{"id":108,"date":"2026-05-19T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/journal\/cucumber-a-post-mortem\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T08:00:00","slug":"cucumber-a-post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/journal\/cucumber-a-post-mortem\/","title":{"rendered":"Cucumber: a post-mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

On paper, cucumber was perfect. Fresh, green, mildly sweet, beloved by anybody who has ever been handed a glass of water in a spa. We were sure it would be flavour six.<\/p>\n

What went wrong<\/h2>\n

Cucumber is about 96% water. Getting enough of it into a can to actually taste meant either a lot of juice, which went cloudy and then slightly sour in a week, or an extract, which tasted exactly like hand soap.<\/p>\n

We tried pairing it with mint. Too obvious. With chilli. Too much. With black pepper, which was almost interesting and then was just a salad.<\/p>\n

“Like drinking a nice bathroom.” \u2014 the most generous tasting note we got.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What we kept<\/h2>\n

We learned how fast fresh vegetable juice turns in a sealed can, which is going to matter, because one of the two autumn flavours does have a vegetable in it. It isn’t cucumber.<\/p>\n

The cucumber coupon on the coupons page<\/a> is retired, like the flavour. We left it there as a reminder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We tried cucumber. We stopped trying cucumber. Full transparency on a bad idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":50,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nxt-post-page-sidebar":"","nxt-post-page-display-sidebar":"","nxt-post-page-custom-sidebar":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[38,39,29],"pulp_writer":[21],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kitchen-notes","tag-cucumber","tag-failures","tag-testing","pulp_writer-nell"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"pulp_writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.uichemy.com\/pulp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pulp_writer?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}