A Brief Review of Nitro Pepsi! (And Life Updates, I Guess...)

This isn't completely gaming-related. More gaming-tangential. I figured that the DTOID blog peeps would enjoy reading about a soft drink. I hope you do.

On Friday, I had to go to the Emergency Room becaust I couldn't breathe. I was diagnosed with pneumonia. Ugh. The hospital wanted to admit me because my heart enzymes were elevated and, y'know, pneumonia. But my health insurance doesn't kick in 'till June 1, and my Blue Cross stuff I got before I got the job didn't kick in 'till then either. So after a round of antibiotics, I left the hospital because I sure as hell wasn't going to stay there uninsured. Took the day off work, sat at home and played Guardians Of The Galaxy on my PS5. 

I spent most of Saturday resting at home on the advice of experts, since it's probably not a good idea to immediately go back to work the day after you've been in the ER for pneumonia. For what it's worth, I feel fine. Doctor at the ER gave me an antibiotic, a steroid, and an inhaler. I feel okay. Deep-cleaned my CPAP machine in case that happened to be a cause for the pneumonia, and I spent the day resting.

I decided to avoid going out later on in the day and used Instacart to pick up some beverages. Mostly Perrier and some Fresca. But I did also grab a pack of that new Nitro Pepsi.

I'm not exactly breaking new ground by getting this, it's not super-new, but I've been seeing commercials for this stuff all the time, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It's basically Pepsi, just with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide. Think Guinness, but Pepsi. And no alcohol.

It's a weird feeling, drinking soda that's infused with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide. I like soda. I enjoy the fizziness. I drink so much soda that my blood might be carbonated, so I've been trying to switch to Perrier or San Pelligrino when I go out so I can enjoy the fizz without wrecking my insides as much. I barely drink regular soda anymore, as I find most of it too sweet, and not like in a NWO/Kevin Nash kinda way, more of a "I can feel my teeth rotting" sort of way. I usually stick to diet stuff if I have it at all. My mom was a huge Diet Coke drinker. She used to drink it to settle her stomach. I developed a taste for it because the only other option was my dad's supply of Mountain Dew, which I wasn't going to to touch since I really didn't like it. My dad drank that stuff like crazy, close to liters of it per day. I hated it because it always just made me more thirsty than I was before drinking it. Pepsi products tend to do that for me. My dad didn't seem to have that problem. He loved Mountain Dew so much that we actually buried him with a can of the stuff, along with a pack of Marlboro Reds and half a roll of paper towels.

So that's a vaguely-interesting side story, let's get back on track, shall we?

Anyway, Nitro Pepsi. It's weird. If you enjoy Guinness, you'll probably get a kick out of this. It's very velvet-y and creamy, almost like it's got soft serve in it. It's phenomenally sweet, which I find a little off-putting. It's on-brand, as Pepsi is ridiculously sweet, but the lack of real carbonation in this makes the whole thing taste a lot sweeter than a regular Pepsi. At least, that's what I got out of it. The lack of carbonation is very unappealing to me. As I said before, I like the fizziness in soda. The mouthfeel of Nitro Pepsi is interesting, but after the initial few sips, you're just drinking a flat Pepsi, and flat soda is disgusting. There may be a market for people who enjoy a less-fizzy soda (Sociopaths? Serial killers?), but I am definitely not one of them in the long-term.

Nitro Pepsi is, in my observation and opinion, a novelty. It's a neat little curiosity. If you can get the stuff on sale or if you're legitimately curious about the experience, go ahead and grab a pack and see how you like it. I definitely didn't hate it. I may even grab a package and bring it to work with me. But I don't see myself buying this like crazy and downing it like I do with Crystal Light and Perrier. There's not enough insulin in the world for me to justify doing that.

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