The Frugal Gourmand

It's the most wonderful time of the year

The holiday season almost inevitably means new soda varieties, and this year got kicked off in pretty fine style with Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash, immediately one of the better forays into the "cram a flavor that seems reasonable into an existing soda and see what happens" school of thought that has dominated beverage production for the past five years or so.

This is not to say that Cranberry Splash is perfect, of course. Most fruit-flavored sodas and candies succeed not because they taste so much like their respective fruits but because they don't; fruit, while good in most cases, just doesn't tend to have that outrageous, popping flavor that manufacturers of sugary treats are looking for. Consider flavors like grape (hugely exaggerated), banana (nothing like bananas usually, not that that's bad), or watermelon (seems to have been created completely out of whole cloth).

The result of this method is that there are some fruit flavors that just don't translate. Either they're too close to the original, or the original is such that anything that falls too far from the tree isn't going to be even slightly recognizable. The cranberry in Cranberry Splash is kind of like that. It's certainly recognizable as cranberry - and you can see why they had to keep it close, because if you moved any farther it could be any one of several berries easily - but that's sort of the problem. Cranberries, on their own, don't really have a ton of flavor; they're just sort of tart and that's it. They get a distinct taste about them when heavily sugared, but it really only works in juice and sauce form; while I liked the cranberry blends that Jolly Rancher produced for a while, their inability to succeed in the national market suggests that not many others did (and anyway those usually tasted more like the flavor with which the cranberries were mixing in any given candy).

What I'm saying here is that the cranberry flavor, while certainly not bad, gets tiresome after a while. It reminds me a bit of Pepsi Holiday Spice, or rather the experience of drinking it - you first think "Well that's not bad," then "I'm glad someone made this because I don't know that I would have thought of it," and finally, after finishing the bottle, "Dear Lord, I can't believe I just drank that whole thing. I feel sick." Maybe I've just lost my ability to kill a 20-ouncer in five minutes, as though that were somehow a bad thing.

I'm also not entirely convinced that lemon-lime was the best medium into which to introduce cranberry; Canada Dry makes a seasonal cranberry ginger ale which seems more reasonable, and which I may have to try and find soon for comparison's sake. At least no one made the mistake of going diet on us (there may be a diet variety, but there isn't only a diet variety); I remember thinking during the Jones Holiday Soda fiasco last year that I would drink a cranberry soda marketed year-round as long as it had sugar and not Splenda. This is close to that, but the hints of lemon-lime lurking in the background didn't help the eventual queasiness and I'm no longer convinced that cranberry as a flavor can hold up its own soda, though the fault may lie as much or more with Sierra Mist's iteration of the flavor as with the actual fruit itself.

Ultimately I'd recommend Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash as a change of pace, but I'd be careful not to drink too much of it in one sitting. Three stars out of five, if I were rating this like a movie. Which apparently I am.

posted by Flax @ 7:46 PM