My daughter found this candy, I’m not sure where, and gave it to me one day. That’s sweet, and helpful. I need more things to write about after all. I didn’t know Charms made anything other than Blow Pops to be honest. I was always more of a Blow Pop than a Tootsie Pop kid growing up, so I am quite surprised to learn they also make these Minipops. Doing some research, and turns out Charms is owned by Tootsie, and they may lots of different kind of pops. And to think, up until writing this, I believed that there was some deep rivalry between the center-filled-lollipop brands. But, nope, they’re the same company. But now I know and so do you. Now root beer float Minipop…
There’s a mild generic root beer flavor that really doesn’t have any standout characteristics. There’s a bit of spicy and bit of wintergreen, you know, standard hard candy stuff. There’s a distinct lack of strong vanilla in it, which is odd because it’s trying to pass itself off as a root beer float. In fact there’s nothing float about it. It tastes like plain root beer to me.
Yeah, so, this isn’t a root beer float flavor. But, it’s not a bad root beer flavor. So I’ll give it a passing grade (whatever that means in this case). I wouldn’t go seeking it out by any means, but it won’t leave you disappointed if you have it, and that’s really all you can ask for from a root beer (float) lollipop.
On New Year’s Day the weather was beautiful and it hadn’t snowed for a few days so I thought I’d take a scenic drive with the family. I figured something the drove along the Mississippi River would be nice, and I knew that in the city of Red Wing, there was a brewery that also made their own root beer. So after a nice drive on the Wisconsin side of the river, we found ourselves at the little Red Wing Brewery. The city of Red Wing actually has a storied past with breweries, but they all were closed by the 1950s. The Red Wing Brewery is the first to open there since 1951. Now the root beer is called Good Old Zimmie’s and this time I actually had the presence of mind to ask why it was called this. I was told that they looked through the long history of Red Wing beers and chose from those names. Good Old Zimmie’s was the name of some old brew. Go figure. 
Canadian Barq’s! That’s right, they make it different in Canada. I don’t know why, but they do. Not only do they only use pure cane sugar, but they use a little less sugar in total, and there’s less sodium. The nutritional information is therefore different, as the ingredients, slightly. And they even had the decency to call it something different, Crafted Soda. That’s not what we call it down here. So that means I can 
