Carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzonate, caffeine, citric acid and ‘natural flavors’.
Why natural flavors? Did they run out of bottles in their junior chemist “Fun with Science!” play set?
I mean, you can make a lot of different flavors from 100% natural ingredients. Not all of them are ones you’d want to lay claim to.
When I was a little kid, my friends and I used to make something we called “Yucki Stew.” Take a galvanized metal tub and fill it from a garden hose. Then start adding shredded leaves, grass clippings, mushrooms, burrs… pretty much anything lying around the yard that was destined for the compost heap. The big challenge was to get the water to change color without adding any dirt. We would add things over the course of several days, and we’d stir it occasionally with a stick to see how the ingredients had changed after soaking up water.
It was really amusing a couple years ago to discover that Frank Zappa has a tune called “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black.”
In high-school, every so often we’d go through the spice cabinet and mix up strangely flavored beverages. One surprising success was root beer and orange juice. If you use pulpy juice it looks amazingly disgusting… The bubbles and fizz from the root beer cling to the pulp and percolate it to the top of the drink. It’s a strange pale brown color too. But it tastes good.
Nowadays, my mixing experiment urge has been sublimated into cooking. Crock pot turkey roast was one of the more successful outcomes. Ginger-lemon chicken was a notable failure. Mixed drinks are another socially acceptable way of playing mad scientist. There’s the added bonus that the more things you imbibe, the more likely your later experiments are to be labeled as successful, regardless of their actual merit.