Songfacts®:

• The first G. Love & Special Sauce single, "Cold Beverage" is an ode to his favorite drinks, which include lemonade, iced tea, Sprite, Kool Aid and strawberry daiquiris.
  
  G. Love (Garrett Dutton) got the idea for the song when he was at an auto repair shop getting his brakes worked on. He spotted a vending machine offering "cold beverages," and thought, I like cold beverages. He started jotting down lyrics on the magazine he was reading, thinking about the different forms of drinking.
• Musically, this song is based on a Robert Johnson-style blues riff G. Love came up with. He worked out the song with his bandmates, bass player Jimi "Jazz" Prescott drummer Jeffrey "The Houseman" Clemens. It came together quickly and they were happy with the song, but they had no idea it would go over so well until they started playing it live and crowds would go crazy.
  
  "It's poetry," G. Love told Artist Waves.?The lyrics, the three instruments and the syncopation are perfect. Live, the song is great. I've tried to figure out what parts of that song work, and why it resonates, and then attempt writing something with a similar sense of composition. But, I can't do it. It's one of a kind, man."
• The song got a gritty, black-and-white video that got some airplay on MTV. The band stuck to a similar style on future videos, which were never too slick.
• Record companies had a lot of money in early '90s, so acts like G. Love & Special Sauce could sometimes get signed as "developing artists." Getting the attention of these companies wasn't easy though. In a Songfacts interview with G. Love, he talked about landing a deal with Epic. "The '90s were rich, but the music industry was a million light years away," he said. "If you were a kid with a guitar there was no way you were going to be on MTV, right? I mean, how would you ever get to that? Do you know how to start? But then I did it. I went from street musician to major recording artist in two years. I kept plugging away, gig to gig, and sending tapes here and there. We booked gigs, went out and booked more gigs. It was happening and then we ended up getting on MTV, and that was pretty cool."