I'm a Type 2 diabetic (it runs in both lines of the family...I'm the lucky one thus in my nuclear fam), and I definitely love a good soda (to a fault). Hence, low/no-sugar soda beverages will tend to get my attention when I can find them. Below are samples photos from various lines (though the Cascade photo is closest to a complete-line representation), with a few comments on how they strike me. I will drink perhaps too much of all of them.
Polar has very impressive lines of seltzers, and flavors I enjoy in liter and 2L bottles such as Diet Orange Dry (an orange-juice flavored soda) and a similarly good diet half-and-half mixture, though their good cream soda and other "standard" soda flavors are oddly hard to find around the Philadelphia area of late. Their "Frost" line of juice-flavored beverages has one of the best sets of flavors (vying with Bing), with a possible disadvantage for some of having caffeine in the mix.Sparkling Ice might just be the oldest of these lines...at least, it was the first I encountered, with a delightful low-sugar lemonade/tea canned beverage I've not seen in years, about thirty years in fact. Back when we might be more afraid of the possible link between Alzheimer's and aluminum cans than the effects of microplastic body-pollution and plastic bottles. Sparkling, like Cascade, doesn't add caffeine to their "Ice" line.
Cascade has perhaps the heaviest syrup to seltzer presence of these lines in my experience, which works for some flavors better than others. This photo array includes a number flavors I've not yet seen in my local markets...though given that I can find these in Acme supermarkets, these days part of the same conglomerate that owns Safeway and a number of the major California "legacy" chains, they might have some availability in the widest array of grocers nearby any readers this post gets, at least in the US.
While the Bings are the smallest line, they might just have the highest "batting average" for me, in terms of how much I like all the flavors I've tried...but I'm a sucker for the oddly (to me) very short-lived set of apple soda flavors over the decades we've seen, and their apple-juice flavored entry is perhaps the best that isn't simply (more expensive) carbonated cider. Mildly caffeinated, like the Polar Frost line.
And other flavors that I will overindulge in include Dr. Brown's and other diet cream sodas (surprisingly few carried by local markets of late), the Polar-affiliated Gosling's Diet Ginger Beer and Vernor's Diet Ginger Soda...but nearly everyone who makes a diet ginger beer does a decent job of it, but usually, unlike Gosling's and Vernor's, at an elevated price. And diet birch beers...seems almost as if these are an northeastern US thing exclusively, a more or less wintergreen-flavored soda, with some small differences between New England clear "white" birch beers and mid-Atlantic "red" birch beers...as with Mackintosh apples, something I missed in my five years in Hawaii. While in the DC area, guarana soda seemed more widespread than a bit farther north...though it took till moving to the Philadelphia suburbs to find the slightly expensive Cheerwine...which reminds me of Dr. Pepper with the cola flavor absent.
I don't approve of "seasonal flavors"--I want a good flavor year-round, thanks--but Polar particularly likes to experiment thus, and their best winter flavor this year is Spiced Pear Cider...the Wegman's Supermarket chain, which alas dumped its store-brand soda flavors this past year (a good, economical diet grapefruit soda among them...though they retained their diet "half-and-half" mixer, rather similar and as good), has their (not quite as good but even less expensive) Cranberry Apple seltzer back out this winter.
Any soft drinks that you might enjoy, even if not as borderline-addicted to as I am to some of these? I am interested in what flavors I might be missing...
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