13 January 2011

Dr. Pepper ZERO / Jasmine Tea [by @NLi10]


Dr. Pepper, what's the worst that could happen? ©

Well? Let’s try getting rid of all the sugar. Dr. Pepper was all sold out in my canteen this week so I decided that I should try out its newer, younger brother.

A few years ago Coca Cola, in response to the popularity of Pepsi Max started their own rival 'diet but for men' range of soft drinks. I'm no marketing genius but where as extreme sports are happy to be associated with a 'Max' brand, few credible teams seem to be keen to brand themselves as a 'zero'. I'd not really pay much attention to this as I am firmly in the camp that believes that Pepsi is superior due to taste. This superiority is only between the mass produced fizzy, sugar-water drinks you understand - things like Fentimans Curiosity Cola are my drink of choice if available, but in the 2l bottles and vending machine world Pepsi is supreme.

Dr. Pepper is probably the closest in taste to Pepsi of all the Coke brands due to it's sweetness and vanilla overtones and essentially tastes like children's synthetic fruit sweets (but in a nice way) so I've recently taken to having it occasionally with work lunches. This Zero version keeps the artificial flavour and replaces the refined sugar with synthetic sweeteners. This isn't really a problem in some foods but here it just doesn't work. The sweetness of the drink it really what makes it work and unlike Pepsi Max (aka Mepsi) it's not been balanced out as well as it could have been.

It starts off fairly plain, has the nice Dr. P flavour in the middle then ends abruptly where the sugar kick should be. I think that I won’t buy this again.

Instead for a low calorie, unsweetened drink...


try a bottle of Jasmine Tea! It has 35 times as much energy as Dr.P0 does (69 KJ compared to 2KJ ) but this is still a third of regular Dr. Pepper.

It tastes like Jasmine Tea does, and is a heck of a lot less sweet than the Wong Lo Kat in a can does. The extra energy will easily be dissipated by walking around to look for this drink.

by @NLi10

2 comments:

S.Emerald said...

Tea always wins over soda.
I prefer cola over pepsi. Pepsi is good, but it's more fruit than vanilla. I can't say I've ever tried Dr.Pepper, though. I have tried the Jelly Belly version....

cinabar said...

Dr. Pepper is a bit of an aquired taste... I like the stuff, but it is a bit weird!