Product Endorsement Monday: Caruso's Legacy Robusto Root Beer

Finally, a couple of classic October days. Cool but not cold, blue skies, yellow leaves. There seem to be more green-leaf hangers-on than usual this time of year. Maybe that has something to do with the rain surplus we've seen in 2009, but I'm not enough of a botanist to know.

We've all heard that the FTC is going to crack down on unacknowledged compensation for product endorsements among bloggers. If only I received that kind of largess. I'd settle for smallgess, for that matter. But no one has ever given me anything free in exchange for my endorsements, since my readership would be a rounding error for, say, Celebrity Baby Blog. I have pay for everything I mention fondly here.

I happened to be at Aldi on Saturday, home of temporarily stocked items you've never heard of, and so it was with Caruso's Legacy Robusto Root Beer. Marked down from $3.49 for six bottles to $1.25, I couldn't pass that up, especially with the promise Made From Cane Sugar. As the real deal among sweeteners, sugar has been mugged in recent decades by corn syrup, at least in North America. It's good to see that "sugar," cast in marketing limbo sometime ago -- Corn Pops were once Sugar Pops, and Honey Bear was Sugar Bear, for instance -- might be making a small comeback.

Even more intriguing was that name, Caruso's Legacy. Does that mean wax cylinders and scratchy 78s? No. The label on the bottle explains that the name is a tribute to Mr. & Mrs. Peter Caruso, soda makers of a bygone age whose descendants carry on the business in the form of Black Bear Bottling LLC of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, which is just south of Milwaukee.

It's a fine root bear, one of several that come from Wisconsin, such as Point Root Beer and Sprecher's, which I've tired, and the more amusingly named Torpedo Juice Root Beer, which I haven't. I slowly sipped my bottle of Caruso's Legacy. Lilly and her friend Rachel, who was visiting, split a bottle, and soon came back demanding a full bottle each, they liked it so much. Ann then decided she had to have one, and actually finished it, rather than leaving it sitting around half empty.

That leaves one more, which I'm hoarding in a hard-to-see nook of the refrigerator. Yuriko as a rule doesn't care for root beer, so it's mine. If it gets warm enough one day this week to each lunch on the deck (and it might), I'm drinking it then.