Zest-O Root Beer

my root beer nemesis had reviewed this soda and i inquired as to where he got it. as sometimes good and evil must work together, we were trying to arrange a trade of sodas we each could get stuff we otherwise could not. he did not have any more of this but pointed me to a website that did and even found that i could get it at a store in my state! wow, what a kind nemesis! i promptly ordered a can as the store was an hour or so away and the gas cost and time spent going there would have been worse than the postage cost. they probably just pulled it off the shelf as it still has the 99 cent sticker on it.
i am kind of surprised that this drink from the Philippines is root beer and not sarsaparilla as all of the other beverages in this category from there have been sarsaparillas. but whatever, doesn’t matter to me really. although the style here is semi-generic, i like it. pretty simple but gets the point across while still looking pretty good. it has no corn syrup, which is great. but it has aspartame as well as refined sugar, the first of which to me is worse than HFCS. i never get drinks that do this. i am committed to a sugared beverage and the calories that that will entail. if i wanted an artificial sweetener and the baggage that that comes with (kidney damage, gross taste) then i would be drinking a diet soda. i also find it humorous that this is a “carbonated drink” and not “soda” or something. that it has “nature identical rootbeer flavor” is even better! how does that work? it is molecularly identical? curious minds want to know! and why it this a 330ml can? 11.2 oz? a “normal” can is 12 oz so perhaps they are saving money by using less aluminum and soda and also it weighs a little less so shipping will be cheaper? i don’t know. perhaps that is the norm in the Philippines.
the taste is actually not bad. for a while. then the aspartame kicks in, but just a little and it fades away. the taste is not great, it is a little heartier than a generic root beer taste but overall it is generic. i am not sure if that is a good or bad thing. on the one hand, it is a little disappointing to try yet another generic root beer. on the other hand it is perhaps good for other nations to know what an average root beer tastes like in the United States and to have that available to them inexpensively without the import costs and so on. on the third hand which is actually a foot with a sideways big toe, other countries not exactly knowing what traditional root beer tastes like has resulted in some pretty yummy sodas. but on the fourth hand that is a mitten on a drumstick, there have also been some pretty vile foreign root beers. so yeah, good and bad. more good than bad in the end.

Anthony’s Rating: 66
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Ingredients: carbonated water, refined sugar, caramel color, sodium benzoate (as preservative), nature-identical rootbeer flavor, citric acid and aspertame