Seattle & 99 Bottles of Root Beer on the Wall

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or if you follow Kita and/or Peabody‘s blog then you know that I spent the beginning of last week with those two ladies in Seattle. Naturally, it involved a lot of food.

Peabody spoiled us with burgers, rosemary mac and cheese, adult-milkshakes and drinks served in beakers and test tubes (appealing to my nerdy side) at Lunchbox Laboratory, Greek food at Kafe Neo, maple bacon, hard apple cider, and pumpkin pie doughnuts from Frost (sadly they were out of their frozen custard), Ellenos Greek yogurt that was equivalent to eating ice cream, pastries from Piroshky Piroshky, and a three course meal at Preservation Kitchen. We would purposely all order different things and then share it all, maximizing our taste buds’ experience of all the food Seattle had to offer in the short time we had.

Universal sign for exploding baby!?

But none of that would have been made possible if it weren’t for my crazed love for root beer. You see this whole adventure spawned from a post on Peabody’s personal Facebook page where I discovered not only is there a Triple XXX root beer drive-in, but a root beer store boasting the world’ largest selection of root beer and aptly named The Root Beer Store. Yes a store dedicated to root beer and my dream land. You see, I have been collecting glass root beer bottles since around 1996 and up until this trip I had 109 in my collection. Prior to setting foot in that store the most I had ever bought at once was 13 and I figured I would find around that many or less. I was horribly excitably wrong. From memory I scanned the rows and rows of shelves and pulled out 45 bottles of root beer- 45!! And my memory served me well because only 2 of them were already in my collection after consulting my list. So in case your math skills are poor that means I found 43 new bottles of root beer that I had not tried before. To soften the blow to my wallet we were offered free pieces of root beer fudge. While we appreciated the offer, like Peabody said it was a “we spent a fortune in root beer and all I got was a lousy piece of fudge moment”. Whatever totally worth it.

You might think that my root beer saturation was complete at that point but I’m not sure that is ever possible. The next day, after expertly wrapping all the root beer bottles for transport in my carry on luggage, we went to Triple XXX Root Beer for frosty mugs of root beer, milkshakes, burgers, hot dogs, fries, and onion rings – things that are obviously good for you. One last meal to tighten the waists of our pants.

I need to invest in new shelving for my rapidly expanding root beer collection. Maybe I should mimic the store shelving.

While Kita headed back to the east coast, I actually stayed on the west side for another week in order to meet my newest nephew in LA! But I will share more about that trip in other post tomorrow. I now am home in TN with 43 unbroken bottles of root beer, 23 of which are empty because I drank them already in an effort to reduce heavy checked baggage costs. After drinking 6 while in Seattle, my suitcase from Seattle to LA was 83 pounds. Instead of paying $175 for an extremely overweight bag I opted to buy a $60 suitcase at the airport and pay another $35 for an extra checked bag. After arriving in LA I proceeded to drink 17 more with the help of my family so that I had the one checked bag weighing in at 50 pounds and a carry on full of the empty bottles. I must have looked like a desperate bottle collector for the bottle returns tot he security scanning people.

But I digress, the point I am trying to lead up to is that after years of my family telling me I should add ratings to my root beer list I finally caved after Peabody’s and Kita’s demands. Starting today I will have a new page called “Root Beer” where I list and rate every root beer in my collection. Of course the 109 I had prior to starting this will need to be revisited over time but I will update it as those ratings come in and as I drink the remaining 20 from Seattle. If you happen to find one that I do not have on my list, feel free to send it on over for me to try ;-).

Want to know more about my adventures with Peabody and Kita? Check out their recap posts HERE and HERE.