Bennetts - 2 Reviews

Old-fashioned taste means different things to different people. There is a place around here that is legendary for "old fashioned" subs. I could go for one of those subs every day and as the years progress they only get better. New bread, new sauces, new ingredients, but at the heart, they are fantastic subs made fresh right before your eyes. I honestly believe that eighty years ago these subs would have tasted the same as they do today. I would do an awful lot to go back in time and try that theory out. I would order a turkey sub and have it with a Bennett's lemon cola and test the "old fashioned" waters. I'd sit down with my inevitable fancy pants, hat, shoes, and pocket watch and eat a sub and drink a pop.

You know what I would say? I would say that this sub is delicious and this pop leaves much to the imagination. It's kind of thick and the cola and lemon are a bit...abrasive. I would also wager a guess to say that in "old fashioned" times, they didn't use artificial sweeteners. Between this and a lemon Pepsi, I would take a Pepsi, but since I'm in old times, I'd have a soda jerk whip me up a genuine vanilla Coke.

Although this would never happen and I will always and forever be stuck in present day like a dumb dummy, I can imagine and know that things haven't changed for subs but have changed for Bennett's.

Today we announced that the winning name for our "name our mascot" contest was "Sir Durstig." The fine folks over at The Rootbeer Brothers came up with the name and we salute them for it. Their response was for us to grab our finest root beer and drink it in celebration. I tried, but what I grabbed certainly wasn't my best root beer, but it was the only one that I had that was already cold.

When I took my first sip I was nicely surprised at how dark and full-bodied it tasted. I was even more shocked when I looked at the ingredients and saw that it was sweetened with HFCS. Then I noticed that it has molasses in it and I understood and smiled. I want molasses in more root beers. The more I drank the less impressed I was. The molasses flavored remained with every sip, but the complexity of the root beer quality of it faltered. It seemed to get weaker and weaker with every sip, until I only had about a fifth of the bottle left. At that point it got stronger, but still not to the level that I wanted it to be.

This had the potential to be one incredible root beer, but when root beer extract is one of the ingredients I guess I shouldn't have expected much. This certainly wouldn't satisfy a tiny bear cub, let alone a full grown big bear.