I have to mention Birch Beer (if its still common, ignore me). We used to be able to buy it at our local market out in the woods in CT. It was a local brand whose name I’ve forgotten. Light, crisp, and clear in color. A friend’s father used to make his own, as well.
Just realized a little clarification might be in order… Birch beer is like root beer, only made with birch tree parts.
-tool
voguevixen-
BevMo locations and Trader Joe locations. They both have stores in Milpitas. Whole Foods has specialty sodas and beers, too, but I dont think there are any near you.
it + is = it**’**s. crap. I even previewed and didn’t catch it!
-lighting(I put the tool back in lightingtool)tool
Already mentioned, but worth repeating over and over:
Cheerwine.
They need to branch out to Texas.
I must begin with a BAD soda story:
:dubious:
There is a spruce beer made in Newfoundland, called Greene’s Spruce Beer, made by a small local company in a small town near St. John’s. Its ingredients are (and I am reading them off of the bottle) Sugar, molasses, and spruce essence. Nothing else. It is certainly an authentic, old fashioned recipe, just like they used to make soda pop years ago.
Ah, but the big question is, what does it taste like?
Well, it tastes like a spruce tree, sweetened slightly with molasses. It’s nasty, to those (like myself) who have never acquired the taste for it. It’s quite bitter, from the molasses and the spruce. There is more spruce than sugar. I coudn’t finish more than half the bottle, and my visiting relative couldn’t finish the other half. Bleechhh… One of the few sodas that I have wanted to wash my mouth out with another soda–any soda–after drinking.
But as for good flavors—
If you like apple sodas, you need to try Apple Beer. It is a dry, refreshing, not sweet apple taste, made in Utah from a German (!) recipe. Yummm! They deliver, by the way.
Another good soda is Bitter Lemon from Riggs and Forsythe. It’s lovely! Nice and lemony, and with a great bitter aftertaste. Very nice stuff.
The Raspberry Cordial sold on Prince Edward Island is not too bad. It’s a touristy thing, associated with Anne of Green Gables. But it is made with raspberry juice, and tastes naturally like raspberries.
Knudsen’s Spritzers are VERY good! They are not sweetened with sugar, but are sweetened only with fruit juice, and are over 70% juice. You’ll never miss the sucrose, dextrose, and day-glo colors. I really like the Jamaican Lemonade.
Weirdest soda I have ever tried: Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda.
Bear in mind, this is only available in one store, and does not come in regular. This was the sort of soda so devoid of natural ingredients you suspected that rather than water, they found a way to mix Hydronium (H3O) and Hydrate(?)(OH) ions and keep them seperate.
It smelled like a tootsi roll.
On initial tast inspection, it tasted like a tootsie roll. Not too bad, actually. That is, until…
Me: Opens can, sniffs it, looks uneasily at it, looks at friend who gave it to me, wonders if this is a plot on my life.
Me: Takes a sip.
Me (As it is in my mouth and is falling down my throat): Hey, this isn’t so (hits my stomach).
Me: Whoa
Me: Ugh
Have you ever felt like you ate so much food you were about to burst, and that it was actually overlapping into your throat and other parts of you body? One sip did this. It is indescrible. I (as well as others who tried it) suddenly found it trying to start moving.
If anyone else (like Hajario) has ever tried this, I would like to hear their opinion on how similar it is to say, eating a few plates of tootsie roll pops, while washing it down with pseudo-chocolate flavored syrup. Unfortunately, my memory is rather lacking in details of that experience.
On a lighter note, I echo others in praise of Mexican sodas. When a Coke executive gets elected PResident, and when you have a situation wherien in many places Coke is cheaper and cleaner than water, you find a country that cares deeply about Soda.
The Topo Chico brand is great. Topo Toronja is the best grapefruit soda ever, and IIRC, is made with mineral water. Yum.
The Joya line is great. Fruit flavored sodas! finally, a grape soda that tastes good, an apple soda that tastes like apple, and beautiful colors!
Coke is made with sugar. nuff said.
more later… Tired
Try the Diet Cherry Chocolate Fudge instead.
Wait, you liked it? Make that “too” instead of “instead.”
Years ago, Mistic (sp?) made a bizarre soda that I adored. It was some sort of coffee/cola flavor with three times the caffeine of regular soda!! Anybody else remember it?
About Cheerwine:
I think they’ve changed their formula at least once over the years, and I don’t like what they’ve done with it recently one bit. See, as I was growing up, that stuff was my absolute favorite thing to drink in the whole world. Then one day a few years back, I just seemed to stop enjoying it as much. It wasn’t for a few weeks that I realized it was because the stuff tasted different, but I had no way to prove it… until one day when I discovered an old bottle of the stuff from about a year before hiding in the trunk of my car. I put it in the fridge, let it cool itself down, and opened it up to test my hypothesis. I was right. Not only did it taste significantly different than the stuff I was able to buy off storeshelves, but it tasted precicely like what I’d grown up with.
That was the last time I bought Cheerwine with any regularity. It was a sad day.
Drex–
Are you sure that the recipe changed? Maybe you were used to having aged bottles of the stuff, rather than new Cheerwine right out of the factory.
I think they have started to sell these in the States, but Appletiser and Grapetiser from South Africa are my favorite soft drinks in the world. Made by the good folks at SABMiller. Can’t get them here, though.
Anyone remember Skipper? that Safeway Dr. Pepper rip-off? That stuff was awesome.
-Tcat
Normally, I would put in a giant hurrah for the Mexican sodas. Only a few years ago they were still made with real cane sugar. That has all changed. Almost 90%+ are made with high fructose corn sweetener. A little primer on HFCS:
HFCS is approximately 400 times sweeter than regular sugar. This allows manufacturers to use less sweetener in their product. This change has a dramatic effect on the soda. Cane sugar, in the quantities found in sodas, gives the drink a special “mouth feel.” (This is an official term they use in the food industry.) There is a syrupy “roundness” and smooth consistency conferred by sugar. Many sodas sweetened with HFCS require the addition of brominated vegetable oil, or ester of wood rosin and other emulsifiers or crap to obtain the mouth feel lost by avoiding the use of sugar. I have always felt that cane sugar, by itself was much more healthy to consume than all of these Frankenstein ingredients.
[/primer]
Jarritos, Peñafiel and other Mexican sodas still beat many American brands because they continue to use natural flavorings. I long for the days when I could by a fully sugar laden Mexican Squirt in the twisty green glass bottle, or a true Coke in the hourglass bottle. Sigh.
Look for a British specialty foods store near you. They frequently sell Coke made with sugar. Evidently, every year around Lent (IIRC), Coke also produces batches with real sugar. All said and done, many of the Mexican sodas still outperform their Murican counterparts.
Drex, please list the ingredients from your old Cheerwine bottle here so I might compare them to the one I bought. Thanks.
Said Coke is produced for Passover, not Lent; during Passover, the kosher dietary laws are racheted up a few notches, and HFCS doesn’t make the cut for some Jews.
Zenster: Sadly, the old bottle was thrown in the recycling bin several years ago. 
If I remember correctly, the ingredient list on the two bottles I compared were the same.
Scribble: You know, if I thought I could hold out and actually leave the stuff alone, it would be an interesting experiment to pick up one today, leave it sitting out in the open for a year, then compare it to the taste of another freshly bought bottle. I’m not certain how long it would take to age the stuff if indeed I somehow were only getting ahold of aged bottles for fifteen years. I live in NC, so I’m not sure how likely that is anyway…
Something else that just occured to me is that perhaps the process by which the drink is made has changed. Or there are different ammounts of certain ingredients as opposed to a wholesale restructuring of the syrup? I just know that it doesn’t taste the way it used to. My taste buds wouldn’t lie to me like that. We’ve been friends for years. 
And that’s where the “(IIRC)” came from.
I saw the Faygo “Redpop” you guys mentioned at Osco today. I don’t really like soda at all, so I didn’t get any, but some of you guys who like it and can’t find it might want to look there.
There’s a local soda here in KY called “Ale 8-1”, it’s kinda like a flat gingerale… verrry popular amongst the locals, though… can’t say I care for it…
I used to love New York Seltzers, and I am really craving a grape soda right no… almost any will do at this point…
and I love black cherry flavoured sodas… I’m going to have to go to one of the import stores around here and experiment… maybe tomorow… <<longing for a soda right now>>
Here in Ontario we have a few that make me laugh:
Lime it Up!
This is one of those no-name Sprite imposters. Why, with an exciting name like that, how could anyone turn it down??
Faygo
C’mon, don’t act like you’re above this kind of humour 