Apricot was easy for us. Nobody ruined it, so we just had to not be the first.
Cherry is the opposite problem. It's the single most adulterated flavor in the beverage aisle. Ask anyone what cherry soda tastes like and they won't describe a fruit. They'll describe cough syrup, or that red popsicle flavor that has nothing to do with anything that grows on a tree. Decades of panel testing didn't just miss the mark on cherry, it built an entirely different flavor and put cherry's name on it.
How a fruit becomes a chemical
Popularity is what did it. Cherry is one of the best-selling soda flavors there is, and anything that sells that well gets optimized for decades, not years. Optimized for shelf stability, for cost, for a taste memory that's easier to manufacture consistently than the taste of an actual cherry ever was. Somewhere in that process, the taste of tart cherry got replaced by a flavor built to taste like people's memory of cherry candy, which is a different thing entirely, several generations removed from the fruit.
That's the rule we work from: if it's popular, it's been adulterated. We said this about apricot to explain why apricot still tastes right. Cherry is the same rule pointed the other direction. It's popular, so it got wrecked. Worse than most, actually, because cherry had further to fall. Grape only ever had to taste like purple. Cherry had a real reputation to live up to and lost it.
So why bother?
Because we'd already done this once. Two of our founders built Pointless Ginger Ale on the idea that a ginger ale should taste like ginger, not like what the category had trained people to expect. Apricot let us do that by default, since nobody had corrupted it yet. Cherry meant doing it on purpose, against forty years of a category telling you what cherry is supposed to taste like.
Reckon Cherry isn't trying to out-cherry the cough syrup. It's tart first, the way a cherry is tart before it's sweet. Tart cherry flavor from natural flavors, barley malt base, dry finish, about 1/3 the sugar of a typical cola. Color comes from black carrot, not a red dye chasing the same fake shade every other cherry soda uses to signal "cherry" before you've even tasted it.
You can get it on its own or in a variety 12-pack with our sun-ripe Apricot, six of each, at DrinkReckon.com, or find it at shops in Cleveland.
Not too sweet. On purpose.