I don’t drink, and for various reasons, I won’t ever start. This raises a problem when your main character has a scene where she drinks ale and doesn’t like the flavor. I don’t know what the frick a medieval ale tastes like. The members of the group came to the rescue with several descriptions of flavors from modern ales to medieval ones, and some good sources to boot, complete with recipes, should I ever change my mind (which is unlikely). But there’s a second problem: these sources didn’t give me much more than descriptive words that would make perfect sense to somebody who’s had experience with alcoholic beverages but none to somebody like me, who’s never had a drop. Notable among these was how the ale was described as “yeasty,” a word that I used in the scene. But I didn’t know what the frick “yeasty” meant, either.

Until now.

From the first time I tried them, I wasn’t a fan of the Bundaberg soda line out of Australia. The first time was on a Saturday night, when my family generally has some sort of pizza. This particular Saturday, either my dad or my sister saw a 4-pack of Bundaberg root beer and thought it looked good. It was not. I looked at the ingredients as I wrinkled my nose, and my eyes gravitated to molasses. I’ve never liked molasses, so I figured that was the strange flavor I was tasting. Now that I think about it, molasses was probably a part of what made the root beer taste so strange. But it wasn’t everything. That much became evident the next time a Bundaberg drink came home. This one was ginger beer. It was better than the root beer, but I don’t like ginger drinks. And it still had that strange taste that made the root beer truly unique.

Then yesterday I saw that Bundaberg made fruit flavored sodas while picking up a pizza to cook for supper. I decided to give their Blood Orange a try, and with the first sip, I was blown away. This was the best soft drink I had ever tasted, and I mean that. It’s better than every flavor of Mountain Dew, edging out Black Label by a very narrow margin. But here’s the thing: that strange flavor was still there, this time a major compliment to the tangy blood orange flavor. So I looked at the label, and I found the ingredient that must have contributed to it: yeast! I took more time with the second bottle of the night, trying to savor that yeastiness, to pick up on the subtleties thereof. And I can safely say it’s pretty much impossible to describe, unless I use the word “yeasty.”

Bundaberg has other fruit flavored soft drinks that I want to try, the first on the list being peach. That way I can compare and see if that yeastiness is still recognizable. And even with the fermentation of the yeast, these sodas are non-alcoholic, which means I’ll drink them happily. They also don’t have any high fructose corn syrup, only cane sugar (but a heck of a lot of it). I wrote them off too soon because I tried the wrong flavors. But now they have my thumbs-up. And I think I owe it to the humble fungus that makes bread so much better.

(Check out http://www.bundaberg.com!)