Jones

The Pooj experiences a paradigm shift.

(BevMo Pasadena, April 2011)

Jones Soda Co. is an interesting animal in the soft drink menagerie. The company started as the Urban Juice and Soda Company in 1987 primarily as a beverage distributer in Western Canada, expanding to cover much of the Pacific Northwest before moving their base of operations to Seattle. While they did start creating their own products in the mid-1990s – including the Jones Soda line for which the company is now named – I wouldn’t necessarily call them a regional brand, since regional brands typically have fairly small spheres of influence. Although Jones’ “alternative” marketing strategy for their sodas stayed out of the mainstream – they sold almost exclusively in board shops, tattoo parlors, and clothing and music stores – their bread-and-butter distribution operation moved products like AriZona Iced Tea all over the country. Eventually Jones Sodas started popping up in Starbucks, Panera Breads, and stores of similar ilk, and for a time was even the exclusive beverage vendor for the Seattle Seahawks. So they managed to become sort of a big, expensive fancy-pants kind of soda company, while still trying hard to look like an obscure little guy on the drink radar (one of their slogans is “run with the little guy”).

I guess you could say that makes Jones the hipster of the soda world. Sure, it might want you to believe it only engages in commerce with local mom-and-pop shops, eats from the farmers market’s offerings, shuns brand-name clothes, and spends its weekends meditating in various yoga poses, but in reality, it drives a $40K European car, works for a mega-chain investment broker, and overspends its disposable income crowding into dimly lit indie music venues that feature unique acts that sound exactly the same as those other unique acts playing in the ten other virtually identical dimly-lit indie music venues down the street (that's right Los Feliz, I'm talking about you).

What were we talking about? Ah, yes, root beer. Jones Root beer tastes like … marshmallows… Big, fluffy, jet-puffed marshmallows. Don’t get me wrong – I like marshmallows as much as the next guy, but until they make root beer marshmallows, my root beer should not taste like marshmallows. And I think I just typed the word ”marshmallows” more times in this paragraph than I have in the previous five years of my life. The flavor is almost holiday-ish to me, possibly because it reminds me a little of the frosting we used to use as children to assemble gingerbread houses. Since Jones uses inverted sugar – a type of sugar typically used in gummy candies and the like because it remains in a more liquid state without crystallizing like regular sugar – I would have expected a fuller texture. Maybe I was expecting the inverted sugar to give off more honey-like properties, since honey may be considered by some as a form of inverted sugar, but the texture was rather uninspiring as well.

Yeah, so Jones Root Beer smells a little like root beer when you first open the bottle, but that’s where the root beer side of things ends. Jones gets a 1.5.