Hansen's

The Pooj stares a hole through my computer.

(Whole Foods Market, February 2011)

Ever since I had the Diet Hansen’s Creamy Root Beer a few months back, I have been meaning to find myself some of the regular variety. Granted, I wasn’t looking very hard, seeing as it is pretty widely available (although the diet version is usually easier to find). Apparently when I slack in my search, root beer actually starts to beckon me towards it. Back-story: I have been employed at the same place of business for the past 10+ years, with little expectation that it would ever leave its non-descript home, nestled amongst houses, apartments, and other uninspired office buildings on a small hill in West Los Angeles. Just like everyone else these days, we came upon hard financial times, and as a result had to move to a new location (I use the term “new” rather loosely – it’s more “new-to-us” than “new,” per se, seeing as I’m pretty sure these digs are much older than our last ones…). Well, this new location happens to sit right across the street from a market which offers no fewer than six different varieties of root beer! See – what’d I tell you? Root beer just calls to me, even on an unconscious level.

But I digress…

Hansen’s Creamy Root Beer is actually quite pleasant. Herbs include wintergreen birch, anise, sassafras, and Tahitian vanilla, of which I would say the wintergreen birch is most prominent. All of the other ingredients play well together, so the flavor is very nice. It’s not too sweet, even though they use real sugar (some sodas tend to think that if they have real sugar in it, they don’t need to add anything else, so all you end up getting is sugar soda, not whatever the flavor is supposed to be…), and the carbonation is not too hard and not too soft, even from a can. My only gripe with it – and this is a relatively small gripe – is that while the flavor is good, it’s a little thin – something that could have been remedied with a thicker head. Still, Hansen’s is making a good argument for becoming my mass-market-ly available pantry root beer. I’ll give it a low 4.