The article is about the 2019 flavor, for the 2020 flavor check out this review of VooDew 2!

The War on Summer is officially underway, and leading this charge are our friends over at the Mountain Dew laboratories! Their summer season promotion, Liberty Brew, won both our hearts and our minds with its cavalcade of unique flavors and memories of summers gone by. Naturally, they took it off the shelves almost as quickly as it arrived, and my personal stash will have to hold me over for what is hopefully only a one-year absence. However, in the meantime, the Dewsters have brought something entirely new and different to the table for the fall Dew campaign.

Fantasy tip: Take Blair Walsh in the first round.

Mtn Dew VooDew is currently making its painfully slow crawl across the soda shelves of North America, and for once, my home market wasn’t dead last in receiving the goods. While Liberty Brew boasted a melange of 50 different flavors, VooDew promises only one…and we don’t even get to know what “it” is. The era of the mystery flavor is upon us again friends, and the marketing of “spooky mystery” meshes well with the Halloween packaging and the slick as fuck color scheme. Before the first sip I’m already sold on the appearance and presentation alone, and this design continues an impressive run of Dew cans that will look good on collector shelves for decades to come. Now to the fun part, let’s have ourselves a taste and see if we can crack the mystery…

The white color (the cup is full in that picture btw) will remind most avid Dew drinkers of “White Out” from some years ago. There’s been some conspiracy we’ve covered in previous Soda Blog articles about the fate of White Out and how the crystal clear Dew Ice was engineered specifically to make us all forget that White Out ever existed. Okay, so that conspiracy has only really been offered by me, but this off-white translucent look to VooDew might explain some of the base formula. The taste however, is a far reach from the “Smooth Citrus” flavor promised by its doppelganger. There’s not too much of a mystery to decode, to be quite honest…it’s orange. Every printed word, YouTube video, and personal anecdote has yielded something akin to an orange base flavor. What’s more interesting is how it starts sweet and gets more bitter towards the end of your sip. It’s not wholly unpleasant, but there’s a definite “start to finish” journey of flavor that Mtn Dew isn’t normally known for producing. Giving it a brief think, I suddenly realized I’ve tasted this same weird approximation to orange before…but never over ice in a glass.

Ah, yes.

When I was in high school, I remember asking my mom to buy me the new Crest Complete Orange Flavored Toothpaste. This was all the rage at the time, as toothpaste had the flavor options of “ass,” or “double ass with mint” and every one of them made me gag. Turns out this new Crest was no different though, as the sickly bittersweet sensation ruined nearly every morning for me until it was time for a new tube (A brief aside, I’ve never thrown out an unused toothpaste tube, and no matter how much I hate it I will ALWAYS see it through to the end. You kids today don’t know the struggle). Anyway, while I feel VooDew was making an attempt for an orange cream sensation, the carbonation and sweeteners used yields a more unfortunate trip down memory lane for me. I guess the taste isn’t the point here however. It should be obvious that <puts on tinfoil hat> it’s far more likely that PepsiCo is adding fluoride additives from the discontinued toothpaste in order to control our minds. I’d like to get upset about that, but after a ten minute read of my twitter feed this can’t even crack the top 10 of corporate outrage moments/ hashtag boycotts this week, so let’s just steer into this one.

Verdict: Mtn Dew VooDew, the limited edition mystery flavor is the clubhouse leader for soda packaging as we approach the holiday season of 2019. The notion of a mystery should be enough to warrant a purchase for the undecided, and it’s always worth a taste to see if there’s something else to discover inside its profile. The translucent look of White Out with the sweet’n’bitter taste of a long dead toothpaste flavor might not grant a return to the regular Dew rotation, but it was good for giggle trying to hammer out the taste. The true new ground covered lies in its clear and indisputable use of fluoride. There are times to get upset, and then there are times to sit back and just accept things for what they are. Sure, VooDew might really be used for genuine despotism and mind control. But thanks to all that sugar, we are without the hypocrisy of oral health and cavity protection, so let’s just dig in and take one for the team this time. Score one in the column for the Orwellians, I love Mtn Dew VooDew.

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