We Tried Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot. Here's How It Went
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We love Mountain Dew. We love Flamin' Hot snacks. We love washing down our Flamin' Hot snacks with Mountain Dew. Why not make things simpler and just put the Flamin' Hot flavor in the Mountain Dew?
Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot first dropped as a limited-time offering in 2021. The brand is rereleasing this spicy soda in 2022, this time with a fun promotional tie-in: It's the official soda of a real town in Michigan called Hell. The brand threw a party in Hell to celebrate the launch on April 30, 2022 that featured Action Bronson making food and former "Jersey Shore" star Pauly D doing a DJ set. That sure sounds like heaven to us.
We were able to score some of this infernal soft drink to sample it and relay the results to you. Clearly, this is more of a novelty product, but could the spicy Mountain Dew actually be... good? Could it be even better than good? Read on to find out what we thought.
What's in Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot?
According to the label, Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot is "Dew with a blast of heat and citrus." The label includes the always reassuring disclaimer "contains 0% juice," so the citrus flavor isn't coming from freshly-squeezed limes or anything like that. However, the ingredients list says the drink contains no artificial flavors, so presumably, citrus fruits were harmed at some point in the making of this beverage.
The ingredients are all basically what you'd expect from any soda: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, caffeine, and preservatives. There's a heaping helping of Yellow 6 and Red 40 to give the drink its striking orange-red color. The one component that we didn't immediately recognize was ester of rosin, which is an emulsifier that Mountain Dew recently started including in its drinks to replace brominated vegetable oil, an ingredient that led to Mountain Dew being banned in many countries.
The package we received also included a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, because what else could make for a better pairing with Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot?
Where can you get it?
Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot is a limited-edition product, so it will probably only be available for a short time. You can buy a 12-pack of cans on Amazon, but at almost $19, it's pretty expensive for soda. This drink is also available at stores across the country, and it may be cheaper to buy in person rather than online. There's a store locator on Mountain Dew's website if you want to venture forth and seek out this spicy soda.
If you want to try this, we would recommend buying it quickly. There's no telling when it's going to sell out, and if that happens, you'll have to contend with the resale market. We found listings on Amazon with people selling individual cans from the last production run for as much as $37. Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot is a fun novelty drink, but it's not fun enough to warrant spending almost $40 on 12 ounces of soda.
How does it compare to other Mountain Dew products?
Mountain Dew is not a brand that shies away from putting out wild and creative flavors. The brand's site lists eight flavors of soda in addition to the classic Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. That's not to mention Baja Blast, which is a Taco Bell exclusive (most of the time, anyway), and Sweet Lightning, which you can only get at KFC. And how could we forget Mountain Dew Kickstart, the brand's juice-spiked line of energy drinks, or Mountain Dew Amp, its other line of energy drinks? We also have to mention Mountain Dew Game Fuel, its third (!) line of energy drinks. There's also Hard Mountain Dew, which is of course the brand's foray into the alcoholic beverage market.
Suffice it to say that Mountain Dew offers consumers a plethora of beverage options, and the company's branding and marketing leans into an extreme (or perhaps X-treme) aesthetic. If you asked random passersby which soda brand was going to make a Flamin' Hot flavor, 9 out of 10 would probably pick Mountain Dew.
What's the nutrition info of Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot?
Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot is a full-sugar, non-diet soda, so as you would expect it's filled with empty calories. The 20-ounce bottle we received contained 280 calories. It had 74 grams of carbs, 73 of which were from added sugar. That's 146% of the FDA's recommendation for added sugar in a day, so if you drink one of these today, you might want to skip dessert tomorrow. That said, soda is delicious, and we're not here to shame anyone for drinking things that make them feel happy. We're just letting you know what you're getting into if you consume this beverage.
There's also the high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) factor. Some studies suggest frequent consumption of HFCS may lead to health problems including diabetes, cancer, dementia, and more. The food coloring Red 40 is another ingredient in this drink you might want to avoid. Although the evidence isn't all clear, it's possible that Red 40 could contribute to hyperactivity and other adverse effects in children.
How does it taste?
Now that we're done scaring you about food dye, here's the fun part: the taste test. Mountain Dew Flamin' Hot is really, really good. The citrus flavoring in the drink is delicious. You can definitely tell that it's more lime-forward than regular Mountain Dew, and we thought we also noticed some orange juice flavor.
The extra dose of citrus tang is the perfect complement to the drink's chili pepper heat, which is surprisingly robust. It's not mouth-meltingly hot, but it has a noticeable burn on the way down, especially in the aftertaste. When we sipped this out of a glass, we had to be careful to not breathe in while raising the cup to our face, as the spicy smell made us cough and sneeze. The overall experience was a lot less weird than we were anticipating. If you enjoy spicy margaritas or other similar cocktails, this soda hits a lot of the same flavor notes.
The pairing with Flamin' Hot Cheetos was a home run. The salty, savory Cheetos balanced the sweetness of the Mountain Dew perfectly, and it made for quite a binge-able combination. We have no complaints about this at all, and wish we could buy this drink all the time.