Watered down drinkies

[fudgee_babee]

Please can someone tell me why pub/clubs insist on watering down products.. i.e coke.. lemonade etc

Is this even legal?

[zippybungle]

the reason you may find the soft drinks in the pubs are watered down is that they come from a box of syrup which mixes with soda when you press the appropiate button. what somtimes happends is the mix get disturbed and it comes out weak or strong. ive managed bars and you cant change the mix yourself, you call an engineer.

[acw]

Well said zippybungle!  That is my experience too.  When the postmix goes, bar staff can change the box.  If the postmix has clearly "gone", ask them to do so.  However if the engineer gets the mix wrong, there's nothing staff can do.  Fiddling with it themselves is usually a breach of the service contract. 

[Rystan]

On fountain drinks, it's certainly possible for the mix to be wrong. But frequently, seedier bars will water down all kinds of drinks for greater profit, which is a more likely reason. If less booze, lemonade, or coke are being used, and more water is being used, the bar makes more drinks out of their supply. Hence, more money.

It's more likely that the bar managers ASK fountain service people to up the ratio of water to syrup for just this reason.

[acw]

What "fountain"?  I was talking about either mix taps on hoses, or mix taps on fixed units. 

Why would the Coca-Cola or Pepsi guy help bars to water it down?  Unless you bribed him/her!  They want you to go thru as much of the stuff as possible so that you have to buy more postmix syrup from them. 

Assuming fudgee_babee doesn't frequent seedy bars, the answer is probably just that postmix cola tastes different from bottled cola (which in turn tastes different from the cans anyway). 

I would suggest also that the question be rephrased "Why do SOME pubs/clubs water down products?".  Because it's only a minotiry that illegally do so, and to suggest otherwise is unfair and potentially illegal too! (I don't mean that you'd get sued for asking it on this site of course - that would be ridiculous!)

[Rystan]

My mistake, ACW, "fountain" drinks in the US refers to the machines that dispense Coke, Pepsi, etc. from a tap that mixes the syrup with the water. I think we're talking about the same thing.

In reality, changing the mix on these machines hardly requires specialized knowledge, usually the people at the bar or restaurant can do it themselves. As to whay a rep from Coke or Pepsi would do this when asked, there are a number of reasons, not the least of which could be a complaint from patrons that the drinks were too sweet.

But again, I was entertaining the notion that this must be done by an "engineer." At least here in the states, an establishment's agreement with Coke or Pepsi does not prohibit that establishment from making any adjustments themselves. My wife's family owned a restaurant here for many years and confirmed this. It could be it's different over there.