I don’t know about you but I’ve come to associate TaB with grandmothers. Exclusively with grandmothers. Well maybe aunts, but definitely older women. I would guess it has something to do with the brand’s position during the late 1970s through the 1980s as a sassy and sexy product for sassy sexy people, and no I’m not implying that your grandmother is sexy, though she may have been quite the spry young woman back in the day.
When TaB first launched in 1963 it was moving into uncharted territory. Diet Rite had been launched as a commercial product just the year before and nobody knew how the health conscious hippie consumer would respond to TaB’s flavor or position as an ultra-low calorie product. Fortunately for Coca Cola, TaB proved to be quite successful during it’s early years and gained popularity right up to 1969 when researchers believed that the primary sweetener in tab, cyclamate, had a carcinogenic metabolite. Read: some lab coat wearing folks thought that TaB was gonna give you cancer. Chemo is totally sassy and sexy.
The FDA pulled cyclamate off of the shelves and after a quick reshuffling of sweeteners TaB marched on continuing to enjoy solid sales people experiencing taste bud damage. That is until Diet Coke hit the scene. That ruined TaB’s sales forever. Though, all of them grandmothers and aunts have managed to drink enough TaB to keep Coke from shutting the product line down.
As a modern beverage TaB is quite lacking. It tastes like a generic calorie free soda with an extra dose of aspartame aftertaste and a good helping of an caramel and hint of burnt motor oil. It manages to have such a complex bouquet of flavors while managing to be completely and utterly bland. To give it the benefit of the doubt I transferred the contents of TaB from the can to a brandy sniffer in the hopes that the sniffer would enhance the aroma of the soda much like it would help a fine liquor realize it’s full potential.
My first at enhancing the flavor of my can of TaB proved to be a failure. It tasted exactly the same. The same oily blandness. I couldn’t just bring myself to chuck out the remaining eight ounces of soda so I decided to punch it up a little with a shot or two of spiced rum. This works with my Safeway Select calorie free colas so I thought it would work here. It didn’t. Now I had spicy oily cola that was still somehow bland and undersweet. (Yes, I said under sweet and I don’t even like sweet things).
The worst part is within a few minutes of adding my splash of rum the entire beverage went flat. Leaving me with half a sniffer of flat oily cola and spiced rum. What the heck. I couldn’t even finish my beverage. It was just that wrong, and I thought it was impossible to make a beverage worse with spiced rum.
At the end of the day I ended up dumping the rest of the glass, spiced rum and all. It just wasn’t good. I don’t see what all of the ex-hippy aunts and grandmothers see in it. It must be residual sexy and sassy advertising.
And even worse, was Tab WITH LEMON! My mom was a huge fan of both kinds and as a kid, that was the “only” soda we were allowed to have in the house. I can still taste the aftertaste of Tab without getting within 1,000 miles of a can of that stuff…
07.02.11 at 9:33 am