Mountain Dew has been around since the 1940s, when two Tennessee brothers cooked up a lemon-lime mixer because they couldn’t find a decent soda to pair with bourbon. The brand has come a long way from its hillbilly moonshine roots — PepsiCo now pumps out flavors in every color of the rainbow, from neon green to fire-engine red to teal blue. But here’s the thing about having a ton of flavors: some of them are genuinely great, and some of them are an absolute chore to drink. Multiple food publications have put these sodas through ranked taste tests in 2024 and 2025, and the results tell a pretty clear story about which Dews are worth your $2.29 and which ones deserve to stay on the shelf.
Diet Mountain Dew
Dead last. Absolute basement. There’s no way to sugarcoat this — pun intended — because Diet Mountain Dew has almost no sugar to speak of. It contains less than a gram of sugar per bottle and just 10 calories compared to the 290 calories packed into a 20-ounce bottle of the original. That sounds like a win for your waistline until you actually drink it. One reviewer called it a “fizzy fail” because of the aspartame-flooded aftertaste that coats your tongue with a relentlessly bitter flavor that won’t quit. Another said it’s “so inferior to Mountain Dew Zero” that they questioned why Diet Mountain Dew even exists anymore. In a blind taste test among five self-proclaimed Dew fans who all claimed to hate diet soda, Diet Mountain Dew still managed to land in the middle of the pack — which says more about how wild that particular test was than anything positive about Diet Dew. If you want a zero-calorie option, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar is right there. It has literally zero calories and, by all accounts, doesn’t taste like you’re licking a chemistry set.
Mountain Dew Zero Sugar
Speaking of which, Zero Sugar is the diet soda that Diet Mountain Dew wishes it could be. It contains five calories per serving — close enough to zero for government labeling purposes — and manages to taste like something a human would voluntarily drink. That said, the citrus flavor has been described as “so fake you could envision the lab where it was created.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but in the world of diet sodas, tasting like a slightly artificial version of the real thing is basically a standing ovation. It consistently ranks well above its Diet sibling, which is damning with faint praise but still counts as a win. If you’re counting calories and still want that Dew fix, this is the move.
Mountain Dew Code Red
Here’s where things get interesting — and contentious. Code Red dropped in May 2001 and was a genuine phenomenon. It increased overall Mountain Dew sales by 6% in its first year and basically kicked off the era of Mountain Dew flavor experimentation. Blue Shock Freeze, LiveWire, Baja Blast, Pitch Black — none of those exist without Code Red proving the concept first. So how does this trailblazer hold up today? It depends on who you ask. One ranking praised it as being “up there with the best Mountain Dew flavors,” saying the cherry is sweet, fruity, and refreshing. But another reviewer was less kind, saying Code Red only “hints at cherry flavor without going full throttle” and that what you actually get is a super-sweet base of carbonated sugar water with very subtle cherry showing up a few seconds late. The harshest take came from a reviewer who expected the flavor to be 75% cherry and 25% citrus but got something more like 85% lemon-lime and 15% cherry — basically regular Mountain Dew wearing a cherry costume. The good news is it doesn’t taste like cough syrup. The bad news is that “doesn’t taste like NyQuil” is a pretty low bar for a soda that’s been around for over two decades.
Mountain Dew LiveWire
LiveWire launched in the summer of 2003 and is Mountain Dew’s answer to Orange Crush and Sunkist, but with the caffeine kick that those sodas don’t bring. It packs 77 grams of sugar per 20-ounce bottle — same as the original — and has an “almost SunnyD-like essence on the nose,” which is either appealing or horrifying depending on how you feel about SunnyD. On the tongue it shares more in common with Fanta or Orange Crush than traditional Mountain Dew. It landed in third place in one major ranking, which is respectable but not dominant. The consensus seems to be that LiveWire is a solid orange soda that happens to have Mountain Dew branding and a caffeine boost. Whether that’s a good thing depends on whether you wanted a Mountain Dew or an orange soda. If you wanted both, congratulations — this is your drink.
Original Mountain Dew
The one that started it all. Well, sort of — the original 1940s recipe was a clear, highly carbonated lemon-lime drink that looked more like Sprite than the nuclear-green liquid we know today. The Hartman brothers created it in Knoxville, Tennessee, after they couldn’t find their preferred lemon-lime mixer for Old Taylor Kentucky Bourbon. The name itself was 19th-century slang for whiskey, and the early marketing featured a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a moonshine jug. Fast forward to now, and original Mountain Dew contains 91 milligrams of caffeine per can and represents 6.6% of the entire carbonated soft drink market in America. It’s the leading soft drink in several states across the Midwest. One interesting wrinkle from a blind taste test: packaging apparently affects how it tastes. Mountain Dew from a plastic bottle ranked four spots higher than Mountain Dew from a can, despite being the exact same formula. That’s either a fascinating comment on how materials affect carbonation and flavor, or proof that five dudes in a room can produce unreliable data. Probably both.
Mountain Dew Throwback
In a blind taste test among five Mountain Dew loyalists, Throwback in a can was the clear winner. The reason is simple: real cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Mountain Dew switched from cane sugar to HFCS sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and the taste test strongly suggested that was a mistake. The testers used a golf-style scoring system where lower was better, and Throwback crushed the competition. The conclusion was blunt — formula affects taste more than packaging, and Pepsi shouldn’t have switched from cane sugar in the first place. This tracks with a broader trend in the soda world where “real sugar” versions of popular drinks consistently get praised over their HFCS counterparts. Mexican Coke, anyone?
Mountain Dew Baja Blast
The king. The absolute favorite across multiple rankings. Baja Blast started as a Taco Bell exclusive in July 2004 and has since become one of the newest soft drinks to earn genuine cult status since Cherry Coke. The teal-colored soda is sweet but not too sweet, with lime flavor that cuts through the sugar for something that’s actually refreshing rather than just aggressively sweet. It retains just enough of that original Mountain Dew flavor to feel familiar without being redundant. One reviewer described drinking it as being like “an intense tropical storm,” which is the kind of thing that sounds like marketing gibberish until you try it and realize, yeah, that’s kind of accurate. The brand deal with Taco Bell has been wildly successful — in 2024, the two companies celebrated their 20th “Bajaversary” with a series of promotions including a limited-edition Baja Blast pie. You can now buy it in retail stores, which is either great news or terrible news depending on how much self-control you have at the grocery store. In ranking after ranking, Baja Blast takes the top spot. It won at Chowhound. It won at The Takeout. It won at Tasting Table. The soda that was invented to go with a Chalupa is, apparently, the greatest Mountain Dew ever made.
The Bigger Picture
Mountain Dew has been around for over 80 years, and PepsiCo shows no signs of slowing down the flavor machine. They’re constantly releasing new varieties and discontinuing old ones — in March 2019, they axed Diet Code Red, Real Sugar, Pitch Black, and several others in one sweep. The brand has also cleaned up some of its more controversial ingredients, removing brominated vegetable oil after years of consumer backlash. PepsiCo even partnered with Boston Beer Company in 2022 to produce Hard Mtn Dew, an alcohol-infused line that launched in Florida, Iowa, and Tennessee — a fitting nod to the brand’s origins as a whiskey mixer. The rankings tell a clear story: Baja Blast sits comfortably on top, Diet Mountain Dew is the consensus worst, and Code Red — despite its legendary status as the flavor that launched an empire — doesn’t live up to the hype when you actually sit down and drink it next to the competition. Sometimes being first doesn’t mean being best.
