Granny Knows Best – Soft Drinks

Surprising though you may find this, the elderly do not live on cups of tea and Bourbon biscuits. Our diets are a little richer and more fulfilling than that. And one day I may even entertain you to my opinions of sushi and sashimi. But not today.

Today we are taking a stumble through the confusing and mind-destroying maze of the soft drink.

By which I mean fizzy stuff. Squash and fruit juices have their own horrors and hieroglyphs, of which I am quite aware.

However, we will concentrate our minds on the job in hand. Fizzy drinks.

Lemonade. Dandelion and burdock. Tonic. Bitter lemon. Ginger ale. Ginger beer. Cola (may whoever invented it be eternally damned). And Irn Bru (whatever the fuck that is). Of course there are more sorts out there. Many more. The above are just what reside in my under stairs cupboard. Obviously I’m an adult so I don’t drink the cola, or the dandelion crap, or the volcanic orange Caledonian stuff, but I do drink the others.

I have made quite a study of them. Particularly the ones you mix with booze.

And I have sad news to impart to you all. With the introduction of the ‘sugar tax’ to ‘curb obesity’ many soft drink manufacturers decided to cut their products with artificial sweeteners.

*pauses to evacuate bit of sick at back of throat*

The results are spectacularly vile.

The great grandchildren inform me that one of the reasons they love me so extravagantly is that I have not succumbed to the ‘reduced calorie’ craze. The little sods come to mine and we have a bloody good walk and then Gyp kicks their asses at football. After which I think chips and full-fat fizzies are perfectly in order.

Which deals with kiddy drinks and leaves us with what the trade so coyly calls ‘mixers’. 

The tonic in your gin and tonic. The ginger ale in your Horse’s Neck. The lemonade in your mojito. And so on…

As the fizzy bit can be anything from a quarter to three-quarters of the drink, if it tastes like shite the whole drinky will be ruined.

Take my word for it.

My advice when making a purchase is as follows:-

Walk right past the own brand, and even eschew the one we always used to buy. No. Sadly the only one worth drinking these days is the hideously expensive one that has No Artificial Sweeteners and no strange plant-based crap neither. It’s delicious. And it won’t fuck up your evening snifter.

Bite the bullet peeps.

Unless you want to spend all evening burping up bitterness and having your mouth go dry because of whatever cactus leaf has been added to fool your head into thinking ‘sweet’.

In the end, sugar still has no rivals. Cut the quantity. But go for something whose taste doesn’t make you want to run screaming from the room…

And finally.

When the world turns and we can get back into the pub. Before you order a large G&T ask the barman who the fuck makes their tonic. You really don’t want to be spending better than a fiver on a drink that tastes like shite.

You can now have a collection of Granny’s inimitable insights of your very own in Granny Knows Best.