Are you like me? A little on the nostalgic side of 40? Then maybe you'll remember something called The Pop Shoppe. It was this depot of soda, a warehouse of pop. The bottles were little and stubby and you could mix and match flavours to suit your tastes. Since I grew up in a family of four kids where saving a penny here and there would mean a university education down the road, then the Pop Shoppe was the bomb!

Anyway, it was at the Pop Shoppe that I first encountered a fizzy beverage called Black Cherry. Who knew it could be a tasty drink? I always thought of black cherries as those canned, pitted things that we'd sometimes have for dessert when we ran out of canned peaches. Those mushy cherries sucked, but the Pop Shoppe Black Cherry pop RULED! Okay, we didn't say things like "sucked" and "ruled" back then.

Anyway, when I took my first sip of Real Rock Hard Cherry (made in Laval, Québec) it took me back to the days of Pop Shoppe pop. But not because this cooler was as tasty, fizzy and refreshing, no sir! it reminded me of being a kid and having to take gross cough syrup when I had a cold. Yech! And believe you me, the cough syrup was better! This drink didn't even pack the wallop that the medicine did. Oh sure, it's 7% alcohol, but when you only take one sip of it and pour the rest into the wasp trap, you don't get that childhood Benylin buzz of the good old days.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.