What Kind Of Soda Is Best For A Dirty Soda?

Dirty sodas were one of the defining food trends of 2024. While dirty sodas — or more generally, dirty drinks — existed for years prior, their popularity was largely confined to the state of Utah. Eventually, dirty sodas broke containment around 2022 when they became a TikTok trend. As is often the case, it took a while for mainstream culture to adapt, hence the trend's explosion a couple years later. Sonic and Del Taco, for example, both added dirty sodas to their menus in 2024, while Coffee Mate dropped a coconut-lime creamer in collaboration with Dr. Pepper. Swig — one of the leading dirty soda chains — might even be coming to a city near you.

Now that they're mainstream, I decided to figure out what kind of soda works best in a dirty soda. Of course, no such experiment could come anywhere close to comprehensive, given the thousands of possible combinations of sodas and add-ins. For the most complete analysis possible, I purchased as many of the most common varieties of grocery store sodas as was feasible and tried them in two drinks each: one with lime juice and coconut creamer, the other with homemade strawberry purée and vanilla syrup. The following are my thoughts on each soda, before my pick for the best soda in a dirty soda overall.

To kick off my dirty soda showdown I tried both original Coca-Cola and original Pepsi. I used each as the base of my two recipes, for a total of four cola-based dirty drinks. Unsurprisingly — after all, many of the dirty soda recipes that first went viral on TikTok revolved around Coke or Diet Coke — all of my dirty colas were solid if not great.

In particular, the broadly sweet, non-specific tastes of Coke and Pepsi paired well with whatever ingredients I added. My favorite combination was regular Coca-Cola with strawberry and vanilla, followed by Coca-Cola with coconut and lime. Then came the two Pepsi sodas in that same order. I found that the most important difference between each cola in this context was that Pepsi tastes less syrupy, and in a dirty soda, a syrupy character pairs especially well with a thicker creamer. Nevertheless, while Coke has a slight edge on Pepsi for that reason, I found that both work well in virtually any dirty soda thanks to their versatile flavors.

After tasting all four of my dirty colas, I compared them to their counterparts made with Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. While most people opting for a diet cola are doing so for reasons unrelated to taste, I got to the bottom of just what makes dirty diet colas taste distinct.

Unfortunately, my dirty diet colas didn't magically taste better than any of the full-sugar cola versions. In addition to tasting less sweet, even amid multiple added ingredients, they retained that unmistakable diet soda character (the real reason diet soda tastes funny isn't necessarily because of artificial sweetener but sensory elements). While less sugariness may benefit dirty soda recipes with excessively sweet add-ins, both of my recipes were plenty sweet and still tasted better with full-sugar sodas and without that signature diet soda flavor. That said, they were both solid — my diet strawberry vanilla colas especially so. Even if there's little reason to opt for a diet dirty cola on the basis of flavor alone, the healthier option should still taste about 80% as good as its non-diet counterpart.

While there's a case to be made for Coke or Diet Coke as the default choice for dirty drinks, there's perhaps an even stronger case for Dr Pepper in the number-one spot. Sonic, for example, spotlighted a dirty Dr Pepper in marketing for its "make it dirty" menu option, and Dr Pepper is the base of Del Taco's sole dirty soda menu item. The menu at Swig even places Dr Pepper-based drinks above its cola-based drinks.

Knowing that dirty Dr Pepper is particularly popular, I was hardly surprised to find that it shone in both of my dirty soda recipes. Its bright variety of sweetness paired particularly well with lightly tropical coconut creamer while simultaneously counterbalancing sour notes from the added lime juice. In the sweet vanilla-strawberry soda, the distinct Dr Pepper flavor benefited from both add-ins. In contrast, some of the sodas I tried with more specialized flavors — as opposed to the broadness of a cola— were poor fits for one or both of my dirty soda recipes. Dr Pepper is a sort of best of both worlds option, tasting uniquely like Dr Pepper while still complimenting every single flavor I added to it. Simply put, Dr Pepper is the leading option for dirty sodas because it's really dang good.

While nationally available lemon-lime sodas are numerous, including brands like 7 Up and Starry, I opted for a Sprite as the category's sole representative. For what it's worth, chains like Swig and FiiZ Drinks offer no alternative lemon-lime soda options, and Sprite even landed first on a Mashed ranking of 18 lemon-lime soda brands. That said, this analysis should apply pretty directly to other lemon-lime sodas too.

First off, my Sprite with vanilla syrup and strawberry purée ended up in the top tier of dirty sodas I tried. Sprite's simple flavor allowed both add-ins to shine with little interference, and its citrus character contrasted nicely with the vanilla's sweetness while complementing this particular batch of strawberries' slightly sour notes. That said, I had mixed thoughts on the coconut-lime Sprite. Of course, lime tastes good in a lemon-lime soda, but the coconut didn't quite mesh and the texture of the creamer was an odd fit with the lighter body of a Sprite. All in all, a good lemon-lime dirty soda is more dependent on its add-ins than versatile options like Coke and Dr Pepper. But with a good recipe, a dirty Sprite can end up as tasty as any of its competition.

While they share a good number of characteristics, standard Mountain Dew is distinct enough from general lemon-lime soda that I felt it warranted its own category. That said, my thoughts on Mountain Dew as a dirty soda base lined up somewhat with my thoughts on Sprite, albeit for different reasons.

My coconut-lime Mountain Dew was just okay. However, rather than a poor textural match — I would describe Mountain Dew as fuller-bodied than Sprite — it was mainly the flavor I felt was lacking. Mountain Dew almost tastes tropical by default, suggesting it should work with coconut, but the end result was closer to wearing black pants with dark brown shoes; the flavors were close but different enough that they simply didn't work together. My strawberry-vanilla Mountain Dew, however, was solid, if not quite as good as its Sprite counterpart. There's just a little more going on in an unaltered Mountain Dew than in Sprite, and while everything tasted good together, it bordered on overcomplicated. There's most likely a dirty soda recipe that makes better use of the baseline Mountain Dew flavor, but given that this was a rare soda that didn't shine in either of my recipes, it's safe to say baseline Mountain Dew is a little too particular for much more than dirty soda recipes tailor-made for it.

Going into this experiment, I hardly expected to find a big difference between regular Mountain Dew and flavored Mountain Dew. Initially, I bought just a berry-plum flavored Purple Thunder Mountain Dew, thinking I could extrapolate general flavored Mountain Dew qualities from that one example. But that Purple Thunder Mountain Dew was so good in both dirty soda recipes that I went back out and bought a Mountain Dew Code Red afterword to explore this category further.

As it turned out, flavored Mountain Dew ended up one of the standout categories in the competition. The Purple Thunder Mountain Dew tasted great with every single ingredient I added to it. My coconut-lime Code Red, meanwhile, was the best-looking soda I made, turning a bright pink courtesy of the coconut creamer. Even though flavored Mountain Dews taste a lot more distinct than most other sodas, the combination of Dew and other elements ends up pretty busy altogether, and that business is actually a blessing. Like Dr Pepper, flavored Mountain Dew offers the best of both worlds, both satisfyingly specific and broad enough to benefit from many different kinds of add-ins. Flavored Mountain Dews aren't widely available at dirty soda shops, but anyone making a dirty soda at home should absolutely keep this unconventional choice in mind.

While playing the "Good Burger" theme song "We're All Dudes" on my iPhone speakers — for non-90s kids, Kel Mitchell's character is a big orange soda guy — I made a couple of dirty orange drinks from a bottle of Fanta Orange. With all due respect to Mr. Mitchell, orange soda ended up falling pretty low on my dirty soda list.

With coconut and lime, I found that the lime in particular fit poorly with the Fanta's orange flavor. No one likes a sour orange after all, and the orange-lime combo accomplished just that. Meanwhile, the same thing happened with the strawberry purée, which tasted better comparatively but still brought down the soda's natural orange flavor with a hint of sourness. Not all dirty sodas contain sour components, of course, but this issue was uniquely pronounced in my dirty Fanta Orange drinks relative to the competition. For what it's worth, there are good dirty orange sodas out there — a McDonald's orange cream soda hack is particularly popular, for example — but for its lack of versatility, orange soda is not recommended unless part of a recipe designed with orange soda specifically in mind.

Root beer is pretty typically bold in flavor and almost unilaterally defined by its sarsaparilla element — as opposed to, say, Coke or even Dr Pepper, neither of which has a flavor so easily categorizable. While that suggests a limited range of suitability for dirty soda, I found my A&W Root Beer to be better, at least, than the similarly specific Mountain Dew and Fanta Orange sodas in a dirty soda context.

My coconut-lime root beer in particular was very good. As evidenced by the canonicity of root beer floats on dessert menus nationwide, dairy (or a non-dairy alternative creamer in my case) is great in root beer. Even if it's a little funky, sarsaparilla also just tastes particularly good with coconut and lime. The strawberry purée, however, brought down my strawberry-vanilla root beer, suggesting that non-citrus fruits aren't a great fit for dirty root beer drinks. All in all, my A&W Root Beer was more versatile than its specialized taste would suggest. So, even if it's not a type of soda that's going to work well every time, that surprising versatility makes root beer a good candidate for dirty soda experimentation at the very least.

Jarritos may be exponentially rarer in dirty sodas than virtually every other brand on this list, but as a native Californian with access to the Mexican soda brand for most of my life, I felt that a couple Jarritos flavors belonged in this experiment all the same. I tried both fruit punch and pineapple varieties in both of my dirty soda recipes. The latter flavor, for what it's worth, topped the Mashed list of 13 popular Jarritos flavors ranked.

It turned out that — perhaps more than any other soda I tried — the quality of each dirty Jarritos depended entirely on how well its ingredients matched up with its base soda's flavor. With the fruit punch soda I enjoyed the strawberry-vanilla flavor but not the coconut-lime, whereas I had the inverse preference when it came to my pineapple sodas. In fact, the coconut-lime and pineapple Jarritos was one of my absolute favorite soda combinations of the bunch. A plain Jarritos typically tastes just a little less sugary and a bit more natural, like the famously delicious Mexican coke, thanks to its lack of high fructose corn syrup. The quality of Jarritos arguably makes the brand a better pick for dirty sodas than similar domestic soda brands — a mandarin Jarritos, say, is probably an upgrade over an orange Fanta. But they're also finicky, so any dirty Jarritos recipe should be designed with the base soda's flavor firmly in mind.

Just like a diet soda, next to no one is opting for an energy drink for its taste alone. But because they're available on some dirty soda shop menus, both an original Red Bull and an original Monster found their way into this experiment. To my surprise, one particular dirty energy drink ended up on my list of favorites.

First off, my Red Bulls were pretty mediocre. While both dirty Red Bulls were better than the drink with no flavor add-ins — meaning anyone who does happen to like the flavor of a plain Red Bull might want to try one dirty — its base taste was simply not interesting enough overall. My Monsters, however, weren't just tasty for energy drinks but outright good. The strawberry-vanilla Monster verged on too sweet, but at least made for a sugary, indulgent treat. It was the coconut-lime Monster, meanwhile, that exceeded at least half of the conventional dirty sodas I tried. Mellowing out the naturally intense Monster flavor with creamer worked wonders, and its idiosyncratic style of sweetness meshed nicely with coconut. For the record, I do not usually drink energy drinks and have no predisposition to Monster flavor. More than just leveling up a source of caffeine, some dirty energy drinks succeed on their own merits as intriguingly unique options.

Funnily enough, I have more experience drinking dirty seltzers than I do any other kind of dirty soda. At the height of the 2024 dirty soda craze, for a short period of time I regularly added sugar free French vanilla creamer to various flavors of La Croix. They made for pretty solid low-calorie dirty soda alternatives. For what it's worth, Mojito La Croix is my favorite dirty seltzer base. With that experience in mind, I thought I would expand my knowledge of dirty seltzer and sparkling water and see how plain San Pellegrino might fare in both of my dirty soda recipes.

The results of my plain San Pellegrino experiment were, as professional wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman might put it, mid. Rather than providing my added ingredients with a blank canvas, the San Pellegrino was more of a flavor vortex, dulling each ingredient practically beyond recognition. Flavored seltzers, however, may not taste as good in a dirty soda context as even a diet soda, but given their cleaner ingredients, dirty flavored seltzers are still worth trying for anyone interested in jumping on the dirty soda bandwagon while still remaining conscious of healthfulness. But avoid plain seltzer altogether.

Plain Mountain Dew might not have stood out in this dirty soda experiment, but somehow both the Purple Thunder and Code Red flavors of Mountain Dew didn't just outshine their unaltered counterpart but ended up making my favorite dirty sodas of the entire bunch. My working theory is that the tastiest dirty sodas aren't defined by their add-ins but that they use their add-ins to emphasize their base soda's flavor.

The overall best sodas for dirty sodas are bold enough to just slightly overpower their additional ingredients while specific enough to contribute to unique flavor combinations. Standouts in this experiment like Dr Pepper and flavored Mountain Dew fell into an ideal middle ground between the nonspecific tastes of Coke and Pepsi and the specialized flavor of a pineapple Jarritos. Flavored Mountain Dews gained an edge on Dr Pepper thanks to a higher degree of uniqueness. This key quality was considerable enough to help create dirty sodas that tasted like no other, while still just mild enough to adapt to a wide variety of ingredients. I tasted lots of good dirty sodas over the course of this experiment, including my coconut-lime Monster and strawberry-vanilla Sprite. But if I were presented with each of these soda options at a dirty soda shop, I now know the best choice of them all is a flavored Mountain Dew.

I tasted 15 of my 16 sodas all in one sitting — as I mentioned in the flavored Mountain Dew slide, I went back out for a Mountain Dew Code Red, which I then tried as soon as I got home. To make each dirty soda, I poured two shot glasses-full of each soda in two separate cups. I then added three teaspoons of Natural Bliss-brand non-dairy coconut creamer and a quarter-teaspoon of store-bought lime juice to one. To the other I added a half-teaspoon of sugar-free Torani vanilla syrup and a small spoonful of strawberry purée that I made by coarsely blending de-stemmed organic strawberries. I then mixed them with a metal chopstick.

Of each soda I typically took between two and five sips — however much I needed to formulate a strong opinion. Some sodas I also sipped once or twice plain if they were flavors with which I was unfamiliar beforehand, like Purple Thunder Mountain Dew. All of my opinions are derived solely from this single tasting, save for my past experience I recounted with dirty flavored seltzers.