Somewhere around 2010, in a strip mall in St. George, Utah, a woman named Nicole Tanner started pouring coconut syrup and lime into Diet Cokes and handing them out a drive-thru window. She called the shop Swig. Within a few years there were dozens of them. Within a decade there were a hundred, the trend had a name — dirty soda — and a generation of teenagers who couldn't legally drink alcohol had figured out something their parents missed: a fountain Coke with a little cream and a little syrup, stirred over the right ice, is one of the most satisfying things you can put in a paper cup.
Then TikTok found it. Olivia Rodrigo collaborated with Erewhon on a "Dirty Lemon Lime" in 2021, the hashtag passed half a billion views, and Coca-Cola itself launched a coconut-flavored Coke partly to chase the wave. What started as a regional curiosity is now a full-on beverage category, with chains expanding into Texas and Arizona and Idaho, and a steady drip of mainstream press calling it the Mormon answer to the cocktail.
We've been watching from Glendale, and we've been thinking the same thing the whole time: we should be making these.
So we are. We're calling it Muddy Pop.
Here's the basic idea, if you've never had one. You start with a base soda — Diet Coke and Dr Pepper are the originals, but anything works, including a craft cane-sugar root beer or a Mexican Sprite if you're feeling fancy. You add a splash of cream — usually coconut cream or half-and-half, which is what gives the drink the cloudy, "muddy" look that named the category. You stir in a flavored syrup or two — coconut, vanilla, raspberry, lime, peach, strawberry, whatever the day calls for. You drop in some fresh fruit if it's the kind of build that wants it. Then you pour it over good ice and hand it to the customer, who takes one sip and starts texting their group chat.
The reason it works is the same reason a really good milkshake works. Cream and bubbles play off each other in a way that feels indulgent without being heavy. The syrup gives it a hook. The fruit gives it a finish. And the ice — the ice is doing more work than people realize. Cheap pellet ice from a chain melts into the drink in five minutes and turns it watery. Dense, slow-frozen ice keeps the cream cold and the carbonation alive twenty minutes into your drive home.
That's where we have an unfair advantage, and we're going to use it.
Pure Bliss already makes the cleanest ice in the West Valley — we slow-freeze it directionally over many hours, with reverse-osmosis water that comes off our membranes at around four parts per million, which is to say almost nothing dissolved in it at all. That's the same water we'll be reconstituting our Muddy Pop syrups in. Same water in the cream blends. Same water in the cubes. The result is a drink that tastes the way the syrup-makers and the soda-makers actually intended it to taste, instead of the way Glendale's tap water filtered it.
We're not going to give away the menu yet — Jennifer is still locking down the signature builds, and she's a tougher critic than any of us — but here's a preview of what we're playing with:
A coconut-and-lime build over Diet Coke, the original Swig, dressed up with the kind of pebble-adjacent ice we'd actually want to drink ourselves. A vanilla-and-cherry build over Dr Pepper that we keep calling "the Saturday night drink" because that's when we keep ending up making it for ourselves. A coconut-cream-and-pineapple over Sprite, which tastes like a piña colada that decided to be PG. And one or two surprises that we're not going to spoil.
We'll also be doing floats. Floats are where this gets really interesting — and where the Muddy Pop story is going to get tangled up in a couple of other things we're working on, but we'll let those posts speak for themselves.
The bigger point is this. Dirty soda is not a fad. It's the same thing root beer floats were in 1960 and milkshakes were in 1955 and Italian sodas were in 1995 — a small, customizable, alcohol-free indulgence that families can share, that costs less than a movie ticket, and that gives you something to do on a 105-degree afternoon when nobody wants to cook. Utah figured it out first. The chains are figuring it out next. We're figuring out our version, with our water and our ice and our neighborhood, and we think you're going to like it.
Stop in soon. The menu's coming. The fridge is loaded. The cream is cold.
We'll be here.