Excerpt From: Dead Beverage Underground
By Jared S. Westheim
Posted October 07, 2005
Speaking of superpowers, do you remember SURGE? That delicious Willie Wonka chocolate river of energy drinks? Yeah, well, it’s dead. But fear not. Be sure that in the technology age, Surge will never completely die in the hearts and minds of the American People. Indeed, savesurge.org—a lavishly built website extolling all aspects of the no-longer-bottled-soda—documents the travails of those seeking the holy grail of dead beverages: lost SURGE soda fountain locations. After Coca-Cola Enterprises, the largest bottler of Coke products in the world, dumped Surge from its line-up in February 2002, the Gen-X-inspired drink simply evaporated from the bottling market. Years later, serious SURGE fans literally travel hundreds of miles to drink from the remaining fountains of greenish delight while they hope, fervently, that the beverage will one day return to soda machines everywhere.
Eric Greene, SURGE fan extraordinaire, hoped to rest his unhealthy obsession with the delicious energy drink once and for all. After he discovered, in 2002, that the SURGE supply in his local vending machine was no longer being replenished, Eric made a run on the last bottles, dropping $10 to purchase every one. And then he waited for the right moment. “Well, I finally did it,” Eric wrote, “I got hitched. I got married on September 4, 2004. On my wedding day, I had planned on drinking one of my last two SURGE cans. I made sure that I was caught in action. Let's just say that my last SURGE made me feel like I was in heaven.”
