RC Cola

RC Cola: I know what you are thinking.  RC Cola?  Who even sells [1] that stuff any more?

I just finished spending a week in Cincinnati and at the end of the week I was lucky enough to go see game 5 of the Kelly Cup [2] playoffs.  Strangely when I went to get a drink at the concession stand at the U.S. Bank Arena [3] I was confronted with an unexpected set of choices.  There was no Coke. There was no Pepsi.  There was only RC.

In case you don't know RC Cola stands for Royal Crown Cola and actually has a pretty interesting back story.

If, like me, you were asked to name a cola that started in Georgia, the only possible answer would be Coca-Cola.  But RC Cola also started here. [4]  In 1903 Claud Hatcher's grocery store was selling a sizable amount of Coke and thought that his orders to Coca-Cola were large enough that he deserved a discount.  Coke disagreed and Hatcher cancelled his orders to Coke and told them they would regret it.  He then went into the basement of his store and developed his own beverage and the name of that product was: Royal Crown Ginger Ale. [5]

He went on to develop a couple of other flavors as well [6] before finally getting around to creating RC Cola.  Though I'm not sure that Coke ever got around to regretting not giving Hatcher a discount, Hatcher did manage to make what is basically the ignored third wheel in the cola wars. [7]

The RC line does have a few highlights in it.  They were the first company to sell soda in a can.  And they were also the first to sell soda in an aluminum can.  The Pook was a big fan of Diet Rite for a while, but that was when it was one of the few colas to be made with Splenda. [8]  For me you can't do much better than the commercials for RC 100. [9]  The commercials had lots of things with numbers on them shrinking down to zero (a bathroom scale being the one I remember best).  Anyway, it was catchy enough that to this day it doesn't take much to get me to start singing the whole thing. [10]

As for the actual RC Cola?

It pretty much starts out mostly flat and finishes the journey in record time.  I only drank half of mine at the hockey game.

RC Cola: C-

[1] - Never mind buys
[2] - That's the ECHL championship.  Yes I realize it is minor league hockey and yes I realize that I could have seen the actual Stanley cup playoffs the same night, but the Stanley Cup was on TV and this was live.
[3] - Home of the Cincinnati Cyclones.
[4] - In Columbus Georgia to be specific.
[5] - Yeah, I didn't see that coming either.
[6] - Strawberry and Root Beer
[7] - It's kind of like if Cain and Abel had a third brother named Brian that really didn't ever do anything of note and thus wasn't mentioned.
[8] - She quit buying it once Coke released Diet Coke w/ Splenda.  (Ooh, twist the knife.)
[9] - I never actually drank the soda.
[10] - RC 100's got nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.  No sugar and no caffeine.