Favourite brands of soda pop!

[Hepcat]

Do you prefer fountain soda or canned or bottled?  I find fountain soda can either be the very best, or terrible, depending on how it is mixed and carbonated. I prefer a glass bottle over a can.

I still remember how good the fountain orange out of the vending machine was at the Loew's Theatre in downtown London in the early sixties but in general the quality of fountain pop is just too unreliable.

Nothing feels as good in one's hand as a ten ounce refillable pop bottle straight out of an ice cooler but I seem to have developed a preference for the taste of aluminum when drinking pop.

[CreepysFan]

   

Out of a glass bottle definitely, but cans are okay.  Don't care for fountain soda much, I think they must calibrate them to save syrup or something.  Fountain soda never tastes right.

[Hepcat]

Don't care for fountain soda much, I think they must calibrate them to save syrup or something.

I think they do precisely that, as if their profit margins aren't enormous enough already.

[Flower]

Looking at something else, I just came across Goose Island Sodas ...

http://www.gooseisland.com/pages/sodas/5.php





I'll have to add them to my 'list' .. 

[Scatter]

here's a related question for everyone:Do you prefer fountain soda or canned or bottled?  I find fountain soda can either be the very best, or terrible, depending on how it is mixed and carbonated. I prefer a glass bottle over a can.

Yup, you take your chances with a fountain, and DEFINITELY bottles over cans.

[Moonshadow]

Yup, you take your chances with a fountain, and DEFINITELY bottles over cans.

Once again, we are in agreement my brother!!

[Hepcat]

Soda pop was a significant part of my life when I was a kid. Pop in my neck of the woods was sold almost exclusively in ten ounce refillable bottles when I started grade school in 1958. The only exceptions were that Coca-Cola was also available in 6 1/2 ounce and 25 ounce bottles and Canada Dry was available in 25 ounce bottles. Cans and non-refillable bottles were not yet on the scene. Nor were there any diet brands, perish the thought!

Pop was found in coolers full of ice water at corner variety and mom-and-pop grocery stores. There was no joy on a hot summer's day like reaching into an ice water cooler and pulling out a bottle of pop still dripping icy cold water onto the floor as you carried it over to the clerk behind the counter!

By the time I was in grade one, my father would send me to the store once or twice a week to fetch a case of six bottles for the family. I would be sternly admonished not to pick any of the coloured stuff by which he meant cream soda, grape, orange or lemon-lime.

There were of course dozens of brands from which to choose:

Coca-Cola
Pepsi-Cola
Canada Dry
7-Up
Vernors
Snort*
John Collins*
Squirt*
Hires Root Beer
Orange Crush
Nesbitt's Orange
Wishing Well (many flavours)
Kist* (many flavours)
Stubby* (many flavours)

The brands with the * would disappear well before I finished grade school in 1965 but would be replaced by other brands such as Royal Crown Cola which was the first brand in those fabulous sixteen ounce bottles, Frostie Root Beer, Sprite, Teem, Mountain Dew, Wink, Fanta Orange, Dr. Pepper, etc.

I'd get my fill of the coloured stuff though at the community dances held perhaps a couple times a year at a banquet hall out in Nilestown. The adults always took the kids to these dances with them. I mean why pay for a babysitter? And these were the baby boom years so there were swarms of other kids with which to run in packs. After a meal of cabbage rolls, sausages, kugelis and corn, the music would begin and the adults would start their drinking - big time. So how could parents possibly begrudge their kids the fifteen cents for a pop (they gouged at the banquet hall!) when the parents themselves were drinking beer and liquor? And the pop sold at the banquet hall was Wishing Well -  ginger ale, root beer, orange, grape, lemon-lime and cream soda in all their splendour! Three or four ten ounce bottles of pop in one evening was about as much as any ten year old could handle.

But most impressive of all was the selection of brands at the annual Labatt's company picnic in Springbank Park. Hundreds and hundreds of bottles of pop and half-pint chocolate milks in long galvanized steel bins filled with ice water! Theoretically you were limited to two pops, two hot dogs and one (or two) ice cream cones. The ice cream was doled out from a pastel coloured wooden trailer in those old-fashioned tube shapes from which the paper would then be unwrapped after the ice cream tube was dropped into the cone. The thing is though you could always bum more pop and ice cream tickets from any available adult. Such fun! And such great memories now!

But best of all the ten cent price for a ten ounce bottle included a two cent deposit. I spent many a morning and afternoon hunting for pop bottles to cash in at the store to fuel my addictions to pop, potato chips, bubblegum cards and comic books, let me tell you that!  The deposit was raised to five cents in 1966.

The refillable bottles in which pop was sold left such a profound mark on my psyche that for the last twenty years I've been accumulating the ones I remember together with any other ones that catch my fancy because of the graphics. I keep all my bottles in a custom built kitchen pantry:

[Radioactive Rod Whitenack]

Hepcat,

I've never read a more beautiful ode to soda pop. I teared up a couple of times reading that post, and your soda pop bottle collection is amazing. There's a book in there an you need to write it. What touches us about the things we collect often isn't the artist or creator of the thing, but how it relates to our everyday lives. Thank you for that.

[Hepcat]

What touches us about the things we collect often isn't the artist or creator of the thing, but how it relates to our everyday lives.

Oh absolutely! The underlying reason I collect the artifacts of my youth is that they embody a mental snapshot of precisely where I was and how I felt when I first encountered those objects so many years ago! They represent not only a tie to the past, but are in a very real sense a vivid connection to the days of our youth which would otherwise be completely gone. With those collectibles, we never have to let go of those precious moments of our lives from years gone by!

Given the two cent deposit on the empties, the pop bottles also represent a very real tie to whatever else I was collecting them to buy at the time - whether football, hockey, baseball, Spook Stories or Civil War cards, Popsicles, or even the penny candies I loved the most e.g. Dubble Bubble or Bazooka gum, black balls, black babies, whatever!

[Scatter]

Hep, that was a great read!! Your sentiments on collectibles echo my own completely. It's not about value primarily, or even secondarily. It's about a touchstone to a different era and a tangible connection to one certain little MonsterKid that I used to know, and never want to let go of.

[Hepcat]

It's not about value primarily, or even secondarily. It's about a touchstone to a different era and a tangible connection to one certain little MonsterKid that I used to know, and never want to let go of.

That's a great way to put it! I agree entirely. It's all about the little kid that should still be there inside us all.

[Sean]

Hepcat,

What touches us about the things we collect often isn't the artist or creator of the thing, but how it relates to our everyday lives.

100% correct.

[Sean]

Hep, that was a great read!! Your sentiments on collectibles echo my own completely. It's not about value primarily, or even secondarily. It's about a touchstone to a different era and a tangible connection to one certain little MonsterKid that I used to know, and never want to let go of.

Also 100% correct.

[Hepcat]

I mentioned previously that the ten ounce refillable pop bottles cost a dime in my neck of the woods when I was a youngster. Sixteen ounce Royal Crown Cola bottles costing twelve cents were therefore an excellent value for a pop thirsty youngster when they appeared on the scene in 1961 or so. Coke and Pepsi brought out their own sixteen ouncers within a year or two but that was it. Only colas could be found in those wonderful big bottles in London. (By high school though sixteen ounce bottles of Pepsi were my beverage of choice.)

Imagine my delight in 1963 therefore when I found that the Faygo machine at the Marathon service station a half block from my uncle's house in Detroit was stocked with sixteen ounce pop bottles in maybe a dozen different exotic Faygo flavours such as Red Pop and Rock 'n Rye!



The machine did unfortunately demand fifteen cents for a bottle but I still hit it repeatedly on sunny summer days on our periodic visits to Detroit.

One of the reasons I still have fond memories of that machine is that I had also discovered a wonderful hobby shop a couple of blocks away on Seven Mile Road where over three summers I managed to score a Revell "Big Daddy" Roth Brother Rat Fink T-Shirt Iron-On, a Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist Laboratory, a 1/24 scale Monogram Ferrari 275P slot car kit and a 1/32 scale Monogram Ferrari 330 P/LM slot car kit. To add to those treasures my cousin bought me a Nash(?) wooden skateboard at Kmart or somewhere and I saw my first James Bond movie, "Goldfinger", with my sister. Good times then, good memories now!

[seed_murda]

Orange, grape and strawberry faygo, squirt, A&w rootbeer and Jones sodas are what gets stocked in my fridge.