A&W

The Pooj waxes nostalgic.

(Gelson’s, September 2010)

A&W Root Beer was probably the first root beer I ever had, just as it probably was with many other root beer aficionados out there. I remember, as a child, my mother relaying her memories of drinking A&W Cream Soda when she was in college in Oklahoma (they didn’t have any in Hong Kong or Macau back when she was younger, so that was her only memory of it), and I remember Joe Cool being A&W Root Beer’s pitch man at the time. Thus A&W set the bar high for mass-produced root beers – if you can’t get an endorsement from Snoopy, you must not be good enough, classic enough, quaff-able enough. My root beer tastes have evolved since then (along with all of my other tastes, one would hope), but unfortunately, mass-produced everything has devolved. A&W Root Beer sadly falls into that latter category as well.

Above all, A&W is bland. The balance of flavors is not bad per se – mostly sweet with a very mild root-y flavor that could be wintergreen or sassafras based. There’s a pronounced vanilla flavor, which is nice, but the mostly-sweet aftertaste turns acidic after a little while. If I didn’t know it was supposed to be root beer, it would be hard to figure it out – that’s textbook 2.