Twigs - 3 Reviews

I'd like to say that it's hard to mess up cream soda, but sadly that is not the case. It seems like it should be such a simple soda to make but I feel that a lot of the time it just falls short. When I was in high school I used to bring “40's” of IBC cream soda to parties, because I thought I was hysterical, but more importantly it was just a great cream soda and it became my ideal for the flavor. Throughout the years my tastes have refined quite a lot, but I still compare every cream soda to IBC in my head.

Twigs keeps the IBC dream alive in my mind and in my taste buds. This is sweet with a nice vanilla flavor that isn't too out of control. As I sip this on this warm summer night I feel like I should be 16 sitting around a fire in the fields somewhere while my classmates are getting drunk on whatever booze that could steal/convince someone to buy them. I thought they were dumb then, and I think they are dumb now, but it's all part of the teenage experience and it makes me smile.

One of the moments in my life when I was completely embarrassed for someone I was with was back in the late 90's when a handful of friends went to Denny's late night to hang out as teenagers are prone to do. One of us ordered some sort of chicken dinner and when it arrived he realized he hadn't read the description correctly, and he asked the waitress to take it back because it wasn't what he expected. Just typing that my spirits dropped and I got a pit in my stomach. I am of the belief that if you order something and it is what it says it is, you deal with it. Just because you come up with something in your head it's not the establishment's responsibility to meet your imaginary expectations.

I feel the same way about this beverage. When I grabbed it I saw the “rhu” and I expected some strange rhubarb soda. I completely ignored the second half of the title, which would have actually prepared me for what this tastes like. It tastes like someone made a soda from those little strawberry candies that come wrapped in cellophane that looks like the fruit. Once that soda was created that added a little bit of rhubarb flavor to it. This is certainly a candied soda, and that's fine, but it's not what I expected, and not what I wanted at this moment. That's on me. It's not Twig's fault. Don't be like me. Read into things. Life's no fun when you're a dummy.

The most important thing that I learned from this soda was that during the 50's in Wisconsin either bread was really expensive, or the mark up on soda pop was very low. The bottle tells a story of how the founder of Twigs would sell a case of soda and use the money he made to by a loaf of bread for his family. With modern production methods you can get a case of cans for more than double what a loaf of bread costs. Taking into consideration the time he put into it and the cost of the bottles that is some crazy math. Who knows maybe wheat was hard to come by in WI during that time. Maybe there was a yeast shortage. All we know is that Twig provided for his family and we applaud him for that.

I was hoping that this would be a lime soda that actually tasted like the green little pieces of citrus, but alas like most sodas this flavor it tastes like melted green freeze pops. Luckily for us there is not that harshness that comes along with that particular confection. Kids would love this, but it doesn't really have a place in my life. It may be the only lime soda I have ever had that uses cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup though, so that's something. I wonder if I could still buy this with bread.