Welcome to a dirty edition of Snackology. (No, not “dirrty.” It’s not 2003, and this isn’t Christina Aguilera on the cover of Maxim.) I’m talking dirty as in the dirty soda craze.
Dirty Mountain Dew and Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar officially hit shelves on Tuesday.
I was late to dirty sodas, first getting a delicious Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning Peaches & Cream Soda at KFC last year and then immediately ordering a Dirty Soda With Baja Blast Zero Sugar when Taco Bell began offering to add a little bit of vanilla creamer to any of their Pepsi products.
I’m fully on board with this trend, and based on the products I just listed, Pepsi has embraced the potential of dirty sodas too.
“Mountain Dew has always led where flavor goes next, and dirty soda is exactly that moment,” Michael Smith, vice president of marketing for Mountain Dew, said in the press release announcing the new product. “Dirty Mountain Dew takes our iconic citrus flavor and makes it bold and refreshing in a whole new way — a bold, creamy ready-to-drink experience that’s exactly what Dew fans have been waiting for.”
Dirty Mountain Dew — and more importantly for Snackology — Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar do not have actual creamer in them. This is not a canned dairy product. Officially, Dirty Mountain Dew is a “Cream Soda Dew.” But for the purposes of riding the beverage zeitgeist, it’s a dirty soda.
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I’m sure I’ve told the story of my decades-long love of Mountain Dew in this newsletter before. Growing up in a household where our main soda was Caffeine Free Coca-Cola, getting a glass of fluorescent green Mountain Dew at a friend’s house was always a wild moment. In college, I originally stocked my mini fridge with four flavors of Dew: Classic, Code Red, LiveWire and Pitch Black. (They were on sale at the CVS I worked at, and that fridge had yet to embrace its future as the home of however much Molson Canadian I could cram into it.)
In the late 2000s, I switched to Diet Dew and have stuck with the Zero Sugar variants of each flavor. (I’m begging Pepsi to release Code Red Zero Sugar everywhere instead of just a random town in the midwest.) If I had to buy only two flavors of soda, it would be Coke Zero and Diet Dew.
I’m also a big cream soda fan, which meant that when I first saw rumors of a Mountain Dew flavor that was both a dirty soda and a cream soda, this potential flavor shot to the top of what I was most looking forward to in 2026.
Cracking open my first can of Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, I was impressed at how well they nailed the smell of a dirty soda. Once again, Pepsi didn’t actually add any creamer to this flavor, but the scent that hits your nose as you bring it in for a sip triggers the same vibe that I’ve gotten from dirty Mountain Dews at KFC and Taco Bell.
The color is lighter than I expected. Maybe it was the classic green 20 oz. bottle that tricked me, but I was surprised at the faded hue of Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. Of course, if you aren’t pouring one into a glass, you’ll probably never notice this.
What you will notice, though, is that the mouthfeel of Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar will instantly remind you that you’re not drinking a true dirty soda. There isn’t creamer or half-and-half added to this beverage. The viscosity of Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar is exactly the same as every other Mountain Dew in the history of Mountain Dew, but it’s going to feel thin if you’re in the mindset that you’re drinking a dirty soda.
Overall, I like the flavor of Dirty Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. It really does straddle the fence between being a traditional Mountain Dew while also boasting the flavor of a cream soda. (Which is a good thing, since I have three 12-packs of cans and two 20 oz. bottles at my house now.) This is a Mountain Dew flavor that I’d absolutely buy on the fly if I saw it in a cooler.
The Omnicosm founder. Snackology, Popculturology and The Cold Open writer. A Rochester, N.Y., native now living in the Washington, D.C., area. Won’t pass up a Genny Cream Ale.
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