In Defense of Root Beer

I took a rafting trip on the American River during the summer when wildfires raged over Northern California and smoke hung like a fog over half the state. We choked on the smoke all that 90-degree day down the river, with only warm, plastic-tasting water to quench our thirst.

So at the end of the trip, when one of the river guides produced a cooler filled with sodas on ice, I nearly cried with joy. I fished out a ginger ale to soothe my throat.

A group of Spaniards who had shared my raft were poring over the cooler. One picked out a root beer and brought it over to me. “Excuse me, is beer?” he asked. “Root beer,” I said, switching to Spanglish, “No es cerveza. Es soda — refresco.”

He opened it, took a sip, and made a face. His friends tried it and grimaced. “I think is for children, no?” he asked. “Of course not,” I said, starting to feel a little defensive. It was more soda than I wanted, but I grabbed a root beer just to show them. “Everyone drinks root beer.”

I then told them about root beer floats, trying to describe the glory of the classic American dessert-drink: the foam spilling over the top of the glass, the icy crunch that forms on the ball of vanilla ice cream, the creamy drink that remains once the ice cream is gone.

My adulations were lost on them. They looked at me blankly, then one blond Spaniard said that root beer tasted like “medicina del estómago” — stomach medicine — and the rest nodded.

But I had whetted my own appetite for root beer float. The last one I’d had was at a county fair, and it was a huge disappointment. The root beer had been warm, which caused the soft serve ice cream to melt immediately into a sickeningly sweet puddle.

So when I got home, I made up for it. I bought Dad’s root beer and Dreyer’s vanilla, chilling both well before joining them in float heaven. The root beer crust that formed on the vanilla ice cream ball had never been crunchier, the foam never so high. I showed those Spaniards.