Best of the Best - Coke

 

 Why is it that McDonalds coke is so much more delicious than other restaurants? I often wonder if this is really the case or is my mind just playing tricks on me. I decided to put McDonalds coke to the test, a blind taste test.

                By “blind” I do not mean I blindfolded myself, instead, I poured portions of coke into three identical glasses. To be honest, I have a hard time not cheating when I am blindfolded or supposed to keep my eyes closed.  I definitely wanted to create an unbiased experiment so I recruited a friend to help out. We drove and picked up three different cokes. The first stop we made was the gas station right around the corner from my house and we grabbed a twenty ounce bottle of coke and a thirty-two ounce fountain coke.  We drove down the road just a few blocks to McDonalds and grabbed a large coke.  We circled around and headed back to my house to begin as quickly as possible. My friend was in charge of pouring the coke into the glasses. She grabbed three identical glasses form my cabinet and poured the same amount of coke into each glass. She them placed them on the table and I sipped from each cup and tried to guess which coke it was.

                The first cup I tried seemed very carbonated. It was still delicious and traditional tasting. I sipped from cup two and was feeling pretty confident. There was a distinct difference between cup one and two. At this point I was able to rule out number one and confidently label it has the twenty ounce bottle. Cup number two was crisp and refreshing. It was much colder than cup number one as well. I still was not able to tell whether or not this was from McDonalds or not. I was beginning to plant seeds of doubt in my head. Perhaps McDonalds coke tastes no different than others and it was just the packaging that has us trained to believe that it is.  After sipping on cup number three I had to take a minute before giving a final answer. I also took one more concentrated sip from cups two and three. The third cup was perfectly crisp and refreshing. Now that I had another cup to compare to cup two I was able to tell that cup one lacked at least one notch on the flavor scale. I ended up giving an educated guess that cup three was from McDonalds and cup two was from the gas station.

                I was not able to tell cup three from McDonalds until I had another one to compare it to. Luckily for me cup two did not have as strong as a flavor, so I made an educated guess.  The gas station coke could have had a bad day. Perhaps the syrup for coke happened to be running low. The twenty ounce coke should have been bought prior and kept in the fridge to get extremely cold before drinking it. It was a dead giveaway which one it was because it was not ice cold. It also affected the flavor because of this. I would like to try this again and tweak the experiment slightly. I would buy from the same gas station, also put the bottle in the fridge from the day before, and continue to buy from the McDoanlds down the street from me. The absolutely wonderful thing about McDonalds coke is their consistency. That refreshingly perfect taste is the same at every restaurant no matter what time of the day you go.