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RICH, creamy root beers, spicy-hot ginger ales, pithy citrus drinks with real tang, complex, herb-scented colas -- they're all out there, along with surprising one-of-a-kind fizzies in flavors as diverse as spruce, Key lime and espresso. This is the new golden age of soda pop.
Following the first golden age, about 100 years ago, soda-pop flavor began a downward spiral. Natural flavorings were replaced by artificial ones, fructose replaced corn syrup and cool-looking, flavor-friendly bottles were tossed for aluminum cans. By the 1980s, a good soda was hard to find.
Now a band of innovative entrepreneurs has struck back, and a dizzying array of terrific, serious sodas can be found everywhere from supermarkets to the French Laundry.
Some of these soda pop entrepreneurs pursued dreams of creating their ideal soft drink. That's the case with Chris Reed, whose Reed's Ginger Brew was first sold at the tiny health food store Rainbow Acres in Marina del Rey. Others, such as Danny Ginsberg, whose Torrance-based company Real Soda in Real Bottles distributes hundreds of specialty sodas, have made regional favorites more widely accessible through distribution innovations and online sales. Still others, like Paul Bauser of Natrona Bottling Co. near Pittsburgh, simply refused to change the way a great pop had been concocted.
Haute food shops such as the Cheese Store of Silver Lake stock the GuS brand of "dry" fruit sodas in flavors like Valencia orange and crimson grape. Abita Root Beer, a longtime Louisiana favorite, is on tap at Father's Office in Santa Monica. Virgil's Root Beer, poured on tap at Mani's Bakery in Los Angeles, tastes like the ingredients it's made with: anise, vanilla, clove, wintergreen, sweet birch, nutmeg, pimento berry oil, balsam oil and cassia oil.
You can sample American classics such as Moxie -- a gentian root- flavored elixir -- along with imports and local brands at the Refresher soda stall in the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles. Dozens of movie-industry types are among the private customers who have arranged for scheduled deliveries of hard-to-find old-style brands such as AJ Stephans or Stewart's.
You can even find them at Per Se in New York and French Laundry in the Napa Valley. For tasting menus, Thomas Keller restaurant group's master sommelier Paul...