Monday, September 10, 2012

3613 King of root beer

Monday, September 10, 2012

The admirable qualities so often sought among human beings
actually reside almost exclusively in dogs.
-- Evan Morris --

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Women who extend their eye makeup way past the outer edges of their eyes in an effort, I suppose, to make their eyes look larger, actually end up looking cross-eyed.  Do they really not realize this?

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Stephen King's 11/22/63 has been sitting on the shelf for a few months, so this week I started reading it.  In the first few pages his character rhapsodizes about 1958 root beer.

Yes!  Yes!  Oh my God yes!  I had almost forgotten.  Root beer used to be full and round and dark and smooth and strong and thick and full of body!  It was only lightly carbonated, but formed a head when poured.  It was a meal!  You rolled it around in your mouth for a while before swallowing it.  You could add 8 ounces of vanilla ice cream to 8 ounces of root beer, and the flavor was still strong.  You could smell a glass of root beer three tables away.  In the '50s and '60s root beer was just about my favorite thing in the whole wide world!

Somewhere along the early '70s it changed.  It got thin and blah.  Fizzly.  Watery.  Add ice cream and the taste almost disappears.  Fizzly water that a root beer barrel candy got dissolved in.  Artificially flavored?  Blah.  I stopped drinking it because it was such a disappointment.  That's not root beer.  I haven't had a good root beer in 40 years.

What happened?

(Up in the mountains you could get REAL root beer, locally brewed and mildly alcoholic.  The real stuff.  I wonder if that still exists?  Probably not - them damn revenooers!  Regulate the flavor right out.) 

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"Root beer used to be full and round and dark and smooth and strong and thick and full of body!"  Hmmm.  I notice a pattern here.  That's what I like about The Man.  The old root beer had a good head, too.
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1 comment:

Becs said...

This is one of the reasons why I make a pilgrimage to The Galloping Hill Inn, AKA Five Points in Union NJ at least once a year. They have the best hot dogs and they have birch beer. It isn't like from-the-past root beer but it's a good sight better than root beer now.