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I'm very fond of soda (not "pop", as Midwesterners, southerners, or Canadians might call it. It's "soda" or "carbonated beverage" in my book). I'm particularly fond of Coke®, ginger beer (the stuff that burns as it goes down), root beer, birch beer, and (the focus of this post) grape soda|grape or orange soda. The last two behave in a rather unusual fashion though: unlike the other flavours, their quality of taste is inversely proportionate to the apparent quality of the beverage.

The primary characteristics I look for in a soda are:

1. carbonation
2. sweetness
3. caffeine content
4. flavour

I've found the best beverages are a good balance of the first three, with each drink defined by the fourth trait. Too much of any one trait can ruin a beverage and overpower any of the other traits. It's refreshing, though, to occasionally focus on one characteristic when selecting a beverage: in the case of Mountain Dew (or the tastier Code Red), the focus is on the third trait. The same applies with Red Bull, although other chemicals are used to function in conjunction with the caffeine to enhance the "energy" nature of the beverage.

In the case of orange or grape soda, the best drinks come when the first is fairly medium, the second is maximized, and there's a good selection on the fourth. If a grape soda is not sweet enough, it ends up becoming much too tart. Too much carbonation overpowers the flavour, and too little makes it taste too much like slightly-fermented grape juice.

The problem arises in these two traits: companies that produce more "expensive" beverages try and deviate from the established "fairly sweet with medium carbonation" paradigm that tends to turn out the best. The data are summarized below (with caffeine left out as none had any):

Note: "corp" means "corporate", "store" means the given beverage is a store brand.

• Polar grape (corp): medium carbonation, mild sweetness: too tart, not very good
• Wegman's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a very "hard candy" flavour
• Shaw's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a bit more tart than Wegman's
• Bread & Circus grape(expensive store): mild carbonation, strong sweetness: light grape flavour, much too tart
• Shasta grape (cheap corp): mild/medium carbonation medium/strong sweetness: a good grape flavour, but a bit light on the other two traits

From the data, you can see that the best grape sodas tend to be the "store" or "cheap corp" sodas. One could hypothesize that the cheaper or more generic the grape soda brand, the better overall it becomes. Thus, the actual beverage quality is inversely-proportional to the "cost" or apparent quality of the beverage. This is a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon that is not often found in other beverage categories.

This was tested with orange soda as well, with the results being that cheap store brands were far better than Coke or Pepsi's answer to the orange soda demand. (especially the Minute Maid brand version).

The question arises: why? I postulate that it's a result of the more expensive brands trying to make the drink seem less "candy"-like and more like their more popular beverages. That, unfortunately, is against the nature of these two flavours. Overall, though, it's not that big a deal as the better sodas end up being cheaper and can therefore be bought in much greater bulk: ready for any long coding sessions.