Product circa: 2006
Due to the time elapsed since this product's release, this post will concentrate on what the product was, and not how it tastes. But to be clear: I have this bottle pictured, and I drank it around the year 2020. Years ago, on a whim, having remembered this old product, I went on eBay and bought an unopened bottle. As expected, the taste wasn't much, due to age.
If I'm not mistaken, Blak was Coke's first coffee-flavored product. It was piloted in France, then released in North America, and it shows; it was a boutique product. It was released in 4-packs, in small glass bottles wrapped in plastic which had a coffee-like design. These were fairly expensive, as well.
The taste was not unlike its successor, Coca-Cola with Coffee. It had a dark-roasted coffee flavor, which doesn't perfectly pair with the cola flavor, but it was fine. In a prescient move that wasn't popular at the time, Coke switched half of Blak's sweetener with the sucralose and acesulfame potassium mixture that was getting popular at the time. Did it make the product suffer? Probably.
In the end, Blak is simply one of the more oddball entries in Coke's historical stable. While not as storied as something like Pepsi Blue or New Coke, I consider it among them as one of the more memorable blips in the beverage industry history.
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