Photo Credit: Sixth City Brewing
Soda is making a comeback, thanks to all-natural ingredients like honey. In fact, craft soda is so hot that Sixth City Brewing Co. created Honey Blonde Root Beer as part of its Sixth City Craft Soda Co. We chatted with Michael Clark, founder of Cleveland, Ohio-based Sixth City Beverage Group, about the company’s No. 1 best-selling root beer, using honey, and the pollinator garden that’s a sanctuary for customers.
National Honey Board (NHB): When you were thinking about creating a honey root beer, what were you aiming for?
Clark: I had attended a presentation with the National Honey Board about 6 or 7 years ago, and you gave some information about what people were looking for. One piece was about acceptable sweeteners, and my wife, Annette, is a beekeeper and majority owner of the company. When we started the soda line, we discussed what sweetener we were going to use, we wanted to focus on honey.
NHB: Consumers are more knowledgeable than ever before, and they ask more questions about ingredients in beverages.
Clark: I was a vendor at a market last night, and somebody came up to the booth drinking the root beer. They commented about how good it was! The consumer asks a lot of questions now, as opposed to before — even in the past five years. They read the labels; they will stand in front of me for 10 minutes, read a label and figure out what the sugars are. It’s great; I’m very transparent with the product and how we’re making it. When I got the label approved by the FDA and the USDA, I wanted to make sure it was true to labeling guidelines, but also make sure that I was conveying to the consumer exactly what we were and tell the story of what was in the product.
NHB: How does honey function in Honey Blonde Root Beer?
Clark: I tend to use more of the late summer, early fall honey because it’s usually darker, and it has a little more of a caramel note to it as opposed to spring honey. The one challenge with honey is because it’s such a unique product it can be so different. It’s amazing how different they all taste. We have three locations around the Cleveland area where we have hives, and that honey is very similar, unless it’s the black locust honey. That honey is very light.
It was really interesting figuring out getting enough honey in the soda so that you tasted it but that it didn’t overpower the root beer. Root beer tends to be very strong — most root beers kind of fall into a menthol/minty root beer or that vanilla root beer category. When I started playing with the honey and the variations of it, I had to move away from the mintier side because it interfered with the honey. My goal was that people noticed there was honey in it — all of my sodas are in the same brix range, and sometimes with the natural sweetened ones, people think they taste sweeter, which is interesting to me. We don’t use caramel color, so it does have a honey blonde color.
NHB: Any plans for honey in other craft sodas?
Clark: I’m working on a couple different flavored ‘sodas’ that are without any other sweeteners. Just honey. Probably going to launch that under a different brand name. We’re also working on a mocktail in the same vein — I’m trying to use as much honey as possible.
NHB: Tell us more about the pollinator garden and why the reciprocal relationship is so important.
Clark: We support the Ohio State Beekeepers — we’re in a very urban area of Cleveland on the East side. By the parking lot in the back there’s a 120x40 foot piece of property, and 2 years ago my wife started planting. She focuses on varietals of plants that are indigenous. We plant swamp milkweed for butterflies …
We created pollinator gardens in a container, and we give them to customers to put by their shops to keep the pollinator thing going. We do a lot of outreach — we have one customer that wants us to plant pollinator plants in his lot. It's nice to see people's reaction; people enjoy gardens. That's part of what we wanted to do. Even with the hives and the honey — we're only going to take so much honey off because we want to leave enough for the bees.
For more information on Honey Blonde Root Beer and future made-with-honey sodas, visit https://scbev.com/ .