I know this is a controversial soda. A lot of people trash Crystal Pepsi, and in all honesty, I somewhat agree with them. Crystal Pepsi was not that great.

Diet Crystal Pepsi, on the other hand, was my absolute favorite! It was the rare case of a "diet" soda being infinitely better than its "non-diet" counterpart. There was no comparison!

It is my opinion that many people tried the regular Crystal Pepsi, found it to be not very good, and therefore never even bothered to try the diet version, thus ensuring the fate of Crystal Pepsi. It was discontinued, and unfortunately for Diet Crystal Pepsi lovers like me, so was the vastly superior diet version.

It had a very complex taste to rival even Coke. Cinnamon, cloves, all sorts of flavors I could not begin to identify, mixed into the finest diet concoction ever created for mass distribution.

But, because Pepsi put out such an inferior "sugered" soda along with it, it bit the dust.

I have written Pepsi. They will not allow the recipe to be released. I was hoping to find the formula somewhere in the hopes that I could make up my own, or at least a "reasonable facsimile thereof".

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I asked in another column about the shelf life of aluminum cans. If, and this is a big "if". If a soda remains drinkable after ten or fifteen years in cans, then I just have to ask:

Does anyone know of anywhere in the Virginia/Maryland/Delaware area where I could buy some of this stuff?

I know that some of it is still out there! I've seen it on e-bay.

If anyone has seen unopened cans, or even bottles in an antique store, flea market, or anywhere, please let me know about it!

Thanks!

I know I drank the stuff regularly when it was out. But of course, it's been more than a decade since I last had it, and I was probably only nine or ten years old then, so who knows what I'd think of it now.