Skip to main content
All I learned about dirty soda I learned from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Last fall, the popular Hulu reality show depicted a group of TikTok influencers procreating, in-fighting and sipping on enormous cups from “Swig,” a drive-thru dirty soda shop founded in Utah. Inside the cups: brand-name sodas mixed with flavored syrups and creams with names like Berry Boujee and Life’s a Peach.
“Six out of the seven days of the week, I’m having at least one 44-ounce soda,” says Layla, one of the wives, in a scene at Swig during the show. “I’m probably only going to live to, like, 50, but it makes me happy.”
It’s hard to overstate what a talker that show was in the fall—certainly for those of us who watch reality TV garbage all the time—but even among people with actual standards. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was Hulu’s most watched unscripted premiere of 2024, unseating the Kardashians themselves. Season 2 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives drops on Hulu on May 15.
After the first season mainstreamed the concept of dirty soda, the trend exploded, and now all kinds of chains are getting in on the game. Taco Bell, Burgerville and Dutch Bros have all released dirty soda menu items. But how good is this beverage that one of the cast members called “her Mormon crack”? And isn’t it just a rebranding of the Italian sodas that have been available at Olive Garden for decades?
I enlisted a real-life ex-Mormon (my colleague, WW creative director Whitney McPhie) to come along on a tasting tour of Portland’s fledgling dirty soda scene to help give it some religious and cultural context, and to be a first responder in case a nondiabetic can go into a diabetic coma. Neither of us are regular soda drinkers. Here’s what we found.
Fizz N Sip
Swig has only made it as far west as Idaho, so we started at the equivalent of Portland’s dirty soda mothership: Fizz N Sip in North Portland’s Overlook neighborhood. Veronika Sakhashchik, 25 and not Mormon, opened the soda fountain in February, inspired by watching the Hulu show.
“Portland is a coffee city, so it was definitely scary opening up a soda shop, but it’s been going well,” she says. “I think The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives really helped with that, and then also on social media it’s been taking off.”
Whitney and I took advantage of Fizz N Sip’s comfy seating area to dig in to what was actually going on here. Whitney was born into the church, the youngest of five, and lived in Utah for 12 years as a young adult. The important thing to know, she says, is that there’s a document called the Word of Wisdom, a revelation received by Joseph Smith himself, that warns against consuming alcohol and “hot drinks,” such as coffee. With so many beverages off the table, some Mormons lean way in to soft drinks to get their kicks, especially after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints clarified its position that caffeinated soft drinks are A-OK in 2012. Whitney started the process of leaving the church about a decade ago, at age 25. The dirty soda tour was a throwback to all those LDS restrictions of her youth.
“I remember writing in my diary as a kid, ‘I will never drink coffee, but I’ll have to pray about hot chocolate,’” she says. “I was taking it seriously to be a good Mormon girl. As a teen, I was like, this is insane. I started drinking coffee in high school.”
Sakhashchik steered us toward the Fizz N Sip favorite, the 1851 ($5.52 for 24 ounces, a medium): a mix of Dr. Pepper, vanilla, cherry and coconut cream. We also tried Farmer’s Choice ($7.22), consisting of Mountain Dew, pineapple, passionfruit, mango and half and half. Finally, Whitney and I tried to make our own dirty soda ($5.09) and came up with a Coca-Cola, lime and Marshmallow Fluff concoction, based on a vague memory of Diet Coke with lime once being a thing.
Bottom line: The 1851 is indeed delicious. The Farmer’s Choice is pretty good too, in a melted pineapple sno-cone kind of way. About five sips of each was plenty for us as nonsoda drinkers. The dirty soda we came up with—we can call it Marshmallow Fluff Fail—was objectively disgusting. Customers should stay on-menu unless they’re dirty soda pros or small children.
GO: Fizz N Sip, 2726 N Killingsworth St., 503-573-0437, instagram.com/fizznsip. 11 am–7 pm Monday–Thursday, 11 am–8 pm Friday–Sunday.
Dutch Bros
“Do you know not to put the straw in right away? It could explode,” warned the Dutch Bros broista before passing me a highlighter-blue iced beverage. No, broista, I did not know. Say more.
“I learned that one the hard way in my car,” she said. “That’s something they don’t tell you about sweet cream and even Soft Top is that, well, it doesn’t happen every time, but you’re kind of in danger of it exploding.” Noted. (Soft Top is Dutch’s proprietary fluffy sweet cream that tops drinks like a pillow.)
In February, the chain rolled out a line of three “Dr. Dutch” dirty sodas, but only in Utah and Tennessee. To pacify customers in other states jonesing for the trend, the company suggested a menu hack on social media to make any soda dirty by adding sweet cream for $1. We went with a dirty blue raspberry ($4.85 for a 16-ounce small) to try to replicate the brand’s Blue Oasis Dirty Soda from last summer.
Bottom line: This one tasted the most like Italian sodas of yore, in a good way. Perhaps follow our broista’s advice and get a dirty Pink Flamingo, which blends peach, strawberry, white chocolate and sweet cream, for a more layered flavor profile, as our dirty blue raspberry was a little one-note.
GO: Dutch Bros Coffee, multiple locations. dutchbros.com.
Burgerville
Burgerville added a premium drink category called “BV Bevies,” the fast food chain’s take on the dirty soda trend, in April. Options include cherry seltzer, iced peach green tea, pomegranate cherry limeade and Stumptown cold brew, all topped with “Cloud Cream.” At the encouragement of the employee working the drive-thru window, we went with the iced peach green tea ($4.99 for 16 ounces, a medium).
This was a mistake. The thing looked like a lager with an unwieldy head of foam, as if poured by a clueless freshman at the keg party. Sweet Burgerville, dedicated to locally sourced ingredients, made the drink with tropical green tea from Smith Teamaker and peach compote from Oregon Fruit Company. Unfortunately, our palates were shot after drinking four dirty sodas before hitting the Burgerville drive-thru, so this elevated version did not compute.
“Why isn’t it sweet?,” Whitney wondered. We winced and tossed it after a few sips.
Bottom line: Skip the iced peach green tea. As dirty soda veterans, we should have known to order Burgerville’s pomegranate cherry limeade, which is made with Portland Syrups to deliver that real hit of sweetness, or perhaps the Stumptown cold brew one for a coffee pick-me-up sure to be shunned by LDS faithful. The Mormon Wives would never.
GO: Burgerville, multiple locations, burgerville.com.