Saranac 1888 Shirley Temple

While primarily a beer brewery, Saranac crafts several flavors of sodas as well. Saranac 1888 is owned and operated by the Matt Brewing Company, purportedly the fourth-oldest family-owned brewing company in the U.S. Francis Xavier Matt was a German immigrant to the U.S. in 1880. Having worked at the Rothaus Brewery in Baden, Germany, his skills were applied as a brewmaster for breweries in Utica, New York. He created The West End Brewing Company out of the remnants of the Charles Bierbauer Brewery. Like many breweries in the U.S. during the prohibition era they relied on brewing soft drinks to keep the lights on. Utica Club sodas made by the brewery offered non-alcoholic malt drinks and ginger ale. Post-prohibition, Utica Club became a label for a primary line of beer. The brewery eventually changed names again to the Matt Brewing Company producing beer under the labels Utica Club and Saranac. In 2000, the Saranac label began bottling soft drinks again. 

This soda has a very sugary cherry-pomegranate smell. The flavor is truer to a pomegranate taste, which is much more true to the use of real grenadine used in a true old-fashioned shirley temple. It has a little zing at the end of a swig as well. Decent effort overall.

Sparky's Fresh Draft Root Beer

This root beer comes from Knox Brewing in Pacific Grove, California. Interestingly, among the cane sugar on the label, honey is also listed among the ingredients. There's a crisp, slightly wintergreen scent in this bottle. I find this particular bottle to be a little flat in terms of carbonation but I cannot find a date printed on it. While sweet, this root beer also comes across as a bit medicinal in nature. Nonetheless, it's a decent small batch root beer and at least better than some smaller brand root beers I've had. 

State Fair Kettle Corn

This bottle is from Blue Sun Bottling's lineup of State Fair themed sodas. This is in the same lineage as the State Fair Mini Doughnut soda reviewed in my earlier post. While the Mini Doughnut flavor was a delight, many strange novelty flavors can go awry. Hopefully this one is on the good side, but I get nervous before sipping on some of these inventive selections. 

The drink itself has the amber color of a ginger ale. A whiff from the top of the bottle knocks me back a bit. The aroma from this is very strong. It felt like I'd just stuck my face into an industrial sized popcorn popper. The scent is strongly wired in my brain to summon the images of walking through the halls at the Indiana State Fairgrounds as a kid. I was rarely there for the State Fair itself but there were many other events there year round and the food stands always had plenty of popcorn and hotdogs filling the expo halls with smells. This has a tad different smell though likely because our own fairgrounds didn't make kettle corn at their food counters, but you could get some from food trucks at the State Fair proper. Tasting it, it's just incredible how they can capture such flavors into a soda. It really does taste like a bucket of kettle corn. There's a slightly butteriness, but not sickening like a soda I reviewed once that shall not be spoken of again. There's also a sweet, caramel taste that is very pleasant. I've really got to try to visit these folks on my next trip to Minnesota. Definitely give this a try if you find a bottle. 

Maine Root Ginger Man

A follow up to my first post about Maine Root, found here, this "ginger man" soda is also made with fair trade cane sugar. This should be interesting because the artwork makes me want to think this will be flavored like gingerbread or a ginger snap cookie. But it could end up being more like a ginger beer. A pop of the top quickly reveals the wonderful holiday aroma of gingerbread. I also pick up a faint hint of something along the lines of a molasses or maple syrup. Sadly the taste doesn't quite match the hype of the olfactory sense for me. The taste of gingerbread is present but I find it to be a tad thin and watery. I would have liked for a stronger punch of that gingerbread man flavor which I think could probably still be accomplished with natural flavorings. I hope to continue to find some of Maine Root's drinks to try in the future though. 

Hosmer Mountain Black Cherry

I first introduced readers to Hosmer Mountain Beverages in this previous post where I reviewed their Sarsaparilla. I've come across a bottle of their black cherry soda this time around and I'm always jazzed to taste black cherry sodas. This 12 oz bottle comes in at 180 calories and uses cane sugar. The scent is not very heavy but definitely a black cherry aroma. I like the carbonation level. I think the taste of this is biased a little more toward a traditional cherry soda rather than a black cherry. The flavor is just okay, not as deep and rich as I'd prefer and I find that the finish comes across syrupy like that of a cough syrup. This is pretty disappointing as black cherry sodas go but still good enough to drink without hesitation. 

Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus Zero

This new flavor from Mountain Dew is available in both regular and zero sugar versions. I was only able to secure this bottle of the zero sugar version yesterday. Despite having zero sugar, the bottle still lists 5 calories per serving and still contains caffeine. It has a sort of orange red color reminiscent of gummy worms. When I opened the bottle there was a nice crack of released air and it actually smelled like candy gummy worms. It has a standard amount of carbonation for a Mountain Dew soda. The taste comes across as orange-citrus at first then a taste I would describe as Live Wire blended with cough syrup. Finally, there's a lime flavored finish. I think the non-sugar sweetener affects the flavor too much and would probably be better with the full sugar version. It's not undrinkable but isn't great either. 

Melba's Fixins Coffee Cake

I've been looking forward to tasting this since I came across this bottle a week ago and stuck it in the fridge. This is another interesting flavor out of the Melba's Fixins lineup produced by Rocket Fizz in California. The aroma from this is beguiling... it's a bit nutty and smoky. Perhaps like smoked almonds with a hint of vanilla? The more I inhale it the closer it reminds me to the smell of coffee in a breakfast diner. It has a taste more akin to that of coffee grounds than the sugar and cinnamon coffee cakes I'm accustomed to. I feel like I should be drinking this out of one of those old, stained, white ceramic mugs with the brown pinstripe around the top of the cup that you see in old diners... few of which still seem to exist. It instantly brings me back to those breakfast joints in the 1980's filled early on weekend mornings with the smell of cigarettes and coffee in the air and the occasional whiff of pancakes and maple syrup. I'm going to insist again that the Melba's Fixins flavors are superior to the gross flavors of the Lester's Fixins group. 

O-So Butterscotch Root Beer

Among the many retro soda labels revived and continuing to be produced by Orca Beverage, whose name has come up several times in past posts, is the O-So label. O-So soda began in Chicago, Illinois in 1946 gaining popularity based on their grape flavored soda. The traction they gained grew their network of bottlers as well as the variety of fruit flavors they offered. From what I can surmise, they shuttered production in the early 1990's before the label was picked up by Orca, which operates out of Washington state.

This bottle comes in at 170 calories and is made with cane sugar. Unlike the last butterscotch root beer I had, this one is more root beer scented, but their butterscotch flavoring must be what gives it a slight smokiness. It isn't heavily carbonated but the cap was extremely difficult to twist off and seems to have left some sort of coarse residue around the bottle opening which isn't ideal. While the scent leans more towards a root beer, the taste leans more towards that of butterscotch. I'm not really getting much in the way of the root beer until the aftertaste of a swig. The butterscotch flavoring is adequate but not all that smooth.

Black Bear Orange Soda

Black Bear dates back to 1920 when founder Louis Patmont began bottling spring water in St. Francis, Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee. In 1931 the company was sold to Lucas Unger, who began bottling sodas. Black Bear passed hands again in 1961 which it was bought by the Caruso family, the same family that was known for their Italian-style sodas that later fell under the WBC Sodas of Chicago. The Black Bear bottling facility in Oak Creek, WI closed in 2017 after falling into receivership. Sprecher Brewery of Wisconsin now owns the label and continues to produce Black Bear along with other labels, including their own.

This soda is not made with cane sugar, but glucose syrup and has a very bright orange color. Sadly, the cap on this bottle is a blank. They could have done something cool with a bear silhouette or something. It provides a very traditional orange soda scent. This soda is also frustratingly flat. There's very little carbonation in it despite having just been purchased about a week ago. I'd had higher hopes for this bottle but it did not rise to the occasion. This is a low to middle orange soda so I'd recommend grabbing something else if the option is there. 

Betty Buzz Tonic Water

Actress Blake Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, have a diverse mix of entrepreneurial interests. Ryan is co-owner of Aviation Gin. Blake, for her part, founded Betty Buzz in 2021. Betty Buzz makes a variety of drink mixers, among several flavors are ginger beer, lemon-lime, and a meyer lemon club soda, as well as the tonic water featured here, which probably pairs decently Ryan's gin. Of course Betty Buzz also has an aviation theme to the brand. Now people don't typically drink tonic water straight, it's usually mixed with something. As I'm more interested in reviewing what comes directly out of the bottles and cans on this blog I'll be trying it without mixing so it probably won't be very enjoyable. Tonic water is a carbonated water with quinine in it and was used by soldiers in tropical climates to prevent malaria. It has a bitter taste so is often sweetened or mixed to be more palatable. Tonic water also has another peculiar property in that it will fluoresce under ultraviolet light. 

I quite like the old-fashioned, hand-sized bottles. There is little to no scent from this bottle. Drunk straight, it is very bitter so I can only imagine what it tasted like in Victorian times when it was made in stronger quantities and without sweeteners. This bottle comes sweetened with agave syrup and is still very bitter. Used as a proper mixer this small 9 oz bottle would be able to extend to make two to four cocktails, yet the entire 9 oz is just 50 calories. Not much more to add here other than I recommend blending it with just about anything sweet to cut that harsh bitter taste.