Crush Lime

This is the second appearance of a Crush brand soda on this blog. You can see more about the history of Crush on my earlier entry here. 

I'm excited to try this bottle because not many lime flavored sodas are on the market. For some reason the bright green color is giving me a psychological impression that it will be thirst quenching, but we all know that's the role. It has a fair level of carbonation and a quaff similar to Green River. The flavor settles nicely on the tongue and comes close to that lime found in Green River, if only a tad shallower which really hits once it touches the back of my tongue. I find many fruit inspired sodas overly sugary but this is nice. I could drink this while hiking through a city or with a burger.

Nehi Grape

In 1905, a pharmacist named Claude Hatcher founded the Union Bottling Works in Columbus, Georgia. Claude's company focused primarily on the production of his sodas Chero-Cola and Royal Crown Ginger Ale. Due to the popularity of Chero-Cola, the company changed its name to the Chero-Cola Company in 1912. 

By 1924, Chero-Cola Co released a line of flavored sodas under the name Nehi. While the name conjures something of an asian origin to my mind, lore holds that it had a more folksy beginning. There is more than one story, but the two major myths basically boil down to calling the competition "knee-high" in how they compared to their drink. The Nehi line up at the time included orange, grape, peach, and root beer. By 1928, Nehi drinks were outselling Chero-Cola and so the company again changed names to the Nehi Corporation. 

Nehi suffered from the Great Depression like most other companies and operated at a loss in 1932. When Claude Hatcher died in 1933, the new president of the company became H.R. Mott. H.R. Mott led the development of a new cola beverage and borrowing a concept from Hatcher, named the drink Royal Crown Cola. Never ceasing to ride waves of popularity the Nehi Co. changed its name again in 1955 to the Royal Crown Company. The company was later brought under the umbrella of Snapple, which was later acquired by Cadbury Schweppes Inc. which spun it off to the control of by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group. Although Nehi can still be found today in some flavor variations, I doubt it is possible to still find it in glass bottles.

Perhaps Nehi is most well known from M*A*S*H, the television series which ran from 1972-1983 about an army surgical group in Korea. The character "Radar" O'Reilly was obsessed with Grape Nehi on the show. 

This bottle has a nearly non-existant level of carbonation, but a pleasant sugary, grape aroma. It has a sweet grape flavor like most modern American fruit-flavored sodas but isn't quite as overly rich as, say, a Welch's or the older Crush Grape which can sometimes make you sick by the end of a bottle.

Crush Cherry

It seems like all sodas with a fruit flavored line up started with orange, and Crush is no different. And just like Fanta, Crush now has a wide variety of flavors, though many are only available in specific regions. Crush began in 1916 as Ward's Orange Crush but is currently owned by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

This was my first taste of Crush Cherry. I found it at a small gas station during one of my forays into downtown for work. Any time I need to pull off the road for a quick stop or have a few minutes to kill I like to pop my head into small gas stations along the highway or in parts of town I don't often frequent because you never know what they are going to have in their refrigerators. I have found everything from obscure glass bottled sodas to my first tastes of Fanta Pineapple.  So if you're looking for something different I advise you to do the same.

I found Crush Cherry to have the scent of grenadine and an average level of carbonation, maybe even a bit on the low level for a plastic bottled soda. It has a very rich cherry flavoring that might even make some people sick after drinking too much. It's similar to drinking cherry flavored candy. I know I've used that analogy before but sometimes the sweetness of a beverage only lends itself to that kind of connection. All in all it's not a bad departure for someone that already enjoys cherry cola.