Place: Bamboo Buffet & Grill
Lunch: Buffet, Coke
I share my fortune cookie fortunes with my Twitter followers. The last couple from here have been doozies.
You are about to become $8.95 poorer. ($6.95 if you had the buffet.)
Then...
Here we go. Low fat, whole wheat green tea.
Not so much today, though. Happiness isn't an outside job, it's an inside job.
Oh well.
Made a trip to Breese, IL this weekend to visit Excel Bottling Company. It's a small antique bottling plant going since the 1930's as a Ski distributor. (Ski is a Fresca-Squirt kind of citrus soda.) They also have a bunch of their own signature sodas, all bottled in glass using cane sugar. They've also started bottling their own line of microbrews to hopefully boost business as the world decreases the amount of soda they drink. They're also bottling the new Dublin Bottling Works sodas. Dublin (the old Dr Pepper bottler in Dublin, TX) doesn't have any way to bottle their new sodas in non-returnable glass or in the volume needed. Their antique machine only does returnable bottles, and in low volume.
Anyway, Excel is a treasure more people in the St Louis area (and the region) need to know about. Breese is about 40 miles east of the metro. While some area convenience stores and supermarkets carry Excel products, you can go straight to the plant and get soda too. CHEAP.
There's two options...Returnable glass bottles, or non-returnable glass bottles. Returnables are $8 per case of 24 with a $10 deposit on each case. Meaning you can pay the one-time deposit and as long as you keep returning the bottles $8 will buy you a case of any of their sodas. Non-returnables? $13 per case.
The returnable glass bottles are becoming increasingly rare. Apparently nobody makes them anymore or they're cost-prohibitive to get or something. So Excel has collected a bunch from defunct bottlers over the years. That means the soda on the label may not be the soda in the bottle. Don't worry...they'll set you straight on the sale. You just might get confused at home. Maybe.
I picked up a case of Blueberry Breese, which is so good Dublin even sells it. It's like a Sprite or Sierra Mist, but with a blueberry kick, in a beautiful blue hue. I think the color contributes to the feeling of refreshment you get drinking it.
I also picked up a 'mix and match' case, where I sampled other Excel sodas. That included the original Ski, which I'll probably maintain a small supply of. The other I've tried so far is Million Dollar Strawberry, which I didn't care for. There's something muted about the flavor. But I have more stuff to try. Two more Million Dollar flavors, Cherry Breese, Excel Black Cherry...
The new Dublin sodas (which, unfortunately, you can't buy at Excel) are universally good. They've sort of put Texas Root Beer up as the flagship, but the real Dublin fans are huge into my new favorite soda, Dublin Black Cherry. Let's just say that has a strangely familiar flavor profile. Yet it's been improved upon. Drink a Dublin Black Cherry, then follow it up with a cane sugar 8oz bottle of Dr Pepper. The Dr Pepper will taste like soda water. Its flavor profile is COMPLETELY LOST. It's as if Dublin came up with a Dr Pepper antidote.
I've tried all of the Dublins except the just-launched Texas Peach and the only one I'm not really a fan of is Cherry Limeade. I even like their Orange Cream, and I'm not a fan of orange creams. These are soda flavors the way you remember them as kids. Kids of the 50's-70's, anyway.
The Dublin sodas are quite a bit pricier at their store ($24-26 if I'm remembering right), but then they have to ship the cases down from Illinois. At Excel, you're standing like ten feet from the bottling machine when you pay the guy. So that's probably the difference.
Anyway, it's been a great summer for soda. Get out your vintage muscle cars and road trip on down to these bottlers.
The little guys are doing it right.
