So by "next week" I guess I really meant almost-a-month.  I didn't plan on getting sick twice in the past month, not to mention the latter bout lasting for almost two weeks straight.  Stupid Bronchitis.   Anyway, I'm still hacking up a lung, but I believe I can think straight enough to write about the World of Coke…

As I mentioned in the last post, the wife and I made our first couple trips to the World of Coke here in Atlanta this past November and I had no idea how much of a weird effect it'd have on me.  For all intents and purposes I cut myself off of carbonated soft drinks a couple years ago, only breaking my vow of non-soda when I see a new variety or something along the line of the recent Pepsi Throwback products.  When we hit the World of Coke museum I was also preparing myself to indulge in their insane 60-odd flavor tasting room, hoping to sample some interesting concoctions from all over the globe.  But before I get to that I thought I'd talk a little bit about the museum and the self guided tours offered by Coca Cola. One of the main reasons we chose to visit was that we were looking to spend the day in the city and we wanted to hit something in addition to the Georgia Aquarium, but we didn’t want to go broke in the process.  At $15 per person, admission into the museum is only a little bit more expensive than going to see a movie these days, so it seemed like a fun, cheap way to spend the morning.  We were also sort of curious about the new WoC building since the last time we were in this part of Atlanta it was still under construction.  The area it self is pretty nice.  In addition to the interesting architecture of the building (including a wild three-story-tall coke bottle suspended in an adjoining glass structure – not pictured below), there's a pretty decent-sized grassy park area in the rear of the museum (sort of in between the WoC and the aquarium) that looks like it would be great for picnics downtown.

I can't speak for the previous location, but the design and layout of the new building is pretty nice, though there are some annoying traffic issues.   Basically, when you enter the museum there are three queuing areas before you're left to your own devices for the two self-guided tours, gallery and soda tasting areas.  The first room is potentially the most boring as it’s the only official queuing area with only a few statues and some flat screen TVs talking up the importance of Coke.  The second room is an interesting exhibit of Coke signage, as well as a couple cases of antique memorabilia (and some Coke-inspired paintings by Norman Rockwell), where a Coke tour guide shares some trivia and gives an overview of what to expect in the museum.  Though this area is basically another way to corral the visitors for a bit, there are a ton of things to keep your attention including a couple of awesome vintage Coke machines…

After a fifteen minute spiel on the virtues of soda advertising the crowd is ushered into another room, a decent sized theater that acts as the third and final queue before you get to explore the museum.   The theater features short animated film called Inside the Happiness Factory, which is a much longer version of the weird Coke commercial that aired continuously in movie theaters a couple years ago.  Basically the whole thing is a fantastical take on what happens after you put a quarter (how long has it been since you could score a Coke for a quarter) into a Coke machine and the insane process that the bottle goes through before it's vended to the customer.  Propaganda at its finest, the film is sort of mind-melting when you try and consider the target audience and the process behind the story and character design.  Honestly, this thing is all over the place, but instead of shooting for an upbeat, broad bit of schmaltziness (like the I'd-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke campaign of the early 70s) you can see the creators trying to specifically target all sorts of age groups and interests.  There's some weird Gary Larsen-esque Farside-style humor in a sequence that involves snowmen being put into chipper-shredders to cool a Coke bottle right alongside some Blue Collar Comedy Tour style hick humor featuring two bumbling guy's guys.   The overall character design is very alien in nature (think Close Encounters mixed with the Thumb Tech Deck figures) that evokes the custom vinyl toy movement.  There's weird sexual innuendo, a giant slug in what I can only describe as flying bondage attire, and inexplicable anthropomorphic furry lips on spiked dog leashes.   Now I'm not saying I'm an authority on what does and doesn't make for audience-bridging pop culture, but I'm really surprised at how "on board" the company seems to be with this campaign.  There's even an official comic book!  Well, I guess if Max Headroom managed to capture the hearts and minds of walks of like 25 years ago, then lollipop sucking, baton-twirling thumb-women have a shot…

The first time the wife and I sat though it we were sort of left in a daze of shock and awe.  I do have to say though, that upon future visits to the museum this short film becomes just this side of unbearable as you have to pass through the theater to get to the museum so you have to watch it every time you go.   It's sort of commendable in that it appears that Coca Cola took a cue from Disney theme parks in the crowd control and flow department, but unlike Disney you're sort of punished upon repeat visits.

Anyway, after the film ends you're escorted into a very bright atrium that opens up to the various sections of the museum.  On the ground floor there are three sections, a meet and greet photo-op area for the Coca Cola polar bear characters (again in the best Disney fashion), and two self-guided tour opportunities.  One of the tours takes you through the history of the brand, beginning in a recreation of an 19th century drug store/soda fountain and continuing on through a variety of Coke highlights including antique bottles and merchandising, international signage and brands, and artifacts from Coke's various sponsorships (including the Olympics and the on-board Coke dispenser used by NASA on space missions.)  The highlight of this tour was what I like to call the Wall of Awesome…

…that features around a 100 different bottles/cans/cartons of Coca Cola brand beverages from all over the world and all throughout the company's history.  I'm a huge fan of branding and package design so it was awesome to get a chance to stroll back in time to see vintage cans of Surge, Cherry Coke, Tab, and OK, as well as bottles of Mello Yello, Mister Pibb, and the small old school Styrofoam-paper-wrapped bottle of Diet Coke.   Noticeably absent from the wall was a can of New Coke, but there is one hiding in a display elsewhere in the museum.  The second tour focuses on the mechanics of bottling and distribution with areas of working equipment that's busy packing cases and mechanically carrying bottles of Coke up to the tasting area (more on that in a later post.) The second floor of the museum features four areas including two more theaters, a gallery, and the coveted tasting area. 

The gallery features, from what I can gather, is a rotating selection of Coke-inspired artwork as well as two other exhibits, a mini, multi-media display that covers the New Coke controversy and a recreation nook with Coke-inspired furniture and a collection of Coca Cola pins.  Then there are the two theaters, one in a separate room that features a very zany 3-D film complete with wind and water spritzing effects, and a second that more open and features reels of various Coca Cola commercials from both around the world and throughout the last 60 or so years.  Again, you can so see Disney's influence in the 3-D film which tries it's best to mimic the experience of the 3-D films at the main Disney theme parks (the Bug's Life flick at Animal Planet, the Muppets flick at Hollywood Studios, the Honey I shrunk the Audience flick at Epcot, and Disney's Philharmagic at the Magic Kingdom.)  Unfortunately, instead of focusing on entertainment the film is yet another sledge-hammer-to-the-head advertisement.  By this point the museum was completely living up to my expectation of being strung out on Coca Cola propaganda.  As much as I love branding, it's kind of draining to sit through hours of programming like this. Luckily Coke saves the best experience for last, the Tasting Area.

In part 2 of this look at the World of Coke I'm going to delve into the overall tasting area experience…

So, I thought I'd start off this new column with a quick explanation of why I wanted to start writing about bubbly colored sugar water, as well as to sort of backdate the column to include some pieces I wrote about six million years ago that really seem to fit into this whole idea.

First, the backdating.  Content-wise on this site, one of the first things that I couldn't wait to write about on this site was my love of the 7-Eleven Slurpee, and the various related frozen soda-esque drinks that dot the landscape of fast food joints, gas stations, and convenience stores in America.  While breaking down all of the various nostalgic memories of food-related items into categories, I can't help but notice that a few float to the top.   When I think of fast food, I think of Long John Silvers.  Favorite at-home food item as a kid = Chef Boyardee Mini Raviolis.  And when I think of my favorite drinks, Slurpees are right up there at the top.

As a kid I wasn't really allowed to drink much soda.   Usually I was permitted my fill of Shirley Temples while dining at Red Lobster on special occasions, or whenever we hit a fast food joint, which was pretty rare.   The only exceptions were a free pass to get a Slurpee anytime we'd hit a 7-Eleven, or an Icee when we went to K-Mart. At the time I never equated frozen drinks with soda, most likely because I tended to stray from the basic Coke version of these frosty beverages in favor of whatever fruit flavor was available at the time.  But when you break it down, most of these frozen drinks are just slightly less carbonated sodas, so the series of article/reviews I did feel like they fit into the new column's tone and content.   I've also written about some crazy sodas over the years, so I figured for simplicity's sake (at least as far as making the site archives nice and neat) I'd include all of these past bits.

Now as far as why I all of a sudden have the bug to write about soda, well that came about this past November when the wife and I made out first visit to the World of Coke museum here in Atlanta.  Though I've lived in and around the Atlanta area for the past 20 years I never made it over to this liquid sugar shrine, and while twiddling our thumbs in boredom one weekend it finally seemed like it was time to check it out.  Honestly, I wasn't expecting the museum to alleviate my boredom as it really does seem like a hokey cash-grab by one of the nations largest companies, not to mention that it was almost certain to be two or three hours of in-your-face advertising that I was paying for the privilege to sit through.

While my cynicism for the experience was more or less confirmed, I had to admit that there was a charm to the place, in particular the final stretch of the self-guided tour which consisted of a free, all-you-can-drink tasting area.  This was the section I was really looking forward to having had an inkling of what it would be like after a couple recent visits to Disney's Epcot which houses a miniature version of this tasting room in the Future World section of the park called Club Cool.  Whereas there were only 8 flavors to choose from at Epcot, the full on World of Coke tasting area features over 60 different Coca Cola brand products.  I scoffed when the tour guide challenged everyone to try all the flavors, and then I left the museum with an intense tummy ache after only making my way through 50 off varieties.

Not being one that backs down from a stupid challenge, especially a stupid pop culture challenge, the wife and I decided to go back to the museum two weeks later determined to not only try each and every drink, but to also write up some reviews and thoughts.  You know, for content on Branded.  Anyway, after achieving this inane diabetes-inducing goal I inadvertently got soda fever and was curious about how many different varieties were peppering our local grocery and specialty stores.  100 bottles later I decided that the only way to justify the sugar intake, not to mention the expense, was to cover all of these finds for the site, hopefully jarring some interesting thoughts and observations along the way.

Next week I'm going to dive into the column proper with the first of a three part look at the insane tasting area at the World of Coke.

Usually around this time of year I can't help but slip into a post holiday internet coma, not unlike the hibernation schedule of many rodents, large hairy mammals, and marsupials, just with a lot less sleep-induced burning of fat, and a lot more avoiding the computer.  Seems like I've been shaken awake this year though and will probably start posting on a more regular schedule.  So I wanted to take a second and announce a new column I've been preparing, Soda Pop Culture.  Hopefully it'll be taking an interesting look at the plethora of fine, fizzy, sometimes caffeinated, sometimes fruity beverages that have been keeping this country happy and alert for over a hundred years, not to mention contributing to the population's ill health and unfortunate rise in diabetics.  Sound like fun?  I hope so.  Since Peel Here has been winding down for awhile, I thought it would be nice to switch gears a and slip away form ephemera for awhile and get back to some of the roots of this site.

I'll also be making a lot of noise about one of the projects I'm working on for this year that I’'m really excited about, the 1st Up! Fair coming November 19th and 20th, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning in Lexington, KY.  Heck, it even got me excited enough to put pencil & ink to paper for the first time in over a year (by designing and drawing this banner…

Anyway, consider this bear nudged.

Every trip down to Florida to visit family always has a sad but true ulterior motive which is to visit every possible 7 Eleven in a 30 mile radius in search of the perfect Slurpee.  I grew up a Slurpee junkie, and living in Georgia (which has no 7 Eleven stores) it tends to be a hard trek in search of a good substitute (see the end of this post for some of these.)  This summer though provided a fun opportunity to combine two childhood passions, Slurpees and G.I. Joe as the convenience store behemoth is participating in the mild hoopla over the new flick set to hit theaters in August…



Though I have little interest in the eventual film, I can't help but love the branding and was really curious to see what sort of flavor concoction would be devised that represented a taste refreshing beverage as well as an almost 50 year old paramilitary toy/cartoon of action.  As a side excursion I was also looking for any Transformers junk I could find as I know 7 Eleven was promoting that turd of a film as well.

The search didn't take long, in fact every single store I hit was splattered with G.I. Joe branding (though not quite to the extent of the Simpson's craziness from a couple years ago.)  What was a little more difficult was finding a working dispenser for the G.I. Joe Slurpee flavor, Liquid Artillery, the blue colored treat that was supposedly infused with strawberry, pineapple and lime flavors.



It eventually took a couple days and stalking out to no less than five stores to find a working Liquid Artillery pump, and I have to say that the wait was really not worth it.



Here's where I get (probably) unbearable with my Slurpee/G.I. Joe nerdiness.  On the one hand, being that this is a movie promotion, I was sort of disappointed in the choices made in the design.   I can see where they were going with the "True Blue" color scheme and the artillery theme, but I'm not a huge fan of the new Joe symbol (much preferring the flag inspired logo design) and considering the plot of the film I think there was a missed opportunity for a neater color.  I'm not sure exactly what the plot of the flick is going to be, but from the trailers I've gleamed that M.A.R.S. (Destro's arms-dealing organization before he aligns himself with Cobra) has developed some sort of neon green metal decimating liquid or nano-bots.  That is what I was hoping to see in the new Slurpee.  Part of the reason for this, and jumping forward a bit, is the taste of this new concoction.  The strawberry, pineapple, and lime flavors mix kind of oddly and instead of it hitting the assumed fruit punch-like taste, it instead just plays off of all the tart and sourness of these fruit.  It ends up just blue and sour.  Though I don't like it for its taste, it would have been interesting in the context of an acidic neon green Cobra weapon.  Granted, based on the movie toys that have been hitting store shelves, it looks like the Joe team will have some sort of anti-weapon that's blue, but it's just not happening for me.  Besides, having Cobra branding on the Slurpee would be ten million times cooler...



So the Slurpee itself was a bust, but I did enjoy some of the other aspects to the promotion, in particular the sturdy plastic cups that were covered with some fun lenticular graphics.   I first saw cups like this with the Incredible Hulk promotion from last year and the effect is great.   Not only does it call back to the lenticular coin promos from the 80s, it just makes for a really striking collectible cup.  Again, this is hitting me in another soft spot as I loved my plastic collectible cups from the 90s that you'd find at various fast food joints.  I was a bit too young to get on board with the Marvel Slurpee cups from the late 70s early 80s, at least in a keeping them capacity.  I even managed to find on 7 Eleven with some leftover Transformers cups in this lenticular style (which is even more fitting considering the history of lenticular stickers with the Transformers branding.)  Speaking of the TF promotion, the accompanying drink, a mango passion fruit combo, was light years better than the G.I. Joe Liquid Artillery flavor.  To bad I didn't run into it until the last visit of the trip.

If anyone is interested, here are some of my previous columns on frozen drink fun:

7 Eleven Slurpee

Slush Puppies

Burger King Frozen Coke

Quik Trip Freezonis

Race Trac Frozen Cokes

Sonic Slushes

Popeye's Cajun Chiller Slushes

Crush Frozen Orange Dreams

Burger King Coke Float and Sonic Creamslush

Lollicup Asian Slushes

Icees

I really have no idea why, but I feel an almost irresistible urge to buy and drink every weird and new soda that I find on store shelves and in convenience store coolers. I think it stems from getting burnt out on regular Coke as a kid because that's all my mother would typically buy, unless of course we were sick and then we could have all the ginger ale we could stomach. The same typically went for when ever we'd go out to eat; Cokes all around. On special occasions when we'd hit a Red Lobster or Stake and Ale I'd break free of the Coke Classic cage and drown in glass after glass of sweet Shirley Temples (Sprite or 7-Up with a good dose of grenadine and a couple of maraschino cherries for good measure.)

Then there were the days when I'd tag along with my friend Bryan to his little league games, almost entirely because I could blend in with the rest of the team after the game and score a free large soda from the concession stand. It was here that I was introduced to the concept of the suicide (mixing all of the sodas on tap into a noxious almost bubblegum flavored soda monster.) From then on out it was always weird (I say weird, but that's just my perspective coming from a Coke only household) when I had a chance.

So what does this mean? It means that when faced with choosing between any of the common sodas you typically find clogging the shelves, I'll almost always opt to find that tiny section that has Mexican, Caribbean, or Asian sodas in flavors like lychee, banana, mango, or lime. It also means that every time one of the larger soda companies spits out something 'new' I'm first in line to try it. It’s a 50/50 kind of endeavor. For every Mountain Dew Live Wire, there's a Pepsi Summer Mix waiting to choke me into almost vomiting. For every Jolly Rancher Watermelon, there is apparently a Mountain Dew Game Fuel, or what I'd like to call Mountain Dew Summer Mix, aka just another way Pepsi is trying to get me to drink my cough syrup flavored liquid bubble gum.

Billed as a limited edition Game Fuel, I assume it's supposed to keep me awake on those long nights when I'm struggling to battle off the sandman while battling, well, what ever it is you battle in Halo 3. If you can't tell I'm not a gamer, and maybe this is why I didn't like the soda, but screw that, I have a palette that appreciates the weird. My question is why the weird or new almost without fail has to taste like bubble gum? I mean it's actually described as having a citrus cherry blast of flavor, but it just tastes like Big Red, Pepsi Summer Mix, or that Bubble Yum Sour Cherry soda that 7-Elevens nationwide were trying to dump on the public at a quarter a bottle.

Maybe next time right? I mean they did make Pitch Black right, they could do something like that again? Right?

One of the joys about visiting Florida is getting a crack at all of the new soda, candy, and snack products that are available there. I think Florida, at least central Florida, is a test market for new weird food stuffs. It was there that I first saw Pepsi Blue, Jolly Rancher Sodas, and a million weird candy varieties. Well as sort of a death knell/bookend for/to one of my favorite sodas that I can't seem to find anymore (Jolly Rancher Watermelon), I present what will probably be the last soda in the Jolly Rancher line, Cinnamon Cherry Fire.

Drinking Jolly Rancher Cinnamon Cherry Fire reminded me a lot of what it must have been like for Andrew to drink the titular concoction in Judy Blume's Freckle Juice. I pretty much had to pinch my nose and gulp it down while trying not to gag on the mixture of weird medicine-y flavors and the inescapably horrible spicy bite of an aftertaste. I wasn't even expecting a crop of luxurious freckles afterwards either, so all I have is this account of how gross this soda is as a reward for my bravery. Actually I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. I honestly think I would rather have had a glass of just plain fire.

I guess the fine folks at Elizabeth Beverage Company had a brain fart when deciding to go ahead with production on this flavor after cutting back on the more or less normal fruit flavors of the original line. If Green Apple, Grape, Blue Raspberry and Watermelon didn't work, well then I guess the next logical step would be combining Cherry with their Atomic Fireball-like Fire flavor to really kick the thirsty soda drinkers in the ass? Maybe it's their comical way of getting back at a buying public that let the original line of sodas fail, but at the end of the day this is kind of mean considering the only people zany enough to pick up Cinnamon Cherry Fire are probably those who DID buy the original sodas. Either way I envision this flavor marked down to 10 for a quarter on my next trip down to Florida, where it will probably gather dust next to the bin that was still full of Bubble Yum Sodas.

So during my trip down to Florida this past weekend, like every other trip down to Florida I take, I was in and out of 7-Eleven's on a crazy thrice a day schedule. You see since I don't have any of these bastions of sticky, kind-of-groady, yet oh so lovely convenience in my area of Georgia, I don't have access to Slurpees, my drink of choice throughout the majority of my childhood. To balance this, I make it a point to get a Slurpee at least three times a day every day I'm in driving distance of a 7-Eleven. If I ever moved back to Florida, I'd have to grow approximately 32 extra arms to enable me to shift and move what would soon become a body of gargantuan and Jabba the Hutt like proportion. I'm sure I'd also start lactating a suicide-like mixture (many flavors mixed for those of you who didn't play little league in the US) of Slurpee as well, so I'd just be a huge, many-armed, cold and tasty mess. Wow, that's gross.

Anyway, as I shuffled into my first 7-Eleven of the trip I realized that I was going to be in for a really great Slurpee chugging experience as I noticed first and foremost that one of my weirdly all time favorite soft drink flavors, Jolly Rancher Watermelon, was now available Slurpee style. Even though the actual sodas seem to have been pulled from the southeast market, some gods above saw fit to give it one last hurrah as a Slurpee flavor, and indeed it certainly didn't disappoint.

I believe over three days I literally drank my weight in JR Watermelon Slurpee. What's funny is that while obsessing over the new flavor, I completely neglected to notice that the Slurpee machine had been re-branded for a Simpson's the Movie promotion into a Kwik-E-Mart Squishee machine!

It wasn't until my second visit that the whole Simpson's branding really caught my eye as I noticed that the Big Gulp machine was now sporting some snazzy Buzz Cola signage as well as the Slurpee machine. Unfortunately, Buzz Cola wasn't on tap, but there was some small print on the sign that directed me to the drink cooler where I could find plenty of over-priced cans for my purchasing pleasure…

At first I was thinking that this must be some sort of Jolt Cola promotion, as I really don't remember Buzz from any specific Simpson's episodes (I guess I'm more visually inclined to spot Duff beer or Squishees.) The can is pretty swanky though in it's very cartoon inspired simplicity. When you compare it to the incredibly loud and crowded design work on most Coke and Pepsi products, it's almost tame, even with it's lightning bolt font that's half the size of the can.

In fact, even on the back there isn't much other than a small Simpson's the Movie logo, a UPC and some ingredients. It's distributed by the 7-Eleven corp., which has had store brand cola products in the past, so I'm assuming they manufacture it as well. As for the taste, like Matt over at X-Entertainment noted, it's very much like RC cola, lacking the crispness of Pepsi or the syrupy bite of Coke. It’s more mellow and almost flat tasting, but it’s very suited to a drink like this. I've always thought Jolt tasted much the same.

In addition to the drinks, the Simpson's branding wormed its way into other common 7-Eleven products, like their donuts. In honor of the movie the store is offering it's plain donuts with a hot pink icing and sprinkles, which even though it seems common enough it actually kind of rare. Most of the donut places by me don't offer pink iced donuts, unless it's Valentine's day, so these were pretty fun to see on the shelf (and apparently a lot of shelves are bare, so I guess I was lucky in Fl.)

Also on the shelves were boxes of Krusty-O's cereal, though I had a hard time snagging a picture. After walking around secretly snapping photos of all the Simpson's schwag, it was next to impossible to get a clear shot of the cereal because it was right in front of the main counter and there were three employees and a customer that were giving me very incriminating glares, so I wussed out and put my camera away. I was going to pick up a box, but it seemed like a waste since I don't particularly like cereal all that much.

It wasn't until visit number 5 at a different location when I spotted yet another new Slurpee, excuse me, Squishee flavor that was directly tied into the Simpson's promotion, Blue Woo Hoo Vanilla. That particular location must have just changed it out because what I was pumping out was hardly blue (it's was more of a plum), but it was very vanilla-y, so I assume there must have been a red Slurpee flavor in the machine prior. It was pretty darn good as a change from the normal fruit and soda flavors, and it was cool to see a flavor that wasn't co-branded by a soda company (remember, it's not Cherry, it's Fanta Cherry.)

It was also at this point when I began actively collecting the various Simpson's Squishee collector cups. There were six different in all, 1 small paper one that just had the Squishee logo, and five more that were a little bit larger, plastic, and had the Squishee logo on one side and a family character on the other. I don't remember ever seeing a Maggie cup, so I guess she was dissed promotion wise. There are also crazy spoon straws that have rubber cutouts of the characters that magnetically stick, but they were a $1.50 extra, so we largely passed on those.

All in all it was a pretty awesome time to be visiting 7-Eleven's and I walked away with a much lighter wallet, and a ton of pointless schwag that will probably be regulated to a box in the closet in the coming months, but it sure was fun.

Wow, so Hoover just tipped me off to an interesting tidbit in the mythology that is frozen drink treats. In addendum to the series of entries I did reviewing various frozen drinks (you can find them all at the end of this blog entry), I've now learned that the Icee company, owned by J&J Snack Foods, acquired the Slush Puppie company (or logo, trademark, whatever) from Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages Company for an undisclosed amount. I'm apparently very late to the party with this bit of news seeing as how it happened last year in June.

So there is one less company floating around in the frozen drink game. This is just another in a long list of corporate mergers that I think is kind of sad in terms of branding because it's one more choice that is little more than an illusion in terms of product loyalty. Now in the grand scheme of things and in the world today worrying about brand loyalty is pretty stupid and unimportant. I am well aware that there are many more important and terrible things going on, and yada yada yada.

I can't ignore that I was raised in a world where branding was hard to ignore, I mean how many people out there are "Coke" people while the others are "Pepsi" (I doubt there are enough "store brand" loyalists out there for me to mention them, oh crap, I guess I just did)? It's not like we're going to go to war over it, but in a restaurant, when ordering a refreshing beverage to wash down a nice meal and you politely ask for a Coke and the waitress or waiter replies, "I'm sorry we only have Pepsi…", doesn't a very small part of you just fall for a second before saying, "That's cool, I'll have one of those."

Well when I see companies and products merged under one roof, I can't help but think that somewhere behind the curtain the product that is being produced just doesn't matter as much anymore, I mean Matchbox, Hotwheels, it's all just little toy cars (well not really, but I'm sure it is under Matel's eyes), it's all units shipped and stuff. I mean, if it's cost efficient, just ship the same toys in different packaging and no one will mind. When I was working at a grocery store in the 90's I learned that the store-brand frozen veggies were actually the same exact frozen veggies that a huge major brand were selling, that the grocery chain had the "major brand company" provide the contents and just packaged them in their own store-brand packaging and sold it for less because they could afford to. So at the end of the day, it didn't matter which frozen green beans I picked up, it was all the same thing. That if I took more than a few seconds choosing between the two it was a complete waste of time because there really was no choice, just the illusion of one, and to me that's kind of sad.

Obviously there is a big difference between a Slush Puppie and an Icee, and I don't even particularly like Slush Puppies, hell they could probably do nothing but benefit from Icee owning them, but I know that there are people out there that love Slush Puppies and if down the road a bit it become apparent that the profit margin for Icee is higher than SP's, that if keeping the option open to choose between the two is unprofitable, Slush Puppie will be fazed out.

I think I'm thinking about this too hard. Hey look, CHiPs is coming out on DVD….

Jolly Rancher sodas, who'd thunk it. I keep meaning to write about these, but I keep putting it off and I don't know why. So here it is. Jolly Rancher Sodas. I came across these during my Christmas 2005 visit to my family in Florida. They were in all the 7-Elevens and pretty much nowhere else.  I was so excited because the Slurpee crop for that year was pretty piss poor.

Growing up I was a huge Watermelon Jolly Rancher fan; I loved the JR sticks and stuff even though they taste nothing like watermelon, so when I saw that these sodas came in a Watermelon flavor I was pretty darn excited. I expected the soda to taste pretty shitty and nothing like a Jolly Rancher because seriously, who in their right mind would think drinking liquid candy would be a great idea. You can't see me now, but I'm raising my hand. Seriously though I figured these were just branded with the Jolly Rancher logo like the Minute Maid sodas of the 90's and the Tropicana Twister sodas you can sometimes find in Pepsi machines, just a name brand for a basic fruity soda. But then again these do come in some non-traditional flavors. I picked up one of each available, Watermelon, Blue Raspberry, Green Apple and Grape (not pictured.)  There's also an Orange flavor but I have yet to find one.

I got out to the car, twisted off the top, and took my first sip of liquid gold. Ho-lee crap nuggets. This stuff tastes exactly like the candy, spot on, and no matter how gross that may sound to you it's pretty darn heavenly to me.


Out of the rest of the flavors, the Blue Raspberry is probably the best, though it's very rich. In fact all these sodas are pretty rich, enough so that you could probably only drink one every couple of days at the most.

I also really dig the bottles and stuff because they're super-clear so the vibrant colors are the soda, not the plastic.


I'm not a big fan of Green Apple to begin with, but this flavor isn't bad. If you like Green Apple then this is probably a good version for a soda though it's a little on the tart side.


I found these bottles at a local Shell station this past winter so I'm glad they finally managed to make their way up from Florida to Georgia, though after I bought out their stock of Watermelon they didn't replenish it, so it might not really be here yet. If nothing else, I have to give the company that makes these (Elizabeth Beverage Company of New Castle, Delaware) props for sticking to the actual flavors instead of just using the branding.

As an added bonus I've also got a snapshot of another soda that I found this past Christmas in Florida, Bubble Yum Soda. Let me just say that these are freaking awful. I think I might have mentioned this, but the clerk at the 7-Eleven I found these in tried to haggle with me to get me to buy the entire stock of these he had. They were marked down to $0.50 each and there's a reason for it. They taste like death warmed over.

So like I said in the previous post I just got back from a vacation to Florida to visit my parents and sister. One of the things that I love about going back down to Florida (where I spent most of my childhood) is the convenience stores, in particular 7-Eleven’s. As anyone who has read this blog knows, I love, love, love me some Slurpees. I could probably drink two a day for the rest of my life and never get tired of them. It was the first frozen drink I was introduced to and for the most part still my favorite today.

A few months ago I started posting my frozen drink reviews in a column I called stupidly enough, Frozen Drinks 101. I wasn’t sure that there was enough material for it to last that long, but I managed to stretch it out to 10 entries, and I’ve been waiting for this last trip down to Florida to get what I needed for the final installment of the 101 series. So here at long last is my review of the 7-Eleven Slurpee.

I’d like to recap a second on the history of the drink. Here’s what I wrote in my last review of the Icee frozen drink:

“As the story goes, Omar Knedlik who owned and ran a Dairy Queen in Coffeyville, Kansas in the 1950s, invented the frozen soda drink. Depending on the telling of the story, he either didn’t have a soda fountain machine yet or it was broken and he needed to supply his thirsty customers with cold soda so he took to sticking bottles of soda in his freezer. One day he left them in a bit too long and the bottles half froze, but being the soda-serving lovable guy he was, he gave them to customers anyways. Well everyone apparently flipped for the half frozen sodas, which consequently have almost the exact same consistency as today’s Icees and Slurpees. Since the customers were so taken with the novelty sodas, he decided to devise a machine that would dispense half frozen soda.

Once again the story gets cloudy, but Omar either couldn’t come up with a design himself or his design wasn’t adequate so he contacted the John E. Mitchell Company, a Dallas machinery manufacturer, in 1959 to help him realize his dream of a frozen soda fountain machine. According to the Slurpee website, Mitchell was very taken with the idea and his big advancement for the machine design was to being working with automobile air conditioners to freeze the syrup and water mix. Together Mitchell and Knedlik began building the frozen fountain drink machines and then sold them to other Dairy Queens and convenience stores under the branding of the Icee.

Depending on the brand history you read (Icee or Slurpee) the machines were either very successful (Icee’s version of events) or a failure (Slurpee’s version of history.) Either way a 7-11 storeowner ended up in Omar Knedlik’s Dairy Queen and ended up buying three machines for the 7-11 Corp. So 7-11, after tweaking the design of the machine, introduced Slurpees to the public.�?

So Slurpees are basically the bastard half brother of the Icee (and in turn the Artic Blast), but I always preferred the tweaked 7-Eleven formula. Well I made sure to hit every 7-11 in a 20-mile radius on my twice-daily trip for some Slurpee goodness. Usually when I go down to Florida there only seems to be one or two flavors working at any one store (even though the machines are typically set up for six), and even then they are usually the same two from store to store. In the past I’ve been limited to Coke and Mountain Dew mostly, but this year I hit the mother load with 10 different flavors to choose from. First off I’ll share some pictures of the various stores I hit. I tried to take pictures of every one, so here’s the more memorable ones (yeah, I’m a picture dork, but it’s like dork-OCD, I can’t help it when I do it):


The first night there we hit this one just around the corner from my parent’s apartment. This is probably the grungiest 7-11 in the area, just really dirty and everything by the Slurpee machine was sticky, almost like someone put their finger on the Slurpee spout like a hose and sprayed everything. The Slurpee machines weren’t quite right either. When you pulled the lever to fill the cup, Slurpee would shoot out at super sonic speeds, so fast that it half filled the cup before you knew it and it didn’t start freezing until then so it expanded just as fast as it shot out to begin with making your cup into a Slurpee volcano. It would have been more fun to watch (or play around with ala the Mentos and diet soda trick) if the clerk wasn’t watching with his disapproving eyes.


This one was down the street from my parents place, and much easier to get to, but alas the Slurpee machine was out of order, so we had to hit the interstate and find another location. The clerk lady was pretty cool though. She had these three discontinued bottles of soda in a little cooler by the register and when I went to buy one she started haggling with me to buy the rest, 3 for $0.75. The soda sucked nuts, but it was still a good deal…


The above is my one of my favorite locations of the entire trip. Not only was it the cleanest 7-11 I’ve ever been in, they also had my favorite flavor of all time, banana. Needless to say we hit this a few times.


This above location was probably the best of the trip because it’s the 7-11 that I used to hang out at as a kid. It’s at the opening to our old subdivision in Castleberry and it’s pretty much exactly a mile from my old house. I used to ride my bike up to this store all the time and buy comics and Slurpees while stealing free games off of the Play Choice 10 machine they had stowed away in a converted broom closet (which is now ironically back to being a broom closet.)

All in all this wasn’t actually the best trip, Slurpee-wise, we’ve ever had. It seemed like only half of the Slurpees we got were any good, and when they were bad they were really bad, but the good was super awesome, so in the end it all kind of canceled itself out as far as a drink review goes. The 10 available flavors were Mountain Dew, Coke, Mountain Dew Live Wire, Mountain Dew Kryptonite Ice, Tropicana Twister Blue Raspberry, Banana, Cherry, Hawaiian Punch, some gross looking Crystal Lite tea, and a special Nintendo Wii branded Strawberry Banana. I tried most of these, excluding the Crystal Lite, and liked them all, which is pretty rare. I think that typically the non-soda flavors like Cherry and Banana usually taste a bit too much like cough syrup to me, but all of the Slurpee flavors were branded somehow or another and I think that the syrups were just a little better in the quality department. Both the Banana and Cherry were Fanta (Coke) branded and I’ll tell you, I would love to see regular soda versions of both of these. As gross as banana soda sounds, it tasted pretty damn good. The Nintendo Wii Strawberry Banana was also pretty darn good going with a more natural banana flavor as opposed to the more fake flavor of the regular one (which I like anyway.)

I had a few Slurpee Volcanoes erupt on me and Carrie had one Coke come out as almost pure frozen syrup (not unlike the all syrup Squishee on the Simpson’s) which is not as good as it sounds.

Here are some pictures of the various machines and flavors:




Is there anything sadder than an out of order Slurpee machine? Well, yeah, but it still bummed me out…




One damn fine banana Slurpee was had here…






The other thing that I love about Slurpee’s is that there is usually some sort of promotion going on like limited time flavors or special cups. One that’s been going on and off for awhile are the Splitzo cups that have a wall down the center so you can sample two separate flavors.


They were also trying to pawn off these “At Home Versions�? that are really only crushed ice machines, but I guess that’s cool in it’s own right like that old Snoopy Sno-Cone makers.


At the end of the day, when the machines are working correctly, there really is nothing quite like a Slurpee. The flavor syrups are great, the flavor choices are great, and the gimmicks are fun most of the time. I hope someday that they start franchising in Georgia so that I wouldn’t have to make a 16 hour round trip to get one.


Anyway, this ends my frozen drink reviews for now, at least until another contender throws their hat in the ring or I think of something more enlightening to say about them. Here are the previous columns:

Slush Puppies

Burger King Frozen Coke

Quik Trip Freezonis

Race Trac Frozen Cokes

Sonic Slushes

Popeye's Cajun Chiller Slushes

Crush Frozen Orange Dreams

Burger King Coke Float and Sonic Creamslush

Lollicup Asian Slushes

Icee’s

So this has ended up being a much longer list of reviews than I thought it was going to be. This is the second to last of them though, and a double whammy at that. These last two entries will cover the more long running and original frozen soda drinks.

This entry is going to cover the Icee and its sister brand the Artic Blast. Before I started these reviews I knew next to nothing about the history involved in the frozen soda drinks outside of the fact that Slurpees have been around for 40 years, and I only know this because of the commemorative keepsake cup series they did last year. Well as it turns out, the Icee is the grand daddy of all frozen soda drinks.

As the story goes, Omar Knedlik who owned and ran a Dairy Queen in Coffeyville, Kansas in the 1950s, invented the frozen soda drink. Depending on the telling of the story, he either didn't have a soda fountain machine yet or it was broken and he needed to supply his thirsty customers with cold soda so he took to sticking bottles of soda in his freezer. One day he left them in a bit too long and the bottles half froze, but being the soda-serving lovable guy he was, he gave them to customers anyways. Well everyone apparently flipped for the half frozen sodas, which consequently have almost the exact same consistency as today's Icees and Slurpees. Since the customers were so taken with the novelty sodas, he decided to devise a machine that would dispense half frozen soda.

Once again the story gets cloudy, but Omar either couldn't come up with a design himself or his design wasn't adequate so he contacted the John E. Mitchell Company, a Dallas machinery manufacturer, in 1959 to help him realize his dream of a frozen soda fountain machine. According to the Slurpee website, Mitchell was very taken with the idea and his big advancement for the machine design was to being working with automobile air conditioners to freeze the syrup and water mix. Together Mitchell and Knedlik began building the frozen fountain drink machines and then sold them to other Dairy Queens and convenience stores under the branding of the Icee.

Depending on the brand history you read (Icee or Slurpee) the machines were either very successful (Icee's version of events) or a failure (Slurpee's version of history.) Either way a 7-11 storeowner ended up in Omar Knedlik's Dairy Queen and ended up buying three machines for the 7-11 Corp. So 7-11, after tweaking the design of the machine, introduced Slurpees to the public.

Both drinks went on to flourish and basically became the standards upon which all others have been derived or judged (in my humble opinion.)

So like I said, this entry of Frozen Drinks 101 will cover the Icee and the Artic Blast. I was always under the impression that the two were different brands, but they are in fact the same product under different names. Up until recently I had only seen Artic Blasts at movie theatres in the area so I was figuring that maybe that was the reason, that maybe Icee licensed their brand to like AMC or something, but then when I decided to hit the local Target for an Icee to review they only had Artic Blasts. So I have no idea why there are two brandings, and the Icee website doesn't have any info on that. Oh well. I managed to find an Icee at a local Shell gas station so whatever. I'm going to review both though for reasons that will become apparent in a minute.

First we'll start with the Icee though. With the famous polar bear in a sweatshirt branding, the Icee was definitely the second frozen drink of choice (behind Slurpee of course) growing up in Florida. The main reason for this is location because I doubt that I had developed my now keen sense of distinguishing between flavor and consistency at the age of seven. When I did have them it was while visiting K-Marts, which my mom rarely seemed to go to. Back in the 80's there seemed to be more choices as far as non-food shopping went. Whereas today you pretty much have to choose between places like Targets and Wal-Marts which are both the same but different, in the 80's there were more places like Ross, Service Merchandise and stand alone Sears stores and stuff.

Anyways, I didn't have that many Icees growing up, but recently, recently I've almost overdosed on them now that I know they are at a gas station on the way to work. The basic set up by work has three flavors, cherry, blue raspberry and Coke. Once again, I'm going to stick with coke for the review for consistency's sake.


Though the machine in the above picture has all the defrost lights lit, rest assured that it was from a different day than when I picked up my first Icee in years. The first thing that struck me about the Icee was just how smart the branding is on the product. Not only is it the only other brand outside of Slush Puppie to use a cartoon character as a mascot, but also its color scheme is so basically American that it isn't funny. Red, White, and Blue all the way. Adding the basic Coke flavor, this should be temporary re-dubbed the Freedom Slushie.


Okay, as far as the consistency is concerned, the Icee is pretty damn good. It's got use enough ice and syrup that it's almost always on the brink of becoming a liquid so every slurp sort of melts in the straw and it's a lot like drink the perfectly cold unwatered down coke. It's a pretty interesting aspect to the drink that puts it a little more in function over form category of frozen drinks. Whereas the Race Trac Frozen Drink is frozen all the way up the straw, brain-freeze inducing and a little harder to drink, the Icee is more like the perfect fountain drink. I can see this in the company history of the story and it seems to be that way to this day.




I did end up trying the cherry flavor recently when the Coke was on defrost in the morning and I was also pleasantly surprised by the non-cough syrup flavor it had. It tasted pretty much like your basic cherry candy flavor, though a little more soda like.



Now onto the Artic Blast. I wanted to cover this drink mostly because it broke one of the main conventions of frozen flavor drinkdom that I don't think I've ever see done, it was available in Pepsi and not Coke. Gasp! Say it ain't so Joe! As far as soda is concerned I'm not really in one camp or the other in terms of company loyalty. I can surely taste the difference, but sometimes I'm in the mood for a Coke and its rich syrupy bite, while sometimes I'm more in the mood for a Pepsi and its crisper cleaner less sweet taste. I'd just as soon pick up a Mellow Yellow as a Mountain Dew, and I pretty routinely avoid Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb both. I know from sodas, but the one thing I never really thought about is why you tend to always find frozen soda in Coke not Pepsi branding.


Well excitedly the fiancee and I marched right up to that machine and poured out heaps of frozen Pepsi fun into our Target branded cups.




In fact we were enthusiastic that we fell prey to the most common of frozen drink faux pas, the amazing growing slushie!


If you're not careful the drink will continue to expand right onto the counter and all over your hands while you're trying to save that precious drink.


Upon taking my first sip I realized why Pepsi is hardly ever found in frozen drink form. It's too watered down to make a good frozen drink. That's inherent in the soda itself as the syrup is less sweet than Coke and therefore when it's frozen and it has to contend with the extra water (in the form of ice mind you) it makes the final taste rater watery. Part of this, I believe, rests with the Target version of the Artic Blast it self because all flavors at all Targets I've sampled are a bit on the light side when it comes to syrup. Target was the only place for a long time that I could find a frozen Mountain Dew, though it lost all the punch of the soda in the process, unlike the Mountain Dew Slurpee which is ten times better than the Artic Blast version.


The odd flip side to this is the difference between Artic Blasts at Targets and AB's at AMC movie theatres. The movie theatre ones are much better as far as consistency and taste is concerned. So I don't think it's a brand thing as much as a location thing, and Target apparently isn't the place to get the optimal version. Of course it's freaking expensive to get into the movie theatre these days and there aren't a lot of reasons (e.g. good movies) to bother, so the theatre Artic Blast is truly a treat that's only available to me a few times a year.

Thus ends my frozen drink reviews for the time being until my next trip to Florida when I'll cover the Slurpee in extreme detail. So once again, here are all the past reviews:

Slush Puppies

Burger King Frozen Coke

Quik Trip Freezonis

Race Trac Frozen Cokes

Sonic Slushes

Popeye's Cajun Chiller Slushes

Crush Frozen Orange Dreams

Burger King Coke Float and Sonic Creamslush

Lollicup Asian Slush

So today we divert a little from your classic American frozen drinks and venture into the unknown world of Asian slushes! Okay, so like pretty much the entire city where I live has had a make over in the last three or four years and slowly everything that was once there business-wise has moved down the main street about a mile. All the supermarkets went from twenty and thirty year old strip malls to brand new mega giant solitary locations while most of the other more eclectic stores that were in the old strip malls either closed or moved to another city. Basically the city has turned into a sort of ghost town of old empty strip malls.

Recently though, most of these have been bought up and either remodeled, or bull dozed to make way for new international strip malls. We now have a Mexican indoor mall where our outlet mall was (and it's really nice with a bunch of awesome candy shops and tattoo parlors.) We also have no less than 4 Asian mega, two-story strip malls as well as two giant Asian farmers markets. Since I'm so enamored with the Asian culture this has been great. There are two stationary stores in particular that can't be beat as far as Kogepan, Astroboy, and Miyazaki merchandise is concerned.

What's been just the bee's knee's though are all the new restaurants that have popped up including a plethora of Vietnamese Pho houses. "Jefe, do you know what a plethora of Vietnamese Pho noodle houses means?" It means lots of awesome soup and sweet, sweet Vietnamese slushes. There are two houses in particular that I frequent, a hole in the wall place with great soup and okay slushes called What the Pho and a more upscale ritzy place with okay soup and awesome slushes called Pho Mimi. We'll concentrate on the latter today as they have my favorite Vietnamese slush flavor, Green Apple!

Now I'm not completely convinced that this brand of slush is actually Vietnamese. The noodle house is, but the brand of slush they serve, Lollicup, makes no mention of nationality on their website and I believe it is based out of California, though it's run by Asians. I'm making the assumption that it's Vietnamese because I can only find them in the noodle houses, so if I'm wrong scream and shout and let me know the error of my ways. Anyway, I grabbed the fiancee and we strode off to Pho Mimi and picked up a couple of slushes, a green apple for me and a chocolate-mint for the lady.


It was a race to get back to the apartment so that I could photographically chronicle this momentous slushy event. As you can see below, traffic got a little bit of the better of my slush as it's kind of melt-y on the bottom. None the less, I shall press on as I'm not about to run out and get another just for the pictures.


So these slushes are awesome. First off after the restaurants make them, they use a machine to seal them in the cup so there will be no spillage. You just poke your straw into the plastic covering and you're good to go. All of the restaurants have served their slushes like this so far, so I'm assuming its par for the course.


Now one of the best aspects about these slushes is how they differ consistency-wise from other more American slushes. These are made with totally pulverized ice that's got such small ice crystals that it's got a very smooth and silky consistency almost like frozen yogurt but obviously more icy than creamy. Most of the places also give you a very oversized, diameter-wise, straw so you get pretty much a consistent flow of icy beverage and you don't end up sucking out all the syrup first. Another great aspect is the syrup. High quality stuff, and it's reflected in the price. Whereas most slush and Slurpee drinks will run you $1 to $1.89 or so, these Asian slushes are typically $3 or more, but they are so worth it every once in awhile.


The last thing that I love about these drinks is their flavor variety. Like I said the woman got a chocolate-mint slush. Chocolate?!? In a slush?!? Yes sir and she said it was great. They're also offered in most of the more Asian fruit flavors like durian, longan, lychee, coconut and honeydew as well as more standard fruit fare like peach, watermelon, orange and strawberry.


It seems like the world of frozen drinks is truly opening up in Georgia.  All we need now is a freaking 7-11 franchise to open up and I'd be freaking set.

Thatsa creamy frozena drinka! Today's entry in the textbook of Frozen Drinks 101 is a double whammy as we take a look at the Burger King Coke Float and the Sonic Creamslush! I was introduced to the BK Coke Float before Sonics started popping up so I guess we'll cover that one first.

Now I am no stranger to the float as a drink, and even sort of grew up on coke floats in general, but I have always known them to be a mixture of vanilla ice cream and regular sodas. Now I love me a float, but I'll be honest, making them at home is an art unto it self. I am not sure if it's an order thing (to add coke or ice cream first) or a "brand of ice cream used" thing but every time I've ever made a float the same problem happens. This nasty unappetizing foam forms on the top that continuously grows for minutes, obliterating most of the soda and taking a good five minutes out of the drinking process while I scrape it off into the sink. It also seems to separate the color additive from the soda so that the leftover soda is clear (and as anyone who partook in that Crystal Pepsi debacle a decade ago can attest to, clear soda that isn't limon in flavor is a scary thing indeed.) I was raised on Breyer's which is about as basic as you can get (I believe the ingredients listed are milk, cream, and sugar.) Maybe I need to switch to a more ingredient filled variety, like maybe the all natural goodness of Breyer's clashes violently with all forms of chemically derived sodas or something.

Anyway, a few years ago, I believe around the time of the first Ice Age movie, Burger King Corp. got the brilliant idea of combining two of their dessert properties into one big frozen creamy soda-y drink movie tie-in known as the BK Ice Age Float. At the time the two available flavors were cherry and some blue fruity thing that wasn't blue raspberry. At first I thought that the drink was an abomination, that soft serve ice cream surely would do nothing but mar the perfectly fine frozen drink flavor. Boy was I wrong. Today the float seems to be a seasonal item and it's pretty basic as far as flavors go, being the creamier version of a frozen Coke or Fanta.


I decided, as you can read in my review of the BK Frozen Coke, that since their Fanta cherry is pretty crappy that I'd just go with a basic Coke Float. Let me tell you, as watered down as the normal frozen Coke was, the addition of soft serve vanilla ice cream is exactly the kick their frozen drink needs to get it back up to mega tasty.


It might be kind of hard to see in the picture because I was gypped and was served the drink in a paper cup instead of the clear one advertised in the sign above, but the drink is basically frozen Coke layered on top of a bed of soft serve. The awesome thing is that whoever poured this monster was bright enough to mix it up a bit before handing it off to me. That makes all the difference in the world as far as this type of combo is concerned. See if they didn't do that all you'd get when you sucked up through the straw would be soft serve. That's how it was when I was first introduced to the drink, and it was cool, but not great.


The only drawback to this drink was that it's best when firm, and the more it melts the less appetizing it gets. I guess melted soft serve isn't exactly as cool as the ice cream soup I used to make as a kid.


As you can see in the gross picture above, if it takes you more than 20 minutes to down one of these bad boys then you'll most likely be left with a watery, foamy mess of a drink that resembles that nasty homemade Coke float foam I was talking about above.

So a very similar drink, just not carbonated and a lot fruitier is the Sonic Creamslush. Basically it's the same deal as above except Sonic blends any flavor slush with soft serve to form a rich creamy, well creamslush.


I tried my damnedest to get a grape creamslush, for one because grape cream-sicles were my favorite and two because I haven't had a purple drink in any of these reviews. Well unfortunately they made this one heavy on the soft serve so a lot of the color was lost.


Whatever the color these are awesome frozen drinks. Whereas the Crush Frozen Orange Dream drink tried to taste like a cream-sicle but only ended up tasting suspiciously like orange flavored children's aspirin, all of the Sonic versions of the creamslush taste awesome. The only one I haven't tried is green apple, because creamy and sour seem like a bad combo, but I'll bet it's better than that Orange Dream piece of crap.

Once again, like the BK Floats, the drink is on a time limit. Because it's made with soft serve it's got a limited shelf life before it gets melt-y and gross. Luckily for the consumer (and unlucky for the environment) all sonic drinks are served in Styrofoam cups so they are pretty well insulated from even the hottest summer heat and therefore can last up to an hours before they get gross. If you can't finish your frozen treat in that amount of time though maybe you should just consider drinking water.

Well we've made it though eight, count 'em, eight frozen drink reviews. So far we've covered:

Slush Puppies

Burger King Frozen Cokes

Quik Trip Freezonis

Race Trak Frozen Cokes

Sonic Slushes

Popeye's Cajun Chiller Slushes

Crush Frozen Orange Dreams

Join us next time when we get exotic and cover Vietnamese slushes!

Okay, so now we're sort of getting to the end of the first year of Frozen Drinks 101. I've searched near and far for everything that even possibly resembles a Slurpee in the north Georgia area (which is why I won't be covering the various milkshakes and Wendy's Frosty-like drinks since these are not Slurpee like at all.) We're entering the home stretch and there are only a few articles left.

Today brings us to a very odd entry in this slush/Slurpee debacle. I'm not sure exactly what this concoction is called outside of the individual flavor names, but for sake of ease I'm going to call it the Frozen Misc. Float. I've only ever seen this machine at one place, this tiny generically named Food Mart that is part of a small shopping center and isn't connected to a gas station though that is basically what this is, the generic gas station food mart.

Before I get into the drink, I'd like to talk a little more about this mart. About a year ago, when I first started putting together the list of movies and candies my friend Kevin and I would be enjoying for our current Movie Night, I hit a stumbling block on a bunch of candies. See for some reason no stores, no grocery stores, specialty candy stores, mega Wal-Marts or Targets, or any gas stations for a 30 mile radius seemed to carry candy items that I knew were still being made. I had the hardest time finding Chunky Bars, Fruit Stripe Gum, and any Bubblicious, Hubba Bubba, or Bubble Yum gums that were anything other than Cotton Candy or Sour whatever flavor. Then one day on a whim I decided to check the odd little Food Mart, and low and behold, as I opened the door I knew I had found the Shangri-La of weird food stuff. Not only did they have everything I wanted on my candy list, but they also had Pepperoni Pizza flavored Combos with the cracker crust (very rare in Georgia), a weird new frozen drink, and a porn rack. No gas stations or related food marts in Georgia have porn anymore. I can think of like two. That was such a staple of my youth (not buying mind you, but just ogling the tops of the covers which were mostly hidden from view on the top shelf) and yet porn is nowhere to be found anymore.

Alas, back to the frozen drink at hand. Basically like I said above this is a Float related machine that has two flavors (one of which that apparently rotates.) When I first stumbled upon the machine it was IBC Root Beer Float and Crush Orange Dream flavors. Soon after the root beer flavor was replaced by another Crush Flavor, Strawberries 'n' Cream.


The first thing that sort of confounded me was the various brandings on the cups. As you can see in the below picture, there is a Slush Puppie logo, and since the drink has a very SP like consistency, I figured maybe it was just a major label of carbonated flavored Slush Puppies or something. The cups though, have like four other brandings on them that I've never heard of, and none of them are IBC or Crush, which leads me to believe that the cups may not match the drink machine. I mean this is a generic Food Mart and I wouldn't put it past them to just use whatever cup stock they found lying in the back alley after closing.


I had previously tried the Root Beer flavor and since it wasn't available I decided to go with the Orange Dream flavor for this review. Though I am hard pressed to say any frozen drink is the worst frozen drink ever, I think these would be a good contender, right up there with the Popeye's Chillers. Basically, like I said, these have the same consistency as a Slush Puppie though they are carbonated and are very creamy. I guess it's supposed to taste like a melted Orange Cream pop, but at the end of the day it just tastes like a bunch of orange flavored children's aspirin crushed up and mixed with milk and ice and that's pretty darn gross. I don't know what it is about frozen drinks and their medicinal taste. Maybe the taste scientists are Nyquil addicts or something.


I'm almost afraid to try the Strawberries 'n' Cream flavor, and at this point might just give these up as they haven't been good yet. The Root Beer was alright, but amazingly watered down and at the end of the day I'm just not a big fan of the "hardly and ice" slush. Once again the below photo is misleading as all the ice has gathered at the top.


Join me next time when I tackle other milk related Frozen Drinks from the BK Frozen Float to the Sonic Cream Slush.

I’ve been doing the positive thing for a couple of these Frozen Drink Reviews, so now it’s time to head back to negative land with one of the worst slush concoctions known to man, the Popeye’s Slush, which is part of their new Cajun Chillers variety of frozen drinks.


Now one of my main complaints with slush drinks is that you tend to suck out all of the syrup/liquid really quickly and then are left with a heaping lump of useless ice. Well on this front, the Popeye’s slush is the on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. There is hardly any ice in the damn things, though the below picture would make you think otherwise.


Basically there is about one fourth of a cup of ice in the drink and it’s apparently much lighter than the syrup because it all floats on top of the drink. When drinking it all you get is syrup and let me tell you it isn’t good. It’s really thick in consistency and tastes kinda chemically like almost gasoline-y. The after taste is god-awful and very lasting.

To top this off, the syrups don’t taste all that different between the flavor varieties. There’s a cherry, a strawberry, and fruit punch, and a hurricane punch (which is blue) and they all pretty much taste the same. When these were first offered they had a Lime slush that was awesome as far as flavor goes, but it was still the same thick consistency with little to no ice. I haven’t been able to finish one of these off yet and I think its time to stop trying, the one for this review being the last one I will purchase.

So let’s bust through some more Frozen Drink goodness on this the most stress-less day of the week. Today I’m going to take a look at the Sonic Slush from the 50’s styled fast food chain. We first got Sonics a couple few years ago after the boom of another 50’s styled chain of fast food places, Checkers. Whereas Checkers has the corner on the market of seriously cheap burgers and hot dogs (almost in a scary way), Sonic has a different approach, a seriously cheap and amazingly diverse drink selection.

Though they are known for their various Lime-Aids, it’s their slushes that I was interested in since I’m a frozen drink fanatic. What stuck me first is their selection. You can get a slush in like a gazillion flavors including cherry, orange, grape, green apple, watermelon, blue coconut (called Ocean Water for some weird reason), apple juice, cranberry juice, fresh lime, fresh strawberry, fresh lemon, and fresh lemon-strawberry. I’ve also heard rumors of a fabled vanilla slush. Well it’s not really fabled; I mean they offer vanilla as an add-in, in any drink though I’m not sure which base flavor other than coconut it would go good with.

Now being a slush it’s definitely in the Slush Puppie camp of frozen drinks and no where near a Slurpee or Icee, and even though I’m not a huge fan of the Slush Puppie, I am of the Sonic Slush. The reason is that where the Slush Puppie has huge ice crystals that are easy to suck the syrup off of, the Sonic slush has smaller ice crystals and therefore it stays more in solution. You can pretty much enjoy a good three quarters of the drink without it turning into a giant useless lump of ice.




Also, all the flavors are good. Seriously. This is an oddity in the frozen drink world. The cherry tastes like cherry candy not cough syrup. The orange is sufficiently orange-y without being too tart (think basic orange drink not soda.) The fresh slushes are awesome being made with real fruit as opposed to a chemically derived syrup, so the lemon is like homemade lemonade and the strawberries are awesomely strawberry-y and not just a bubble gum derivative.

Now being the option laden chain that they are, Sonic just compounds the possibilities by adding soft serve vanilla ice cream as yet another flavor option in the form of the Cream Slush. Basically you take any slush you love and have soft serve blended in to make a creamy dreamy concoction that is unmatched in the world of frozen beverages. It’s not like a milkshake or any of the various “Orange Cream�? flavored drinks out there. It’s like a cream-sicle (you know the pop-sicle with the vanilla ice cream in the middle) whipped into a drinkable drink. For however bad my grammar is, don’t let that get in the way of knowing just how good these things are.

Here are the previous entries in Frozen Drinks 101:

The Slush Puppie

The Burger King Frozen Coke

The Quik Trip Freezoni

The Race Trac Frozen Drink

I was going to do these in the order I originally encountered them, but thought that I should keep the two big gas mega stations drinks together, so today we're going to take a look at the Race Trac Frozen Drinks.

Now I haven't really been to any Race Trac's because they are just starting to pop up in my area, and I've been a big fan of Quik Trips for a while so it seemed sort of wrong. That is until I sampled one of their frozen drinks, and now I'm thinking of defecting.

First off, and like the QT Freezoni's, Race Trac has a very large selection of Frozen Drinks. There are 8 to choose from, from your standard Coke and cherry flavors to the more rare watermelon and lemonade. They also have four additional flavors that are in a different style, more like a Slush Puppie, but I decided to concentrate on the more Slurpee like drinks.


For the purpose of this review I decided to stick to the basic Coke flavor, though I have now tried them all. I didn't have high hopes as I've pretty much given up on finding anything that matches the almighty Slurpee (but I'm also beginning to wonder how much of that is psychosomatic?) As I began to dispense the drink my hopes rose as it came down pretty slow and thick. I had images of the all syrup Squishee from the Simpson's dancing in my head, and I expected the machine to start rattling and knocking at the sheer power it took to dispense a drink this thick. This was surely no foamee.

I'm being honest when I say that this is the closest to a Slurpee a frozen drink in Georgia has come. And with such an innocuous name like Frozen Drink, I fully expected it to be cough syrupy and horrible. The consistency was perfect from start to end, and it melted at just the right rate. I never had to reposition my straw and only had to shake it once or twice. The straw was also a surprise, being of the spoon ended straw variety, also a feature of the 7-11 Slurpee.




I left that Race Trac a very happy boy with high hopes at finally finding a Slurpee replacement (until I can raise the $159,000 it costs to open a 7-11 franchise.)


Though this is largely a positive review, I do have to be honest with myself. Since the damn Frozen Drink was so good I ended up going back five or six times since that first drink and to be perfectly honest, the consistency of the quality varies. A couple of the times the Coke flavor dispensed too thick, so thick that it was mostly ice. I'm still throwing my vote in that this is the best so far, but we'll see in the long run if the consistency of quality holds or not.

Also, as far as the other flavors are concerned, none of the others are really winners. The best of the bunch is watermelon, though it's a little on the tart side, which is strange considering it's watermelon flavored, the most non-tart of all fruit flavors. The cherry is hands down the winner for the most cough syrup like flavor ever in the history of frozen drink kind, and the rest are either too chemical tasting or too sweet. I'll take a good frozen Coke any day though, enough of my bitching.

So as promised, here is the next thrilling chapter in the textbook that should be a part of the curriculum of Frozen Drinks 101 (to be offered at any self respecting community college near you.)

Today's review: Quick Trip Freezoni's. I'm not sure how far reaching QT's are, and I'm too lazy right now to look it up on their website, but suffice it to say, they are the most popular gas mega-station in the metro Atlanta area. Sure we have Shell's, Texaco's, BP's, Citgo's, Chevron's, and the occasional Circle K, but QT's are the only 16-24 pump stations with a nice large (and clean) convenience store as well. They've always been the gas station convenience store of choice, if not just for their selection than for their mega-awesome fountain drink station. They always have both Pepsi and Coke products on tap, and there are usually about 20 to choose from. They also specialize in the Double Quart fountain drink at a measly $0.99. Can you drink 2 quarts of soda in a sitting? Probably not, but it's handy to have around during late night role-playing sessions, or for those not often enough Godzilla marathons on the Sci-Fi channel.

Well about a year and a half ago QT decided to get into the frozen drink business with their own concoction called the Freezoni. It's available in 4 to 6 flavors, depending on the setup, ranging from Orange Cream and Sour Apple to a suspiciously basic Cola. They also offer the innocuous White Cherry, which is typically both bland in color and flavor.


I was pretty excited about this new direction in refreshment opportunity as I have QT's within a mile of both work and home. Unfortunately, and once again because I was weaned on the 7-11 Slurpee, these Freezoni's just don't cut the mustard. For the sake of this review and my own taste buds, I decided to go with the only flavor that's even partially drink-able, Blue Raspberry. Now I've tried all the flavors and all of them are hideous. I'm not talking bland or kind of bad, I'm talking impossible to keep down.

First off, the general consistency of the drink is like too dry oatmeal. The syrup to ice ratio leans heavily towards the syrup, so much so that it's like drinking honey. There is so much, well flavor for lack of a better term, that it actually hurts a little so swallow it. Second, the flavor is so intense that there is an aftertaste for hours, most likely because it coats your throat like cough syrup and takes that long to clear. My frozen drink shouldn't be this combative, though because of this "thickness" it does form a pretty nice firm head.


What I've found is that you have to cut the consistency and flavor with something much crisper and well wet. When I'm in the mood for seriously intense frozen drink flavor and I feel brave enough to attempt a Freezoni, I've found that the best way to get through one is by mixing it in a 50 to 50 ratio with either Sprite or Mountain Dew from the tap. The Freezoni acts as the ice in a normal fountain drink and the soda cuts though the "so sweet it's bitter" flavor. Here's an example of what that looks like:


Though that may not seem appetizing, it's they only way it's drink-able. At the end of the day I'm not sure it's worth it for your basic adult who just wants a good frozen drink. For kids though, it's a whole 'nother story. When I went to the machine to get the pictures and a sample, there was a guy with four kids all screaming and clamoring for the damn things. So much so that it took twenty minutes to get my drink and pictures in peace. It just so happens that on this day the Cola flavor was on defrost and this seriously pissed off one of the kids who was like on this mission to get one a day for the whole summer or something, I couldn't get the entire story over the din of his whining. But then again, kids have a tendency to go towards stuff that the typical adult doesn't have the time or patience for. When I was young candy couldn't be too sour or sweet. I remember when the liquid lollipops in the toothpaste like packaging came out and I would suckle off that for hours even though it was just about the same consistency as the Freezoni's above.

Anyway, this unfortunately seems to be yet another bad frozen drink review. Trust, me though, keep attending this class and you will eventually see something positive, like maybe next time when I hit the next gas mega-station entry the Racetrack Frozen Drinks. Till then, do you homework and if you live by a 7-11, drink a Slurpee for me.

So here's another exciting chapter in the book of Frozen Drinks 101. Today I'm going to review the second leap in frozen drink technology I encountered when I moved to Georgia, the Burger King Frozen Coke and Frozen Fanta Cherry (formerly Frozen Minute Maid Cherry.) If you'll remember last time I reviewed the less than stellar Slush Puppie.

I was pretty excited when Burger King added their frozen sodas to their menu because from all appearances it was built on the same foundation (or at least a similar lot) as the 7-11 Slurpee, the king of frozen drinks in my humble opinion and the one by which all others are judged.

When I first tired one, I was a little bit disappointed. Whereas it was much more like a Slurpee, there was something that just wasn't right. It was too light and air-y. It almost seemed kind of watered down. Though I haven't started my own lexicon for frozen drink conditions, I'll take this opportunity to borrow from an already established one and say that they seemed to be Foamees. Though since they were also weak and since I'm not sure if this has a term I guess I'd also have to call them Jipees, which is the condition of being jipped on syrup.

I tried the other flavor at the time, the more classic Cherry but I didn't like it too much because it tasted a bit too much like cough syrup, which was how a lot of the Minute Maid brand sodas seemed to taste to me.

Well for this new review I hoped that maybe BK had changed their formula, as its been awhile since I'd been to one. The fiancee and I both picked up a basic medium Frozen Coke (that's the BK large equivalent, which just brings up another gripe I have with the various names of drink sizes that's for another time.)


Though I still like it a hell of a lot better than a Slush Puppie, it sadly hasn't changed much in the last 7 or so years. It's still light and sort of watered down.


This one in particular developed a nasty case of the Chunkees, which is to say that there were large air pockets in the dink that cause you to have to reposition your straw a number of times to get it in a better position.


On a separate occasion when I didn't have my camera handy I tried the new equivalent of the Cherry flavor, which is now under the Fanta brand. I was really disappointed in this one because not only does it suffer from the basic physical problems of the BK frozen Coke, but it's also the weakest tasting Cherry I've ever tasted. It was like the crystal light version of crystal light or something.

Anyway, stay tuned for the next installment of this education series when I discuss the Quick Trip version of a slushie.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Slurpees lately, or more accurately the lack of Slurpees in Georgia. I figured it’d be fun to cruise around to the various gas stations and fast food places to do small articles on the state of the frozen drink availability in rednecksville GA, so today the fiancée and I tooled around the city looking for Slush Puppies.

When I first moved to Georgia I was in serious Slurpee withdrawal as we’d already been 9 months removed from Florida and there were no 7-11’s in New Hampshire. I was hoping, since we were trekking down south again, that there would be a 7-11 somewhere, but no luck.

The first drink I came into contact with that was even close to a Slurpee was a Slush Puppie, but I was wary of the concoction because instead of simple pumping out the frozen bliss into a cup you had to combine the ice/liquid mixture with the flavoring syrup yourself. I had good reason to be wary too because when I finally got one I messed up the ratio of icy liquid to syrup and made one of the nastiest drinks ever. It was beyond sour to a point where it hurts to pucker your lips any further, and no amount of sugar packets swiped from the coffee section would sweeten it. As I’ve said before, I’m not the brightest boy and it took me a bit to realize that there were cryptic instructions on the cup that you mixed the drink in. Each cup had a “paw points�? number on it that was the number of syrup squirts you were supposed to add. This isn’t explained; at least it wasn’t on the machine I came into contact with.

The next ones were better, but it was never in the league of a Slurpee and here’s why:


The above picture is of one of the newer Slush Puppie machines that took us the better part of an evening to find (it was the 4th gas station we tried and the second Chevron). In the new format, you no longer do the drink mixing yourself. I assume some kid died from adding too much syrup and the company had to rethink their strategy.


So since I’ve never had a great love of the drink I picked up a small to try for old time’s sake. You can see the trademark Slush Puppie on the cup.


I chose the Blue Raspberry flavor purely because I liked the bluish tint to the drink and in the end it really didn’t matter because I don’t care for them. See the drink is made up of a very liquid-y mixture of sugar water and large (think sesame seed like in size) ice crystals with a sour syrup flavoring to add color and well flavor. To me this is just too wet for a frozen drink and because of this you can easily suck out all of the syrup and sugar water in like three sips. Every Slush Puppie ever has ended its poor excuse for a life as a giant chunk of flavorless ice that’s tossed into the nearest trashcan. The only way to sidestep this phenomenon is by drinking it without a lid. This can be very dangerous.

Before today the last time I had a Slush Puppie was about 7 years ago. I was particularly craving a frozen cherry drink and decided to drive 15 miles out of my way to get one from one of the last remaining Amaco gas stations in our area. I got the drink and made my way to Blockbuster to return a video. I was waiting at a red light sipping my drink sans lid for the full Slush Puppie experience when I was rear ended by a girl applying make-up in her car because she was late to work. Upon impact the entire contents of the drink exploded onto my windshield and dash scarring the bejesus out of both the girl who hit me and the guy infront of me that she knocked me into. When I stepped out of the car dripping with red Slush Puppie, they thought I was going to die.

So what’s the moral of the story kids? Leave the damn lid on and even though the drink will suffer, it’ll be less of a hassle to clean your car in the event of an accident.

Next time I’ll review the next frozen drink on my list, the Burger King Frozen Coke.