Tastings: Rooting for Root Beer

My son loves root beer. That's only remarkable because I've never been able to stand it. My mother loved it, my brothers loved it. The family would pile in the wagon when we were kids and go to the A&W Drive-In in Redmond and everyone except me would order a big, frosty mug.

So when I went to Pop Culture in Vancouver the other day to see just what sodas a store devoted to the carbonated beverage would carry, I came home with eight different root beers for my in-house devotée to sample and evaluate. Because of his love for the beverage, he rejected the side-by-side comparison which would have required opening them all and wasting a good deal of decent root beer. Instead he decided to have one each day and give each due consideration, with me keeping notes.

Going in, his acknowledged favorite was IBC, which had always taken first place in his pantheon of great root beers, though it had recently become hard to find locally. The others were a variety of traditional and newer brews, with different kinds of sugars and blends. A surprise dark horse that entered the competition was Crater Lake Soda's root beer, a new local root beer that we found on tap on a recent dinner outing to Ned Ludd.

The results of our very unscientific survey were as follows:

• Faygo, Detroit, Michigan: Not super-sweet. A normal root beer with a little herbiness. Like many of these root beers, it was better once the carbonation had subsided, allowing its herbiness to come through.
• Sprecher, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Very mild and creamy, not overly sweet.
• Boylan, Moonachie, New Jersey: Almost cola-ish without that cola harshness. Fruity.
• Dad’s Root Beer, Chicago, Illinois: Tastes like it was made from syrup. "Not necessarily sweeter than the others, but not much else there.” Almost no head on it.
• Americana, Mukilteo, Washington: Mellow, not very fruity. “It’s only hitting one bandwidth of flavor.” In other words, "a one-note root beer."
• Thomas Kemper, Portland, Oregon: Very sweet. Honey and vanilla dominate.
• Stewart’s Diet, Rye, New York: (I bought diet by mistake) Fairly decent with a nice herbiness. Fairly sweet, also, but not too much.
• Crater Lake, Portland, Oregon: (on tap) Very herby, almost borders on harsh but not quite. Quite dense. "If I drank a bottle every day, I don’t know if I’d choose that one," but "probably the most interesting of the bunch."
• IBC, Plano, Texas: “A good root beer” and milder than Crater Lake with a nice fruit and herbiness. At first “it was not rocking my socks off" but, again, as carbonation decreased it improved. "My favorite for an everyday root beer."

Are you a root beer fan or do you have a favorite root beer-related story? Click on the comments link below and let me know.

Pop Culture

Oldsters and the terminally nerdy will remember a Saturday Night Live sketch from the late 70s called The Scotch Boutique, featuring a store whose sole product was Scotch tape. Fred Willard played Walker, a man with a dream:

"Yeah, you know, when you're working with a brand new, fresh idea, it's always a little harder. You know, um, most people are used to buying their - their tape when they go to the supermarket or drug store, you know. What we've got to do is turn their thinking around so they make a special trip down here to the Scotch Boutique when they want, uh, tape."

Why am I bringing this up? Because the Scotch Boutique instantly popped into my head when my friend Luan mentioned a store in Vancouver called Pop Culture that sells only soda pop. And just as quickly I knew I had to go there. And I'm not even particularly fond of soda pop, but when you hear something like that, how can you stay away?

Located in downtown Vancouver in a quaint brick building under the spreading branches of a maple tree, the sidewalk in front is lined with colorful Adirondack chairs ideally suited for sitting and sipping. Walking in the door reveals an oddly empty room with a counter in back that sells sandwiches and hoagies, a stage on the left with several tables and a bank of coolers against the right-hand wall. But look into those coolers and it's a one-way ticket to childhood.

Glass bottles of Dad's Root Beer, original-recipe Dublin Dr. Pepper and Nesbitt's orange soda are lined up like so many little soldiers, along with multiple flavors of newer sodas from Jones, Izze, Fentiman's, Boylan and Portland-based Hot Lips. You'll also find exotic sodas like Sidral Mundet, an apple soda from Mexico, Sprecher Root Beer from Wisconsin and a psychedelic array of Jarritos sodas that would send Timothy Leary into flashback mode.

Pop Culture is obviously someone's dream, and a focused one at that. As Walker said when a woman came into the Scotch Boutique asking if he had recording tape, "No, just cellophane. The sticky kind. If you need any of the sticky kind, you know where to come!"

Details: Pop Culture, 1929 Main St., Vancouver, WA. Phone 360-750-1784.