At $1.99 for a 12 oz. bottle, Leninade brand soda is overpriced. It also has 150 calories and 38 grams of sugar, which is like eating nine and a half four-gram sugar cubes. And I can’t quite place the taste, beyond it being sweet and mildly fruity (the color is orange, but it’s not an orange soda or lemonade). The vague “natural and artificial flavor” gives it whatever taste it has. I drank it, but not all at once. I did it roughly in thirds over three days, and the girls sampled some too.
Yet I couldn’t resist the bottle when I saw it in a hardware store recently, though that was before I knew all that detail.
In case that’s hard to read, under the star on the bottle’s neck it says, Join the Party! Over the hammer and sickle, Get hammered & sickled. And under the name, A taste worth standing in line for!
Not really. But amusing.
The back is a little harder to see when the bottle’s empty. That’s a Lenin-like figure quaffing a bottle of Leninade, presumably.
More verbiage on the busy back, not counting the Cyrillic:
A PARTY IN EVERY BOTTLE!
Surprisingly Satisfying Simple Soviet Style Soda
Beware the repressed Communist party animal who is really a proletarian in denial masquerading as a bourgeois Cold War monger!
Our 5-year plan: drink a bottle a day for five years and become a Hero of Socialist Flavor.
Misha, chill down this bottle & chill out!
Drink comrade! Drink! It’s this or the gulag!
I can’t say I didn’t get a few chuckles from the over-the-top copy. You can go all sour on the idea, noting that Lenin founded a totalitarian nightmare, and asking why there’s no cola having sport with a certain other totalitarian nightmare founded by an Austrian corporal, but that doesn’t take away from the amusement value of Leninade. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but historical reputations, like life, are unfair.
Also worth noting: I don’t believe this cola is furthering the cause of socialism one iota. The manufacturer, Real Soda in Real Bottles Ltd., is clearly a capitalist success story of the most American kind.
I believe you mean four gram sugar cubes, not four ounce. I don’t think you could fit that much sugar in the bottle, no matter how closely you follow the party line.
Ah, yes. That’s what I get for being my own editor.
When you can get all of that including a better-than-expected refreshing Drink Of The People for 1.99 (and consider all that went into getting it to where you found it) it’s actually a good deal. When Big Brother is thirsty, 1.99 is a cheap thrill! And you have the bottle to educate and entertain you afterwards; when you are tired of that you can recycle it for a nickel 🙂