The Coke Freestyle Flavor Combo We Found Sickly Sweet And Medicinal

Coca-Cola Freestyle machines can be a lot of fun to experiment with, specifically because the flavor combinations are seemingly endless. Want to add an orange-vanilla twist to your Diet Coke? There's a button for that. How about a peach-flavored Coke? There's a button for that, too. We once played around with a Coke Freestyle machine and tried 20 flavors to rank them all, and found that one fruity combination disappointed us, because it reminded us more of a cold remedy than a lunch beverage.

That combination would be the Fanta fruit punch flavor. Our taster wrote, "As always, something has to be last on the list, and Fanta fruit punch pretty easily takes that spot. In theory, the fruit punch should be a great addition to citrusy Fanta, but something about the mix doesn't quite work as well as expected. Instead the mix tastes overly sweet and syrupy, like a cough syrup with effervescence (which sounds like a cool idea for medicine, actually)."

A drink shouldn't remind you of feeling sick under any circumstances, so it's best you avoid this one, even though fruit on fruit doesn't sound like a terrible pairing on paper. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, which is exactly what seems to have happened in this case. 

What may have been the problem is that all those artificial fruit flavors were too complex, which could have contributed to a cacophony of tastes. Our favorite flavor combination ended up being vanilla-flavored Barq's root beer, not because it's the best root beer we've ever had, but because the vanilla complements the natural flavors of root beer. Is this off-kilter and unexpected? Not so much. But you know, sometimes variations on a basic gold standard are a good thing, and in this case, we think the vanilla-flavored Barq's is something to enjoy. Nostalgia was a big driver in this case, too.

Still, experimenting with the Coca-Cola Freestyle machines is a fun way to play, especially because the ability to add extra flavoring is a real bonus as opposed to a fountain machine. A fountain machine only allows you to combine different types of soda, while a Freestyle machine lets you do things like create a Strawberry Citrus Vitaminwater, for example. Taste is clearly subjective, but we do think that fruit punch Fanta might be too noisy and too much like cough medicine for our tastes, so we suggest you don't bother mashing those buttons. Try anything else and see what you like — just skip that combination.