Who: Sean Bodie
Age: 50
Experience: Sean Bodie and his sons love the smell of root beer in the morning.
“I [usually] don’t drink pop. I don’t drink carbonated drinks at all. [Root beer] is probably the only one I would drink,” says Bodie, the owner of Bodie Brothers Root Beer, which sells its refreshing elixir from oak barrels on the back of vintage trucks on Saturday mornings at both the City Market on 104th Street and the St. Albert Farmers’ Market, plus other markets and events around the Capital Region. “If I was going somewhere and was going to buy a drink, I’d probably buy juice or water or a smoothie. But root beer – I don’t know what it is, but it’s awesome.”
Of course, being so heavily invested in a product can definitely change one’s tastes. And Bodie has been putting his stock in root beer since the age of 13.
“I was working at Klondike Days, selling root beer in a booth. There was an old guy who made it from scratch in big oak barrels, and I was selling it for him. I learned to make it then,” he says. “Many years later [in my 40s] , a friend of mine decided he wanted to do that, so he got the recipe and started making it. We started working together. But then he kind of bowed out and I became the owner.”
While root beer isn’t a full-time gig for Bodie – he also works as the general manager of a marketing company in Edmonton and has a psychology degree – it is the job he most relishes because it lets him spend time with his sons Matthew, 23, Noah, 18, and Christian, 16.
“It’s about two and a half hours [to make a batch of root beer] . We have to be there early in the morning to start brewing it – that’s one of the cool things about us, is that it’s fresh. And whatever we don’t sell, we have to get rid of. It’s not going to be good the next day or at the next market. It’s a fresh product, and that’s part of why it tastes so good. It takes on a bit of the flavour of the oak from the barrels. And it loses its carbonation really quickly; it’s only lightly carbonated anyway, which is one thing people like a lot, and that carbonation is gone really fast.