Manhattan Special Espresso Coffee Soda

Manhattan Special Espresso Soda used to be everywhere and synonymous with New York City.  Certain foods are just a New York thing - and Manhattan Special is one of them.  Like Fox's U-bet chocolate syrup, and Guss' Pickles on the Lower East side, if you don't live there you just don't get it. I have the fondest memories of visiting my grandma in Bayside and her stocking the house with real bagels and Drakes Cakes Devil Dogs.

Living in Denver, getting hold of real New York stuff is near impossible.  Regardless of what bakeries may try, the altitude is too high to even attempt to make a good bagel - and no deli sandwich can bring me to heart melting happiness like the way Stage Deli's Reuben does.  However, in the cooler inside an ACE Hardware I find they stock it with these awesome black bombers of East Coast happiness.

Packaging:9
This soda is about as old fashioned as it gets.  It SCREAMS 1930s, with the old New York skyline (pre-World Trade Center) and an old flapper kissing a Clark Gable dude featured in the middle of an old movie circular dissolve.  I get what they are up to here - and it works.  Everything from the date of creation (Since 1895) to the color scheme is perfectly suited to invoke that Olde Tyme feel.  If it were not for the website listed on the side you never would have thought this label to have changed in the last hundred years as well.

The bottle itself is cute too - a little 10 ounce shot of goodness that is just the right size to pound down - and still in thick glass so it feels right in your hand too.  Of course there is no listing of caffeine - but seeing as this is just a drink made from coffee sugar and water, you know what you are getting into on the very first sip.

Taste:10
And you only need one sip to be hooked on this sweet liquid crack.   But you have to know what you are drinking before you try it out.  Firstly, you have to love coffee - and I mean actual coffee.  Anything that involves the words Half-Caff,  soy or whipped do not count as coffee.  Secondly, you can't be a snob about it either.  This is good coffee - strong and rich and dark and sweet.  This is NOT your natural-foods-store-fair-trade-organic-shade-grown stuff; it is just good regular coffee and tastes like it.  

Manhattan Special is such a pleasure to swig out of the bottle. The thick cold heavy coffee is suffused with big ol' seltzer bubbles - like they actually used seltzer to make it! Yes, the sweetness is strong, but it is a real sweetness that comes from adding just a touch too much sugar packets to your coffee - using real cane syrup to give it a real mouthiness that sticks with you well after the first sip.  Yes, I am a fan because of the memories this brings up, but that does not change the fact that this is a damn fine fizzy espresso drink.

Buzz:8
The ingredients in here are about a simple and straightforward as it gets.  Coffee, water, sugar, caramel color, and preserved with potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate.  Usually, the flavor of sodium benzoate kills coffee drinks, but in this case there is just the perfect amount of sweet to cover the flavor.  This is good strong coffee - and the buzz you would get depends clearly on how many of these you want to drink down.  Will one of these drinks get you buzzy?  Probably not.  But, by the same token, pound 3 of these and I dare you to try and sit still.