One of the reasons I started drinking tea a couple of months ago was because I thought I was drinking way more Diet Coke than any one person ought to, and I was looking for a tasty no-cal alternative. Never would I have guessed at the time that the worlds of fizzy, flavored water and tea would overlap.
It occurred to me to ask myself whether this is in fact a good thing. But on balance it seemed snobby to even ask that question, and so I answered that I am much too much of a tea neophyte to start displaying snobbery (at least openly) at this point and I should just shrug and say why the heck not.
Yeah, it is unmistakably root beer when you give this sample a sniff upon opening the packet. And since I now know what rooibos smells and tastes like by itself, I can smell that as well.
Brewed up, it does smell like hot root beer, minus the head, though I don’t get a creamy smell as I’d expect from the float part of the name. There is obviously no fizz, and drinking a hot/warm root beer flavored beverage is a little weird, but then I am a pro at drinking room temperature Diet Cokes so again, why not. The flavor is sweet like root beer, but not overly sugary, and the rooibos complements it nicely. As others have said, though, there’s no perceptible “float” aspect.
In all, I think this is well done. It’s something I might drink every once in a while. I don’t drink root beer that often, so I’d probably drink it about as much as I drink root beer, which is to say maybe once or twice a year at the most. It’s not that I don’t like root beer, it’s that I don’t think to seek it out to buy. It doesn’t have caffeine, which is something I normally want in a soda. And when I’m eating out it’s not typically on the menu, at least not in diet form.
It would be interesting to try this iced and taste next to an actual root beer.
