Getting Wet

Knowledge for Thirst, an endlessly fascinating blog of beverage taste tests, reviews everything wet. They sort out Mountain Dew Baja Blast:

Mountain Dew is some crazy motherfuckers. Why would you create a ridiculously good soda and then basically hide it from the general public? They are really making a concerted effort towards market saturation these days, to mixed results. Mountain LiveWire is pretty terrible, I feel. Code Red is just OK. But Mountain Dew Baja Blast is freaking amazing and has shot to the top of my favorite sodas list. So why is their best flavor only available at Taco Bell? That is some wacked-out shit that I cannot wrap my brain around at the moment. I would be buying this stuff by the gallon if it was available at the local 5 and 10. But who’s going to trip over themselves in a mad dash to Taco Bell just to try it? The whole thing just don’t make no sense.

The party line, flavor-wise, is that this is Mountain Dew with a bit of a tropical lime twist. Which I guess I get, aside from my uncertainty about what makes a lime tropical. But the beverage itself is a lovely fluorescent blue, and it totally fills the Pepsi Blue-shaped hole in my heart. I wish I could try them side by side to compare, but since all you punks failed to get my back on the Pepsi Blue tip, it’s no longer available. Thanks for that. But whatever, it’s fine, since Baja Blast is here now. Although wait, Mountain Dew is owned by Pepsi, so what are the chances that this is all just a rebranding strategy? Oh my goodness I am totally smart. That’s why it reminds me so much of Pepsi Blue, that‘s exactly what it is. Do you feel the magic of the moment we are sharing right now or what. I knew that Pepsi Blue and I were destined to be together and even 100 million idiots voting with their wallets for Diet Cherry Pepsi Vanilla with Lemon (*rolls eyes*) could not keep us apart.

Except the problem is that I’m still left feeling totally skeevy driving through the Taco Bell a few times a week, just to get a large soda. That’s some junkie-level shit right there. You can’t spend that much time at Taco Bell each week and still manage to meet your own stare in the mirror. You can’t. I am telling you I been there, and you can’t. I’m willing to admit that the just-out-of-reach-ness of Baja Blast informs the appeal and increases what we in the industry call “cravitude,” but I can’t believe for a second that that was anything but an unforeseen by-product of the marketing plan. Come on. Have you ever known marketing executives to be anything but lazy? Not if you’re honest, and I want you to be honest. I mean they were too lazy to invent a new flavor, as we established above.