YW Root Beer Tasting

I forgot to take pictures during the actual event so all of these are staged.. in case you can't tell.

My cohort in YW (the first counsilor) had to work this week and so I volenteered to do a root beer tasting party along with Personal Progress. Don't quite know how that all fits together, but with Young Woman.... it doesn't really matter!

We actually have a pretty amazing band of MiaMaids and I will be sad to be losing a bunch of them this year. They really are good to me when my lessons are plah. I just remind myself that I don't remember any of my YW lessons so we're all good.

Truth be told, I actually had never HOSTED a tasting party before, only participated. As lists are so fun (I think so), I will list the things I learned.

1. Put a bunch of rootbeer into girls and they get VERY silly. I had nine different types of Root Beer and even though they only got a small shot of each kind in a dixie cup for the actual taste testing, adding Root Beer floats sends it right to their heads. They start laughing and snorting and burping and mixing. Kinda acting like boys.

2. The way to the Mia Maids hearts is to burp louder than them.

3. It only takes one fifth of a can of Root Beer for 6 people to have a shot. If you don't realize this, you better like Root Beer because you just might end up with 3 cases of cans, 8 glass bottles, and 2 2 liter bottles of the stuff. And if you didn't realize you really DON'T like Barqs Root Beer and none of the mothers will let their kids take it home because it have caffeine, you might have a problem. As my sister said, "Its just your Root Beer food storage". Right, I'm good for 20 to 30 years.

4. To make the activity go slower, try giving them a breather between each sample. I had 2 little girls helping me out (daughters of our leaders) so between the 3 of us, we had each sample ready and out in 50 seconds (give or take). I had planned on serving the Root Beer out of the kitchen into the RS room, but the dumb scouts were having a court of honor in there. As it was, I forgot to give them each a glass of water to rinse their pallet after each test (which would have extended things) and had to hang up a sheet I had brought so we could hide behind it and prepare the samples.

5. Along the lines of helping the activity go slower, make sure they have PLENTY of time to decide which is their favorite and which they DON'T like. Then when they finally see all the different types of root beer you have on the table, they remember that they LOVE the more expensive glass bottle kind even though you distinctly remember them discussing how it tasted like DIRT from the Dixie Cup. Apparently once it gets out of the bottle, all the good flavor is gone. AND, 2 or 3 picked the Albertsons brand as their favorite which they conveniently forgot when preparing the root beer floats. For some reason, at the end of the activity all the A&W and Mugs was gone but the Albertsons, Safeway (Vons), and Big K bottles were still there.

6. Bring wet wipes. Root Beer is STICKY and using a sheet to mop up spills just doesn't cut it. Of course being in the kitchen would have made everything better (dumb scouts).

7. Smiths sells IBC AND the Weinheart brewed stuff. If you don't realize this, you might pick up Weinheart instead of IBC thinking you have IBC but you didn't so you could have had TEN different types instead of just NINE. And, of course, the girls lament that fact since they all LOVE IBC (its in bottles so its SO much better (see 5)).

8. Its over much quicker than you had planned (see 4 and 5) so if your wonderful cohort is not there with ice cream for floats... everyone kinda stands around and drinks which type of Root Beer they suddenly remember they like (see 5). When the ice cream does arrive, they fill themselves with ice cream and Root Beer and start being very silly (see 1).

All in all I learned alot. I thought it was tons of fun and I have so much left over that I could do about 20 more parites. Anyone want to hire me for an FHE or RS activity?

P.S. This is my favorite picture. I don't have much patience with how LONG it takes my digital camera to take pictures and so I often take the camera down from my eye and THEN it flashes.

Its a knack I have.