Saturday, November 6, 2010

A Unique Dr. Pepper Experience

This will be a bit more writing intensive because I don't really have any cool pictures that would make sense so sorry about that.

So, I've been at theater for the past week for "tech week". For those that do not know, in a theater the week before the play is called "tech week", that is the time when everyone in the whole theater, actors and technical crew stay until 9 PM everyday after school. That's the reason I haven't posted but you know, no excuses, no regrets. Anyways so we always get fed right after school but that's it. Right around 8 last night Jason and I were on the sound board and we got pretty hungry. We both asked Eitan to go out and grab some McDonald's for us. We both ordered a Big Mac, Fries and a Dr. Pepper.

I was having my meal and then I sipped the Dr. Pepper but it wasn't quite right. To explain why it was "off" and tasted different from canned Dr. Pepper you need to understand how a soda machine works. When you are dispensing the soda into a cup you can see a stream of clear liquid and a stream of colored liquid. The clear is basically just bubbly water and the colored is just syrup. So as you can imagine, too much syrup and you get a very sweet soda, too much water and you get a watery soda. Most people have probably experienced the latter because places that are really cheap will actually turn down how much syrup is dispensed since the syrup is much much more expensive that the carbonated water.

This soda that I had from McDonald's was basically a normal Dr. Pepper but with way too much syrup. Even Jason noticed it and pointed it out. What the most noticeable change was is not the flavor but the feeling in the mouth. When I had finished a sip my mouth would have some saliva and when I swallowed that it actually tasted like Dr. Pepper. Not something like watered down Dr. Pepper but exactly Dr. Pepper. This was due to the large amount of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the soda. The High Fructose Corn Syrup basically sticks the the roof of your mouth. On a bottle of Boylan Root Beer they said that the reason they use sugar instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup is that is leaves a sticky feeling in the mouth. I definitely felt that but I actually really liked it.

I ended up liking the Dr. Pepper quite a bit and it made me wonder if a fast food restaurant could get well known for having sweeter, better tasting sodas than the other ones ad thus sell more. Make it almost a destination "come taste the super Coke!" It would be interesting, there is already about a 10,000% profit on soda sold in Fast Food places so upping the syrup would not hurt you too much and it could really increase sales if you advertise and market it right.

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