Alex Gavioli and his siblings weren’t allowed soft drinks growing up – unless it was on a Friday night when his parents couldn’t be arsed upholding the rule of law.

“Everyone’s pick was Pepsi Max in a can,” he tells Broadsheet. “That was our little pleasure.”

That little pleasure came to represent more than just Friday-night rebellion. The fizzy black stuff reminded him of his childhood growing up in a big Italian family. So he started making Joy Italian Cola, which he describes as a cross between Pepsi Max and Dr Pepper that some people tell him tastes like sour cola lollies.

“I went pretty old-school with it,” he says. “I used a really good cola syrup, bitters, shiraz powder and almond extract. Like, it’s an elevated cola. But I didn’t want to shy away from the GOAT either. You gotta respect it. Pepsi and Coke have been around for years for a reason.”

Launched in the middle of last year, Joy is one of a handful of brands having a crack at cola. Around the same time as Joy, Sydney’s Crave Cola kicked off with a caffeinated low-sugar riff on Coke. And Bobby has been flogging a functional version with prebiotics, in classic and vanilla flavours, for a while now.

For now, Joy is mainly stocked in wine bars – including Don’s in Prahran, which Gavioli also owns. But Joy was never meant to be just another non-alc option at the pub. “The original vision was with a sandwich or on a Sunday afternoon,” he says.

“In Melbourne there are heaps of sandwich shops and they’re all stocking Coke No Sugar now. The demand is there, that’s what people want. Even at Don’s, people come in and they’ll ask for it. It’s so regular, people just assume you have it on your list.”

In the age of fancy house-made sodas, the idea of a major soft drink brand sitting comfortably on a drinks menu at a trendy sandwich deli or wine bar should probably give us whiplash – but it doesn’t. And while the emergence of small Aussie cola is a promising development, clawing fridge space away from Big Red and friends is essentially a David and Goliath story when you look at Australia’s consumption.

More than 30 per cent of Aussies aged 14 and up drink Coca Cola-branded liquid at least once a week. And despite the wellness fever currently gripping the internet, Coca-Cola’s Australian sales spiked in the fourth quarter of last year.

Fighting against that level of popularity is one thing. But the real challenge is this: Australians associate the flavour of cola with Coke and friends. To taste anything different is to enter the uncanny valley of cola, and the challenge of making an indie version of the soft drink is two-fold: how to “respect the GOAT”, as Gavioli does, while bringing something new to the table?

Daniel Cox of Adelaide’s Mischief Brew says the brand went through 140 iterations to land on the recipe for its cola. “It was the thing we worked the hardest on, did the most research in and had the most test batches for,” he tells Broadsheet. “If someone asks you to make a lemonade or a grapefruit soda, you pretty much know where to start. Whereas a cola can be really anything.”

Mischief Brew’s version – made to a recipe of local citrus, Christmas spices, vanilla and burnt sugar – is among the brand’s top-selling products.

“What’s really interesting is the repeat customers. We call them cola fiends. People who just buy boxes and boxes really consistently and never stop.”

Cox says that while Mischief Brew’s cola is “completely different” to the cloyingly sweet colas most people have been guzzling since they were kids, theirs is closer to the colas of the early 20th century.

“In that whole development journey, we went full circle and thought about it when people were using real ingredients to make drinks. It’s a very traditional cola, but nothing like the Red Guy. Which is anything but traditional.”

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper were all invented in the late 1800s in the American south by huckster pharmacists flogging their recipes as medicinal tonics for a variety of ailments, from nerve disorders to dyspepsia (indigestion), for which Pepsi was named.

The most famous was Coca-Cola inventor John S Pemberton, whose monumental success was a case of right place, right time: when Atlanta voted itself dry in 1885, soda water – dispensed from carbonated “fountains” in shopping malls and pharmacies around the country – was just coming into vogue. Pemberton combined the new soda craze with a sugary tonic infused with coca leaf (the South American plant from which cocaine is derived) and kola nut (a caffeinated African nut) to create a temperance drink that would ignite the American cola wars to come.

After removing the cocaine, Coca-Cola landed in Australia with its first bottling plant opening in Sydney in 1938. Back then, soda companies were almost as widespread as indie beer breweries are today. But once Big Soda moved in, Australia’s soft drink industry fizzled, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been battling it out here ever since.

But there are signs we’re edging towards a new golden era of Aussie soda. For one, nostalgia is reviving our small old-timey soda brands, especially in the sarsaparilla-loving state of Queensland. For another, our booming craft spirits space has paved the way for like-minded soda makers such as Mischief Brew and Byron Bay’s Strange Love, whose interesting drinks work both as mixer and standalone. (Strange Love was recently snapped up by Japanese beverage giant Asahi for an undisclosed sum.)

But Aussie soda could never stage the kind of comeback it has without the rise of mindful drinking culture, and now there’s an expectation among Aussie punters that restaurants, bars and pubs should have more considered non-alcoholic options. Bridge Road’s Free Time pale ale has been so successful the Beechworth brewery is tapping the non-alc space further with its own soda range. Could cola be the breakout star?

“In the last month, two people have stopped me in my tiny town on the street [to talk about cola],” says brewery founder Ben Kraus, who’s about to send 1000 Bridge Road soda cans to Mount Buller in Victoria for a mountain bike event. “We’re seeing more and more people choosing things that are perhaps more sophisticated in that space, rather than the standard brands of Pepsi and Coke. People are looking for something else.”

Kraus says Bridge Road’s cola was partly inspired by Tirola Kola, an independent Austrian brand going gangbusters overseas. “I wouldn’t say Austria leads too many hospo trends, but in the regional parts I go to, seeing how non-alcoholic beer was culturally acceptable in an old-school masculine environment, I thought that might work for us here [with Free Time]. So I was interested to see the explosion of Tirola Kola.”

Gavioli simply feels that something’s gotta give. Just like a verboten taste of Pepsi on a Friday night, Joy is a little 250-millilitre pushback against a soda scene and a consumer base that, in his opinion, have tried too hard to be healthy for too long.

“Kombucha had its moment, a lot of soft drinks are coming out with zero sugar. There’s been a lot of fermenting and experimenting,” he says. “I think it’s all gonna come back around to being naughty again.”