A while back I was going through the grocery store and saw these. I think it was a HyVee, but it’s been awhile, I must confess. Anyhow, Magic Straws have been around for over a decade and are supposedly a great way to get kids to drink their milk. They’re extra thick and crimped at the ends with flavor crystals/balls filling them up. So the idea is you stick the straw in the glass of milk, take a sip, and the milk gets flavored as it travels through the flavored … filter? Interesting concept. It says on the package that it’s made in Hungary, which isn’t where I think of when I think of quality root beer float flavored things, but hey, maybe I’ve been missing the robust Hungarian root beer scene. There were four straws in the pack so I let the whole family share in the experience.
The flavor is weak on the first drink. It’s sorta like root beer, but very diluted. If you do small sips, and like I mean, really small sips. It gets sweet and tastes like watered (milked?) down root beer float. The whole process is difficult and unsatisfying.
Okay, why? Why is this a thing? If you want anything out of this at all, you really need to slowly sip. Even still, it’s hard to get a very good root beer float flavor out of it. This whole process seems so unnecessary. Why not just have single serve tubes that you add to 8 ounces of milk and use the straw to stir it up? That would simplify the process and could potentially give a nice root beer float milk. This whole product is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, and doing so in the least practical way possible. To their credit, my kids did think it was rather neat, but I bet they would have thought it neater if you just dumped it all in, got a better tasting product, and then drank it through the straw, but what do I know?
Not far from my house is a lovely craft ice cream shop called Honey & Mackie’s. They do small batch, hand mixed flavors that are truly top notch. Many a summer afternoon or evening, we’ve strolled there to get a waffle cone full of their decadent treats. They also have fries. Loaded fries that are kind of like a poutine, but not exactly but will definitely fill you up and are as high quality as their ice cream. So yeah, it’s one of those gems you find sometimes. They rotate through various flavors and this past week they made root beer ice cream, so I had to get some. Their method was to use root beer candy sticks, crush them up, and mix them in. I wasn’t sure how that would work, but I immediately went and bought a quart to give it a try. 
