Aspirin soda.

Coca-Cola has come out with very odd new flavor of cola -- orange vanilla. It can be found in the regular soda and Coke Zero Sugar lines. 

I've reviewed some of Coke's flavoriffic expeditions into the unknown before, and have yet to find anything that seems like a New Coke-style problem that could rattle the company. Let me say up front that this attempt at the Coke Creamsicle also does not rise to that kind of trouble. However, I have to tell you it is pretty weird.

Why? Because on the first taste of Coke Zero Sugar Orange Vanilla I said "St. Joseph Aspirin." My wife tried some and said the same thing.

You kids today with your Reye syndrome probably have never tried St. Joseph Aspirin, but I guess we were the last generation that did. Reye syndrome, which can strike youngsters who have viral infections if they take aspirin, is quite rare but very dangerous, which is why the phrase "children's aspirin" is now pretty much an oxymoron. But before 1986 it was not. Aspirin was commonly given to children as it was to adults, and for the same reason -- it is an excellent medication, a fever buster, an anti-inflammatory, a painkiller, really a miracle drug whose deadly downside was not known for a long time. 

One of the problems with aspirin, though, is that it tastes terrible, and the genius of Plough, the company that bought the flailing St. Joseph brand in 1920, was to make a chewable aspirin that children would like. The orange flavor, introduced in 1947, was a success. Between St. Joseph Aspirin and cherry Sucrets, I didn't mind getting sick that much at all when I was a kid. Which is part of the terrible problem the brand had over the years -- kids wanting to eat aspirin like candy. Before Reye syndrome was known and aspirin was regarded as unsafe for children, "candy" aspirin was killing children who got hold of the stuff. (For the grim details, check out this article in Penn Today.)

Anyway, St. Joseph orange chewable aspirin is still around, having been reintroduced in 1993 as a low-dose aspirin for heart patients whose doctors recommend one 81 mg aspirin daily to prevent blood clots -- or, as our friend Stiiv mentioned recently, the kind to take before looking at hawt pics of Lynda Carter. In other words, the same Baby Boomers who took St. Joseph Aspirin in childhood now take it again. 

I am not a heart patient, at least not yet, and I had to wonder if my memory was accurate. Does St. Joseph chewable aspirin taste like Coke Orange Vanilla? 

I got a bottle of the aspirin at the supermarket and prepared to go mano-a-mano, taste bud to taste bud, to find out. Which I then did.

And the answer is... I'm not sure. 

I think they changed the flavor of the St. Joseph Aspirin, to tell you the truth; it seems to have gotten a bit more of a candyish boost, making its taste closer to the orange Tic Tac. So in a way the new Coke flavor tastes more like the medicine of my childhood than the modern adult version of that same medicine. But I admit it's been a long time, and memory is notoriously unreliable. 

Ultimately I think the flavor is a failure, as the orange and vanilla don't work as well with the cola as I would like. Orange + vanilla = good, vanilla + cola = good, orange + cola = bleah. No one ever mixed Coke with Tang, and I suspect no one ever asked for Diet Coke with a twist of orange. It's strange, but not good strange or even bad strange, just meh strange. Unusual for strange = just okay.

But for the blast of nostalgia, recapturing a flavor that may not quite exist anywhere anymore, I am grateful for the Coca-Cola company's effort.