College towns are essential to the survival of amazing food. The combination of large amounts of hungry people that don’t know how to cook for themselves with limited budgets breeds a culinary creativity that’s hard to find elsewhere. My college town is well known for heaping bowls of pelmeni (Russian dumplings), potato burritos, and delightfully weird ice cream flavors. Maybe that’s why I’m not surprised to find such a good root beer from a beautiful college town in another state. Meet the Durango Soda Company from Durango, Colorado, and their line of Zuberfizz soda.
I came across this brand at Cost Plus World Market in Redmond, Washington. At first blush I thought it was some German variant of root beer, not realizing that it’s actually the last name of one of the company’s founders. My mistake. They’ve been producing sodas for the past 15 years with an emphasis on using cane sugar, glass bottles, and traditional flavors…vintage inspired. I respect that, and I thought the label was pretty spiffy as well.
As for the flavor, I found this bottle to be a kid friendly root beer with a strong vanilla and caramel presence. It has a deep root beer body, excellent mouth feel, and smooth finish. It reminded me of a better version of A&W root beer. It’s not spicy or sharp, but it’s rich, sweet, and pleasant. There’s isn’t a strong mint flavor, so for those that are really into wintergreen you’ll probably be disappointed. I drank this bottle while eating a giant plate of tacos and it hit the spot.
I came across reviews from other soda consumers that complained about the soda from Zuberfizz being inconsistently carbonated or watery. This wasn’t my experience, but I only had the one bottle. As a first impression it was fantastic. I give it an 8.3 out of 10 on my rating scale and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to people who enjoy smooth vanilla based root beers. Maybe I got a really good bottle and they got bad ones?
I plan on finding more flavors from Zuberfizz for some future reviews. Once that happens you can find them by clicking here.
Catalog:
Sampled on 2/1/2017, purchased at Cost Plus World Market in Redmond, Washington for about $2
The Sodafry 