Amongst those bee keepers and bacon curers and renegades of raw-milk cheese on hand at the Mother Earth News Fair a week ago were a few purveyors of actual manufactured food.  Amongst these was Begley’s and Bill’s, an all natural soda company owned by Ed Begley, Jr., that most famous of Spinal Tap drummers and a long-term and pleasingly unassuming environmentalist.

Begley’s sodas are not only all natural (a term not regulated by the FDA), but calorie free (a term which is).  Or, to be more precise, they have 0.2 kilocalories per gram which is the same, as far as the FDA is concerned, as calorie free.

I am not a soda guy.  I haven’t had a Coke in years and only occasionally mix ginger ale in a drink.  Our favorite Chinese delivery place (J’s Wong, here’s to ya) continues to bring us cans of Pepsi and they are lined up like soldiers beside the sink, waiting to see which of my impulses—(a) to not waste and thus put them on the stoop for passersby or (b) to do the world a favor and pour them down the drain—will win out.

And I think artificial sweeteners are poison hand’s down.  After all, what foodstuffs taste like poison until you ingrest them enough to become inured?  Other than Aspartame and its cohorts, the thing that springs to mind is whiskey.  I like whiskey.  But I’m under no illusions.

So I was interested in checking out Begley’s soda.  I bought a four-pack that included root beer, ginger ale, strawberry, and banana’s foster.  That’s right.  Whomever thought of that last as a soda flavor was a genius.

But first, let’s address the zero calorie thing.

The sodas are sweetened with SweetenFX™, a proprietary mix of Stevia and erythritol syrups.  Erythritol is a sugar alcohol produced by fermenting glucose with a yeast named Moniliella polinis and was discovered, incidentally, by a British scientist additionally credited with inventing, in 1854, one of the first usable respirators.  Combined into SweetenFX™, these two main ingredients turn out a very tasty, pretty unique soda.

The quality of the ginger ale was particularly noticeable in how much its taste was ruined by the addition of this Evan Williams, which was on sale for ten bucks. Not pictured: plastic Comfort Inn ice bucket.

The four Begley’s and Bill’s I sampled were lighter than regular soda.  They were sweet, but noticeably not in the typical syrupy way, and that gave them a crispness, almost anairiness.  They tasted simpler, more stripped down, than their mainstream counterparts.  This was most noticeable in the ginger ale and root beer, and although they went down easier than Canada Dry or Mug or what have you, that simplicity did emphasize that these are still “regular,” rather than artisanal, sodas.   The explosion of microbrew beers has, at least in Brooklyn, also led to a minor renaissance in artisanal sodas, and our local beer distributor also carries root beers that list ingredients such as vanilla bean and ginger root.  These are sodas with such complex tastes that you might find yourself a bit embarrassed to be putting so much foodie time into sugar water.  Nevertheless, they’re out there, and they’re tasty.

Begley’s and Bill’s sodas aren’t like that.  They’re straight-up, Main Street America soda pop that happen to be a lot healthier for you than your average Coke and happen to be fresher tasting, too.

That banana’s foster flavor, however, is a standout.  Besides being straight-up unusual (and thus praise worthy), it’s the kind of strong, concentrated flavor that goes really, really well with ice cream in a float.  I’m not a fan of banana candy, but the bananas foster float (made with Breyers all-natural) basically tasted like what I wish all banana candy in the world would taste like.  Shannon said it reminded her of the banana pecan waffles at IHOP.  Her eyes were very big and happy when she said it.  We also made floats with the strawberry soda, and although Shannon thought it was nowhere near as yummy as the bananas foster, I thought it tasted like a much improved (and, given a comparison between the ingredients, likely much healthier) strawberry Quik.

Not bad for four bottles of soda.  For me to write this much about Coke or Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper, I’d have to venture into the realm of Big Money or politics or something.  Begley’s and Bill’s keeps it simple and healthy (or at least not unhealthy) and the result is good and tasty.