Kutztown - 8 Reviews

The weird thing about diet drinks is the more you drink them, the more tolerable they become. Normally I despise diet sodas because they taste like chemicals, but I've been drinking a lot of Diet Pepsi over the past couple weeks. This is because I've been staying with my mom for a few weeks until I found a place to live (which I will be moving into tomorrow) and all she has here is Diet Pepsi. Being the soda fiend and night owl I am, I have been drinking enough of it to build up a tolerance to fake sugar in soda.

I realized I had built up this tolerance when I took my first sip of this diet birch beer. I was expecting it to taste gross, but the first sip wasn't that bad. In subsequent sips I could taste the Splenda. This is a really light birch beer. It has a slight bite in the aftertaste, but not nearly as much as I would like and tend to expect from standard birch beer. This definitely gets filed in the "not the best, but not the worst" file.

Invisibility; the world's most desirable super power. Flying? Yeah, that's awesome. I would love that, but invisibility...that's where it's at. Honestly, the best place is probably some sort of girls changing room or communal shower. What? I'm a scumbag? Yeah, like you didn't think it. I guess practical jokes would also be pretty awesome. Ghosting people. Carrying drinks around, making them look like they're floating. That would be awesome. When you're invisible and when you eat things, do they just disappear when you eat them? I would be psyched if you could eat things as "an invisible" and the food would go down and look like it was being processed, but then it will eventually turn in to poop and it's just going to be a walking turd and that will kind of give it away.

Oh, what am I getting at? This root beer was smooth, but there is no sign of head. Head is invisible but there is that essence of some sort of foam. It's a creamy root beer, really light. It's pretty average, but it's at very least, surprising.

Something...something's not quite right. You know when you leave the house and something feels right and around 11:48 in the morning, you check your watch to find out...ahhh...I didn't wear a watch. How about that feeling when you think you forgot something? That might be worse than knowing that you forgot something because it's essentially forgetting if you forgot something. It's a two-fer.

This isn't a bad flavor at the end but at the beginning something is going on that I can't explain. It's very sweet and very dark too, like "cup dying" dark. I stopped drinking a lot of powdered juice because I saw it stain a counter top once and thought, "if that can dye that, what is it doing to my insides" like someone is going to rip me open and analyze me by the color of my throat and stomach lining. Hey, it could happen.

This isn't the best black cherry pop I've ever had. It's not bad, but it's not something I'd return to. After the Kutztown sarsaparilla, I thought it was looking up and no, this isn't a black eye for them, it's just kind of like that sadly ugly sister that everyone knows is the nicest girl around, but no one wants to verbally say anything to her.

Kutztown. This. Is. Awesome. I don't know why I mentally wrote you off. Did I do something in the past that made me think you weren't good? If so, I'm sorry because this sarsaparilla is top notch. Top notch. It's got such an earthy, rich flavor. I stupidly/politely gave everyone else a nice 6oz. each of this because it in it's entirety was a whopping 24oz. Leaving me with only 6oz to do this review. Had I known in advance how good this was ahead of time, it would have been Sipsville for those jerks I work with and Kutztown for me. I feel like I can taste everything in this from the classic root beer root flavors to whatever the heck makes sarsaparilla. It tastes homegrown and handmade, like there is some feeling to it.

Seriously, this is awesome. This is a "Oh, I'm in Pennsylvania? I've got to search and find and buy some Kutztown sarsaparilla." Every sip is as good as the last. It doesn't get old. I wish that I could keep this on ice and enjoy it until my teeth fall out. Mmmm, that's a bit too much. I like my teeth. I'll just say that I like this stuff, a lot.

I think this company bought up a surplus of purple freezie pops. They then tried to bite them open, but realized it was futile (as we all have) and then used scissors to cut off the ends so they could dump them in a giant vat. Once in the vat, they allowed the freezie pops to melt part way and then removed the ice parts that had become white. They needed this to be concentrated. They then added the only other ingredient, carbonation. Someone had the job of putting it in these plastic bottles, and then it showed up at my house.

The first two flavors of Kutztown that we tried weren't that stellar. In fact they were on the badder side of the spectrum. At least they got birch beer right.
I always split up birch beer into two categories, and this falls under the "county fair" umbrella. It's super sugary and tastes like it should be a fountain soda. I feel like I should be drinking it in accompaniment with some fried dough on a hot summer night. Kids who are waiting in line to ride the camel or the elephant are just dying to get their hands on some of this sugary goodness. The carny that is goading you into trying to win an enormous stuffed animal for your girlfriend has an extra large cup of this hidden underneath the counter. He takes sips in-between spitting out the extra saliva from his Skoal Bandits. Sure it may rot out what little teeth he has left, but what does he care? He's living the dream, the carny dream. I like it, but I've never met a birch beer I didn't like.

Much like Jay's fears over the red cream, the large plastic bottle this came in also turned me off. It screams "cheap soda for under a dollar". Sadly, my instincts were right. There is barely any cream flavor so I would hardly call this an orange cream. As far as orange soda goes, it has a good smell and tastes better than big name orange sodas like Sunkist. But that's as far as it goes. There's nothing special about this pop.

When we first got a package of these, I was a little turned off by the plastic bottle. In my mind things that come in plastic bottles are generally cheap tasting. After looking over the bottle I got over it. The company made the effort to use pure cane sugar, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt.
After a sip, I was skeptical again. After half the bottle I was convinced that my original thoughts were correct. This tastes like a cheap soda. Not like Shasta cheap, but it just doesn't taste like a fancy pop. The cream soda taste didn't come out and punch me in the uvula like I wanted it to. It's subtler than I like my cream sodas. The "red" flavor is decent. If they had added that to a better cream soda base, I think I would be all over this. Unfortunately they did not. I drank the whole bottle, so it wasn't terrible. If someone offered me some I wouldn't turn it down. I just wouldn't purchase it myself.