Best Health's

The Pooj gets a check-up.

(Old Town Root Beer Company, June 2011)

This stuff’s made in New York City…!

OK, now that we’ve got that out of our system, I can at least establish that yes, Best Health’s Root Beer is made in New York City – Brooklyn, to be exact. The Brooklyn Bottling Corporation began as a seltzer company in 1937, founded by a Polish immigrant named Jack Miller who delivered his wares from a horse-drawn wagon. Miller, along with his fellow seltzer purveyors, would mix flavored syrups with their fizzy waters in old Czechoslovakian squirt bottles, now obsolete because the plants that made them were destroyed in World War II. Jack’s grandson Eric now runs the company and still sources water from New York, where he contends soda was invented. Best Health’s Natural Gourmet Sodas did not actually get their start until 1988, but Eric drew on the traditions that had sustained his family’s business since its inception and a Miller family member still oversees the mixing, blending, and production of each batch of beverages they ship out.

Best Health’s flavor is actually a little hard to pin down. On the one hand, it really tastes like cherry cough syrup (a little more “healthy” that I think any of us want our root beer to be…), but not really in an altogether unpleasant way. It’s more like a very strong, bitter Cheerwine that goes down smoothly because of some added sugar (I’ve heard from credible sources that a spoonful of it really does that to medicine). The aftertaste is similar to that watered-down taste you get when you rinse out the cough syrup dosing cap, but with a little bit of vanilla and just an inkling of root-y undertones. Since the sugar also hits a little harder in the aftertaste, you get something less herb-y and more cherry-crème-y, if your cherry crème was heavily medicinal.

I don’t really consider drinking cough syrup a good Friday night activity or anything, but like I said, despite the NyQuil effect here, it’s not altogether unpleasant. There are some “natural flavors” listed with the ingredients, as well as some vanilla, but again, the vanilla really only comes through slightly in the aftertaste – I can’t really speak to the rest of those “natural flavors,” whatever they are.

“Not-altogether-unpleasant” isn’t really one of my rating descriptors, but I’d venture to say it means I’m probably not going to get any more anytime soon. But since it was not altogether unpleasant as opposed to just plain unpleasant, I won’t give Best Health’s Root Beer an abysmal rating. Let’s leave it at a 1.5.