What a weekend! The party on Saturday went really well and we drank a LOT of good soda and it seemed like everyone got a nice sugar buzz going for most of the evening. Thankfully there were only a couple of flavors that were, er, unpalatable.

Unfortunately among them was one of the Journey Foods root beer flavors: Shenandoah Sassafras Root Beer. The problem is not that they use Star Anise as one of the ingredients, it’s that they used a LOT of Star Anise as one of the ingredients. The first comment from someone who tried it was, “Tastes like raisins.” Not that raisins are a bad thing, but it was just a very off taste and not very pleasant.

The other unsuccessful one was the Steap line of sodas. All of them are based on Green Tea, which doesn’t sound like a bad thing until you taste one. Ick. Someone said that their sweetie might like them and so took the rest home to see what happens. Good riddance and I hope they get some enjoyment out of them. I did try both the Cola and the Root Beer and both were pretty disgusting.

OTOH - on the good advice of someone close, I found some Sangria flavored Mexican sodas that were quite good. One of them was mostly grape soda flavored, but the other actually tasted like good sangria, but without the alcohol. [Now I just have to get around to calling her today after I didn't get a chance to this last weekend like I was supposed to. ] Another really pleasant surprise was the Journey Foods Carribean Creme Soda, which had a very nice flavor of toasted coconut. It tempered the usual oversweet flavor of cream soda very well and was a big hit. I’ll have to stock that in the fridge more often.

I didn’t end up getting either the Boylan’s or the 1919, but I think I more than made up for it with the rest of the selection. I’ll post a link to the picture I took of the entire selection arrayed on the dining room table. The chicken curry turned out really well too (though needed a touch more salt) thanks to the lesson on using chicken thigh meat instead of breast meat I learned a few weeks ago in Chicago.

I’ll try and come up with a revised list of the stuff that I actually did end up getting later this week.