Alcoholic Root Beer, Alcoholic Root Beer Float Alcoholic Soda, Orange Soda, Hard Soda, Alcoholic Ginger Ales - whatever name you call them, these are not your typical soda as they have alcohol content.
Gone were the days when you only have zero alcohol in your root beer or ginger ale. With the demand for putting alcohol on your soda, root beer manufacturers and hard soda brands considered serious marketing. Coney Island Hard Soda is made by Coney Island Brewing, owned by Boston Beer (Sam Adams). Not Your Father's Root Beer, from Small Town Brewery, is distributed nationally by Pabst, which has part ownership of Small Town.
Best Damn Root Beer, produced by Anheuser-Busch, hit stores by end of 2015. Henry's Hard Soda, from MillerCoors, was released in the first month of January 2016. There's also Jed's Hard Soda, from F.X. Matt Brewing Co./Saranac. The hard soda saga started with the wintertime release of Best Damn Root Beer and Henry's Hard Soda as huge proof that big brewers believe hard soda is not merely a summertime fad.
According to the Thrillist, a movement's been brewing across America this past year, bringing high-quality alcoholic root beers, ginger ales, and other sodas into the collective consciousness of drink swillers looking for something different. These hard sodas-root beers in particular are being brewed by some major players in the beer game and their unique flavor profiles have taken the drinking world by storm.
It's estimated that consumers have spent about $111 million (a number that's expected to double in 2016) on alcoholic soda last year, and some individual brands are even outselling major brews like Samuel Adams Boston Lager and Lagunitas IPAs, proving that alcoholic soda has come a long way since the days of Zima and chugging clandestine flavored malt beverages on one knee.
Nearly half of all the people in the USA drink soda every day and Americans consume around 240 pints of the fizzy stuff each year. That's a staggering 7.5 billion gallons for American consumers. Root beers and ginger ales are also sodas. A number of non-cola drinks such as root beer, orange soda, cream soda, and lemon-lime drinks contain caffeine in amounts similar to those in the cola drinks.
You have probably watched dozens of videos showing how much sugar you have on your Coke. A 12-ounce can of regular Coke contains 39 grams of total sugar, which is about 9 1/3 teaspoons of sugar. You won't find sugar listed in the ingredients. Coke in the United States is made with high fructose corn syrup as a lower-cost sugar alternative.
High fructose corn syrup is actually the second ingredient in Coke, behind carbonated water. A can of Coke is a bizarre mixture of extremely high levels of sugar (or the even worse high fructose corn syrup), corrosive phosphoric acid, 'natural' caramel coloring, and a well known drug that has a powerful effect on your brain chemistry - caffeine.
Caffeine is the responsible a stimulant to the central nervous system, and regular use of caffeine does cause mild physical dependence. In addition, alcohol in your caffeinated drink like hard soda would double the addiction since findings suggest that people whose brains release more natural opioids in response to alcohol may get more pleasure out of drinking and may be more likely to drink too much and become alcoholics, according to a researcher from the University of California, San Francisco.
Now you know why you can't resist that Hard Soda!
