anthony's root beer barrel » random junk

bigger photos

anthony — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:54:00 +0000

so i have had a few requests for me to put up bigger photos of the bottles and cans. i did implement it but i have to go back and find the original images in order to make them good quality for older and even current reviews.
so right now, reviews that will publish next May and after are all set! =) you will be able to click the small image and get the big one.
i will see what kind of time i get to do this image creation so it may take some time. i also am not sure i even have a lot of the original photos anymore. a lot of the first couple years were actual, physical photographs and i doubt i will go scan those even if i knew where they were. it is time consuming to crop and adjust each bottle. i also have to watermark the images so all of those rotten root beer bottle image thieves will be thwarted as they should be! we shall see.
any other desired features, let me know.

hello new people!!

anthony — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:19:44 +0000

wow, so i did not quite expect the huge traffic spike as a result of Modern Marvels! crazy! mainly since they did not ever say the site address or name. i had about 10 times more traffic than usual yesterday and i am quite surprised my server handled it ok. very good.
anyway, welcome new visitors! thanks for finding me. enjoy a frosty one and feel free to browse around. there are 430 reviews up right now with new ones posting every 12 days for at least the next year or so. hopefully longer if i find more sodas. click on “Reviews” above to go to the alphabetical list of all of the sodas i have reviewed in the past 14 years. you can submit ratings for each one under their reviews. if you click on “Rankings” you can see what sodas i and users each rated highest. or lowest. sign up to receive updates or just follow me on Twitter to see when i post new reviews. i have sodas lined up for the next year already so no worries there. send me a message and i will be sure to get back to you soon. and come back again soon.
oh! if you can get any of the sodas in my WANTED section, i would be more than happy to pay all costs. or trade with you. also if there any any sodas you can get that you don’t see reviewed, i probably want em! so write to me. please. kthxbye

Modern Marvels! at last

anthony — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:39:50 +0000

so finally the episode of Modern Marvels that i am briefly in, “Soft Drinks”, will be aired this Thursday, April 8th at 8 pm EST on the History Channel. it will also be on a few more times in the week or so after that at various times, so check your local listings. i am in it for a couple minutes and there are many shots from my house, close ups of bottles and me pouring a root beer and junk like that. cool junk! check it out!

in memorium…

anthony — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:21:03 +0000

the online root beer reviewing world is a pretty small place. i found that when i was contacted for my ‘Modern Marvels’ appearance a couple years ago, the producer and i both ran through the list of who else was out there. i have never physically met any one of these people in the meat space, but i feel almost like i know them in a way. i have traded emails if not sodas with almost all of them, especially the ones who have been around a few years.
just now i found out that we lost one last year. Luke Cole was killed in a car accident abroad in June of 2009. i always liked his site and found it very humorous that we both loved root beer and gigantic roadside characters. he always had root beers on his site that i had never heard of and will probably never have. his press releases of the best root beers of the year each year around 2002-2005 did make me a bit flustered, who was this guy to have a press release about root beer?! what qualifies him to decide this junk?! after 2006 or so he did not seem to update his site although i checked in every couple months or so to see, hoping he would have found more new sodas for me to then acquire somehow.
it is a shame that i really knew nothing of all of the great things he did outside of the root beer world. he was a lawyer, working for environmental justice, founder of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and he seemed like an amazing person.
nope, i never knew you Luke, but i shall miss you.

one tweet root beer

anthony — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:33:39 +0000

i am not sure if anyone cares, but if you do, you can follow me on Twitter. i have been tweeting more about current root beer activities lately even. although it is almost meaningless, what i review today won’t be published until the end of october, 2010! but you can look back and remember fondly the day i actually reviewed it when it does finally appear. =)

save your ratings!

anthony — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:15:36 +0000

indeed, a new feature on the site is pretty much up now! you can now save your ratings and get a list of your sodas with your ratings! you need to register and log in of course. when you are on a review, you will see your previous rating (well, from this point forward) which you can change or else a notice that you have not rated that brew. also on the right sidebar should be a link to see all of your ratings, in alphabetical order. i have to clean that up and format it better.
so check it out and start your root beer list going!

thanks for the suggestion from Andy! if you have any ideas for improvement, let me know, it may happen.

policies and re-reviews

anthony — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:54:30 +0000

so i started this site over 13 years ago now. at the time there were a couple of other review sites out there, all of which have disappeared. at this point my site has been up longer than some reviewers have been alive probably.
in that time, many sodas have come and gone. some others have changed their recipe or just their sweetener or whatever. most have changed their labels. i also have become more wordy. i consider this a good thing, it entertains me more to write and probably you to read when more info is given in a more enjoyable manner. although this is strange as the early years of all of this i was actually writing a lot more other junk in general so one would think i would write more here too. but i digress…
through the years too my tastes have changed. i actually enjoy Virgil’s now! i still hate all of the vile Journey drinks though so don’t fret too much. nonetheless i let my original review stand, it was what i thought and felt at that moment of that time of my life. agree or disagree, it stands. now, when a company changes their recipe, that makes it a harder call… i will probably from here on out, do a full on new review, even for just a sweetener change, just to keep stuff more current. people will not care as much what the old recipe was like as they do about the current one.

i will probably also go back and add to my reviews when i encounter a drink again for which i was too short. not taking away what i wrote initially but adding to it. i definitely will not be mail ordering sodas all over again, that is way too costly, but if i get a bottle i may as well talk about it. if a company wants to send me a bottle, i would be happy to take another drink of it. so if you see a review expand, don’t be alarmed. if i do totally change my mind about something, i will add that as an update, to let you know.

wedding root beer!

anthony — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:39:39 +0000

so my wife and i had our big wedding ceremony / reception a couple weeks ago. of course me being me and my wife being the awesome, we had to have a custom root beer. or at least a custom labelled root beer. as the event was in Philadelphia, i wanted to get a Pennsylvania brew. Hank’s would have been fine, but the embossed bottles would make it a pain to relabel them. Olde Philadelphia is not actually that good. so i contacted the Appalachian Brewing Company to see if i could get a few cases of their brew, since it is amazing and also since it is from PA.
now, i expected them to maybe say they would ship it to me and i would have to pay crazy prices, or else that i could try to contact their distributor to find out where i could go buy some at a store closest to me. but no, they offered to meet me at a location of my choosing with however much i wanted to get! i figured it was fair to suggest someplace in the middle of our 2 locations so after a bit of back and forth about a good place to execute the transaction, we settled on a Cracker Barrel in PA. Plus it was my lucky week as they were just about to bottle more root beer so they could do a run without labels for me! and it would be superfresh too! hooray, this rocks!
a couple weeks before the wedding i drove out there, got some candy at Cracker Barrel and found their guy in the parking lot. he was amazingly kind and even threw in an extra case of soda and a keychain! if i drank actual beer i would have gotten a case of that too i think! craziness! plus they charged a crazy low price. woo hoo!
i went home, designed some labels, tried em out, decided the top labels are pretty much impossible to put on perfectly. which is unfortunate as i like that part. nonetheless we went with having just the bottom part which is still fun.
we put a bottle in all of the hotel welcome bags and had 7 or so cases at the bars for servin’ up cold. it was a big hit as i expected it to be, many people approached me about where i got it and how they could get more. it is a mighty fine soda and a great bunch of people brewing it.
so huge thanks to Appalachian Brewing Co. if you are ever in the area of any of their establishments, i recommend stopping in. although i have never been to one, if the rest of their employees are as great as Brian and who ever created their root beer then they must be excellent places.

free root beer float!

anthony — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:31:59 +0000

yes, today (6/19/2009) only, A&W Restaurants are giving out free small root beer floats from 2 pm to 8 pm in honor of their 90th anniversary. so find your closest location and get one. then put on a hat and get another one. then try the fake moustache trick or maybe the blonde wig you have been hiding behind the cheese doodles and Bigg Mixx cereal.

dvd with me

anthony — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:32:58 +0000

oh wow, i keep on forgetting!! so a while back i was filmed for an episode of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels show about soft drinks. they had little idea when it would air or anything so i kept waiting for it to be on, telling my friends and family whenever i heard an approximate air date. first it was fall 2008, then early 2009, then maybe spring 2009. but apparently it aired already. in January or so. no one seems sure just when that happened. weird indeed. so i have yet to see it as they also have no idea when it will be re-aired. but you can buy a dvd of it here if you so desire.
i will have a copy eventually but i am tempted to buy it myself just so i can see it at last. if anyone out there has seen it, let me know, i am curious how it came out and how the 2 hours or so of footage got editted down. maybe i get 2 minutes or something, who knows… not me, that is what i am saying.
i will try to put some screen caps up when i do get it.
i also owe you guys a recording of that radio show i did too! ug, so much to do, so little time, so much time i waste.