> > > Ditto. I quite dislike soda drinks in general, but I feel free to sample those products that have an almost iconic stature in western culture. For me to be honest with myself, Mountain Dew actually doesn't taste bad, which scares the heck outta me because I certainly don't like its colour.
> >
> > I do have a problem with the color. It's just... wrong.
>
> I started thinking about this and the implications just go on and on. Would I be right in saying the natural colour for soda type drinks is either clear, or dark brown? Anything else seems weird. Things like red (raspberry) fizzy drinks, green (lime) fizzy drinks etc may or may not be to your taste, but either way, the colour doesn't seem "normal" for a soda.

Tradition, I guess. First there were clear summer soft drinks based on citrus/lemonade. Then Dr. Pepper was invented, with its brown colour due to caramel and phosphoric acid (phosphoric is a think syrupy brown). Dr.P was one of the first blended "fantasy" flavours, meaning that you couldn't quite identify the individual components of the flavour it had. The success of Dr.P was so overwhelming that Coke and Pepsi soon followed in rapid succession.

Food colouring as an additive to soft drinks came later, of course.


> I then thought, well, when you think about it, dark brown is a most unpleasant colour for anything edible. But we have coffee, tea, chocolate in all its forms, the list goes on. Strange.

Natural products tend to contain complex oils and sugars and carbohydrates which, when exposed to oxygen, well...they go brown.


> Brunnen-"what was that motto about taking weirdness and irrelevance to new heights?"G

Hey, that's right... Sam, will you be adding Erica's "Motto: We take oddness and irrelevence to new heights" to the Motto Contest page? That's a handy one. And how about the combined effort for Howard/Brunnen-G's motto: "A hodge podge of drivel"?

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