An Ode to Brio

Here is a bottle of a beverage that has a special place in my heart.  Brio is a carbonated soft drink that is widely available in Canada. 

It is about the same colour as Coke, but that is where any similarity ends.   Brio is a bitter drink apparently coming from the juice of the fruit of the myrtle leaved orange tree, or chinotto in Italian.  According to the internets, chinotto is a drink enjoyed in Italy and Malta as well.  I find this a little surprising, since on the whole I would say I like most Italian foods, but Brio is an abomination that should be thrown into the deepest pit of hell

Brio is foul evil stuff.  Wikipedia says that it tastes “bittersweet” whereas I would describe it with more of the taste of a rancid animal corpse, left to ripen in the sun for just the correct amount of time, and then wrapped in garbage and distilled and filtered through fungus ridden sweat socks. 

I hate it.  I hate the taste of Brio more than almost any other food/drink product that I can think of.  When I saw Brio on the shelf of no frills in Bradford, waves of pure hate rolled over me and mixed with an intense revulsion.  I was almost overcome to the point where I wanted to smash the entire display to the floor, then dance on it screaming at the shards of the bottles.  This was the reaction evoked after seeing no Brio for at least 12 years…

In some ways, Brio does however hold a very special place in my heart.  They used to sell it pretty much everywhere in southern Ontario, so it was always around.  When my friends and I would go out and grab some food and drinks, you would always ask  what each person wants.  If anyone ever made the mistake of saying “I don’t care” or “anything is fine” you could guarantee that person would be getting Brio.  You could play punishing games like Brio roulette where one can of Brio was mixed in with nice beverages that everyone had to pull blindly.  You could lay Brio traps for people based on its colour being almost the same as Coke’s.  Upon reaching the age for alcoholic beverage consumption, we could try to come up with any cocktail at all that incorporated Brio and did not taste like a bucket of ass. 

Brio was a running joke that lasted at least 15 years of my life.

Brio is the taste of failure.