Unavailable sodas you have known and loved

Dee, re: Delaware Punch -- I have a feeling it's popular/available in New Orleans for alcohol-related reasons. Delaware Punch + two kinds of rum comes a lot closer to tasting like a hurricane than Hawaiian Punch or Kool Aid do. (Although I always made them with Kool Aid Tropical Punch, Parrot Bay, and Cap'n Morgan's.)

My favorites have always been Squirt and Moxie. Neither is particularly easy to come by, but not impossible.

I was just thinking about New York Seltzers not long ago. When I lived in Riverside, CA back in '86/7ish, I remember they were rather hip. Maybe?

i long for Skeleteen Sodas, which aren't available around here anymore.

It really is. It's supposedly a "bitter apertif" in Italy, but it's absolutely foul.

If you absolutely must give into temptation, you can sample this (and a great many other rare sodas) at the end of the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta - with the price of admission you get all you can drink at the end of the tour, where there are wicked fountains that arc soda into your cup from ten feet away. They also have a domestic variants fountain with rarer American flavors (mostly odd Fantas and whatnot) and then an international room with crazy sodas you'd never dream of. Beverly is one of them. In any case, it's a giant $15 million ad for Coke, but perhaps worth one visit nonetheless.

SunDrop
Vernor's Cream Soda

Imagine the colors and flavor range.

http://www.novamex.com/images/jarritos.jpg

The Pineapple flavor is the best.

Also, Sioux City Sarsparilla.
Can't get it here.

First off, I had Beverly. It was abyssmal.

>>cherokee red pop. probably partially discontinued due to racial insensitivity - picture of big indian chief on bottle. <<

I found a can of it randomly at a RC Cola (!) machine in Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania this past year. Its still being bottled under the banner of Cadbury/Schweps (sp?).

>>Also Canada Dry Cranberry Ginger Ale.<<

Polar Beverages in New England makes a version I think is actually superior. Really solid stuff.

Apparently, for those in the new england area, there's an independant bottler of soda in New Britain, CT whom I'm gonna have to check out. Since he uses pure sugar, I'll go ahead and make the suggestion to visit (Adams Soda, I think) anyhow.

-
Alan

squirt seems to be hard to find around my parts (boston).

Aaaaaaaaanyway... the other sodas I miss:
• Original New York Seltzer: a treasure of my childhood
• Apple Slice (though the Mexican soda Sidral Mundet is a damn fine substitution)
• Clearly Canadian and its whole family of beverages, which seem to have left the state of Arkansas. Favorites were blackberry, strawberry and peach, but I also remember more distinctive flavors like loganberry, the clear iced tea, and diet Key lime. They made Orbitz (but no longer, I guess), and still produce and distribute a recent object of affection — Trè Limone, a terrific little dry ginger and lemon soda I last saw on a "Will & Grace" rerun.
• Pepsi Clear, the official drink of the Rose Bud Rambler Band 1993 Presidential Inauguration Performance Field Trip. Good times.
• Canada Dry Cranberry Ginger Ale, which was a close second to the Pepsi Clear.
• Schweppes Raspberry Ginger Ale, which I once could find by the liter bottle. Sadly, all good things must come to an end.
• Cappio (yes I know it's not a soda, but still...), which set the stage in my senior year of high school for a coffee addiction later in life.

Other drinks...
• OK: I seem to remember this as New Coke with Sunkist added. Not a fan of either. Can you imagine how I felt about them mixed?
• Cheerwine: I don't think I got to try this, but last I saw, it floated around some Restoration Hardware store locations.
• NuGrape & Welch's Grape: Had both of these growing up, and can still find Welch's, but will always feel they are best served over vanilla ice cream.
• Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda: Saw it TODAY! It's at Cordell's Delicatessen in Little Rock. And I can't imagine what in the world it must taste like.

Dr Brown's Cel-Ray is great stuff -- like Sprite or 7-Up, but with celery instead of citrus, which isn't as nuts as it sounds. It's a very light taste, which disappoints a lot of people trying it for the first time. (I grew up with it, so it's never had the novelty value for me.) Ideal with a pastrami sandwich on rye with whole-grain mustard.

Cheerwine's great, too! A Carolina soda. More or less cherry, just not the same cherry flavoring as most cherry sodas (it predates the third-party development of flavoring agents which resulted in the taste-sameness of a lot of regional or storebrand sodas).

I gotta big up WINK. http://www.one-mans-junk.com/sodacanlibrary/Canada%20Dry3/Wink9a10.jpg
Although to this day I had no idea it was known as a 'Grapefruit beverage'. It never said that on the bottles I remember. I found an old Wink ad on Google which had the tagline: "The sassy one from Canada!". haha

B-b-but surely that's you Rob!! ;-)