Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla

Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla


I imagine the creation myth of the stuff goes something like this:



Bob: Hey Rob, we need to make a handful of generic soft drink flavors to round out our coffee line. I mean we got all these bottles and labelers and shit, so let's get 'em to use.

Rob: Do we care about taste or quality or anything?

Bob: What'd I say? I said, "Let's round out the line". Get a list of ten soft drink flavors we don't have in development already and get back to me.

two weeks later...

Rob: Here you go, sir, a list of ten new flavors. All written out.

Bob: To make it convenient to the conceit of conversational format, please read them aloud.

Rob: Coca Cola.

Bob: That's a good one, but I think it's claimed.

Rob: Ah. Okay. Cherry. See, I'm doing them in alphabetical order.

Bob: Rob, "Cherry" should come before "Coca Cola" alphabetically. You see, you go to the second letter to determine the order if the first letter is the same.

Rob: Oh, I thought that the second letter would be the "C" in "Cola". I do envy you your liberal arts degree sire. Anyways, I thought we'd make our cherry "natural" or some such thing. People like that nowadays.

Bob: Whatever sells. Next!

Rob: Chamomille.

Bob: I hate to hassle you, but you spelled it wrong.

Rob: What? How can you tell? I said it out loud and you aren't even looking at my paper.

Bob: It's "chamomile". I know it looks wrong but that's it.

Rob: I find this conceit of a written out conversation script thing to be confusing. I don't like it.

Bob: Anyways, chamomile is a stupid soft drink flavor and your a gigantic stupid head for proposing it.

Rob: Sob

Bob: Man up. Next.

Rob: Gassosa.

Bob: No one knows what gassosa is, but it gives fake class to the rest of the line by being all Italiany. Let's do gassosa.

Rob: Iron brew.

Bob: One authentic old country thing is enough. Hey, wait a sec. Why don't we pick something old Country, like Country-Music country, to draw in the cowboy hat people.

Rob: There aren't a lot of those in our distribution area, sir.

Bob: You're thinking small, son. With the sort of money that big manufacturers give the Republicans, cowboy hat people will soon be everywhere. Everywhere.

Rob: As you say, sir.

Bob: Root beer is too kiddyish, though is certainly in the right area. Anyone can make a rootbeer. It's just Root Beer Flavoring Pack 12H and Brown 3. But root beer is for kids, and we make classy adult soda candy.

Rob: How about a whiskey flavored drink, sir?

Bob: That has potential, but gimmee something else.

Rob consults Internet in whispers. Internet gestures wildly.

Rob: Apparently "sarsaparilla" is a cowboy word for a drink similar to root beer.

Bob: That sounds great. Perfect in fact. It'll be cowboy to the cowboy people but the word is weird enough to sound European or Amerindian to the non-cowboy people. Win/win!

Rob: The trouble is, sir, that an authentic tasting sarsaparilla is tricky to make. It has to be spicy but earthy at the same time, sweet and creamy but have bite. It's a root beer, technically, bit it's made from a whole other mess of stuff than what we call "root beer". This is going to take a lot of time and research to blend together a meaningful yet unique mixture which we can sell as "Manhattan Special Sarsaparilla".

Bob: Rob...

Rob: I foresee six months of work. I'd also recommend some research trips, sir, to areas where
people hand craft sarsaparilla at home.

Bob: Robert...

Rob: It will be a rewarding process...

Bob: HEY! Shut up. Listen up genius, you said sarsaparilla is just like root beer...

Rob: Actually, no...

Bob: ...AND we'll make ours out of what we have on hand. Root Beer Flavoring Pack 12H and Brown 3 will do nicely.

Rob: But sir! You are completely missing the point. It's not root beer, it's something else entirely, with a long and rich history...

Bob: FINE! You can add DOUBLE the Brown 3 to make it look dense.

Rob: And some Red 4, sir? Oh please can I add some Red 4?

Bob: Yes, Bob, for you anything.

Rob and Bob hug, curtain falls.

I used my web cam to take this picture,
and had to put the bottle super close to the camera
because it's 10am and I haven't put on any clothes yet.

Okay, to be fair, the ingredients claim there are no artificial colors and it uses natural flavorings and real sugar, but this does not taste like a sarsaparilla to me. Not in the least. It's overcarbonated and tastes like a generic root beer. Or at least the top half of the bottle does as I couldn't bring myself to drink the bottom half.

Maine Root Sarsaparilla

I get those stupid plastic pillows
from Amazon and keep them to reuse, but they suck to
store as they are just little balloons which take up
a lot of space en masse. Keep forever, though.

Maine Root Sarsaparilla
Maine Root Sarsaparilla smells like a mixture of lake water and SweetTarts, being from Missouri I like this. Really. It smells like a good summer's day spent menacing fish from the safety of a flat bottomed boat. Taste-wise it ain't so hot, though.

It has a great aftertaste, a bit like minty discount toothpaste. The initial flavor though, ugh. Somewhere between freezer burned vanilla ice cream and cardboard. You only get a flash of sarsaparilla about two seconds into a taste, then it yanks off it's Halloween mask revealing itself as root beer.

Yeah, this is a pretty bad flavor right out of the gate. Too foamy, too, right when it's opened but much better after it sits for about fifteen minutes. The foaminess early on covers some of the nastiness, but it really is better flatter.

Maine Root is puzzling in the big picture. It's part of a wave of designer soft drinks waving the flag of environmentalism and responsible social activism, which rocks. These are great things. What baffles me is that I bought this at Duane Reade in a fancy 4-pack. Why are these hoity toity drinks being carried by a big pharmacy chain? Is this part of the movement that put fancy coffee and fresh made sandwiches in 7-11s? It's puzzling.

The thing is that I don't trust it. Maine Root sells itself like it's a small label, but it must have a pretty significant factory output to fill all the Duane Reade's and everything else in the world. It says right on the label that it's a handcrafted beverage, but how? It's that sort of fake down-homeiness that puts my guard up.

I mean, yeah, it's awesome that it has certified organic fairtrade sweeteners and spices. That's hard to beat, but it feels... disingenuous. And it doesn't taste good, which is a bummer.

By the way, I used to work in Maine during the summers and have no idea how this relates to Maine at all. It doesn't taste a bit like the state.

I dub thee, Sir Buck the Cat, defender of the true faith
and upholder of my right to look at internet
pornography when my wife isn't around.

Snake River Sarsaparilla, Jackson Hole Soda Company

Surely a soft drink with pictures of dour ladies
on the label will taste delicious.

The sarsaparilla says "Don't call me Shirley".

Snake River Sarsaparilla, Jackson Hole Soda Company

I did not know that the spelling "sasperilla" is incorrect until now. I'd thought "Sarsaparilla" some fanciful version of what I'd thought was the proper spelling. Now these collegey soda chemists come along and ruin my carefully cultivated ig-no-rance. Bah. Next time I'll believe the little red line of my spell check, no more doubting for me.

The soda is okay. Not bad, not great. It's not too sweet, but also not too flavorful. Tastes a little watery, but in a clean way. Like my wife said, "It tastes like sasperilla". Note her pitiful ignorance in spelling "sarsaparilla" wrong. Unlike some root beers, it doesn't fight back - half the bottle will be gone before you know it.

When I was a kid, an international pipeline ran through my side yard. A long, cleared strip ran across the hills for as far as you could see in either direction, supposedly all the way to Alaska or some such thing. Workers came and dug this cleared area out to add a fiber optic cable, back when I was a kid. The dig site became our playground, and one day a worker gave me a freshly dug up "sarsparillo" root. My mother and I tried to boil it into tea, but it tasted like dirty water and was all for naught.

That's a pretty fantastic idea, a trench that runs all the way from Alaska and on to who knows where.

Remembering this, I tried to go back and trace the pipeline on google maps, but quickly lost track of it as I moved from a series of maps shot in the fall to maps shot during the summer. The summer shots don't have the definition needed to be able to tell trees from meadows, alas.

While idly hunting away, I finished the bottle of soda and didn't even notice.