New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: A&W Float

by Teresa Gubbins

A&W Float is for the root beer float fan who has neither the time nor patience to carve out a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

A&W Float came out a few months ago but according to the Web site was in development for "quite some time", which I want to say was maybe two years? A while. Creating soda has apparently become a scientific endeavor. Well, except A&W Float is not an ordinary soda. It's a high-calorie soda pretending to be a fountain drink.

Some key ways it is different:

• It comes out and says that a bottle represents one serving. (Sometimes these bottled products deceptively claim to hold two servings when you know people are going to drink the whole thing.) Good.
• It contains 230 calories (for the Root Beer variety) to 260 calories (for the Orange). Not so good.
• It uses sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup or artificial sweetener. Good.
• It has 63 grams of sugar per serving. Not so good.

Operating under the assumption that today's busy indulgence-seekers don't have time to pour a glass of soda and plop a scoop of vanilla ice cream into it, the Dr Pepper/Seven Up people created a float approximation by combining flavored soda with skim milk and cream.

Then in an effort to make it foamy, they put in a gassy additive -- nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas -- designed to produce a foamy head when you pour.

But no foam on the two bottles sampled. At best, a few bubbles collected at the top of the glass before fading away. In fact, both bottles sampled were on the flat side. This is not a fizzy soda. One on-line source recommended shaking the bottle before opening to increase foaminess, but that didn't work, either.

These drinks are a novel idea for sure, and novelty is fun. But they make the assumption that people like floats merely for flavor and not for texture. I would guess that most people who order floats like having the actual ice cream. So the premise seems flawed. On top of that, the flavor of the root beer option doesn't especially evoke the flavor of a float. It's probably the result of adding milk; it ends up tasting more like caramel and watery coconut than root beer.

The root beer version was definitely richer and creamier than a regular soda, and that felt indulgent. The glass bottle with its rounded edges felt good in the hand. But milky flavoring in a super-sweet soda does not a float make.