Henry Weinhard's Orange Cream

Here's a brand with an interesting and extensive history. While I don't generally discuss alcoholic beverages there is a complicated intertwining of beer and soda brewing because so much of the equipment and processes cross-over as well as the period in US history, called prohibition, which forced much of this cross-over. 

Henry Weinhard was a German man who immigrated to the US in 1856 and opened a hotel/bar in Portland, Oregon. By 1862, he had built his own brewery to produce his own suds. He eventually also purchased additional hotel/bars and business was well enough that Henry offered to pipe beer through a public fountain in the city of Portland. The city politely declined worried about rowdy horses drinking from it, though I think they should have been more worried about the city's residents. Without a fountain to plumb beer through, Henry gave his employees free beer. There are stories of Henry declining large buy outs of his brewery and saving banks from collapse as well, but you can read those stories of hero worship somewhere else. 

Henry died in 1904 and his family took over the company. It was during prohibition, 1920-1933, that the brewery started making sodas. This was common among many beer breweries during the era because they already had the equipment, bottles and distribution needed to do so. Although it was a strong family run company, and later after a merger with a local competitor, a regional one... the brewery was sold to Pabst in 1979. Pabst, in turn, sold to Stroh's in 1996. In 1999, Stroh's handed the brewery over to Miller, and so the building was shuttered and moved the operation to their plant in Tumwater, Washington. The production of the sodas continues out of Ft. Worth, Texas.

The orange cream soda itself smells wonderful, like an orange cream ice pop. My first taste of this was good, as good as the smell made it seem. It really does taste good when it first hits your tongue. My issue with it would be the finish, that is as it passes the tongue when you swallow, it looses the creaminess and ends up with more of an artificial taste you'd expect from a lab. So it's an alright soda, but I think it's label over reaches what you want from something called gourmet.