My Form Letter Meets Your Form Letter and "Fuck" is Involved but not in a Sexy Way

Dear Tim,

Thank you for contacting us at Pepsi-Cola regarding the availability of Caffeine Free Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew Throwback .

I am so sorry you are having a problem locating this product. We do operate under a franchise bottler system and as such, bottlers have the freedom to decide which product flavors and package sizes they will offer. For this reason, local availability can vary across the country.

To locate stores in your local area that might sell our products, (within a 50 mile radius), please log on to www.pepsiproductfacts.com. Simply click on the STORE LOCATOR tab in the upper right hand corner of the page, select the product you're trying to find, enter your zip code, and you'll see a list of the chain grocery stores and chain pharmacies closest to you that have sold the product in the last 30 days. This information is generated by stores that use computer scanning equipment in their check-out process.

If you would like additional assistance, please call our Consumer Relations department at 1 (800) 433-2652 Monday – Friday, 9am-6pm EST. When calling, please refer to the file number located at the bottom of this email.

Thanks again for contacting us.


Tina
Consumer Relations Representative

012910540A

{\i DID YOU KNOW ... *** All of Pepsi-Cola’s plastic soft-drink bottles contain an average of 10% recycled plastic, and the average aluminum can contains 40% to 50% recycled aluminum. ***}

Dear Pepsico,

You're a bunch of jerks. You can't leave important decisions like this up the bottlers, they're idiots. A fucking bottler can't make a same tasting drink two weeks in a row, yet you trust them to know what the market is? Did no one tell the idiot bottlers that Mountain Dew Throwback would sell out of my local store within a day? Have you ever TRIED Caffeine Free Mountain Dew in the NYC area?

No. Seriously, you should fix this.

Hugs,

me

Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel

That can looks very small for some reason.

Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel

It's hard to improve on Mountain Dew. The stuff is heaven, sweet and bitey with a caffeine zing that few other sodas manage. It rocks. The long parade of non-Mountain Dew flavored Mountain Dews was nothing but a string of failures, beginning with "Red Alert" or whatever it was up to present.

"Gamer Fuel" might be an exception, however.

I laughed when I first clapped eyes onto a can of Gamer Fuel. It's a ludicrous cross promotion, almost offensive in its stereotyping - Gamer Fuel pairs Mountain Dew up with World of Warcraft. There's a somewhat angry looking orc on the can front, looking like a cranky, green Down's Syndrome child dressed up by an older brother with a Tolkien fetish. Or a Warhammer fetish, actually. I was sort of surprised how much Warcraft bit off of Warhammer, especially with the tremenous shoulder pads. Orcs armor up like it's the 80s.

There is a long standing problem with orcs: They are either
faceless mooks getting endlessly mowed down by
Dungeons and Dragons characters, or they are over
the top cartoon bad-asses like this here. My favorite orcs
are the Rankin and Bass guys from Return of the King,
truly horrific. The live action remake orcs were
kind of lame, suffering from the "guys in masks" problem.

As long as I'm picking on the can art orc, I'll draw attention to his ludicrous neck chain. It's a large linked, metal chain, and it sits on the orc in an incredibly unrealistic fashion. It's not so much that the bad-ass orc has draped a metal chain around his neck but rather that he took one of those redneck welded-metal-chain-steering-wheels and hung it over his head. It's hilariously poorly done, floating.

The chain is also confusing. It looks like it starts as a link of earring and connects to one of the awful Bloodbowlesque shoulder pads. The whole illustration is full of little awkward bits where lines fall into visual holes, looking like things they are not. The big goofy spike earring in the orcs left ear looks like it folds down over his left shoulder, blah blah blah.

Which leads me to my next point: Warcraft characters sure are vain. Look at this orc, looks like a tough character, eh? He's wearing at least six earrings, a necklace, a metal band to hold his purple dyed topknot in place, a nose ring, a TOOTH piercing, and that snappy necklace. Maybe the nose ring and the chain around the neck are practical tools used to enforce his servitude by his evil orcy masters, but the rest is just fancy pants and battle scars.

I bet he gets his fashions out of "Pretty Orc Monthly".

At least when a sailor wore a gold hoop earring it had a purpose, to pay for his burial if his body washed up on some foreign shore. The orc "bling" is just... visual busyness. An attempt to lend personality and authenticity through a glut of meaningless details.

Bonus: This orc is about fifteen feet wide. The layout people cut the orcs left arm off and moved it to the other side of the Mtn Dew logo, tripling the orcs size. Hilariously awful. I only wish this could come through on the photos.

Okay, okay, enough about the Bloodbowl wannabee orc. Yeah yeah yeah, it's silly, it's indicative of the kid-ification of games like this, it's a knock-off of Warhammer stuff which suffers from the same cartoon affliction. The rest of the can art is pretty neat, black and red is a kick-ass color palette. The black bands at the top and bottom ends of the can are edged in gold fancy work, and the metal parts of the orcy armor are all naked can metal.

All in all, it's a serious can, orc doofus aside.

And the drink itself isn't awful, either. Like I said earlier, Mountain Dew has an awful track record with it's flavor additives. They all taste cheap and chemically, totally dissipating the carefully cultivated air of class which Mountain Dew has spent generations acquiring. This stuff isn't as bad as the other Mountain Dew mutants, I mostly blame that on their choosing to go with "citrus cherry" instead of "double dingle berry" or "triple jungle lingonberry". Simple tastes are the best, and adding cherry to any soda makes it better.

The cherry isn't quite cherry, of course. They had to qualify it by adding "citrus" ahead of the "cherry" on the can itself. It's a little sour, and little mediciney, a little off-putting. It reminds me of nothing so much as these terrible cherry chew candy strips I had been given as a child, they were covered in crystallized sugar and sour stuff. Not very good at all, but those didn't have the blessing of Mountain Dew.

So yeah, I could actually see myself drinking this more than once. Shame they discontinued it. Seriously Mountain Dew people, this is the only non-straight Mountain Dew flavor you people ever got right.

I swilled this stuff down while playing twenty minutes of "Call of Duty: World at War". It's a game I'm not especially good at, but am lucky enough to have friends who are almost all worse at it than me. For this test, I played on-line against against unknown people, and didn't do exceptionally better than my typical game. No super-powered moments, no godlike omniscience and speed. No nuthin'.

Now the embarrassing part:

I didn't drink this stuff because I was anxious to do another review. Nay, I dread writing these reviews now. Rather, I wanted a caffeine dose to keep me awake as I went to a pseudo-rave party thing. Yeah, I'm embarrassed, but I had reasons. I shall enumerate them:

1. The party had a theme close to my heart, the Galapagos Islands, Darwin and the HMS Beagle. The title of the party was "Stranded", which also had a touch of nice to it. There was an interesting list of events, including some artsy stuff which I was interested in seeing. I also was under the impression that some puppeteers I wanted to see were going to be there, but they weren't. Alas.

2. The party was being held in a part of Brooklyn where I hope to get a work space. Actually, it's not that I want a studio there so much as it's my only possible hope of ever having an art studio. To be an artist nowadays takes a lot of dough, something which I ain't got, fat Google advertising checks aside. It turns out that the event was held in a building run by a somewhat overpriced studio rental company, not in their studios but on a floor below. I'll admit that not much was learned.

3. I was curious.

So I went and the event was a raging bore, a failure on all three counts. Of course, everyone else seemed to be having a good time, so I'm pretty sure the fault was mine. I hate people who have fun.

Caffeine Free Pepsi, Home-made Jucy Lucy's

I took this picture for insurance reasons.
I had to prove that dent was there when I received the can.

Caffeine Free Pepsi


Caffeine Free Pepsi reminds me of the Biologic Show comics. You know, the short lived series by Al Columbia who did all those terrifying comics for various compilations like Zero Zero.

The similarity lies in the discovery of the thing. I'd been an Al Columbia fan long before I saw Biologic Show comics for sale, they'd been out of print and impossible to find. I go to Austria on "business" in 1998 or 9 or 2000 or something, and visit a Viennese comic store. There I find Biologic Show comics for sale. "!" I exclaim, and buy doubles so I'll have one to share when I get home.

I get home and find out that these comics were on sale everywhere now. I'd just happened to be someplace far away when they re-entered general circulation with a new print run. Ha. I'd thought that some rare pocket of comics had just miraculously shown up in Vienna, like when I saw all the Polish weight lifter guys wearing Vision Streetwear clothes in Warsaw. That was just a wacky coincidence with discount goods going on sale.

So it was with Caffeine Free Pepsi. I see it on sale while looking for Pepsi Natural, buy a can and take it home, thinking it a rare treat. Later that week I see it everywhere. Ha. Nothing special at all. Just newly distributed.

Anyways, I'm not a big Pepsi fan but I like the Caffeine Free Pepsi. Much more so that I like regular Pepsi, believe it or not. It's different. Or maybe the cans aren't as old and stale. Who knows. It's sweet the way Pepsi is supposed to be sweet, but not chemically tangy like Pepsi usually is. I think I also prefer it to caffeine free Coke, it tastes sweeter and doesn't have as much senseless carbonation.

I drank my first caffeine Pepsi with home-made Jucy Lucy hamburgers, so it was kind of lost in the shuffle. A Jucy Lucy is a Minneapolis delicacy, a hamburger patty stuffed with molten American cheese. It was incredible when I had one at "Matt's Bar", but mine weren't so hot. I couldn't manage to cook them the proper amount of time, I'd either melt the cheese and have a dried out hamburger or a perfectly medium rare burger with a lump of unmelted cheese in the middle.

Then I ate too much and felt sick.

A real Jucy Lucy is crispy on the outside of the patty, soft no the inside, and the cheese center is no longer just cheese. It's a super goop composed of boiling American cheese, melted fat, and blood. It's heaven.

Surprisingly enough I managed to get pretty close to the original by accident. I cooked way too many hamburger patties so I put some in the refrigerator for the next day. These I microwaved and they came out perfect, an almost identical eating experience to a real Jucy Lucy. The microwaved heated up the cheese inside, but didn't overcook the medium-rare meat. Really good, though I'd be embarrassed to have a microwave be a part of my hamburger cooking.

This is a home-made Jucy Lucy. Note the unmelted cheese
and that it's upside down on the plate. I like to think of myself as an
"Outsider Art" style cook.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Seven

All Natural Pepsi, meet all natural tile pear.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Seven:

The story so far:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6



And now...

So today I ride my bike a long, long way to the one store I KNOW has Pepsi Natural - the Columbus Deli on 18th Avenue and 86th Street. It's cold and my bike has a wonkity-wonkity element to the ride ever since the ugly incident during my first attempt to pick-up some of this alleged wonder drink.

The bike ride is long and cold, but easy. It's all downhill with the wind at my back. All I can think is that the ride back will be colder and more miserable, as it's uphill into the wind. I mosey along and find the place, caddy corner from an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant. I knew it. I was sure it was there the other day during the false start bus trip, and now it's confirmed. All you can eat restaurants are a rarity in NYC, one needs to keep track. And I have been forbidden eating dinner as my wife is getting off work early and wants me to eat with her.

What a horrible, selfish person.

Arrive in the deli, snoop around and grab three bottles of Pepsi Natural. All they have left. Hoorah! They also have what appears to be kvass made from apples, but only in super-mega sized bottles that I am loath to carry uphill and into the wind for a long cold ride on my bike. So those are left behind. I'll always miss you, suspicious russian faux alcoholic apple drink. Another time.

The Middle-Eastern fellow at the counter asked me if I was Muslim, making a little "I'm pretending I have a beard" motion with his hands. I said "No, I just have the dopey beard". Ooh. With that level of suave you'd think I was talking to a pretty girl. My drive to self-deprecation overwhelmed my drive to not offend minority religions. Whoops.

I tool around the area trying to find other drinkable novelties. I pick up an imitation Mountain Dew I think I already have, but couldn't risk NOT having, and a few other bits. Nothing important.

Long, long cold ride up hill into the wind back and...

...taste.

Wow. It's... good. I think. There's a weird tinge in it, something fruity like oranges or apples. The smell is perfect, it's everything Pepsi should smell like. That fruit taste is maddening, the back of the label says that apple juice is present for color but that isn't what I'm tasting.

It's oranges, I swear it. No, apricots. Maybe it's apricots. It's the taste of a marginal citrus fruit that no one sensible every really eats. When that flavor runs out into the light, I get a little suspicious of the whole drink but otherwise it's a good, clean taste. Enjoyable, sweet, and natural tasting. How about that?

.
+-------

Those little marks are from my remaining cat rolling over onto the keyboard when I ate the last bit of asian bakery hotdog bun thing. Poor abused cat, not getting any hotdog to eat.

Yeah, I think it's an apricot flavor. A little bitter, or tart or whatever.

The Pepsi Natural bottle is pretty classy, minimally texted and entirely bare for the upper half. That's how I like my drinks and my women. Wait a minute, there's a relief of a Pepsi logo up at the top, but it's still classy. And the little drink by date is stamped right above that, I guess that's functional classy. Secret classy are the little ring of bumps on the very bottom of the bottle, the pattern is irregular so I sort of wonder if there is some secret purpose to these bumps. I bet they somehow orient the bottle during the manufacturing process to ensure that the "Pepsi Natural" text is printed on the proper side in relation to the relief logo.

The bottle shape is a little sci-fi, a little cartoon-made-real. The color of the Pepsi is a little lighter than your usual, a little browner. Just a shade darker than very strong tea.

So Pepsi Natural medium-rocks. Much much better than regular Pepsi, and better than standard Coke, but NOT better than real sugar Coke.


Edit: A year later I have come to love this stuff. The favorite drink of me and my wife. Of course, they no longer make it, so go to hell Pepsi.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Six

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Six:

The crafty Manhattan distribution manager has been out to lunch for six days. I give up. My wife and I bust out the Brooklyn bus map pdf and plan a trip to the other deli that sells Pepsi Natural. A simple bus ride. I call and confirm that they have it in stock.

We set out, it's really cold - our warm day had turned miserable and we are underdressed. Nonetheless, my wife wants ice cream from a chain place on Third Avenue. We walk and walk and don't see it, try to look it up in Google and realize that it must have closed within the past week. Alas. [edit: It didn't, it was just a block further north than we thought it was]. We're hungry so we stop at a family style Italian restaurant, complete with an old guy singing love songs. Sad that these were wasted on a married couple.

We emerge from the restaurant into the thickest fog I can remember seeing in NYC. Visibility peters out at about three blocks, fog horns rumble out on the river. We head home, this is not a good night for adventures that don't involve murder and/or zombies.

...

I made another dream drawing out of one of our cats. It's far too horrible to show, but I'm copyrighting the Pepsi logo I made. It's... unique.



My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Five

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Five:

I bicycle to the nearer store. Turns out that there is no "Stop One" deli at 72nd and 5th Ave. There's a Russian pharmacy with a name which sounds similar when spoken out loud, but they don't have soft drinks for sale. Or so they claim. If I was a real investigator, I would break into their store room at night, just to be certain. But I'm not.

However, the trip was not without adventure. I picked up a Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi, something I'd never actually seen but had only imagined in my most fantastic dreams (not pictured). I also picked up a Mexican Coke with real sugar, a rarity nowadays.

Then disaster. I quote from my "Facebook" page:

Tim used a his bike spokes to open a bottle of Mexican Coke. While riding. On accident. I could've died.

And the follow up...

I didn't get to enjoy the Coke. It was in a cloth bag, which swung down from my shoulder and caught in the spokes. It was spun with the rotation and jammed up into the front brake, which made my front wheel seize up. As it caught, the cap popped off and a jet of soda shot out of the bag and into the air. Meanwhile, the back tire of the bike lifted high up into the air and my butt left the seat. My legs flailed straight out in a successful effort to keep my balance, which was quite remarkable in itself.

At the peak of my arc, with soda spraying in the air and myself balanced on the handlebars and my butt higher than my head, I looked over at a passing mini-van full of Middle-Eastern men. Our eyes met, theirs were full of horror and sympathy, I suspect mine were already shot through with embarassment.

The caffeine-free Pepsi survived intact.

Yeah, you fucks. Laugh all you like.

Another dream. I'm in a poorly drawn sloop and see a gigantic bottle of Pepsi Natural bobbing on the waves. I heft a harpoon, put my knee in the clumsy cleat, "dart the harp", and then all goes black. I have a vague memory of an ominous voice saying "1d6 investigators per round", but I don't remember what happens next. I think the dream symbolizes that Pepsi Natural is like an ice berg, and 90% of the deliciousness is concealed under the water.

Here's the drawing I made:

1d6 investigators per round

My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Four

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Four:

At my wit's end, I decide I have no recourse but to invoke a higher power fraught with forbidden knowledge.

I call the Pepsi company that serves New York City. They give me the names of two different distribution managers, one for Manhattan and one for Brooklyn. The Manhattan guy never seems to be in, the Brooklyn folks are very helpful. They give me names and addresses of two different stores that stock Pepsi Natural.

Ah. Pepsi Natural is the name of Pepsi Raw in the US.

One is a short bike ride from my apartment, the other a long slog. We'll see what a new day brings.

Another dream, I drew it out below. I think this one symbolizes my belief that I am hot on the trail of Pepsi Natural. Or that it will be Pepsi's hot new drink. This dream interpretation stuff is pretty easy.






My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Three

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Three:

While testing a "make your own soft drinks in your office" thing at a friends business, one of his co-workers tells me that the local Whole Foods is selling Pepsi Raw. He's wrong.

I had another dream last night. I won't tell you what happened when the cap came off, I'll just say that it was an erotic combination of sex and murder.






My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Two

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry Two:

I've visited dozens of stores and called many more, no one seems to have ever heard of Pepsi Raw or any all natural Pepsi product. At each turn I am greeted by a lack of understanding, whether due to the fantastic assertion that there is an organic Pepsi product or because most deli workers speak English as a second language I do not know.

My wife hollers at me whenever I try and break away and investigate a new shop, my will is breaking. Does this marvelous thing exist, or is it a hopeful wisp of fantasy? Will I be jostled by a swarthy seaman and wind up dead by poison, a victim of those who wish to keep Pepsi Raw out of the eyes of man?

I had a dream last night, I drew it out:










My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

It's a bottle of Pepsi Raw atop a volcano spouting lava. The banner of the top reads "Persevere", there's a bunch of other words but I didn't bother reading them.

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry One

Pepsi Natural, Journal Entry One:

A friend sends me a link to a webpage which mentions the release of Pepsi Raw to a handful of markets in the US. New York City is on the list. I use the marvel of "social networking" to see if any of my Facebook associates have seen the stuff for sale. I'm greeted with derisive jeers, and assurances that Pepsi Raw is only for sale in Europe.

The fools, I'll prove them all wrong.




My whole Pepsi Natural Saga:

The Prelude
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Pepsi Throwback

This isn't your father's Mountain Dew, nor is it that punk kid's,
it's YOUR Mountain Dew. At least judging by the label.
And assuming your about my age.

I've been trained by enough horror movies to know that
a "throwback" is a genetic monstrosity sure to kill
almost everyone in the film.

Okay, so Pepsi is releasing "retro" versions of its soft drinks. These drinks will use sugar instead of corn syrup. It's first mentioned in a bevindustries.com link here:

In the middle of April, PBV also will begin distributing Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, which features those brands formulated with sugar.

There's a very nice write-up on this at bevreview. Smart folks over there. Too bad my "no research" policy prevents me from actually reading their website. This was an okay bit of looking because:

1. It's about something that hasn't actually been released yet.

and

2. Enough people sent me the link that I felt I HAD to look.

Not much else I can add to this. One thing mentioned in the original Bevnet article is that Pepsi has some kind of consumer voting thing for the new Mountain Dew flavors. I'm hoping I can hire some African dictator to come up here and rig the polls so we can get rid of some of those disgusting cartoon flavors they falsely call "Mountain Dew [*]".

It astounds me that companies have people vote for flavors. I've always assumed that this was total crap, even as a kid. As an adult I had it confirmed when I worked on a cereal ad campaign for which the results were determined before the "kids go vote" commercials were even aired. That Bevnet runs an article which states that:

In CSD flavors, PBV will add Mountain Dew Voltage, which was the winning flavor in the brand’s Dewmocracy campaign.

This makes me half wonder if there might not be some legitimacy to the Dewmocracy thing. And if Coke isn't passing bribes to get the worst possible results.

That Pepsi logo looks kind of Mad Maxx, especially with
the dirt on the circle part. I hate the font on
the Mountain Dew "Throwback". I want to put the designer
inside a big inner tube and roll him into a river of lava.