Coca-Cola Starlight | Soda Blog Review

Coca-Cola making a brand-new soda pop may not be as rare as it used to be, but a new drink under the Coke banner is still seen as an event in the soft drink world. Coca-Cola Creations promises to be a new line of products under the Coca-Cola brand that will no doubt introduce new and unique flavors while staying out of the way of the main flavors market share. The word “creations” give the company a lot of slack in how they go about this. New flavor tastes like s—? “Meh it was just a creation thanks for giving it a shot.” Hey, this flavor I liked was only in my store for three days! “Ah well you see this was a creation and our lab boys only had so much of the passionfruit extract..blah blah…” Hopefully you get what I mean here. Anyway, Coke is making it extra clear that their first drink in the Creations line is to be a head turner. Enter: Coca-Cola Starlight

A familiar logo with cool new colors, Starlight is a mystery flavor that chooses to use its cloaked flavor pallet as an opportunity for ambiguity rather than a riddle that needs to be solved. The label calls it “Space Flavored” and the cosmic look on the bottle and in advertisements make a clear attempt to capture the Imagination and wonderment of your mind rather than poke you into cracking some sort of code a la Mtn Dew’s Halloween flavors. On aesthetics alone Coca-Cola Starlight is a home run. There are more than a few Coke collectors out there and something this cool with “limited edition” and “Space” right on the damn bottle will probably make the company all of its money back before the first sip is savored. I personally like the color of the soda itself. It’s a light red that reminds me of the old soda fountain style of Cherry Coke, when you’d manually put the syrup in the regular coke. It has a unique smell also, one that reminds me of…cookies? Wait that can’t be right, how ‘bout a taste?

Ok, it’s still cookies. This drink smells and tastes like f-ing cookies! Sugar cookies, to be more precise. Some astronauts had apparently said space smells somewhat like cookies, so maybe this was the plan all along. Surprisingly I don’t mean this as a negative. The flavor is enough to be noticeable, but nothing is quite so overpowering as to mess with the fact that it still has a Coca-Cola base to it. My first sips were over ice, but doing a room temperature taste right out of the bottle it still had the cookie essence. However there was a bit of a cotton candy element as well when you factor in the direct carbonation of the room temp drink. Given all that, it’s not even a particularly sweet soda compared to others in the market. Maybe my tastebuds are stone dead from trying every Mtn Dew they pump into our grocery stores, but despite the dessert flavors involved it’s quite mild to sip as a regular drink.

I could see myself drinking these more often. There might not be enough room on the shelf to keep it long term, but I hope they reconsider before muscling this off into the collective memory of the soda market. It might not be what they intended, but I get big Fallout video game universe vibes from this. This idea seems plucked straight from the files at Nuka Cola with the space age cosmic atmosphere. Maybe a bit of gallows humor but as the world seems to get closer and closer to the Fallout Universe every single day, we might as well have a bit of that culture in our hands as we see just what might come next for us all. The bottle cap says to recycle, I just hope they don’t mean as a currency.