[Picture of Brain Wash bottle] Skeleteens, a small soda company in LA, used to make Brain Wash, a soda with lots of herbs and caffeine and red dye or even more blue dye, which had a unique peppery flavor, and bottles with skeletons on them, if you like that sort of thing. They also made Black Lemonade, a similar soda without the caffeine, and Brainalyzer, a somewhat calmer-packaged sweeter drink, and a variety of other attitude-projecting sodas. My wife and I both liked the stuff, and I've found that, aside from the caffeine and sugar, there's something about it that makes me feel better and more energetic that nothing else quite does, and she found it contributed significantly to her ability to test software. (Disclaimer - this doesn't mean that you should overuse the stuff, or that caffeine isn't addictive, or that sugar and heavy blue dye don't have other physiological effects that you might wisely choose to avoid, but used in moderation it's a pleasant beverage.)

But Oohhh, Noooo, they STOPPED MAKING IT a couple of years ago, and while you could occasionally get cases of it from a distributor who had some in the back of the warehouse, the stuff was basically GONE. Like the, ummm, software industry here in Silicon Valley, that's an occupational hazard of small businesses with lots of character. Other people we knew were desperate for it too.

Recently, our local liquor store, Beverages and More, started getting some of their products again - apparently they occasionally crank up a batch, and the Bevmo folks pointed us at Real Soda, aka* Soda King who distribute the stuff, as well as selling a variety of other niche-market sodas. Their web site doesn't always have Brain Wash on it, or if it does, it's hidden in a maze of twisty little hyperlinks, but it's possible to contact them and get caseloads of the stuff. (How strongly this was related to our desire to buy 20 cases of it isn't exactly clear, but these guys do respond to their fans :-) It's possible for them to ship it almost anywhere, but at least here in California the cleanest method seems to be for RealSoda's distributors to deliver it to a nearby liquor store where they do business.
I don't think Real Soda and Soda King are exactly the same company (Real Soda's in the LA area and Soda King is in Seattle), but they've got some kind of business relationship and their web pages bounce back and forth between each other. Anyway, the stuff gets delivered :-)