The bottled beverage trade has had a rich history in Hawaii with several hundred companies having come and gone between the 1860's to the present. In 2003, husband and wife team Karen and Jason Campbell opened Waialua Soda Works and began making sodas inspired by Hawaiian ingredients. The Hawaiian islands are well known for pineapple crops and appropriately the first offering from this company was a pineapple soda. They now have four other flavors including root beer, mango, vanilla cream and lilikoi.
I like pineapple juice at breakfast and I love a good pineapple soda on a warm day. Today it was sunny and began to feel more like summer again as I drove on the highway with my windows down and the temperature passed 80˚ for the first time in ages, so it's a fitting day to add this one.
This bottle has a sugar-sweet scent and a light color, no neon yellow for these folks. There's a great balance of carbonation in this drink as it fizzes up a little when tipped back. It's deliciously sweet but very tasty and they really hit the pineapple flavor well with a ohh-so-tiny creamy finish. As I savor this soda I can clearly imagine laying on a remote Hawaiian beach sipping away at it. I'll be looking for their other flavors in the future and if you happen to find a bottle on vacation in the islands I'd recommend an ice cold bottle of this.
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