The Frugal Gourmand

Pepsi to the Max

Pepsi recently introduced a new diet cola, Diet Pepsi Max (the official website is here, although it looks pretty obnoxious). The target market, I guess, is people who want more caffeine than normal colas/diet colas provide, but aren't willing to endure the sugar of Mountain Dew or regular energy drinks to get it. Diet Pepsi Max contains 69 mg of caffeine per 12 fl oz can. Compare that to 34 in Coke, 38 in Pepsi, and even only 55 in Mountain Dew. It's still short of Jolt Cola's 71.2, but Jolt doesn't have a diet alternative that I'm aware of and is pretty hard to find these days. Coffee still has significantly more caffeine (about 276 mg in 12 ounces), but as far as pop goes, Diet Pepsi Max has pretty much made itself the king. (Vault has slightly more caffeine, and there is a zero-calorie version, but I imagine some people just prefer cola to the Dew-like citrusy variants.)

Diet Pepsi Max also contains some panax ginseng extract, which gives it a slightly different flavor than most colas. In my experience, ginseng actually adds quite a bit to cola, and in fact, the herby flavor added by the ginseng does a lot to cancel out the mineral taste of the aspartame. (It's certainly not gone altogether, but since I drink a fair amount of Diet Coke at work, I've gotten used to it.) Overall, Diet Pepsi Max is probably one of the best-tasting diet sodas ever produced. The high caffeine content is a bonus (if you like that sort of thing), but I feel like this product would do fairly well even without it (though I'll grant that without the caffeine boost, it probably wouldn't exist).

Historically I haven't cared for Pepsi as much as Coke, but I probably prefer many of Pepsi's ancillary products to their Coke alternatives - Dew to Vault, Mug to Barq's (not that I love Mug, but I've come to find Barq's overpoweringly undrinkable on its own), Gatorade to Powerade, Aquafina to Dasani. (Coke wins with Sprite over Sierra Mist, however.) This is looking like another winner for Pepsi at the fringes of the cola wars, even if the main battle will continue to elude them.

Rating as soda: 6/10
Rating as diet: 9.5/10

posted by Flax @ 1:38 PM