Greeting Ladies, Gentlemen, and fellow free thinkers.

I’m sure most of you are aware classic tradition of pairing wines with different types dinner Entrees. However if your like me you don’t get to many practical opportunities try your hand at this art form. I present to you today another form of drink pairing that is so simple and easy a child could do it. This is the art of Soda Pop pairing.

Soda Pop pairing, like its classy cousin, centers around flavour matching. “What taste best with what , should I have a 7up or a Root beer with my cheese burger? The general rule that I follow for any of my soda pairings is, “Dark meat, dark soda, light meat light soda.”

Dark meats are your Hamburgers, Polish hot dogs/bratwurst, and pizza. Pizza is lumped in with the dark meats because it tends to have sausages and pepperoni on it and cheese tends to have a musky full body flavour when melted. The exception to pizza are Hawaiian and  specialty pizzas which, For these types of foods colas (Pepsi, Coke, etc.)Dr. Pepper, and Root Beers. All these drinks have a dark full body flavour that seems to go well with the aforementioned  foods.

Light meats include such things as fried chicken, ball park franks/hot dogs, thin sliced deli meats (turkey, ham), and some fried fish like cod and halibut.  For these foods Sprite, 7up, Sierra Mist, and Mountain Dew are the drinks of choice. These drinks have a citrus taste which adds a nice zest to the light  flavour of those foods.

Who says you can’t make your mundane meal look fancy?

A tip for deserts: cream sodas, Root beer, and fruity drinks like grape and orange work out well most of the time.

Well that’s all I have for now, feel free to leave a comment with pairings you’ve found you like. Raspberry soda with cream cheese and bagels anyone?

I had a taste for a citrus rum concoction the other day. I was, however, out of pineapple juice, and lemon lime soda, and even out of orange juice. I do, thankfully, keep the taste of the stars, the astronauts ambrosia, the nectar of NASA, TANG! So I popped the cork on a fresh bottle of 10 Cane Rum (top shelf in your favorite jar store) and dribbled a generous shot into a 10 oz glass and topped it with Tang. I little sip to awaken the tongue. Now that the flavor is fresh in my mouth, I deem this a good mix. What then do we call it? I muse to myself. We mixed the drink of American astronauts, Tang, with, as Capitan Thomas so gleefully noted, the drink of scoundrels and Pirates all, Rum.

I dub this lively, and nutritious, divination the…. Star Pirate! or Space Grog, whatever.
(technically grog is 3 parts water to two parts rum so you do the math)

Love Smiles and …. Oh ya!.. Rum!

–Please drink responsibly, and obey the laws of your locality.–