Mountain Dew Black Label

I'm not sure if they were meant to be released together, or if it's just because they have the same parent company but I keep seeing Mountain Dew Black Label and Pepsi 1893 displayed together. I was shocked by how much I am a fan of the 1893. It's a throwback to the way cola was originally made, and there is something about it that is just classy. It's like they took one of the baseline companies for all soda and made it seem like it was upscale. Even though they had already gone back to an original recipe with Dew Shine, I was hoping that Black Label would be another old time soda. The can didn't have a fancy look to it, but it was more visually appealing than Mountain Dew's normal output.

Now this is much better than a classic Mountain Dew, but this is not the high end soda that it is posing as. Words/phrases like “crafted” and “black label” are a buzz these days and lead a person to believe that this is something that was prepared with more care and in smaller batches. The truth is that this is just soda created with slightly better ingredients than the company would normally use. Sure there is sugar instead of HFCS and there is grape juice involved, but this really just falls somewhere extremely close to their Dark Berry and Pitch Black flavors. It's like someone took their flagship flavor and added berry and grape juice to it.

I really wanted this to be better than it is, but to be fair it is one of the better Mountain Dew flavors. It's an improvement, but they still have a ways to go to create something (besides Voltage) that I would go out of my way to purchase for pleasure and not review.