When I was a kid, my friends and I would ride our bikes down to the local grocery store and buy bottles of Souix City Sarsaparilla to carry along on our rides around the lake, or just as often, to be consumed on the way home. My grandfather in Montana would make “black cows” with me on special occasions,  and I remember sipping root beer floats while watching movies in the evening with my dad. I’ve loved root beer ever since, and every time I run across an unfamiliar bottle, I feel compelled to give it a try.

It turns out that there are a wide range of flavors to be found in root beer recipes. Some have a full body and taste of sassafras or molasses, while others taste strongly of licorice or wintergreen, and some are spicy or laced with flavors that don’t belong anywhere near a root beer.  Some are watery, others syrupy or creamy, some sharp, some a little more smooth.

Whatever your taste in root beer happens to be, though, you’ll probably find it at the Root Beer Store in Lynwood, WA, or at their other locations in Redmond and Puyallup. They stock over a hundred different varieties, from A&W to Zuberfizz Creamy Root Beer, with about a dozen brands from the Pacific Northwest, and dozens of other regional root beers… some from New York and Chicago, others from California, New England, and Louisiana, just to name a few. But they don’t stop with root beer. You’ll also find shelves of cream soda, birch beer, and sarsaparilla. Not enough? They also have bottled sodas and colas, from standards like Orange Crush to the more obscure ones like MacFuddy’s Distinctively Strong Pepper Elixir.

Stepping through the Lynwood shop’s back door (the parking lot is behind it, not on Highway 99), I found that there were several (mostly occupied) tables at which customers could sit and relax with a cold mug of root beer or a float dispensed by the soda-jerk behind the counter. The two young men working there were helpful and refreshingly knowledgeable, offering me suggestions while chatting amiably with the other customers. I had intended to say that they were “charmingly nerdy” or some such thing, discussing Magic-card decks and a past membership in a barbershop-quartet, but the truth is that in this era of teenagers raised on Glee instead of real rock music, I have no idea what counts as “nerdy” anymore. These guys could be Players for all I know.

The shelves along the back wall were replete with root beer bottles, with smaller sections for specific sub-catagories such as sarsaparilla and birch beer as I moved towards the right-hand side of the shop, and also for cream soda, ginger beer, diet varieties, and finally other assorted sodas and colas. I was overjoyed to find that they carried most of my favorite brands: only Steelhead Root Beer was missing this time (sold out), and they no longer keep Scuttlebutt Root Beer on tap.

Behind the service counter, a menu board advertised mugs of root beer from tap, root beer floats, ice-cream cones and sundaes, various ice-cream concoctions called “Muggers”, and hot dogs. The floats looked good, but I didn’t have time to stop for one that day… I’m sure I’ll stop back again soon, though. If you want some root-beer merch, they have T-shirts and branded mugs, too. I kinda liked the mugs.

The Root Beer Store’s website at www.therootbeerstore.com offers most (if not all) of these beverages for sale, if you can’t make it in to one of their locations, but the shops are definitely worth a visit if you can.

I discovered the Double DD by mistake; I had sold an item on Craigslist to a man from Bellevue, and he suggested that we meet at a butcher’s shop in Mountlake Terrace to make the exchange. I was intrigued. He claimed that he made the trip up from Bellevue to this shop at least once a month, and that it was always worth it. He said that my first visit would be “awe inspiring!”

I’m not sure that it was that, exactly, but it was wonderful. The decor is a style I like to think of as red-neck whimsy. There are flying pigs dangling from the ceiling, a sign proclaiming that “Bacon Makes Everything Better”, the obligatory placard warning of a $10 fee for dealing with grouchy customers, and a tip jar marked “Boob Job Fund”.  High on the walls you’ll find the kinds of T-shirts that are popular with weird uncles that spend a lot of time in basements (eg, “The Party Doesn’t Start Until Somebody’s Naked!”).

More importantly, though, their steaks are beautiful, and the prices are lower than those at my local grocery stores. I picked up a couple of ribeyes during my last visit and they were some of the best I’ve ever had anywhere. You’ll find a good selection of common cuts (T-bone, strip steaks, etc) and also some less common offerings, like ox-tail. Their snack-sized pepperoni sticks are excellent, if you like that sort of thing, and they also have a full selection of lunch-meats and cured meats.

And let’s not forget the sausages… they make around 60 different varieties, and that doesn’t even include the cured sausages! These range from the expected standards like andouille, chorizo, bratwurst, Polska, and Italian sausages to Greek, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Old Kentucky. They have artisan style sausages such as “Artichoke Parmesan” and “Spinach Mushroom Garlic”. There are a few German style sausages in addition to the bratwurst, including knackwurst, bockwurst, and dried sausages like Landjaeger. I also discovered a collection of chicken sausages, including chicken andouille, rosemary, heavy garlic, tomato-basil, and Italian. I’d visit this shop for the sausages alone.

The thing that catches your eye when you walk in the door, though, is the first aisle of hot sauces… thousands of them! I didn’t take count, but they claim to have over  2,000 different ones, and I don’t doubt it. Many of them are obviously just novelty items (“This Sauce Tastes Like Sh*t”, for example), but there are also hundreds of interesting regional and international hot sauces. The following aisles keep it up, with thousands of varieties of barbeque sauces and spice rubs, hot-wing sauces, and the like. There are also Double DD branded items like bleu cheese stuffed olives and spicy pickled garlic cloves, among many others.

They also have a great assortment of craft and independent sodas and root beers along the back wall, from old-time favorites like Dad’s Root Beer and Bubble-Up to imported Australian ginger beer. Finally, in the back corner of the store, there’s a big cheese case, which I haven’t even had a chance to explore yet.

If I have one complaint about the place, it’s that some of the employees got strangely paranoid when I pulled out my cameras. OK… that probably won’t be an issue for you. In any case, the owner has been unfailingly friendly and helpful throughout my visits, and that’s all that really matters.

Double DD Meats is located in Mountlake Terrace, WA and on the web at http://www.doubleDDmeats.com. You can get Google map directions by following this link, or you can use the address below:

5602 232nd St SW #104, Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043