Reading Draft - 3 Reviews

Part of a good, quality cream soda is that it's smooth. It should taste like I'm drinking vanilla ice cream, right? Well this drink tastes like someone forgot to put ice cream in and put sparkling non-alcoholic champagne in instead. I mentioned to this to Jay and he told me that it's a shame because the blueberry birch beer was "sensational." This is much less than that. This is disappointing because I really want to sit and mellow out with a mellowed out pop but I got something I feel like I've got to quickly come with something to celebrate about in order to drink. This is nothing to celebrate about.

This delicious soda has a sordid past with Franklin Mercer. As you all know, he grew up in rural Pennsylvania and this soda was in every store. At a very young age, before he even had his first sip, Franklin knew he loved soda. From ages 3-7 he would bug his parents every time they were at the corner store for a bottle of it. Like clockwork, they said not until he turned 10. This made no sense to Franklin because his older brother had been drinking root beer since the age of 4. Those Mercers were always hard to understand.

This all took a turn for the worst one day when he was visiting his grandparents in Kingston, PA. While they were taking their usual afternoon nap, he ventured into the kitchen for a snack. He couldn't believe his eyes when he found a bottle of this Reading Draft Creamy Red Birch Beer in the fridge. Without hesitation, he cracked it open and took his first sip of liquid heaven. He promptly drank the whole bottle and hid the evidence behind some newspapers on the counter. He didn't hide it good enough because his father found it an hour later when he came and picked it up.

As you can guess, Mr. Mercer was furious! He thought long and hard about what Franklin's punishment should be and he came up with the meanest thing he could think of. As long as Franklin still lived with his parents (which ended up being around 23 more years), an unopened bottle of this soda would be permanently affixed to his bedroom dresser. That bottle just sat there everyday, taunting Franklin. You'd think this would have turned him off from soda, but it actually increased his appetite for the sugary drink.

Franklin never had another bottle of this creamy red birch beer, which is a shame, because it's really good. I'm more partial to birch beers with a good bite to them, but this tastes like a mix of birch beer and red cream soda.

Deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania there once was a group of hill people who lacked intelligence to such a great degree that they couldn't even make moonshine properly. They were the laughingstock of the yokel world. All these pour saps wanted to do was make some cheap hooch that could potentially make them blind, and they failed at every turn. No one really knows what they were thinking when they were trying to make it, but what resulted was a world-class birch beer. You know the kind that you would buy out of a tin mug at a county fair. When they presented it to some of their neighbors, it took awhile for the laughing to subside, but then one of them said something along the line of "how do you expect to make booze without some sort of fruits or vegetables. Since they were in season the family added a butt load of blueberries to their next batch. They still failed to make anything that would get them drunk, but what they did make was truly magical. It was a fine birch beer to start with, but the addition of the blueberries made it astronomical. It was incredibly fruity and sweet and chock full of classic olde time birch beer flavor. To top it all off it somehow went from a healthy dark brown to a bright blue.

The word soon spread about how dumb this family was, but how they had somehow managed to create a tasty treat. The tale soon reached the ears of a wealthy railroad family who moved to PA and hired the family on the spot to continue production of their soda. As a salary they would be paid in low-end whiskey (the gave them nice whiskey at first, but the hill people made fun of it saying it was too hoity toity, so they switched to swill). And that is the story of how Reading Railroad got put on the Monopoly board.


*****************************************EDIT*****************************************
As I drink more of this I realized that Reading Draft has done to birch beer what Voltage did to Mountain Dew, except normal birch beer is great where as regular Mountain Dew is garbage. It just has a slightly similar taste to the Voltage, which is the only Mountain Dew flavor worth putting into your body.