Tuesday, May 28, 2013

A&W 10

I love soda.

There are tanker trucks out there that used to be full of soda, until I drank them. Mostly Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper, but I drank my share of Pepsi, too. Nothing tastes better.

About ten years ago, though, I started realizing that if I consumed 2,000 calories a day, and 25% of those were soda, then I was doing something wrong to my body. I was starving myself, food-wise.

That can't be good.

So I started drinking diet drinks. Good God, they were nasty. They all had this terrible aftertaste. I kept drinking them, though, and after about a month, my taste buds had lobotomized themselves to the point where diet soda tasted "right".

I wept.

Okay, I didn't actually weep. I was just glad I could continue to drink tankers of soda, even if it was imitation soda.

As time passed, I figured out that I could mix a little sugary soda (5-10%) in with the diet stuff, and it made everything taste significantly better.

Then my doctor started giving me crap about my caffeine consumption. This is how getting older works. Everything you do, health-wise, is some degree of wrong. For the last fifty years of your life, your doctor just berates you, basically.

I always liked root beer--which isn't caffeinated--so one day I tried diet A&W. As diet drinks go, it was decent, and it was very sweet, which is why I like soda to start with. So I started drinking quite a bit of that, just to get my caffeine intake down.

Three weeks ago, I was in a Walgreen's and saw a case of "A&W10". This stuff:


(image credit to the Soda Emporium, where you can buy all kinds of cool soft drinks)

Well, what the hell. I bought a case.

And it's great. Let me capitalize that: GREAT. It tastes so much like regular A&W that I'm not sure I could even tell the difference in a blind taste test. It's smooth, and creamy, and the vanilla flavor comes through very clearly. It's also much sweeter than regular Diet A&W.

If you like root beer, particularly if you like A&W root beer, then you need to try this. Immediately.

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