Each Tuesday and Thursday for the next few weeks, we'll be taking a look at alternatives to cokes for the sticky Houston summer that lays ahead.

We're back to regular old unhealthy-for-you sodas today with Postobon. Chock full of high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and artificial flavors, this is a coke you'll be right at home with, just before you develop adult onset diabetes.

Postobon is produced by Colombia's largest soft drink company, Postobón (note the slight difference in spelling), which is a portmanteau of the original manufacturers' last names: Gabriel Posada and Valerio Tobón. Posada and Tobón first began bottling soft drinks in 1903 and -- at least according to Wikipedia -- plied their wares in what I'm imagining is the cutest way possible: in a wagon pulled by a donkey. I hope the donkey had a cute name. Like "George."

Postobon was the first in a line of fruit-flavored sodas that Postobón eventually began producing. Old-school Postobon is apple-flavored, and that's the flavor I picked up out of the refrigerated case at Phoenicia. Since then, the company has played off of Postobon's immense popularity in South America and also makes grape, orange and lemon-flavored Postobon. I'm not sold on the lemon one yet.

Apple-flavored Postobon tastes almost as you would expect. It's tastes strongly of apple, but with a very weird, almost medicinal kick at the end. It reminds me of the neon pink-colored Amoxicillin they gave us as kids, which -- coincidentally -- is the same color as the can. You remember that stuff: slightly bubble gum-flavored, but you could still tell it was medicine. That's how Postobon tastes, but with strong apple overtones.

Is this stuff the soda form of antibiotics? Okay, it's obviously not. But do you want to drink something that tastes that way? Maybe you do, but I'm sticking with Uludağ Portakal for now.