For most of my life, I’ve hated diet sodas. Sacharine/Sweet & Low tasted especially horrible, but Aspartame/Nutrasweet didn’t taste great, either. Diet Coke and other colas taste pretty foul to me, and I love Coke. Friends have told me that all I have to do is choke down the stuff daily for 3 months, then you can stomach it no problem. I’ll pass. However, a few diet sodas have managed to taste really close to their non-diet counterparts:
- Diet Minute Maid Orange The first diet soda I really enjoyed, very close to the original, but almost impossible to find in can form these days. I occasionally see it in 2-liter bottles.
- Diet Sunkist A very good substitute for Minute Maid Orange.
- Diet Sprite, aka Sprite Zero Nearly identical to the original. They are getting on the low carb bandwagon, rebranding it as “Zero”. Great for me, as it’s carried in 7-11 now, and I’m occasionally seeing in vending machines.
- Diet Cherry 7-Up What I like to call a Shirley Temple in a can. Not very manly, but tastes great. Note that I have not included Diet (regular) 7-up, that misses the mark.
- Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi This is pretty groundbreaking for me. I’ve long been a champion of Coke in the cola wars, and I’ve outright hated all diet colas (only Diet Rite came anywhere close, and still not close enough for me). Regular Coke meant less sweet, more carbonation; Pepsi tastes too flat. But in diet sodas, less sweet tastes wrong. Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi still needs the carbonation of Coke, but flavor wise it’s an achievement. Almost no diet taste. Can’t say the same for Diet Cherry Coke, which still has a ways to go. As for carbonation, if you’re just drinking a can, there isn’t much time for it to get any flatter. Worth it just for the caffeine, which none of the other sodas in the list have.
- Coca-Cola C2 This is great while it lasts. I think this tastes very close to regular Coke, and makes an excellent substitute. Unfortunately, it looks like both this and Pepsi Edge (never tried it) have lost millions for their companies. The problem is, they wanted to capitalize on the various low carb diets, which prescribe zero sugars, not just lower carbohydrates. Half isn’t close to zero. Still at the supermarket, but my local vending machine has been sold out of it for some time, and it doesn’t seem to be getting replenished.
Now, if we could just get more of these into vending machines, instead of the foul Diet Vanilla/Lemon/Lime Coke/Pepsi/Dr. Pepper permutations that currently fill them.