Hollywood’s Original Shirley Temple:
When my grandfather died, he didn’t leave an inheritance or anything fancy. He left a lot of stuff that I thought might be treasure because he had the freewheeling spirit of a gray-haired Peter Pan in a Winnie-the-Pooh leather jacket. I was too young to understand that the fishing rods he left would only be used twice, maybe three times, and that I wouldn’t be able to recall the various tchotchkes that now collect dust in my parents’ basement given a year’s time. Mostly, he left a tradition of well-spun tales and wit for us, though I suspect my wit comes more from my mother, which is best suited to those on lithium (or those who perhaps should be). I can certainly recount his most outrageous moments off the top of my head and when I do, their veracity, though questionable, is of little importance. He did actually leave one physical thing of note for my father and his siblings: a lockbox containing cash asterisked “spend it on things you want, not things you need.”
So his first posthumous birthday my father spent some of the earmarked money on a fancy dinner in a fancy restaurant with a fancy bar one floor down. I, eleven at the time, wanted a fancy mixed drink from the bar in a fancy glass with a cool color so I went down to the bar and demanded one of the bartender.
Now, a Shirley Temple is not a complicated drink; traditionally, it’s just some ginger ale, grenadine, and a maraschino cherry on top but children are stupid and novelty is easily mistaken for something more magical. The restaurant is still there and there are windows on every side of the dining room, offering a stunning view of Pittsburgh from Mount Washington. That view doesn’t change. Somehow, though, the Shirley Temple is too sweet for me now. Its namesake notably called the drink “saccharine, sweet, and icky,” and even though I have quite the sweet tooth, this beverage was more of a sipper. I have to say, on a hot day, a cold glass of liquid sugar should hit the spot but I found something lacking this time round. 5/10
Manhattan Special Pure Espresso Coffee Soda:
The prior opinion notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were told my blood and corn syrup share most of their chemical makeup. Much of my youth was spent in ice cream parlors, bakeries, and pop shops so my resistance to oversweet flavors was stiff and my tolerance for bitterness low. On Saturday mornings my family would head down to the strip district to get fish and coffee and produce, and though I wouldn’t hesitate to brave the pungent smell of the sea to watch the fish filleted fresh, I would kick rocks on the pavement outside Sal’s place while my parents sipped espresso. The smell was just as strong and did not herald, like that of fish, a delicious meal that evening.
Though I expressed a distaste for coffee, my parents loved espresso. A good espresso, though: they made it clear they had high standards. I became familiar with the phrases “mature palette” and “acquired taste,” which only led me to disparage it further. The smell was strong, the machines loud, and the smallest sip offensively bitter. When we got a machine of our own it crowed like a rooster in the morning and I, an insomniac, declared the sound to be “the screaming of a thousand damned souls.”
It is with this in mind that I address my fledgling coffee habit, fused here with my love of novelty sodas. Maybe it is the fact that I actually enjoy coffee now that permits me to enjoy this soda. It is still very sweet and has little of the bitterness from which I recoiled as a child – which I even miss from this beverage. The flavor is quite simple but it is good. Now it tastes like innocence and Saturday mornings with my family. It’s a good idea well done. I imagine, however, that few would choose it over sweeter things. 6.5/10
Sioux City Birch Beer:
The Sioux City brand is a staple of ice cream parlor and candy shop refrigerators. On the one hand, this makes it rather commonplace and I have begun to take their specialty brown soda-pops for granted. Their root beer is great, their cream soda a notch above its peers, and Sam Elliot demands their sarsaparilla in “The Big Lebowsky,” but I tend to have strong opinions on the matter of birch beer.
A while back, my dad, my older brother, and I went on a trip to Hershey to eat chocolate and see the amusement park there. I no longer like Hershey’s chocolate all that much and my brother pressured me into going on a roller coaster even though I hate roller coasters. I cried until my father waved chocolate under my nose.
We stopped by Harrisburg the next day and kayaked in the Susquehanna. I remember stepping off onto an island in the middle of the river and exploring it until we felt we had seen the whole thing and moved on.
These days each presented to me entirely different versions of Pennsylvania and even as a kid I understood that this was not only a geographic difference but a divide in treatment of satisfaction: one of demand and immediacy and a priori expectation which lends itself so well to the emptying of pockets; the other of slowness, acceptance, and even boredom. Maybe that was the moment I began to appreciate not just silence but a shared, communal silence.
That evening, before the setting sun, the three of us shared a rack of ribs at a brewery called Appalachian Brewing Company. Anytime my mother was around I wasn’t allowed to drink soda and so when my father asked if I wanted something to drink, I had already selected one of the house craft sodas they had on tap. Of course I had no idea what it was that I ordered then but I know now that it’s ABC’s White Birch Beer. It was surprisingly light and had an almost minty flavor. There was something woody and smoky in the back of the palette (a retroactive analysis after having had more since achieving a fuller sentience) and it tasted to me like a forest in the best of ways. To this day it may be my favorite soda.
As for Sioux City’s take, I’m afraid it’s a hard recipe to botch as long as you don’t oversugar it. Of course they use cane sugar instead of honey, like ABC and it lacks the savory complexity but it hits all the same notes. It’s hard to say it differentiates itself much from the rest of the Sioux City lineup (their Sarsaparilla tastes like a 1:1 mixture of their root and birch beers) but in all, I tend to like it over most of the standard pops you find in the same fridge. 7.5/10
Bawls Guarana Cherry Cola:
My old high school buddies and I used to have these long game nights, and on those occasional days when we were supposed to play Dungeons and Dragons and I hadn’t prepared anything, we would play Monopoly. We had 2 pm to 11 pm penciled in every Saturday to play and we’d usually get pizza to split and take a break around halfway (read: 10 pm). On Monopoly nights, however, there were no rules save the handshake and there were no holds barred. A contract was a contract and it could say anything. We were businessmen on those evenings in much the same way Tony Soprano is a garbageman; there was something brutal and sinister happening behind each of our eyes.
One evening at my friend’s, in the middle of the game, as things were getting heated, his cat leaped onto the board and scattered the pieces to the floor like some fat orange Godzilla. His owner and our host (let’s call him David) decided in that moment that we needed a break. David proposed we imitate a wine tasting with novelty sodas from the pop shop down the street. This seemed a great idea to me. The others were less enthusiastic but agreed nonetheless, perhaps out of resignation – this had been a pretty intense game and it was still early in the evening.
Among the beverages we got from the old pop shop was Bawl’s Gurana Cherry Cola, something I’d never seen before. The name seemed silly (I mean it’s right there), the bottle looked like a fruit from an alien planet, and I had no idea what a guarana even was (and neither, it would seem, does autocorrect). Of course, I had no idea it was a predecessor of Red Bull and similar energy drinks. I later read that it was originally advertised as an energy drink for gamers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. This was also a moment in time in which I looked down upon pedestrian sodas out of some form of snobbish soda-pop condescension and so had I known that this were a soda defeated in the market by the likes of Monster Energy and Mountain Dew–beverages my mother implied were for degenerates–I would likely have had a rather biased reaction to the negative. Be that as it may, I recall enjoying the beverage quite a bit. Drinking it today, as a fan of its successors (my mother may have been right, after all), I find I’m a little disappointed. It is busy. The citrus and cherry clash and the tart aftertaste disagrees with the cola flavors. It feels a bit much and at the same time like it is a less effective version of something else. If you’re some soda hipster, I imagine you’ll like it quite a bit if only for its novelty and lack of mainstream appeal. 6.5/10
Monster Energy Zero Ultra:
Better known colloquially as white Monster, this beverage feels like a first impression with each sip. About as invigorating as a slap in the face, it does everything it says it will on the box. There are few moments in which words fail me and in describing the flavor of this beverage I cannot best my first attempt when handed one by my friend after an all-nighter: “it tastes like awake.”
Now “awake” and I have a rather contentious relationship. Even as a toddler my parents would find it a good night were I to permit them five hours of sleep. As I got older I learned to be silent(ish) at night and even though I was not asleep it was simply the quieter time of day – for the sake of those who did manage to sleep. I don’t think even now that I’ve managed the recommended eight hours per night of sleep for more than a week at a time before slipping into some cycle which ignores the sun entirely. A family friend of ours told me once about an uncle of his who slept only a few hours each day and would be awake for multiple days in a row because he was blind and could not see the sun and so it did not dictate his schedule. I said that I suffered the same condition, only I was merely above obeisance to the sun, not ignorant to its demands.
The issue was that pride comes before the fall. School was affixed to the rotation of the earth like an insect to a board while I flew high above, subject to invisible winds unknowable by the institutions to which I was beholden by such mechanisms as grades. Perhaps I was above the cosmos but I was not above my physiology and even though I thought of my mind and body as discrete objects I was burdened by sleep deprivation.
Today the smallest drop of white Monster activates me like a sleeper agent. I become powerful; immune to the basic limitations of the flesh. It is an elixir with which one bests nature. Its ingredients are each a mile long and the smell alone reaches through the sensuous into the sublime like few things can. I will say for your own safety: every Icarus falls. 7/10
Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey:
Among the most flavorful whiskeys I’ve ever tasted. It offers a particularly fruit-forward but oaky nose and singes the hairs just a little. Actually the first whiskey I’d ever had but certainly my favorite, it left me with an affection for it and a little more patriotism for western Pennsylvania. It’s been a while since I’ve had any and tasting it now reminds me of the friend I first drank it with.
To start, I was madly in love with her. She was my best friend and maybe my only friend. This was back in high school. I was quiet but not soft-spoken as a kid. I was told I came off like an asshole because people mistook my silence for an air of superiority. I guess she either understood or didn’t care because she bullied me into being her friend and she was the first person I felt really understood me.
One evening, her parents were out of town and we were hanging out at her place. She pulled some honey-colored bottle out of the liquor cabinet and handed it to me. I pretended that I’d drank a lot more than some beers at my friends’ house because I thought I’d seem cooler. She poured us each a splash and I demanded more just to show how mature I was. She took it like medicine and I did, too. She looked at me with a curiosity that frightened me and an expression I can imagine vividly and still couldn’t say what it meant. I did my best to keep a straight face at the burn of the whiskey. I still didn’t like things that weren’t sweet. We drank maybe one more shot each and sat in an indescribable silence. We had barely had any and I was drunk and afraid of doing something embarrassing. Tonight, I found the bottom of the bottle all on my own and I can imagine her face but I can’t remember the sound of her voice. She’s gone. The whiskey tastes good now. 7.5/10
Graham’s 20 Year Tawny:
In Portugal, a while back, I had a sip of my father’s port wine after dinner and fell in love with it at the same time as him. I didn’t drink and was pretty little but it was sweet for a wine and that’s what I liked about it. I probably pretended to some sophistication but most of the attraction was that it wasn’t so sweet. I’ve tried port now wherever I’ve seen it and I’ve learned that I find the ruby ports (not aged in oak barrels) thin and oversweet. In general the tawnies, named for the yellow meniscus in the glass, taste deeper, darker, and, at risk of personifying a liquid, serious. I think I may be trying to find something they aren’t in them sometimes, though. When I think of port, I am reminded of a specific bottle of Spanish brandy called Louis Felipe which I’ve had only twice and whose flavor I can best describe as caramel filled with hate.
The brandy has nothing to do with the port and port is delicious in its own right, of course, and at the end of a sip I’m tasting it, not thinking. This particular port is fairly accessible and certainly no less delicious for it but it is interesting that now, here, in rehab, facing a life of sobriety that I find myself wanting a wine I’ve had in recent memory and not this fantastical liquor whose empty bottle I kept just to smell from time to time.
I could say that I like it because before I arrived at drinking age my father gifted me a bottle. I think he wanted that moment to be something special but we had drank together plenty before and he would not be with me when my birthday did eventually roll around. It was a beautiful gesture, really, and one I still appreciate but my affection for the drink predates that moment; my father picked out that bottle because he knew I liked it already and so it is hard to say what draws me to it now. I’ve only had more of it as time has gone on, which rules out nostalgia. It almost feels like the last thing that seems innate. Everything else is full of rationale and inexplicable ties to other things. In this moment I want it because I want it and nothing else matters. I don’t think I’ll get to taste it again. 10/10
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When my grandfather died, he didn’t leave an inheritance or anything fancy. He left a lot of stuff that I thought might be treasure because he had the freewheeling spirit of a gray-haired Peter Pan in a Winnie-the-Pooh leather jacket. I was too young to understand that the fishing rods he left would only be used twice, maybe three times, and that I wouldn’t be able to recall the various tchotchkes that now collect dust in my parents’ basement given a year’s time. Mostly, he left a tradition of well-spun tales and wit for us, though I suspect my wit comes more from my mother, which is best suited to those on lithium (or those who perhaps should be). I can certainly recount his most outrageous moments off the top of my head and when I do, their veracity, though questionable, is of little importance. He did actually leave one physical thing of note for my father and his siblings: a lockbox containing cash asterisked “spend it on things you want, not things you need.”
So his first posthumous birthday my father spent some of the earmarked money on a fancy dinner in a fancy restaurant with a fancy bar one floor down. I, eleven at the time, wanted a fancy mixed drink from the bar in a fancy glass with a cool color so I went down to the bar and demanded one of the bartender.
Now, a Shirley Temple is not a complicated drink; traditionally, it’s just some ginger ale, grenadine, and a maraschino cherry on top but children are stupid and novelty is easily mistaken for something more magical. The restaurant is still there and there are windows on every side of the dining room, offering a stunning view of Pittsburgh from Mount Washington. That view doesn’t change. Somehow, though, the Shirley Temple is too sweet for me now. Its namesake notably called the drink “saccharine, sweet, and icky,” and even though I have quite the sweet tooth, this beverage was more of a sipper. I have to say, on a hot day, a cold glass of liquid sugar should hit the spot but I found something lacking this time round. 5/10
Manhattan Special Pure Espresso Coffee Soda:
The prior opinion notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were told my blood and corn syrup share most of their chemical makeup. Much of my youth was spent in ice cream parlors, bakeries, and pop shops so my resistance to oversweet flavors was stiff and my tolerance for bitterness low. On Saturday mornings my family would head down to the strip district to get fish and coffee and produce, and though I wouldn’t hesitate to brave the pungent smell of the sea to watch the fish filleted fresh, I would kick rocks on the pavement outside Sal’s place while my parents sipped espresso. The smell was just as strong and did not herald, like that of fish, a delicious meal that evening.
Though I expressed a distaste for coffee, my parents loved espresso. A good espresso, though: they made it clear they had high standards. I became familiar with the phrases “mature palette” and “acquired taste,” which only led me to disparage it further. The smell was strong, the machines loud, and the smallest sip offensively bitter. When we got a machine of our own it crowed like a rooster in the morning and I, an insomniac, declared the sound to be “the screaming of a thousand damned souls.”
It is with this in mind that I address my fledgling coffee habit, fused here with my love of novelty sodas. Maybe it is the fact that I actually enjoy coffee now that permits me to enjoy this soda. It is still very sweet and has little of the bitterness from which I recoiled as a child – which I even miss from this beverage. The flavor is quite simple but it is good. Now it tastes like innocence and Saturday mornings with my family. It’s a good idea well done. I imagine, however, that few would choose it over sweeter things. 6.5/10
Sioux City Birch Beer:
The Sioux City brand is a staple of ice cream parlor and candy shop refrigerators. On the one hand, this makes it rather commonplace and I have begun to take their specialty brown soda-pops for granted. Their root beer is great, their cream soda a notch above its peers, and Sam Elliot demands their sarsaparilla in “The Big Lebowsky,” but I tend to have strong opinions on the matter of birch beer.
A while back, my dad, my older brother, and I went on a trip to Hershey to eat chocolate and see the amusement park there. I no longer like Hershey’s chocolate all that much and my brother pressured me into going on a roller coaster even though I hate roller coasters. I cried until my father waved chocolate under my nose.
We stopped by Harrisburg the next day and kayaked in the Susquehanna. I remember stepping off onto an island in the middle of the river and exploring it until we felt we had seen the whole thing and moved on.
These days each presented to me entirely different versions of Pennsylvania and even as a kid I understood that this was not only a geographic difference but a divide in treatment of satisfaction: one of demand and immediacy and a priori expectation which lends itself so well to the emptying of pockets; the other of slowness, acceptance, and even boredom. Maybe that was the moment I began to appreciate not just silence but a shared, communal silence.
That evening, before the setting sun, the three of us shared a rack of ribs at a brewery called Appalachian Brewing Company. Anytime my mother was around I wasn’t allowed to drink soda and so when my father asked if I wanted something to drink, I had already selected one of the house craft sodas they had on tap. Of course I had no idea what it was that I ordered then but I know now that it’s ABC’s White Birch Beer. It was surprisingly light and had an almost minty flavor. There was something woody and smoky in the back of the palette (a retroactive analysis after having had more since achieving a fuller sentience) and it tasted to me like a forest in the best of ways. To this day it may be my favorite soda.
As for Sioux City’s take, I’m afraid it’s a hard recipe to botch as long as you don’t oversugar it. Of course they use cane sugar instead of honey, like ABC and it lacks the savory complexity but it hits all the same notes. It’s hard to say it differentiates itself much from the rest of the Sioux City lineup (their Sarsaparilla tastes like a 1:1 mixture of their root and birch beers) but in all, I tend to like it over most of the standard pops you find in the same fridge. 7.5/10
Bawls Guarana Cherry Cola:
My old high school buddies and I used to have these long game nights, and on those occasional days when we were supposed to play Dungeons and Dragons and I hadn’t prepared anything, we would play Monopoly. We had 2 pm to 11 pm penciled in every Saturday to play and we’d usually get pizza to split and take a break around halfway (read: 10 pm). On Monopoly nights, however, there were no rules save the handshake and there were no holds barred. A contract was a contract and it could say anything. We were businessmen on those evenings in much the same way Tony Soprano is a garbageman; there was something brutal and sinister happening behind each of our eyes.
One evening at my friend’s, in the middle of the game, as things were getting heated, his cat leaped onto the board and scattered the pieces to the floor like some fat orange Godzilla. His owner and our host (let’s call him David) decided in that moment that we needed a break. David proposed we imitate a wine tasting with novelty sodas from the pop shop down the street. This seemed a great idea to me. The others were less enthusiastic but agreed nonetheless, perhaps out of resignation – this had been a pretty intense game and it was still early in the evening.
Among the beverages we got from the old pop shop was Bawl’s Gurana Cherry Cola, something I’d never seen before. The name seemed silly (I mean it’s right there), the bottle looked like a fruit from an alien planet, and I had no idea what a guarana even was (and neither, it would seem, does autocorrect). Of course, I had no idea it was a predecessor of Red Bull and similar energy drinks. I later read that it was originally advertised as an energy drink for gamers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. This was also a moment in time in which I looked down upon pedestrian sodas out of some form of snobbish soda-pop condescension and so had I known that this were a soda defeated in the market by the likes of Monster Energy and Mountain Dew–beverages my mother implied were for degenerates–I would likely have had a rather biased reaction to the negative. Be that as it may, I recall enjoying the beverage quite a bit. Drinking it today, as a fan of its successors (my mother may have been right, after all), I find I’m a little disappointed. It is busy. The citrus and cherry clash and the tart aftertaste disagrees with the cola flavors. It feels a bit much and at the same time like it is a less effective version of something else. If you’re some soda hipster, I imagine you’ll like it quite a bit if only for its novelty and lack of mainstream appeal. 6.5/10
Monster Energy Zero Ultra:
Better known colloquially as white Monster, this beverage feels like a first impression with each sip. About as invigorating as a slap in the face, it does everything it says it will on the box. There are few moments in which words fail me and in describing the flavor of this beverage I cannot best my first attempt when handed one by my friend after an all-nighter: “it tastes like awake.”
Now “awake” and I have a rather contentious relationship. Even as a toddler my parents would find it a good night were I to permit them five hours of sleep. As I got older I learned to be silent(ish) at night and even though I was not asleep it was simply the quieter time of day – for the sake of those who did manage to sleep. I don’t think even now that I’ve managed the recommended eight hours per night of sleep for more than a week at a time before slipping into some cycle which ignores the sun entirely. A family friend of ours told me once about an uncle of his who slept only a few hours each day and would be awake for multiple days in a row because he was blind and could not see the sun and so it did not dictate his schedule. I said that I suffered the same condition, only I was merely above obeisance to the sun, not ignorant to its demands.
The issue was that pride comes before the fall. School was affixed to the rotation of the earth like an insect to a board while I flew high above, subject to invisible winds unknowable by the institutions to which I was beholden by such mechanisms as grades. Perhaps I was above the cosmos but I was not above my physiology and even though I thought of my mind and body as discrete objects I was burdened by sleep deprivation.
Today the smallest drop of white Monster activates me like a sleeper agent. I become powerful; immune to the basic limitations of the flesh. It is an elixir with which one bests nature. Its ingredients are each a mile long and the smell alone reaches through the sensuous into the sublime like few things can. I will say for your own safety: every Icarus falls. 7/10
Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey:
Among the most flavorful whiskeys I’ve ever tasted. It offers a particularly fruit-forward but oaky nose and singes the hairs just a little. Actually the first whiskey I’d ever had but certainly my favorite, it left me with an affection for it and a little more patriotism for western Pennsylvania. It’s been a while since I’ve had any and tasting it now reminds me of the friend I first drank it with.
To start, I was madly in love with her. She was my best friend and maybe my only friend. This was back in high school. I was quiet but not soft-spoken as a kid. I was told I came off like an asshole because people mistook my silence for an air of superiority. I guess she either understood or didn’t care because she bullied me into being her friend and she was the first person I felt really understood me.
One evening, her parents were out of town and we were hanging out at her place. She pulled some honey-colored bottle out of the liquor cabinet and handed it to me. I pretended that I’d drank a lot more than some beers at my friends’ house because I thought I’d seem cooler. She poured us each a splash and I demanded more just to show how mature I was. She took it like medicine and I did, too. She looked at me with a curiosity that frightened me and an expression I can imagine vividly and still couldn’t say what it meant. I did my best to keep a straight face at the burn of the whiskey. I still didn’t like things that weren’t sweet. We drank maybe one more shot each and sat in an indescribable silence. We had barely had any and I was drunk and afraid of doing something embarrassing. Tonight, I found the bottom of the bottle all on my own and I can imagine her face but I can’t remember the sound of her voice. She’s gone. The whiskey tastes good now. 7.5/10
Graham’s 20 Year Tawny:
In Portugal, a while back, I had a sip of my father’s port wine after dinner and fell in love with it at the same time as him. I didn’t drink and was pretty little but it was sweet for a wine and that’s what I liked about it. I probably pretended to some sophistication but most of the attraction was that it wasn’t so sweet. I’ve tried port now wherever I’ve seen it and I’ve learned that I find the ruby ports (not aged in oak barrels) thin and oversweet. In general the tawnies, named for the yellow meniscus in the glass, taste deeper, darker, and, at risk of personifying a liquid, serious. I think I may be trying to find something they aren’t in them sometimes, though. When I think of port, I am reminded of a specific bottle of Spanish brandy called Louis Felipe which I’ve had only twice and whose flavor I can best describe as caramel filled with hate.
The brandy has nothing to do with the port and port is delicious in its own right, of course, and at the end of a sip I’m tasting it, not thinking. This particular port is fairly accessible and certainly no less delicious for it but it is interesting that now, here, in rehab, facing a life of sobriety that I find myself wanting a wine I’ve had in recent memory and not this fantastical liquor whose empty bottle I kept just to smell from time to time.
I could say that I like it because before I arrived at drinking age my father gifted me a bottle. I think he wanted that moment to be something special but we had drank together plenty before and he would not be with me when my birthday did eventually roll around. It was a beautiful gesture, really, and one I still appreciate but my affection for the drink predates that moment; my father picked out that bottle because he knew I liked it already and so it is hard to say what draws me to it now. I’ve only had more of it as time has gone on, which rules out nostalgia. It almost feels like the last thing that seems innate. Everything else is full of rationale and inexplicable ties to other things. In this moment I want it because I want it and nothing else matters. I don’t think I’ll get to taste it again. 10/10
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