A Look Back at Our Challenge to Find the Greatest Soda for Ice Cream Floats

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Two years ago this summer, two ambitious scientists commenced the long, laborious, diabetic adventure to discover the best soda to use for an ice cream float. Using Stewart’s Vanilla as the constant throughout, and breaking the dozens of soda options down into six specific categories, these two meticulous analysts…no, dare I say HEROES…taste tested each soda and vanilla ice cream combo using a rigorous system of metrics and scoring to determine just what soda is the best for floats. Th results were not what either expected, and you can read about each part of the investigation within.

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Six and the FINAL RESULTS

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And so we have come to the end of our scientific jaunt into the deepest realms of the ice cream soda float universe…or something like that. We have come to the final round, the root beer round! And once I reveal the final results of the best root beer soda to pair with vanilla ice cream, I will also share our final tally of the winner in each category. (Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Five

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After exploring the various flavors of Cola, Cherry, Pepper, and Cream sodas paired with vanilla ice cream, we have arrived at the largest and most diverse round of them all, what we’re going to call the Fruit Round. Now not all the sodas here are technically fruit flavored. For example, Big Red is technically a red cream soda, but we are not going to explore a round of that specific type, and it didn’t really fit the regular cream soda round either, so here it goes, alongside the other bright rainbow-esque colors and flavors of the fruit sodas. Our possibilities were almost endless here, but we settled on eight and only eight, partially so our hearts don’t stop beating from diabetic shock.

The sodas include Big Red, Stewart’s Key Lime Pie, Grape Nehi, Orange Nehi, Flathead Lake’s Huckleberry, Coke’s California Raspberry, Coke’s Georgia Peach, and Swamp Pop, a strawberry flavored soda popular in Louisiana.

Yeah, that’s a lot of fruit soda…

(Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Four

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We now have results from four rounds of ice cream soda float taste tests, with the Cola Round, the Cream Soda Round, the “Pepper” Round, and now the Cherry Round complete. I’m pretty confident that I can speak for both scientists involved when I say this has been the most delicious round yet, a round that included: Cherry Coke, Boyland Black Cherry, Virgil’s Black Cherry Cream, Stewart’s Cherries ‘n Cream, and Cherrwine.

(Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Three

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With the results from the Cola Round and the Cream Soda Round now tallied, we move on to the Pepper Round. Now this name might not quite fit since a couple of these sodas aren’t in the same exact vein as Dr. Pepper, but they share some traits and fall into that pepper/medicinal/spiced soda realm in one way or another. And we had to cluster at least four sodas together somehow, so this is what we ended up with: Dr. Pepper, Pibb Xtra, Maine Root Sarsaparilla, and Moxie.

(Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Two

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And now that we know the results of the Cola Round, we move on to another flavor altogether: cream soda. I have never had a cream soda float despite having a soft spot for root beer’s golden-pale cousin, so I was pretty excited to begin. Before I introduce the flavors we picked for this round, let me give you a quick recap of how we’re doing this challenge.

(Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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The Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge: Round One

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Summer is coming…and I dream of cold drinks and icy desserts on the front stoop, in the back yard, at patio bars, and roadside ice cream stands. I have designs on a boozy hollowed-out pineapple cocktail complete with little umbrellas and twisting straws, and of course one of my childhood favorites, the root beer float. Or maybe a Coke float. Or a Big Red float. I’ve even had a Purple Cow, but how would that grape soda float hold up against one made with Dr. Pepper?

And thus came the idea for an ice cream soda float challenge: 25 flavors, one brand of ice cream, and eight nights of carbonated sugar highs that will not only threaten our bodies with immediate Type A through Z diabetes but also determine the greatest dessert-beverage question of them all: what soda is the best for an ice cream float?

(Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)

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