Bedford's - 4 Reviews

I often find myself wondering if this website is actually of any use to anyone. I'm fairly certain that no one reads it religiously, but anyone coming for actual input on drinks is either met with ridiculous fake story/reviews or they have to deal with our strange tastes. Let's take this bottle of Bedford's ginger beer for instance. A normal human would probably drink this and think that it has a strong burn to it. To me it's very weak. Sure there is some burn there, but it doesn't do what I want/need it to. I want there to be pain and discomfort when I drink a ginger beer. I want it to be hard to make it through an entire bottle. Could get through multiple bottles of this and I would only stop because of sweetness, not the burn. To me this tastes like the company took a great ginger beer and mixed 2/3 of it with 1/3 generic soda. It's just a tad too sweet for what it is, and it takes away from what I love about this type of soda. Others would probably find this just the way they like it. I rarely find anything just the way I like it.

Why aren't ginger ales more popular in bars? I mean you occasionally come across some bottled root beers in watering holes, and the west coast drinkers seem to have a love for ginger beer, but I've never come across bottled ginger ale when I'm awkwardly in a bar because it's where my friends wanted to hang out. I would really like to, and that may be solely because it has the word “ale” in its name. truth be told I would take a root or ginger beer over a ginger ale any day of the week, but sometimes it's nice to have choices, and my brain tells me that it should be served.

Bedford's makes a ginger ale that would be perfect for such a scenario. It's much better than any ginger ale that has ever come from a dispenser gun, and anyone who says that bartenders “mix” ginger ale is really good, is a crazy person. This soda has a nice label that would fit in perfectly with those of real brews, and it really does taste great. It has a different sweetness than your Canada Dry or Schweppes. It tastes like it had the same general taste that those sodas do, but that they slowly swapped out ingredients one by one with those of a higher quality. The result is a very slightly new twist on an old favorite.

If you need me I'll be nursing a bottle of this against the wall, not talking to anyone and pretending that I am enjoying myself.

What we have here is soda for royalty. Do you really think that they would let a common peasant drink something with such a crest on it? One needs to be a blueblood for sure in imbibe such a treat, and what a treat it is. If you've ever spent a long day at the jousting arena, just to be let down by the low quantity of vanilla flavor in the soda you purchased to clear the dust out of your head holes, then may I suggest trying this? Well, if you have the proper lineage that is. This soda is very, very heavy on the vanilla, but remains ridiculously creamy and smooth. This isn't your blacksmith's cream soda. If you see him drinking it make sure to alert one of the guards walking around so that he can be properly beheaded in the public square.

This is Harry Potter. No, I did not cast a spell on him and turn him into a bottle of root beer. This is the soda that lived. Allow me to start my story from the beginning.

I was just on tour with my friends' band and we stopped at Galco's Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, CA. I had wanted to go there for quite some time so I was very excited to be there. I hand picked a lot of sodas we hadn't reviewed and safely put them in a box in the van. I didn't have as much time on the road to review them as I thought I would, so my plan was to bring them all back to Buffalo. They were traveling great, until we got to Saskatoon.

Saskatoon is a small city in the province of Saskatchewan in the middle of Canada. When we got there, it was zero degrees outside (around -18 Celsius) in early December. The locals told us this was mild for that time of year. Immediately, Saskatoon became a place I will never visit again in the winter. We played the show, and then went to a friend's house to sleep. No one told us of the dangers of leaving a dozen glass soda bottles in the van overnight.

The next morning, we found all of my sodas frozen and the bottles shattered. Obviously, I was really bummed. We drove to a gas station to sadly throw them out. As we were doing so, we found one that wasn't frozen: this bottle of Bedford's Root Beer. I don't know what prevented it from freezing, but I was happy to see at least one survived.

I was expecting it to taste like the best root beer ever. I figured any drink that can withstand those extreme temperatures must be magical. Sadly, it wasn't that awesome. It was a good middle of the road root beer. But if you want a root beer that can withstand freezing temperatures, this is the one.