Pepsi Next

Price: $2 deal with chips at my local Walgreens . . . I'll get back to you about its price at gas stations.

Total Calories: 100 for 20 fl oz

Look: Like any old cola

Smell: Alternates between regular and diet cola smell

Fizziness: Mild

Experience

Curiosity about this drink is one of the things that made me start this blog in the first place. There's a diet version of just about every soda out there, and there's a ton for Pepsi, alone. Still, until now, it never seemed to occur to anyone in the soda industry that you just can't make a diet soda taste like its non-diet counterparts.

That's why Pepsi Next fascinates me. Instead of trying to make a diet soda that tastes like the real thing, Pepsi decided to dilute their regular soda with artificial sweeteners so that it wouldn't be quite as bad for you. This was a pretty big gamble. While the best case scenario would be the perfect synthesis of taste and . . . non-badness, the worst case would be being saddled with a soda that both tastes bad and doesn't have the guilt-appeal necessary to make people buy it in order to avoid drinking water. This could have really blown up in Pepsi's face.

Well, as it turns out, it's kind of hard to describe Pepsi Next. The first time I drank it, it was fantastic; it tasted just like a regular Pepsi, albeit a bit lighter, and didn't leave me with that aspartame aftertaste so many diet sodas have. However, after finishing my second bottle about two days later, I have to say that I'm not nearly as impressed. It still tasted pretty good and I would still probably choose it over a regular Pepsi, but that diet soda feeling is now very strong on my tongue but without the phantom sweetness to distract me from it. It looks like promise of Pepsi Next was just too good to be true.

Would I recommend it?


Yeah. It's not perfect, but it tastes good and now I have an excuse for all the other junk I'm going to go eat.

Monster Rehab Green Tea + Energy

Price: $2.29 plus tax

Total Calories: 20

Look: Like an iced green tea

Smell: Like sweetened ice tea that may or may not be made with green tea leaves

Fizziness: None

Experience

I normally really like Monster energy drinks, but this was sadly not one of the good ones. I was expecting it to taste weird, but in that familiar Monster way of weirdness. This drink, however, was very off.

How it looks outside of the can

The best way I can describe the taste is that it's like a regular Monster and some generic sweetened green tea had a baby which they fed on an exclusive diet of blue Pixie Stix. It tasted too much like a Monster to be like tea but it was too much like tea to be like a Monster. It also had some kind of weird candy taste that kept coming and going, hence the Pixie Stix comment. It didn't taste like any sort of candy in particular, but I figured Pixie Stix would give the best image of that pseudo-fruity tang.

One more thing I have to say about this drink is that, even though the second ingredient on the list was glucose, it definitely tasted like a diet drink. It had that same aspartame sweetness that sticks with you long after you've placed it next to all of the other empty soda cans on your desk.

Would I recommend it?

No. It wasn't terrible, but two and a half dollars is way too much money to spend on something so questionable.