plastic surfaces, old things, things that have been touched by many hands, can radiate with a kind of beauty. What I'm talking about is the opposite of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "dearest freshness deep down things," that realm of the natural world which lies beyond the influence of human beings. I'm talking about how over time objects, tools, gages and handles, pianos keys, old lawn mowers, worn coins, Decca 33s, soak up the essence of something instantly recognizable to the spirit. These things speak to something starving in me. Maybe in 30 years I'll feel the same way about the iPhone. I doubt it. My iPhone isn't a thing in quite the same way. You can hold it in your hand, it was designed for just that. But an iPhone is an abstraction, an idea utterly other to the flesh. What I'm trying to say is, things just aren't what they used to be.

The guy who owned the mill sent us up alone to check out the second-floor space. We wandered littered hallways like ghosts past offices with decades-old calendars advertising products no one wanted or even recognized anymore, tarnished green-cushioned Steelcase furniture, and time clocks that had stopped, yellowed punch cards still waiting in their paper slips. I wouldn't have wanted to work here, but I could sense the accumulated human whatness, which still hummed in the worthless objects all around us. The main shop area opened out vast and dark, with oil-dark oak floors and hand-written cardboard signs tacked over workbenches and machine parts fallen on their sides like clumsy giants. Then we entered the syrup room. That's what the label on the door said. A windowless inner chamber and industrial sanctum where robin's-egg blue ceramic tiles covered the walls and ceiling, and chrome spigots with black-beaked nozzles angled out at us, and the floors sloped to a grated drain the diameter of a fedora hat brim. In the silence, it took a moment for me to wrap my mind around what I was looking at: this was where the flavors had been birthed, before being mixed with carbonated water and bottled by midwives wearing Dickies with a little patch over the right breast pocket that said Manhattan Fruit Sodas.

Maybe they'd even manufactured strawberry here, which, of all fruit flavors, has always seemed to me the rankest absurdity. Fruit sodas, like Velveeta and Disney World, only "make sense" to those who live astraddle the two worlds I've been talking about, the virtual and the real. This is not to say they don't taste "good," only that the flavor you experience upon biting into an actual strawberry (not one of those notional strawberries you buy at Stop & Shop) is only notionally related, if at all, to the flavor of strawberry soda. Which is to say that whoever invented strawberry soda was unsuccessful in capturing the whatness of strawberry—if that's what they were after in the first place. Probably not. It's a whole lot easier just to dye whatever you come up red and let loose the elves of simulacrum.

That said, I've always liked the feel of the bottle in my hand.
-Pete Duval

Polar Orange Dry
Not all orange flavored sodas are the same.  In Europe, Hi-C orange drink and Orange crush don't exist. Fanta tastes completely different here and comes in various citrus varieties- pomegranate, grapefruit, tangerine. Despite the cavalcade of carbonated options, I still occasionally find myself craving Orange Dry, a New England regional soda, manufactured by Worcester Massachusetts' own, Polar Beverages.

Orange Dry, although sweet, is not overtly sweet, a downfall of many 'fruit' sodas. Dry has a crisp flavor, and is best served over ice, in the summer. The soda has created a culture of obsessives. I have heard tale of several non-New England residents hoarding supply and transporting its two-liter canisters across regional boundaries, as a post-Prohibition Smuggler's Notch inspired paean.
-Nick Farrell

Sunkist Orange Soda
I got to be a big kid at the pizza place soda fountain. I had my own oversized cup, and the choice of what would fill it belonged entirely to me. But I always chose the Sunkist orange soda. I wouldn’t use a plastic cover so I could feel the bubbles popping freshly beneath my face—their stinging, heady smell. Orange soda was something greater than oranges, something purer and more ferocious. It felt like a celebration to drink it—more than champagne can be to adults. I still think it is the best thing to have with a slice of pizza, a tangy shot of sweetness cutting through the cheese and grease; and, even as an independent young woman, giving me a chance to remember to thrill in my power of choice.
-Amanda Daly