The Unexpected Pleasures of a Dirty Soda

The other day, while exploring Saratoga Springs, Utah, a small city between Provo and Salt Lake, I wandered into an outpost of Deseret Book, a chain of religious-goods stores run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among rows of scriptural texts and other missionary essentials (neckties, journals, L.E.D. bike lights) was a display of graphic T-shirts, including one printed with a list of foods that Utah is known for: “Fry Sauce & Casseroles & Funeral Potatoes & Green Jello.” Fry sauce, I had recently learned, is a mixture of ketchup and mayo, and funeral potatoes are themselves a casserole, made with cheese and cornflakes and so named because they’re often served at community gatherings after someone dies, though you can also find them at restaurants. Jell-O—wholesome, shelf-stable, inexpensive enough to feed even the largest of families—is so beloved by Mormons that Utah and parts of the surrounding states have been nicknamed the Jell-O Belt. The lime flavor is the base of many a “green salad.”

The shirt had one glaring omission: dirty soda, a Utah phenomenon that’s become a national curiosity. If “funeral potatoes” makes for sorry marketing copy, Don Draper might have come up with “dirty soda,” which refers to a fountain drink—any of the name-brand heavy hitters—that’s been doctored with syrups, fruit purées, and creamers. Swig, a chain founded in 2010, coined and later trademarked the term. But, in the years since, an astonishing number of copycats—Thirst, FiiZ, Sodalicious, Quench It!, to name a few—have cropped up all over the state. You can even make a dirty soda at the gas station, where you’re likely to find a selection of syrups and creamers by the self-serve fountain.

For many in Utah, dirty soda is not just a regional specialty; it’s an organizing principle of everyday life. There’s nothing unusual about pulling up to a drive-through as early as 7:30 A.M. to order a fizzy beverage between twelve ounces (considered to be child-size) and forty-four (roughly equivalent to a Super Big Gulp, at 7-Eleven), plus a cup of warm pretzel bites or a sugar cookie. Soda features prominently in the new Hulu reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which follows the comings and goings of a group of TikTok-famous young women. In one episode, a cast member named Layla declares that she has at least one forty-four-ounce soda “six out of seven days of the week,” and orders a Swig drink known as a Bloody Wild (Mountain Dew spiked with mango and strawberry purées). In another scene, at a graduation party, the group enjoys a Thirst-catered soda bar complete with pebble ice, the soda-shop standard.

A daily soft drink is not uncommon for the average American, but for a practicing Mormon it may take on greater significance. In 1833, in Kirtland, Ohio, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints, considered by Mormons to be a prophet, received a revelation known as the Word of Wisdom, which proscribed tobacco, alcohol, and “hot drinks,” without further elaboration. Most Mormons do not drink coffee of any temperature, nor caffeinated tea, though herbal tea, hot or cold, is thought by many to be acceptable. Ruling out caffeinated soda might stand to reason, but according to an official church statement released in 2012—two years after Swig was founded—it is not prohibited. In the absence of coffee runs and barhopping, members of the Church have embraced souped-up soft drinks and novelty desserts such as Crumbl cookies, which also originated in Utah. “It’s not like when you go to Seattle and everyone has a morning cup of coffee, or Italy and everyone has a glass of wine with dinner,” Brooke Eliason, a food blogger and church member who grew up in Salt Lake City, told me. “And yet we still enjoy rituals and things that are fun.”

I arrived at the Swig in Saratoga Springs around 3 P.M., in the middle of the after-school rush. Outside, as a dozen or so cars waited their turn at the window, a small team of cheerful young employees were acting as an advance guard, approaching each vehicle to take orders. Inside, another group pulled and mixed drinks with impressive speed, while singing along loudly to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” Though there was a small counter where, theoretically, a customer could order and pay on two feet, almost no one did, and there was minimal seating. “We’re really fitting into people’s busy days,” Alex Dunn, the company’s C.E.O., told me as we surveyed the scene. “This is not a destination. It’s a treat. It’s a break.”

Life in Utah involves a considerable amount of driving. It’s not unpleasant to spend hours in your car, surrounded by striking mountain ranges, but you might need a pick-me-up if you’ve got a gaggle of kids in the back seat. More than one person I spoke to identified mothers as a top market for the dirty-soda business, showing up in minivans on the way home from sports practice or getting together for midmorning drive-through dates. Swig’s founder, Nicole Tanner, a Mormon mother of five, made daily stops at Sonic for Diet Coke before she came up with the idea for a more exciting, customizable experience. Fourteen years later, Sonic’s menu includes a Dirty Dr Pepper.

In a back room, Dunn and several of his team members presented me with a sampling of best-sellers, including the Founder, Tanner’s signature concoction of Diet Coke with sugar-free coconut syrup, coconut cream, and a squeeze of fresh lime; the Happy Camper, made with root beer, toasted-marshmallow syrup, and half-and-half; and the Fresca-based Island Time, featuring passion-fruit syrup, mango purée, coconut cream, and a wedge of fresh orange—a favorite of the Mormon models and influencers Lucky Blue and Nara Smith. I’d been skeptical of the idea of adding something milky to a soda, but any doubt was washed away with my first sips. As with coffee or tea, the mellow lusciousness of the cream played off the acidity of Coke and Dr Pepper especially, offsetting and enhancing each soda’s darkest, spiciest notes. In the Founder, the combination of coconut and lime brought to mind a piña colada.

As outré, or even profane, as dirty soda might sound, there are plenty of precedents: ice-cream floats; Italian sodas; egg creams, which despite the name contain only seltzer, chocolate or vanilla syrup, and milk. As it happens, you can find an egg cream in Salt Lake, at Feldman’s, the city’s single Jewish deli. Michael Feldman, a New Jersey native who opened it with his wife, told me that many of his customers are Jews (there are an estimated six thousand in Utah, a population that dates back to the nineteenth century), but he’d been surprised to find that at least half are Mormons. Though egg creams have not been a particular draw—he laughed off my suggestion to rebrand them as Jewish dirty sodas—some church members, he said, become adventurous eaters after seeing the world on missions. “If you asked a Mormon, ‘When you travel, what food do you miss?,’ there wouldn’t be much,” Feldman surmised.

As a concept, dirty soda might prove to be the state’s most successful culinary export. Swig is growing rapidly, with eighty locations in nine states. In Millcreek, Utah, I met Ethan Cisneros, the bushy-tailed twenty-seven-year-old co-founder of Thirst, a chain that will open its seventh location this month, in the Salt Lake City airport. On his phone, Cisneros showed me a new product called Bevfix: shelf-stable packets containing a mix of syrup and creamer, to turn any soda dirty, on the go. (Coffee Mate released a similar product, a coconut-and-lime-flavored creamer promising the “ultimate dirty soda sensation.”) Earlier this year, the trend reached New York: Manhattan is now home to two locations of Cool Sips, which offers drinks, such as the Montauk (Dr Pepper, mint, and vanilla cream), that max out at a chaste twenty-four ounces.

Soda, of course, can also be a vice. New Yorkers will recall Bloomberg’s short-lived attempt to restrict it. “You can see that lady is literally finishing her other forty-four,” Cisneros said, laughing, as he watched a customer pull into his drive-through to get her next fix. As a parting gift, he gave me a Thirst tumbler: a neon-orange, forty-ounce facsimile of a Stanley cup, the enormous insulated mug whose explosive nationwide popularity originated with Mormon moms. I was reluctant to fill it with soda, especially after I had learned the hard way that Dr Pepper, a top seller in Utah, is caffeinated: my after-dinner Dr Spice—a Swig seasonal special featuring cinnamon and coconut syrups, half-and-half, and a cinnamon stick—left me so wired that I lost a night of sleep.

“It totally can get out of hand—I have been addicted to Diet Coke!” Eliason, the food influencer, told me. “Our current prophet has talked a lot about addiction. You can go to the temple if you drink energy drinks, and Diet Coke, but we have been asked to not be over the top.” I wondered about the growing market for non-alcoholic imitations of drinks like Negronis and I.P.A.s. Had they taken off among Mormons, too? Eliason said that, in her experience, they hadn’t, citing a verse from First Thessalonians—“abstain from all appearance of evil.”

A server at Oquirrh, a Salt Lake restaurant with a full bar where I ate dinner one night, told me that he was somewhat surprised that zero-proof substitutes aren’t more popular with church members. “But nobody wants to pay fourteen dollars,” he said, “and if you don’t know cocktails it’s kind of, like, ‘This is a weird-tasting drink.’ ” ♦