Dr. Pepper Makes a House Visit to the Pens

A fountain Dr. Pepper machine. (Photo: sage.kitamorn.com)

While trying to hatch up some tough college hockey related NHL playoff trivia questions for my gig managing the Rival Films Facebook page, I noticed a press release on the Pittsburgh Penguins team page regarding the beverage contract for their new arena. The Consol Energy Center will have an exclusive beverage contract with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, which means RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, A&W Ro

ot Beer, and 7Up will be flowing out of the concession stand fountain machines, and Snapple and Fiji water bottles will be available along side them. This is the first beverage deal for the Penguins in quite a while, and is one of the first I’ve ever heard where the exclusive beverage rights were given to someone who isn’t Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

Dr. Pepper? Fountain soda Dr. Pepper? Alongside hockey? Well, wrap me up and ship me UPS to Pittsburgh.

If there is a weakness I have in life, fountain soda/pop is undeniably it. Don’t even begin to tell me how awful it is for me – I am more than fully aware. Even a year working in the Campus Center Dining Hall at Ithaca College, where I was often made to change the disgusting looking syrups for the fountain soda machines, could not dissuade me. Before I became addicted to coffee, the rare occasion I had fountain soda was my vice.

If my actually being able to have a fountain soda before college was a rare occurrence, finding Dr. Pepper on tap was even rarer. Ithaca had Mr. Pipp, its inferior counterpart, on one fountain in the dining hall. It sufficed. Binghamton didn’t have it at all on tap. It’s near impossible to find here in Boston. Dr. Pepper is just difficult to find in fountain soda machines in general, and the whole idea of a entire arena filled with them is simply glorious.

And why Dr. Pepper? Dr. Pepper was Everyone’s Favorite Mormon Quarterback, Steve Young’s, own vice. Mormons are forbidden from having caffeine (which just about cut Brigham Young University from my college list as an 18 year old, which made my Catholic parents happy), but in a Sports Illustrated profile in 1994 or 1995, Young was caught drinking Dr. Pepper. The writer questioned him about the transgression, and Young mentioned that it was a weakness he had, one he usually hid from others. Tweenage/teenage me was sold. My mega-crush drank Dr. Pepper, and now I needed to.

My parents were nonplussed, and entertained my newest obsession with a single 2-liter of Dr. W, the Wegmans brand version of Dr. Pepper. The real stuff was too expensive, they told me. I could be happy with this one allowance, and then go back to drinking multiple Tupperware pitchers of cheap knock-off Kool Aid that lined the top shelf of the old fridge.

So of course I take some perverse pleasure in finding a fountain Dr. Pepper machine somewhere in my adult life. Thirteen year old me urges me to indulge, and fourteen year old me attempts to egg me into texting my mom and telling her, “Nah, nah, nah. I’m having real Dr. Pepper, and you can’t stop me because I’m in my late twenties and live 7 hours away.”

Perhaps a roadtrip to the Pens new arena is in order.

(Have you noticed that I’m on a blogging redesign/relaunch yet? Two days, two posts….get excited for the official relaunch in the coming weeks.)