This was one of the very first glass bottled root beers that I ever tried. Probably the sixth if I can remember that well. The amazing thing was that it was in my hometown, a small city of around 5,000 people. It was just sitting there at Safeway but it was in the “Health Food” section. Remember back in the 1990’s before organic and all natural got all trendy? There was a “Health Food” section. I’d never thought to look for root beers there which is why I’d missed it. Granted I’d only been looking for root beers for a few months at that point so I hadn’t thought to look in a lot of places. Anyhow, it was my dad who found it and brought some home so we could try it. They also had a Sarsaparilla and it was then that I decided that if it wasn’t called specifically “Root Beer” or some close phonetic variation thereof I wasn’t going to review it. Health Valley later renamed their Sarsaparilla to Sarsaparilla Root Beer but forgot to tell me so I never got to try it. Interestingly they sweetened this with fructose which you’d never see in any “health food” nowadays.
This is all right at first but an absence of vanilla ruins the Body and the Aftertaste. It’s also not very sweet. The Aftertaste is a strange herbal flavor and there is not much Bite at all. Head is mediocre at best.
Yeah, this stuff is pretty nasty. Which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that it was discontinued a few years back (before I realized I needed to try their renamed Sarsaparilla Root Beer). To its credit it isn’t super vile like some other strange herbal brews, but the as a whole is very much not good. See how it rates against other root beers.