Pepsi X Peeps (2023)

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I was pretty disappointed that I wasn't able to acquire any of the 2022 version of this one. I haven't been paying as much attention to the industry the past few months and I was pretty surprised to see an entire end cap of bright yellow cases at one of the local grocery stores the other week so did not want to miss out a second year.

Very sweet. After opening the can my younger tasting partner said that his first impression was Play Doh from his youth which apparently came in vanilla? We had a discussion about how Play Doh had changed in the ~30 years between the times we had respectively played with it as I'm pretty sure there was never vanilla Play Doh in my era. In any case, vanilla is definitely the first impression in both the nose and in the mouth. Vanilla Pepsi fans will be pretty familiar with most of the profile, but there is a bit of caramel in the middle providing a little bit of contrast between the sugar and vanilla brightness and cola's darker tones. Though, this being Pepsi, there isn't much of the darker part of the cola flavor to start with. There is some other flavor in there I can't quite place that I think is where the earlier Play Doh reference came from. As the soda warms this note becomes more prominent in the nose but not more identifiable. Everything continues nicely into the early finish before taking a slightly disappointing turn with a very long and unpleasant end. All through I kept looking for the Peeps and I never found any, or even really anything resembling marshmallow. I can slightly see what they were going for but it doesn't work for me as good branding. Ok.

Purchased from Lunds and Byerlys Roseville