Simpson Spring

Mmmm, root beer...

 (Rocket Fizz Pasadena, October 2011) 

South Easton, appropriately enough, is located somewhere southeast of Boston. There you will find a bubbling water source known since the 1830s as Simpson's Spring, so named for blacksmith Samuel Simpson, who at that time acquired the land surrounding the spring. Although the spring had been a water source for Native Americans in the area at least since the 16th and 17th Centuries, it wasn't until Simpson's granddaughter's husband Frederick Howard purchased a portion of the land near the spring that the water was sold as fresh spring and soda water. In the time since the Simpson Spring Company was established in 1878, it has had only two owners other than the Simpson/Howard family, and has come to hold the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating US bottling company still located at its original site. Back in the day, RH Macy of the Macy's stores was so fond of the coffee soda prepared by Simpson Spring that he had it especially made and shipped to his Manhattan store for years until sugar and coffee rationing during WWII put a halt to it. Each batch of Simpson Spring soda is still mixed by hand by one of the company's 12 employees with water from that same spring before carbonation and bottling, all totaling 10 flavors and only 4,000 cases produced each year.

As far as their root beer goes, I'm generally pleased. It's got a decent head, but the bubbles are big, so I wouldn't call it foam per se. The head doesn't linger long though, maybe only about as much as Coke's would. Upon opening, it has a root beer candy-type smell and a pretty hard carbonation. Once the carbonation settles and I can taste it better, it's got a fairly root beer candy-ish taste, not too sweet with a nice "organic" taste in that it tastes like it was made with a plant (or a root, more precisely, I suppose...). While the taste borders dangerously on bitter, it's not in a way that I dislike, though the aftertaste is slightly medicinal.

Overall, Simpson Spring is pretty good - it's what some other old fashioned root beers used to taste like before they changed their formulas and/or substituted HFCS (which in and of itself doesn't make them bad - it just usually tends to be a hallmark of companies changing age-old recipes and sacrificing quality in order to cut costs). I'd say that the aftertaste is enough to make it slightly off-putting for some people, though less so for me. The relative lack of smoothness, however, does make me less likely to go back for more. For now, Simpson Spring Root Beer gets a high 3.5.