There was a time when walking into a corner store felt like opening a time capsule. Rows of glass bottles lined the cooler, some you’d never heard of, others that became permanent fixtures in your childhood memories. You didn’t think about caffeine content or sugar grams back then. You just grabbed what looked good, popped the cap, and let the fizz do the rest.
Today, the shelves are full of “zero sugar” and “energy” everything, but the real classics, the ones that defined generations, have quietly fizzed out of existence.
🪵 Root Beer: The Original American Flavor
Before colas and caffeine took over, root beer was king. Hires was the first commercially sold root beer in the late 1800s, setting the tone for every brand that followed. It had that old-time sassafras flavor, earthy, creamy, a touch of wintergreen, and somehow managed to taste like childhood and history all at once.
Then came the heavy hitters: A&W, Barq’s, Mug, Dad’s, IBC, and a dozen others that carried us through cookouts and floats at diners. But Hires, the oldest of them all, quietly disappeared, not because people stopped loving it, but because someone at corporate decided the shelf space was better used for something “modern.” A piece of Americana shelved for efficiency’s sake.
And somehow, that feels wrong. The oldest should still matter.
🍒 The Doctor Was Always In
If root beer was the taste of nostalgia, Dr Pepper was the taste of mystery. No one could ever quite define what it was, cherry? plum? something else? Whatever it was, it worked. And it inspired an entire wave of imitators: Mr. Pibb, Dr. Wells, Dr. Thunder, Dr. Bob, Dr. Perky, and a half dozen other “medical professionals” of the soda aisle.
But nothing quite matched that 23-flavor blend of the original. Dr Pepper was one of those sodas that transcended time. Whether in a frosty glass bottle or a 20 oz. plastic one, it somehow still felt like a throwback.
🍋 Lemon-Lime and the Slice That Slipped Away
If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you remember this rivalry: 7UP, Sprite, Sierra Mist, and Slice. Slice was different, real juice, bold citrus, and those colorful cans that practically glowed from the vending machine. You could find orange Slice, cherry Slice, even pineapple Slice if you were lucky.
Then, like so many good things, it vanished. Pepsi replaced it with Sierra Mist, then Mist Twst, and now Starry, none of which have managed to capture what made Slice so simple and good. The market didn’t ask for that change. The executives did.
🥤 Colas and the Battle of the Titans
Coke vs. Pepsi, the eternal rivalry. But beyond that, there was RC Cola, Double Cola, Tab, and the small-town heroes that got drowned out by marketing budgets.
Remember New Coke in the ’80s? That one still makes people laugh and cringe in equal measure. And yet, even as flavors came and went, cola remained the backbone of American soda culture. It was what you ordered at diners, poured over crushed ice at ball games, and sipped in glass bottles on front porches.
Some things don’t need reinventing, they just need remembering.
⚡️ Mountain Dew and the Citrus Revolution
Then there was the extreme side of soda, Mountain Dew, Mello Yello, Surge, and the wild neon wave of the ’90s. Mountain Dew turned soda into an identity. It wasn’t just something you drank; it was part of the culture.
But even here, you saw the corporate churn, new flavors every few months, old ones disappearing before you could find them again. The fun turned into a flavor carousel, and the original magic got buried under marketing slogans.
🧃 When Simplicity Meant Flavor
It’s funny, the sodas that made the biggest impact weren’t the ones that shouted the loudest. They were the ones that quietly defined moments.
A glass bottle of Hires with a slice of pizza.
An ice-cold Slice after mowing the lawn.
A Dr Pepper with a burger at the diner on a Friday night.
Those weren’t just drinks. They were snapshots of a time when flavor meant something, before the age of algorithms and artificial everything.
💭 Final Sip
There’s something beautiful about those forgotten brands. They remind us that good things don’t always need to change, and that nostalgia isn’t about living in the past; it’s about remembering what was worth keeping.
Maybe one day Hires will return to shelves, Slice will sparkle again, and we’ll remember what real soda used to taste like, not just in flavor, but in feeling.
Until then, there’s a Hires syrup bottle on Amazon and a SodaStream waiting for a little history to bubble back to life.
Troy P Zehnder 