On the morning after my arrival (short sleep, totally jet-lagged), the (very well-meaning) housewife and mother of my friend (who had been over in Germany the summer before that) decided to prepare a hearty breakfast for me. She took out two of the largest T-bone steaks I ever saw in my life up to that moment and waved them (raw) at me, asking which one I’d want for breakfast. Now, I don’t usually eat anything for breakfast, but drink a large bowl of coffee and if hard pressed I’ll dip a real French croissant into it and slurp that. The very last thing I think of, at breakfast time, is salty or meat, especially as in a huge steak.

I was totally bowled over and started to fend off the steaks with incoherent babbling, trying to find a polite way out of that fix. Parallely the equally nice (and cute) older brother of my friend asked me from the huge fridge across the kitchen whether I’d like some “root mumblemumble…”. As he had a glass beaker in his hands which looked as if it contained either Malzbier or (sort of a foamy) coca cola I nodded, quite absentmindedly.

In the end I was fixed up with a huge glass of ice-cold root beer and a jelly-salami-peanutbutter triple-decker sandwich. Boy-oh! To the day I clap myself on my own shoulder for not spitting out either directly onto the kitchen table. My face must have told volumes, though! I swallowed both that one bite of sandwich and that one draught of root beer, put both on the table in front of me and must have looked like I’d keel over next.

That was when my friend came down to the kitchen and immediately started howling with laughter while telling everybody that “NO-NO-NO!” and “don’t do that to her! They don’t have such stuff for breakfast.” Thank God, from that day onwards all I got was coffee and a bread roll for breakfast and no one ever again tried to give me any root beer, coca cola it was from then on instead.

To any halfway normal German root beer tastes like something you get at the dentist’s or like liquid, spearmint-flavored flu meds. It’s really a no-no taste for most of us.

What I took away from the USA as fav US foods were steaks (prepared in the evenings), corn on the cob with butter and pancakes with maple sirup.

I never was able to tolerate the sweetness of US pastries, cakes and sweets, a year later I started studies in France and got so totally hooked on French baking and pastries, well, French cooking in general, that today I’ve often trouble even with German bread and cakes concerning finesse of natural flavours. Nothing like a real French butter croissant hot from the bakery, a tray of petits-fours or a real French baguette.

That said - I’m a believer of trying everything at least once

I am American and I can say that a lot of the foods here are too sweet. But, we are sort of a melting pot when it comes to things as culture. And I’d say sweet is one thing that resulted from it all. I live in a predominately German part of the US, almost everyone has German blood in them and/or came from Germany in their lifetime to live here. We have German celebrations, and things such as that, but let me say that anything we could eat or drink here, could not possibly compare to that of authentic German food and drinks up there Of course it’s better in Germany.

Personally, I love bitter things, and sour too. I guess it just depends on what you were raised on.

When I read that root beer is flavoured with wintergreen, as well, I looked that up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintergreen

The oil of wintergreen, consisting of 98% methyl salicylate, is indeed not only used to flavour soft drinks, but also in tooth paste and for example Listerine antiseptic mouthwash.

Also, methyl salicilate is an ingredient in DDD Hautbalsam, a kind of dermatological skin cream. Seems there a some medical products in Germany that smell or taste like wintergreen… but virtually no food.

A strong reason why first contact to root beer causes so many Germans to be thoroughly irritated or even disgusted.

It seems that I wasn’t referring to “dental sealant” but to “fluoride varnish”, which is applied more often.

I just had my first root beer float. The combination of root beer and vanilla ice cream is really nice (as are most other soda floats I tried so far).

Of course, before making the float, I tasted the root beer. I think it has been roughly 15-20 years since I last had the opportunity to drink root beer… some no-name stuff. This time it was the quasi-standard A&W from a 12 oz. can.

And now I finally could identify the reason why most Germans are suspicious to the taste of root beer and mostly dislike it.

The only place most Germans come into contact with a similar or identical flavour is indeed the dentist:

It’s either the prophy paste they use for cleaning your teeth or the dental sealant that is regularly applied to your teeth until the age of 18. Definitely one of those two.

Either it’s an ingredient that’s needed to make the stuff work or it’s an added flavouring that happens to be the same as in root beer.

However, I think you can get used to root beer. I like it, I do not love, but I like it.

Be that as it may, you cannot REALLY enjoy a root beer float outside of the correct enviroment. Have one in the early evening of a hot and sunny Sunday in the Midwest after a big meal of fried food! MMMMMMM!