Midweek Marvels - Fever Tree Ginger Ale

I have a very weird guilty pleasure; I love wandering around grocery stores. Whenever I find myself in a new state, or town or just happened to travel down a new road, I have to check out the nearest grocery store. And even when I'm just bored at home, I'll head down to my regular haunts and scan sections I have seemingly no use for like the sugarless aisle with foods for managing diabetes, the pet food aisle when I've never owned a pet. I'll even do this when I'm a passing through a Walgreen's or a gas station I don't know too well. I love to wander through stores, and I mean every aisle, to check out their setup, scan their frozen food section for any untested Ben and Jerry's flavors (of course), and see if they have anything I don't recognize. What kind of music do they play? What does the produce section look like? Is their deli or bakery any good (a rarity)? What kind of things are in their "ethnic" section (never what you'd expect)? For some reason I find the experience so extremely therapeutic for my food nerd sensibilities. I imagine it's the same feeling some people get from window shopping for shoes, or cars, or garden gnomes (yes! let's be friends!). So! As a total beard/excuse for me to indulge myself further I've decided to add another recurring feature called Midweek Marvels where I talk about new foods that I've discovered  through my grocery geeking out/ insane compulsive behavior. Wait... uh.. hobby! My charming hobby!

This week I bring you Fever Tree Ginger Ale. 

It probably makes me a weirdo to say it but ginger ale is my favorite soft drink. Something about how rough  and mean it tastes compared to something like Pepsi or Fanta has always appealed to me. A harshness almost like it wanted to be liquor but didn't quite make it. I am always in search for a new, meaner, put some hair on your chest tasting ginger ale, especially since my all time favorite, Reed's Ginger Brew, has become increasingly hard to find in my area, so when I stumbled upon Fever Tree I thought I would give it a chance. The flavor though wasn't exactly what I was expecting, it has a gentle herbal freshness that mirrored its delicate gold packaging and dainty 6 ounce bottles. It was pretty much exactly the opposite of what I look for in a ginger ale, I was looking for a monster truck rally and stumbled into a tea party by mistake. Even so, it wasn't that bad. I added a sprig of thyme I had growing on my balcony to highlight its light, floral notes (yeah I know, how monster trucks is that?!), and I found it to be surprisingly refreshing. Would I buy it again? Probably not. Fever Tree is far too civilized for my taste, so I guess my search for a ginger ale strong enough to give me a whisky cough and a pair of low hangers, continues.