Pocket Pooj precipitously
ponders persistence.
(Spireworks, December 2016)
If we are to believe the marketing campaign, Stubborn Soda will
apply the same hipster treatment to soft drinks that hipsters have already
applied to beer and coffee. Depending on
your view of hipster beer/coffee, this could either mean a healthy dose of care
and craft or an unhealthy dose of lumberjack beards and pretension. We, of course, are not here to judge the
merits of the marketing (or beards, lumberjack or otherwise); only the relative
merits of root beer. Even so, the
Stubborn Soda website’s boasting of special glasses they created to highlight
the soda’s carbonation and a special tap to decant the soda from a fountain (though
I’m not sure what the tap adds to the experience) should give us some pause
(source). Un-pause then, if you will, and you’ll notice
that Stubborn Soda’s parent company, The Concentrate Manufacturing Company of
Ireland, is actually a subsidiary of Pepsi, which perhaps indicates that Stubborn Soda is taking the Goose Island/InBev route of craft beverages, at least more so
than being an Irish craft product.
The tapped version (alas, decanted into a cheap paper cup
instead of the fancy snifter) produces a good head of foam (which may be the
purpose of the special tap) that’s almost red in color and stays for a decent
while. Despite this, the carbonation in
the beverage actually fades quickly. It has
a fruity birch flavor that’s otherwise pleasantly not too sweet, even though it
finishes with a very sweet, slightly menthol aftertaste. Were I more poetic, more cynical even, of
Stubborn’s marketing, I might regard this little package of paradoxes
intentionally ironic.
According to website data, the tap version is
sugar-sweetened*, whereas the bottled version adds Stevia. I do have a bottle in my possession, but have
not yet tried it, so it might be worth a side-by-side comparison at some point
(though I’m not sure how I would get a sufficiently cooled bottle into a
restaurant with a tap yet, since I’ve only seen it at one restaurant so far). Stay tuned, I guess. In the meanwhile, the tapped version of
Stubborn Root Beer gets a 3.
*Did anyone else hear this NPR interview with John Nese of
Galco’s? Anyone want to comment on the
veracity of his statements about “real” sugar versus “cane” sugar?
