A weird flavor, snowflakes on the package and the phrase “limited time only” spell holiday edition to you, right? They sure do to me, and that’s why I feel justified in calling a pointless blog about Pomegranate 7Up a Christmas post. I have a pretty fierce obsession with Christmas editions of food. Christmas Crunch is perhaps the finest thing ever devised by cereakind. Slap Santa on the label and I’ll eat a can of Dinty Moore Hippo Anus In Its Own Juices. And so I must now sample Pomegranate 7UP, a thing that I would never ever try if it didn’t have those tantalizing snowflakes on the label. I have no idea what a pomegranate tastes like and I assumed I’d never find out. But the Christmas season, with its miracles and magicks, can surprise us all.

Of course, for a holiday edition soda, I’m gonna need to use my special glass with the happy snowmen on it, so I’ve got that. I’m giving it its first use of the season, in fact! I washed the year-old dust and dead spiders out of it just for this very special occasion. And I’ll need some ice cubes of course so…plink plink. That’s taken care of. I would, as Marion Ravenwood did before me, invite you to pour, but you’re not really here, so I hope you won’t take offense if I just pour it myself.

Glubglubglubglubglubfizzzzzz.

Hmmm…

The color is a very deep red indeed. It’s much darker than, say, the Cranberry Splash Sierra Mist I sampled a week or so ago, convincing myself it was a “Thanksgiving soda.” That drink was bright and sparkly, about the same color as Cherry 7Up. And, truth be told, the taste was about the same as Cherry 7Up, too. My experience with cranberries is admittedly limited, but what I drank didn’t taste much like them bogfruits. This, though, is a dark color indeed, like blood when you cut yourself pretty good with the mixing bowl you dropped and shattered yesterday when you were doing the dishes. (Attention, people in my house who may want to mix things in a bowl: pretend you didn’t read that.) This Pomegranate 7Up has a distinctive smell, too. It’s not overpowering, but there’s a definite fruity aroma in the air if you put your nose close to it. I guess the only thing left is the tasting. Here goes…

Gulp gulp gulp.

Well, I can’t say I particularly enjoyed that. The taste is hard to describe. I don’t really know what I imagined a pomegranate would taste like, but certainly not like that. It sort of tastes like the juice from a can of mandarin oranges mixed with really flat Pepsi. With one lime floating in it. A lime that had been dropped in an ashtray and plopped down into the drink without having the ashes blown off or anything.

So yeah, I don’t like it. It’s by no means the worst thing I’ve ever drunk, so I can’t justify putting on a Santa hat, screwing up into a sourpuss face and saying “That’s ho ho ho-rrible!” but I certainly don’t recommend you try it. The snowflakes on the package are pretty though.

Important True Pomegranate Fact: If you pronounce “pomegranate” incorrectly, it kinda sounds like you’re saying “poem grenade.”

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