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Competition No 3729

Set by John Crick, 29 April

Wine writers always go over the top. You were asked to do the same for less fancy liquids.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Excellent. Hon menshes to Geoff Noble, G M Davis, Peter Norman, Prue Sheldon and Sara Williams. All those below get £20; the overall winner, Ian Birchall, also gets the vouchers.

This revelatory own-brand cola comes only in the bottle, but don't be put off - its chewy plasticity adds to the air of pure ersatz exuded by the poster-paint bold label and one-curlicue-short-of-a-lawsuit branding. Like that first French kiss behind the bike shed, the fizz is ticklish on the tongue, giving way to a sugar rush intense enough to make your teeth itch, exhibiting intuition acute as pigs have on entering a slaughterhouse. Keep your nerve and you'll catch - albeit fleetingly - a veritable bevy of E-numbers skittering off with the torturing alacrity of half-remembered dreams, hiding behind the residue that coats the suddenly irresistibly lickable inside of your mouth. Ponder, as these flavours recede; they don't exist in nature, but have been designed in the pristine cool of the company's laboratories to pique palates the length and breadth of England.

Adrian Fry

Moxie blends gentian, wintergreen, water, sugar, cinchona, alkaloids and caramel (sassafras - a carcinogen - no more). On tasting Moxie, two things strike me. First, a medicinal taste, a tribute to its origins as "nerve medicine". Bottles from 1902-2002 taste similar. Stored properly, Moxie will taste bitter well into the next century. I cannot verify that; I'll take it on faith. Its enormous bouquet contains tarry notes of aged natto, aroma of Shetland pony on a summer's day, hints of haggis, and roasted-fruit nose of a 19th-century plum pudding (improperly stored). In reality, it's not like any of these. Coloured black as a talent agent's heart, the flavours are deep as a Welsh mine, calling to mind a broth of old shoes and eucalyptus, but with greater fruit ripeness. In short, Moxie represents another great soft drink, less familiar than Coke or Pepsi, but equally great in its way.

Bruce W Alter

As the magical, sparkling liquid comes gushing and bubbling out of the tap, I remember just how recently this selfsame water has flowed forth in the same way from a warm, sinuous, living body. What a cornucopia of tastes! The fruity tang of urine, the ripe full-blooded flavour of diesel, an impudent hint of Harpic and the opulent, variegated, unpredictable mixture of industrial chemicals, from which the trusty dioxin is never absent. Here, in one extraordinary brew, is all the flamboyant vibrancy of urban life. For those of us fortunate enough to drink water from the sun-drenched north-eastern slopes of the Thames, there are enough drug-users contributing to the supply for every mouthful to bring the heady thrill of intoxication. Happily, "treatment" is still of the traditional, artisanal kind, with none of the spurious purity offered by those methods so deplored by the Campaign for Real Tap Water.

Ian Birchall

No 3732 Set by Margaret Rogers

"Le Pen's not mightier than the sword." We want other punning headlines on the contemporary scene.

Max ten puns by 31 May (to appear in issue dated 10 June) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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