Nonetheless, the controversy and confusion propped up Coke; they'd been having a market-share problem ever since they started gradually replacing sugar with corn syrup. When the smoke cleared, the US product was still 100% corn syrup, rather than sugar, which it had been prior to 1980.

I remember this as I was working at a 7-11 at the time. I saved a case of the "old" Coke and taste-tested it against the "new" Coke. I preferred the original. Then after they came back out with the Classic Coke, I tested them again and the two Cokes didn't quite taste the same. I savored the original case until it was gone.

Brian

How long did you have that case of original? I imagine it would have become flat after a while.

Word on the street has it that kosher Coke and Coke sold in EU are still made with sugar rather than corn syrup. Can anyone confirm?

lifespan of a case of Coke
 

It lasted (a teenager) about three weeks.

And Coke will keep for about a year if unopened and refrigerated. Or so.

I miss the "Good Old Days". Also, I'm officially old.

Brian "eh, sonny?"

I couldn't find anything official on the Coca-Cola site, but apparently, it is made specially to be kosher for Passover.

Kosher for Passover coke is no longer made -- unfortunatly, the particular council of rabbis which objected to corn syrup has dropped its objection.

It's still theoretically up to the bottlers, but corn syrup is far cheaper. Want sugared coke? Convince Al Queda to take out Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Coke is pretty adamant publically that the bottlers have no leeway in the formulation of the syrup....if there's a sugar vs. corn syrup option they're keeping pretty mum about it.
I hardly think Al Queda is gong to do something to encourage the production of Kosher-for-Passover Coke. :-)

Unfortunately opencola.com has gotten completely distracted from their core mission by some silly distributed search engine nonsense. I guess that's what happens when you pick up $13 mil in VC backing: you lose sight of what's truly important. :O)

You're thinking that would be a perfect domain name for the open source soda movement?

John S. Pemberton's syrup recipe just wants to be free.

Well, the opencola folks actually *did* have a formula published on the site at one time, and canned opencola was being hawked at the site too. I guess the VC guys decided it was either undignified or dangerous.

We'll just have to settle for:

http://home.kc.rr.com/laestrygon/cocacola/formula.htm

Of course *that's* copyrighted...

Maggie of the Pepsi Generation is nearly right, again ;-)
 

Softdrink

#!/usr/bin/perl open CAN, "excitedly"; join ($can, $mouth); while ($colaRemaining > 0) {if ($reallyThirsty) {$chug;} else {$sip};} dumpIN_RECYCLING_BOX;IN_RECYCLING_BOX;

openCola™ marks the first time that open-source licensing has ever been applied to a consumer product. OpenCola is canning the code, so to speak, and will be shipping this sooper dooper gnu soda in the late spring or early summer of 2000. We're expecting more tabs to be popped than at Woodstock ;->

http://web.archive.org/web/200102150...softdrink.html

Nope, it's too old to be copyrighted.

chmod 777 coke.recipe

Re: Maggie of the Pepsi Generation is nearly right, again ;-)
 

Yeah, I was there too...looking for the ortiginal site, the one they had before they got the opencola domain. I could have sworn they actually did publish a real formula early on, too. But my recollection is that I read about it on Slashdot, and the only Slashdot article I've found already had folks finding syntax in the errors in the perl script, so perhaps I've misremebered.

I think what happened was as soon as they had enough VC money to hire a lawyer, the lawyer talked them out of publishing a real formula. Don't try this at home...