You know what I haven’t done in awhile? An Old Fashioned Soda Fountain review. Why? Turns out those are significantly more rare than I initially thought when I accepted the category into gourmet root beer-dom. Even rarer is the fountain that uses their own home recipe for their root beer. So I was extra excited when my favorite store around these parts, Blue Sun Soda, announced they were adding an old fashioned soda fountain, while keeping all of the other goodness like $0.25 arcade games (hint hint Northern…) Anyways, so they have this awesome new soda fountain, with tons of flavors using the Whistler syrups which they make. You can mix and match them too, giving you near infinite flavor combinations. However, that doesn’t seem right from a review standpoint, so I’m going to stick with a classic soda fountain concoction, the phosphate. If you don’t know what a phosphate is, you have lived an incomplete life thus far, but it’s something that the jerks would put in the drink to add acidity and saltiness that would enhance the flavor. All of the old soda fountains would have it. I’m not sure how common root beer phosphates actually were, but I wanted to try theirs as it’s both a unique take on the Whistler while being a base flavor. One final note, I didn’t ask them for no ice, and while I regret doing so, if the jerk was competent, and added the correct syrup ratio for the amount of liquid to be added while accounting for initial ice melt, the ice shouldn’t mess up the flavor like it would if the root beer were coming from a bottle or a keg. Nevertheless, it is a mistake I shan’t make again, I assure you.
The Body is sweet and mild with a nice middle of the road root beer flavor that’s accented by the salty sour of the phosphate. It actually is just a hint of sour so it ends up actually adding to the flavor. The Bite is mild without any discernible spice and low carbonation. There isn’t any Head, none at all. The Aftertaste is mild and slightly salty, but it a good way.
I wasn’t expecting it to be this good, dare I say, it’s an improvement over the Whistler Soda which syrup it uses. I quite like it, and would recommend it with the hot dogs and popcorn and other stuff there. It’s nothing amazing as far as root beers go, but a solid drinkable, which is enough for what they’re doing there. I can’t wait to return and try some other root beer flavor creations.
The Blue Sun Soda Fountain. Sorry for blurry pic.
Two weeks ago I took a nice long vacation and went and visited my parents back in Central Washington. We took the train which I highly recommend. One of the days we went to visit Ohme Gardens in Wenatchee, which is a lovely alpine garden with lots of trails and fountains and ponds and streams and the like. Very picturesque. But since it’d been awhile since I’d been there, I did the search and you know what’s coming, Root Beer! I started calling breweries, and stopped as soon as I started, because the very first place I called, Badger Mountain Brewing, said they did, in fact, make their own root beer. Where to eat for lunch was settled! Badger Mountain Brewing was started in 2012 and has produces nearly 2000 barrels of brewed stuff a year. They also have a restaurant in their tap room with some of the most epic food imaginable, which I’ll get to in a bit, but first, the root beer.
Still at the Northern Soda Company tap room, after I’d finished a pint of their most 
