Welcome to Teetotaler, a new online column geared at showing you the amazing non-alcoholic drink options around the city. You’ve seen our recommendations for where to get the best brews, booze and bubbly around town. Now it’s time to show you that you don’t have to get tipsy to taste the best this city has to offer. Here’s to the teetotalers in all of us. In addition to locally brewing dozens of delicious beers, Schlafly also brews a line of non-alcoholic soft drinks named after co-founder Dan Kopman’s great, great grandfather Lewis Osterweis, a cigar manufacturer from 1860’s Connecticut. “I figure that I’m not going into the cigar business,” said Kopman, “so the name lives on with the traditional sodas.”
The three sodas – root, ginger and birch – are all notable and all carry the Lewis Osterweis & Sons label, but the rarity of the birch beer makes it the obvious highlight. Crimson in color, this birch beer is the hue of a watered down, bubbly red wine. While most sugary, carbonated beverages can be overly sweet and dry, this treat is full-bodied and balanced, equally sweet and creamy-flavored, made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. Although not quite as filling, birch beer is a close cousin to both root beer and cream soda, though the red color and clean finish set it apart.
So as to not taint the immaculate beer lines, Schlafly brews and bottles the sodas (all are Kopman’s recipes) with the help of Fitz’s American Grill and Bottling Works (as noted by the caps on each bottle), and distributes it to a few places in town, including the Four Seasons and The Royale. Both Schlafly brewpubs offer all three sodas on their menus for $2.75 per bottle and for purchase in their gift shops. At the Schlafly Tap Room, you can taste the sodas in the form of a Lewis Float: your choice of soda topped off with vanilla ice cream for $6.
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2010.