Today, like all Thursdays, we went to lunch at Firehouse Subs. But unlike all previous Thursdays, today they had a new coke fountain installed. I had heard about these before, but had not actually seen one. This soda fountain can deliver over 100 different beverages. I was hoping it would be like the World of Coke’s room where they have flavors from around the world, but really a lot of the combinations seem to come from mixing pretty standard flavors. So you can get Coke, but you can also get lime Coke, vanilla Coke, cherry Coke, orange Coke, and raspberry Coke. I got an orange coke and you could see it running orange, so it is probably just mixing Coke and Fanta Orange.
There are a number of flavors of Fanta (including Peach which is supposed to be pretty good) and Sprite, but also Vault and Powerade in addition to Dasani flavored water. I don’t even want most of this stuff. There are also a number of different Zero flavors, so I had a Pibb Zero first which tasted kind of flat to me.
You use a touchscreen which has the basic flavors. When you click one of those you go to a screen of flavors based on that first choice. I didn’t want to spend too long checking everything out because there were people in line behind me, so I couldn’t play around with it much. Two people I ate with tried raspberry Cokes and agreed that it wasn’t very good. The orange Coke was okay, I thought, but I could have probably made one at their old fountain too.
The downside is the machine also makes ice and Firehouse used to have really good ice (the little crushed ice pellets) and now it is just regular ice.
Today we went to Firehouse as we do on most Thursdays and the Freestyle fountain was gone. I didn’t talk to the manager, but I know he has had issues with the machine which would sometimes give erroneous messages about flavors having run out which then forced him to reboot the fountain and make everyone wait during the busy lunch rush. The conventional replacement fountain seems new and the pellet ice has made a welcome return.
Another problem was that only one person could use the machine at a time whereas with a lot of fountains one person might be able to get ice and one person can get a drink. Also it takes a while for people to work through the menus, but the line was rarely more than a couple of people deep.
My favorite flavor was Fanta Peach Zero, but I’d also get Vanilla Coke Zero sometimes. I’m just as happy with regular Coke or Dr. Pepper from the regular fountain.
The Freestyle fountain was back today. Plus they raised their prices. I don’t know if there is a connection. The good ice is gone again and I couldn’t get a refill after lunch because the line was too long. Grrr.