Foxon Park soda is easy to find. Along with distributing locally, the century-old East Haven beverage company offers a web shop that ships.
Foxon Park hard soda is, well, harder. It’s alcoholic, so Foxon Park can’t produce or sell it directly. That’s where production partner Thimble Island Brewing comes in. Yet even Thimble offers just three of six flavors in its Branford taproom/restaurant: White Birch, Grape and the product line’s latest addition, Gassosa (lemon). Those and other varieties can be found at some area package stores, though it may take calls or visits to several before you find the flavors you’re looking for.
Out of the dozen places I called, East Haven’s Bottle Depot Liquors emerged as a honey hole—the only store with more than three flavors in stock. The store actually had five, including the Cherry and the Orange. The sixth and final flavor, Cream, which was tapped alongside the Birch to introduce the product line in early 2023, was nowhere to be found, even at Bottle Depot. A call to the brewery confirmed that the flavor hasn’t been produced or distributed “in a while,” though it also hasn’t been discontinued.
Undeterred, a friend and I were content to taste five of the six, each of them a direct extension of one of Foxon Park’s legacy sodas. We started with a local classic: the White Birch. The resinous primary birch note felt like it could have hidden the 4.5% ABV even if it hadn’t had 37 grams of cane sugar to help. The drink was at its smoothest from a glass, though I’d recommend going for the extra bite and bubble of swigging it from the can. “The only thing that’s missing is the pizza,” my friend said, referring to the long New Haven tradition of drinking a Foxon Park White Birch with a pie.
Next up was another Foxon signature: the Gassosa, a tribute to a traditional Italian lemon soda. It actually nosed somewhere between ginger and lemon-lime, but to taste, the lemon won by more than a nose. From a glass, it was sweet and perfectly pleasant; from a can, whose physics just seem to do a better job of activating the carbonation, it had the citric zing we were craving.
Craving more, we moved to the Orange, which smelled like the slightly funky flesh of an overripe fruit, just without the pop of the rind. That dynamic carried over into our glasses, where the flavor was a fascination even as my friend and I agreed that a part of the spectrum was missing. Here again, the can offered a better experience.
“If you didn’t tell me there was alcohol in these, I wouldn’t know,” my friend said at this point, and that held true for our next selection, the Cherry. On the nose, it was like someone had taken the dark luscious syrup used to cure Luxardo Maraschino cherries and plopped in the much more ubiquitous bright red imitator you find in Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers. The hard soda’s bright red flavor reminded me of the top note of a Dr. Pepper without all the other complications of a Dr. Pepper—a very pure candied cherry note that, you guessed it, was best enjoyed straight out of the can.
A sugar headache was coming on, but we couldn’t finish without trying the Grape, which poured like liquid amethyst into our glasses. The flavor here was less confectionary than the Crush I remember loving as a kid in the ’90s, and yet, when my friend said it tasted like a grape Jolly Rancher, the kid in me also knew she was exactly right.
Asked to rank all of them, she put the Birch on top, followed by the Gassosa, the Grape, the Cherry and the Orange. My rankings were similar, switching the Cherry and the Grape.
During the tasting, my friend and I flashed back to our childhoods, reminiscing about our favorite sodas growing up. But we couldn’t forget our adulthoods either. We noticed each 12-ounce can of Foxon/Thimble contains 280 calories—nearly three times more than a White Claw or a High Noon. This really is soda, not seltzer, and the flavors are much bolder, as is a sugar content that rates only slightly lower per ounce than Coke, which meanwhile boasts half the calories.
On taste alone, your favorite Foxon Park hard sodas could have you drinking a few cans or more in a single session. But between the sugar, the alcohol and the calories, they also lend weight to the refrain, “Please drink responsibly.”
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
