I still remember my first time drinking Josta. Every morning, I would stop at a gas station to buy soda and candy before trudging off to another terrible day at middle school. One day in the spring of 1997 I came across Josta, a drink that looked like it came straight off an A Tribe Called Quest album cover.
I’d seen ads around promoting it as a high-energy drink, but Jolt Cola was already popular by this time so that wasn’t much of a selling point. However, summer was just around the horizon which meant I wasn’t thinking clearly and grabbed a bottle of Josta along with a PayDay just for the hell of it.
From the second I pulled the bottle out of my backpack, I immediately regretted the decision. Everyone teased me for having a drink made from bat crap. The common myth, at least at my high school, was that Josta was made from bat poop or guano as it is known in Spanish.
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That’s because the featured ingredient of the beverage was guarana, a word that sounded vaguely similar to guano in the ears of some people. Either way, drinking liquid bat dung may have been a better experience than trying to down a bottle of Josta.
Let’s get to drinking the actual soda. I vividly remember taking my first sip and being horrified about the taste. To this day, it remains one of the worst things I have ever drank. Now, I’ve traveled to countless third-world countries and purchased some truly awful beverages. But none of them were as disgusting as Josta.
It tasted like someone put three packets of Equal into a cup of NyQuil and then added some flat club soda. Worst yet, the flavor lingered awkwardly in your mouth like your roommate’s one-night stand who set up shop in the living room waiting for them to wake up. The entire Josta experience was unpleasant.
One drink was enough to know you didn’t want any more. But I was stubborn that fateful day in 1997 and forced myself to drink it all. I didn’t want that .99 cents to go to waste. It took me 12 hours to finish the entire bottle and the taste still gives me nightmares more than 20 years later.
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Please don’t bring Josta back
Like just about everything else ever made in the 1990s, there has been a push to start making Josta again. Unlike the movement to bring back Surge, which was actually a great soda, the calls for a Josta revival haven’t been as loud thankfully. A Twitter account championing the god-awful beverage only has 103 followers.
However, the Josta lovers are a passionate bunch. As Jay Hathaway found out in his article for Daily Dot earlier this year, the few people who actually like it have put a lot of time and effort in trying to get it back
Which begs the question, did they ever really try it? Josta has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And while Josta wasn’t made from bat poop as my middle school classmates might have thought in 1997, man did it taste like shit.
