Drinks: It’s the simplest, most perfect cocktail. Most of you are doing it wrong.

This quest began, like so many, with a crisis in the aisle of a CVS. Much has been written about quinine as a “tool of imperialism” in European colonialism, but the thumbnail story, which I’m drawing from Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt’s definitive book Just the Tonic, has Catholic missionaries first observing the ability of local preparations of cinchona bark to treat the fevers, chills, and other symptoms associated with malaria around 1600, give or take a few decades, in the Loja region of Ecuador, or perhaps Peru. Fever-Tree, with a brand name hearkening back to the mixer’s literal roots, is usually credited as the instigator of the tonic revival, entering the scene as it did in 2005 with its “Indian” tonic, bearing quinine sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexican bitter orange, and, most importantly, a fraction of the sugar of the standard brands and no HFCS. One tester described Fever-Tree as a “brightly lit empty apartment,” while another called it “forgettable.” Owen’s bore “hints of Crystal Lite.” Poor Fentimans was “wan” and tasted of “rocks” and “pee.” Of Schweppes, my testers praised the tonic’s balance, roundness, lemon-forward citrus, and tang, while acknowledging that it was sweeter and tasted more “mass market.” Indeed. Instead, what I think we witnessed here was, for one thing, the impact of habit and familiarity—as Chirico put it, “Americans do like their G&T a little more citrusy and sweet.” But more importantly, this result confirms a suspicion I have harbored for some time now—that it’s not so much the formulation of the tonic that matters, as it is its packaging and size, and what that has to do with carbonation.