In the U.S., Root Beer is the ultimate beverage expression of lost innocence. I have no cites to back up that claim, and my Freudian-trained father is no doubt rolling in his grave, but I believe it nonetheless.
Milk? Bah. We've been bombarded with too many "milk is good for you" messages. Our parents made us drink it, our schools pushed its consumption, and we're bombarded by ads touting its health effects. Even chocolate milk loses its verve when served in a heavily subsidized half-pint in a school lunchroom.
Cool-aid? Hawaiian Punch? Juice Boxes? These are a little closer, but to many of us, they suffer from the stigma of being "little kids" drinks. Our treasured childhood memories typically draw from a slightly later age.
Coke? 7-Up? Most of us have drunk enough of these so they become a blur. Real fountain cherry cokes, on the other hand, deserve a spot on the list, but it's hard to find a place that does a good one.
Regional drinks like Moxie, 50/50, or Green River? Not universal enough.
Water? Only if accidentally drunk while running through a back-yard sprinkler.
Shirley Temples? Only if you like remembering childhood embarrassments. Whenever I got to drink one as a kid, a boring event was sure to follow.
Lemonade? A faded contender. A fine drink, but good lemonade is made, not bought. Either it was made by a grown-up, with all the authoritarian overtones that implies, or you had to make it yourself, which was work. Pseudo-lemonades like Country Time left their psychic aftertaste as well. Lemonade stands are one of my treasured childhood memories, though, which is sufficient to put it in second place.
But root beer, ah, root beer. It was sweet. It was carbonated. It had a head. No one ever claimed it was good for you. It didn't pretend to taste like fruit. And, like Dennis the Menace, you could call it "boot rear" and think you were clever and a little naughty.
While your parents may have made root beer, chances are they only tried once and it exploded on them. Then you got to laugh while they had to clean up their own mess for a change.
Root Beer was a "road" drink. In theory, you could buy it for home consumption, and many parents did just that. But it never tasted as good as it did from a roadside stand or fair.
When you drank root beer, adulthood seemed a little closer. After all, it was as close to the adult activity of drinking beer as you could get. Even if, like me, you had snuck a sip of your parent's beer and hated the yellow stuff.
At some point in my teens, I spurned root beer as a child's drink. Yet on my first amusement park date as an adult, we still found our way into the root beer stand. Marriott's root beer might have been swill, but I'll never know. My memories tell me it tasted great that day. It's still not an every day drink, but it's a good change of pace.
No ramblings about root beer are complete without talking about Root Beer floats. I can't remember when I had my first root beer float, but I remember my last one vividly. Given that it was last week, that's not much of a feat. Earlier in the day, I had impulsively bought a 4-pack of root beer at Trader Joe's. We later bought some vanilla ice cream for a different dessert. But after dinner, Deb suggested making the floats and I agreed immediately.
Guess what? Whether you are 5 or 50, the combination of good vanilla ice cream in good cold root beer is still wonderful.
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branchandroot
Root Beer
Date: 2008-06-26 01:59 pm (UTC)Milk? Bah. We've been bombarded with too many "milk is good for you" messages. Our parents made us drink it, our schools pushed its consumption, and we're bombarded by ads touting its health effects. Even chocolate milk loses its verve when served in a heavily subsidized half-pint in a school lunchroom.
Cool-aid? Hawaiian Punch? Juice Boxes? These are a little closer, but to many of us, they suffer from the stigma of being "little kids" drinks. Our treasured childhood memories typically draw from a slightly later age.
Coke? 7-Up? Most of us have drunk enough of these so they become a blur. Real fountain cherry cokes, on the other hand, deserve a spot on the list, but it's hard to find a place that does a good one.
Regional drinks like Moxie, 50/50, or Green River? Not universal enough.
Water? Only if accidentally drunk while running through a back-yard sprinkler.
Shirley Temples? Only if you like remembering childhood embarrassments. Whenever I got to drink one as a kid, a boring event was sure to follow.
Lemonade? A faded contender. A fine drink, but good lemonade is made, not bought. Either it was made by a grown-up, with all the authoritarian overtones that implies, or you had to make it yourself, which was work. Pseudo-lemonades like Country Time left their psychic aftertaste as well. Lemonade stands are one of my treasured childhood memories, though, which is sufficient to put it in second place.
But root beer, ah, root beer. It was sweet. It was carbonated. It had a head. No one ever claimed it was good for you. It didn't pretend to taste like fruit. And, like Dennis the Menace, you could call it "boot rear" and think you were clever and a little naughty.
While your parents may have made root beer, chances are they only tried once and it exploded on them. Then you got to laugh while they had to clean up their own mess for a change.
Root Beer was a "road" drink. In theory, you could buy it for home consumption, and many parents did just that. But it never tasted as good as it did from a roadside stand or fair.
When you drank root beer, adulthood seemed a little closer. After all, it was as close to the adult activity of drinking beer as you could get. Even if, like me, you had snuck a sip of your parent's beer and hated the yellow stuff.
At some point in my teens, I spurned root beer as a child's drink. Yet on my first amusement park date as an adult, we still found our way into the root beer stand. Marriott's root beer might have been swill, but I'll never know. My memories tell me it tasted great that day. It's still not an every day drink, but it's a good change of pace.
No ramblings about root beer are complete without talking about Root Beer floats. I can't remember when I had my first root beer float, but I remember my last one vividly. Given that it was last week, that's not much of a feat. Earlier in the day, I had impulsively bought a 4-pack of root beer at Trader Joe's. We later bought some vanilla ice cream for a different dessert. But after dinner, Deb suggested making the floats and I agreed immediately.
Guess what? Whether you are 5 or 50, the combination of good vanilla ice cream in good cold root beer is still wonderful.