Santa Cruz Organic, Part II

The Pooj doesn't get it either.

(Big Lots, July 2010)

For the advancement of science, I revisited Santa Cruz Organic Root Beer recently to test the theory born from the previous post about this beverage:

“So it smells like root beer and tastes a little like root beer when imbibed from the can, but loses all root beer flavor entirely when quaffed from a glass …. I suppose I’ll have to taste it side by side – alternating sips between the can and the glass to see if there’s a noticeable difference there.”

Thus I poured half the can into a football season-appropriate glass (Fight On) and left the other half in the can. And you know what? They actually did taste different! But you know what else is strange? I took my first sip from the glass, noticing that there was a definite root beer smell, and even some root beer flavor, but when I sipped from the can, there was no discernable root beer flavor there. Subsequent sips from the glass and the can yielded less and less root beer flavor as time went on. Mind you, there really wasn’t any to begin with, so it actually just tasted kind of like carbonated cane juice – and the sips from the can tasted sweeter than those in the glass. Now I would have thought the opposite would normally be the case, since drinking from the glass would also allow piquing the olfactory senses, as I would be smelling the beverage as I drink, logically making it taste fuller. Of course, as I noted previously, the flavor dissipated the longer the drink was exposed to open air, so perhaps the flavor was literally vaporizing, and thus the can, with its smaller opening, simply allows less vapor to escape than the open-top glass.

Hence the only conclusion I can come up with here is that the root beer flavor, however fleeting, must come from the smell of the beverage rather than the taste of it. Imagine that – root beer perfume, perhaps mixed with the carbon dioxide which, once released from the liquid, simply vanishes into the ether. Unless you can come up with a better conclusion, I guess I’m sticking with that one.

It still only gets a 2 though. On second thought, I didn’t really like it at all this time around, so I’m dropping it to a 1.