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.)
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.)
The Cars have been one of my favorite bands since around the time I transitioned from middle school to high school, which was the mid-90s, perhaps an odd time to become a fan of 80s New Wave. Nevertheless, I would listen to them obsessively on my Walkman cassette player and later on my Discman—so super cool, I know! Or rad! Or whatever we were saying back then. Anyway, after Ric Ocasek’s unfortunate passing this September, I revisited those Cars albums and decided to rank them in order of my personal favorites, because I’ve already done the same with so many other favorite bands, including my favorite of all time, Tom Petty, so why not The Cars? With that said, let’s go!
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.)
