A&W Ten

The Pooj quests for ten.

 (Vons – February 2013)

To celebrate the 49ers' first Super Bowl appearance in 19 years, the Missus and I hosted a small Super Bowl Party this past weekend. Well, to be more accurate, I wanted to celebrate the 49ers' first Super Bowl appearance in 19 years and the Missus just wanted to host(ess) a party this past weekend. As we all know by now, the results of the game were less than desirable for the 49ers (for which I’m still sad, despite the fact that I, the 5’-6” 135 lb Chinese guys who’s never played anything more than a pick-up game of football in his life, can claim no credit, blame, or involvement in, except maybe disturbing my neighbors’ peaceful Sunday afternoon with loud interjections and floor stomping), at least we did have a great as-SF-themed-as-possible comestible spread. Naturally, the root beer of choice for such a theme should have been Pearson Bros, but I searched as far and as wide for it as could be justified to no avail. Thus I settled for a collection of Bay Area and NorCal sodas, including Bulldog Root Beer from Fresno, Camaño Brothers Sarsaparilla from Berkeley, and River City Blueberry Lemonade from Sacramento, as well as the distinctly non-SF-themed bottle pictured above.

As I’ve said before, I don’t make a habit of drinking, much less buying or writing about diet sodas unless there is a compelling reason to do so (e.g., a new natural sugar substitute, I couldn’t find the normal version, etc…). My compelling reason for acquiring A&W Ten was that it came free from my local grocer (um… that’s pretty much it). My compelling reason, then, for writing about it is threefold: (1) I’ve written about A&W a couple times before, so adding A&W Ten feels, if nothing else, consistent; (2) I’ve been cataloging all of my root beer experiences on this blog, liquid, solid, gaseous, or otherwise, so adding A&W Ten feels, again, consistent; (3) I feel a moral obligation to warn the rest of the root beer-drinking masses to stay away from this stuff.

You may recall that the Ten line of semi-diet beverages was first introduced by Dr. Pepper, who marketed it as a diet drink “for men,” meaning that it still contained some calories – 10 to be exact – despite it being a diet drink. Somehow, somebody in the front office reasoned that men want their diet beverages to be slightly less diet than women do…? In my opinion, both men and women who need to reduce the caloric value of their soft drinks are better off just sticking with the no-calorie diet drinks, as the addition of those 10 calories is not worth the corresponding reduction in beverage quality.

First, it smells like burnt marshmallows with a slight generic root-iness, which in and of itself is not necessarily bad. What is bad is the accompanying sinus-stinging acridity. This, in addition to burning my olfactory senses to a temporary oblivion (if such a thing exists…), also leaves a rather bitter aftertaste that settles mostly on the top of my tongue.

Second, it tastes like a rubber balloon. Now this may have something to do with the smell sufficiently frying my sense of taste as well, but hey, that’s all part of the experience of drinking this, so I’m not going to discount it. Otherwise the flavor is a little smoky, without much of the “aged vanilla” that all A&Ws claim to be made with, or much of anything else. On a positive note, the addition of some HFCS seems to have tempered some of the sting in the back of the throat that typically comes with the “diet” territory – not entirely, but enough that I don’t really notice it unless I’m looking for it.

Of the nine ingredients listed, HFCS is still second only to water, a fact that should alone scare me into never drinking soda again – if A&W Ten has barely 1/16th of the calories as the regular version, and HFCS is the second ingredient for both versions, that gives me a new perspective on how much HFCS/sugar there really is in regular soda…! Aspartame, the artificial sweetener, is all the way down the ingredient list at #6, after the preservative and the natural and artificial flavor. Quillaia extract is also included (regular A&W includes it, too), which results in a decent head when first poured, but dissipates very quickly afterwards.

Even in the pantheon of diet beverages this stuff is just plain bad. There are actually several no-calorie diet root beers out there that taste better – at least as “better” as one can expect any diet root beer to taste – than this. Since I’m not in the business of rating diet root beers (well, technically I’m not in the business of anything root beers…), I’ll forgo any formal judgment. And despite not being able to raise a celebratory root beer after the game, there is some small consolation – during my failed search for Pearson Bros, I did manage to find six new root beers instead, so at least one Quest for Six turned out well this weekend.