Thanksgiving Root Beer Spectacular! Part 2: Frostop

The Pooj sneaks a ride.

(Wilging’s Fine Meats, Mansfield OH; November 2010)

Another local brew, with another local root beer stand origin story! Frostop (which is probably pronounced “frost-top,” as in “frosty on the top,” but I will continue to refer to as “fro-stop,” as in “putting a halt to 70’s hair”) dates back to 1926, when LS Harvey opened his first root beer stand in Springfield, OH (on the other side of Columbus from Mansfield). I discovered Frostop during an afternoon wandering around the dilapidated industrial areas of town with the missus’ dad, which included a stop at the old-knitting-factory-where-the-missus’-grandfather-once-worked-cum-vintage-Corvette-part-factory, a drive past the abandoned state reformatory where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed, and finally a visit to Wilging’s Fine Meats, the butcher shop where the in-laws have shopped for decades (and are still friends with the family), where I ultimately came across my second Ohio root beer.

Frostop has a good root beer flavor that, although a bit mild, has a nice balance of sugar and herbs – not too sweet, not too herby. The aftertaste is mostly wintergreen or birch, or at least something bark-y, and is much stronger when you pair the Frostop with Wilging’s salami. It should be noted that my first bottle of Frostop came after snacking on that salami, and the salami made the root beer a little hard to drink – for some reason, it elevated the bark-y undertones into bark-y hit-you-over-the-head tones, and left a strong menthol/almost bitter taste in my mouth. Thankfully, we had plenty more bottles left for me to give Frostop another go later in a more controlled environment (i.e., no salami involved…), where I liked it a lot more.

While I would certainly have another Frostop given the opportunity (not sure if they are available on the west coast), I don’t think it’s one I would go back to over and over again – both because of the relatively mild flavor and for the weird interaction with food. As just a refreshing rooty accompaniment to a lazy afternoon though, Frostop is a pretty good option – I give it a 3.5.