I Tried 21 Flavors of Mountain Dew For Some Reason.

I read this article partially to see how many of them I had consumed. There is a surprising number of them now. I laughed so hard throughout this article. It was a treat to read.

These are my favorite parts that hit me as the funniest.

Voltage (blue raspberry plus ginseng) – There is no such thing as a blue raspberry. The idea of making raspberry flavors blue started in 1958 as a way of differentiating it from other red flavors. None of this matters, because voltage doesn’t taste like raspberries. It does, however, taste blue. Like a melted rocket pop. My husband noted it had a faint amaro flavor, because he is lying to himself.

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Major Melon (watermelon) – In the swirling abyss of garbage drinks, we found rock bottom. It tasted like liquified watermelon Bubble Yum. The mascot is a watermelon that does war crimes.

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Overdrive (citrus punch) – Look, does it even matter what I say here? Do you actually care what Overdrive tastes like? No. It tastes like every single other Mtn Dew, and it tastes like nothing.

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Thrashed Apple (green apple) – The flavor of this drink is fleeting and crisp, like a fall day. At least, I thought it was, until everyone else at the table told me I had Mtn Dew-induced scurvy. It tasted like carbonated apple cider. This was the clear winner for me, and by winner, I mean “It doesn’t make me want to cry.”

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Explaining why I embarked on a quest to consume as many different flavors of Mountain Dew as possible is not an easy task.

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As my husband put it, “It’s like someone made the diet in Diet Coke into a drink.” I eventually found the regular variant of Spark, which tasted like a wet pixie stick

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Code Red (cherry) – Have you ever eaten a maraschino cherry and thought, “I want to drink the syrup that this was floating in”? Of course you haven’t. You’re not a toddler.

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LiveWire (orange) – Am I losing my mind? Is LiveWire not that sweet? (No, it has 1.5 times the amount of sugar an adult human should consume in a day.) Is my body merely growing accustomed to the Dew, the way we do to heat, to pain, to the loneliness of existence?

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They are almost all equally bad, and half of them are the same drink. It is an egalitarian system of suckiness, wherein even the best variant of Mtn Dew is still just Mtn Dew. Also, “Mtn” isn’t even how you abbreviate the word “mountain.”

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What followed was a journey deep into beverage purgatory, a strange sort of limbo where things taste like nothing but sugar, occasionally like bubble gum, and invariably like defeat. The focus groups for these products consisted of a cardboard cut out of Randy “Macho-Man” Savage and a beer koozie that says “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Titties”.

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Baja Blast (tropical lime) – Have you ever wanted to taste something the same color as Windex, but allegedly less likely to make you go blind? This tastes like bland fruit punch and is somehow vaguely vegetal.

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Legend (blackberry citrus) – Buffalo Wild Wings exclusive. It is a strange thing to find yourself in a Buffalo Wild Wings for the first time, and the reason you are there is for Mtn Dew, something which you do not actually enjoy. It causes you to take stock of your life as you stare into the inky depths of this drink. Others described the taste as “a melted popsicle”, “a less sweet Blue Gatorade”, and “a depressed grape.” It tastes like Berry Bash, and Purple Thunder. Either it’s having an existential crisis, or I am.

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White Out (citrus) – This is apparently the white whale of all Mtn Dew flavors, nearly impossible to find, and another item that I got from a stranger online (sorry, Mom!). I could no longer tell you what I was tasting, perhaps in part because I’d decided to use flaming hot Cheetos as a palette cleanser between sips. (My body is a decaying temple.) Everyone else said that this iteration of Mtn Dew was inoffensive, and not unlike Squirt, though with less of a overt grapefruit taste. I don’t know. Honestly, does it matter? Does anything matter?

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Baja Flash (pineapple coconut) – Discontinued. In every project, there is a point where things get so bad, they become a truly spectacular kind of awful, and that is what Baja Flash is. It smells like sunscreen, like the liquid hedonism of spring break. There is something illicit about drinking it, like eating an entire tube of Chapstick. “This is rad,” I whisper, cackling, as I take another sip.