🌊

you know i felt very similarly, having quite enjoyed the original drink's flavor when my job stocked it over 20 years ago. there was something vaguely ineffable about it, i thought. a real memorable soft drink, and i'm a person who became a strict water-only drinker not many years after. it takes a lot for a soda or whatever to pull me in.

so when Bawls re-entered my consciousness a few months ago i ordered one of their variety packs which have six different flavors, most of which i hadn't tried before. and it was largely disappointing! argh.

first the standard blue bottle didn't taste half as intriguing as i remembered. a change in me, or a change in formulation? i suspect both. this is just another corn syrup soda now. in fact, it tastes indistinguishable from a typical cream soda. i don't recall thinking of its flavor like that in the past, else i wouldn't have seen any allure in revisiting it.

meanwhile the newer varieties are just undistinguished attempts at root beer, cherry, orange, ginger ale, and cherry cola. all too corn syrupy, none with any identifiable "Bawls"-ish flavor. it's like buying the generic soda brand.

the final cherry on top of the sad sundae was that every variety except ginger ale was very flat-seeming, very few bubbles. no idea if that's normal or the stock was old? just made it more like drinking straight sugar-water.

in conclusion i don't know the root cause here, but aside from the still-lovely bottles Bawls seems to be nothing special now. it might be best to just enjoy the nice memories?

...though on the other hand i'd be very interested to hear your subjective findings.

(one other funny detail i discovered is that Bawls' level of caffeine is minuscule compared to that of modern "energy drinks," to the point where it's odd to even consider it in the energy drink category. pour one out for a pioneer...)