GourmetRootBeer

Restoration Pizza Root Beer

Nov 012023

Back in August I found myself in Albuquerque for the final end of my project. If you’ve been following you’ll know that I’ve found several brews down there but I had hopes I could find another one. I searched for a couple of days, reaching out to every brewery and distillery I could find online, but no luck, so by Wednesday I’d given up on root beer and we decided to hit our favorite pizza join, Restoration Pizza. If you can’t get a new root beer, at least you can get an amazing pizza with green chile. When the waitress asked what we wanted to drink, we asked what kind of root beer they served. She informed us that they make their own. Well that blew me away. How’d I missed that? They’d just started making it a mere two months before. How serendipitous for me. Now I could have my pizza and my root beer too. The question is, how was it?

The Body is weak, not very sweet nor creamy and a little bitter wintergreen. The Bite is mild but not smooth. It could use more spice. The Head is short and foams away by the time they bring it out to you. The Aftertaste is milde and sort of bitter. There’s a little bit of caramel flavor to it though.

Yeah, this is not really a very good root beer at all. Hopefully they are still trying to improve their recipe because it does need some work. Their pizza is still amazing so I definitely recommend visiting, but maybe skip this, unless they make it better.

Pop Singles Crystals Clear Root Beer

Bottled Root Beers No Responses »

Oct 042023

This one comes from a trade with that great collector and proprietor of The Museum of Root Beer, Vince. Pop Singles is an interesting brand that has a record on the label of their bottles, you know like it’s an old pop single. It makes googling the company rather difficult because there seems to be an actual single that was released about every flavor they carry (maybe that’s the idea?) and I couldn’t actually find a website. Maybe they don’t have one. I’m always very cautious about a clear root beer. A lot of real root beer ingredients are naturally a darker color, so if your root beer is crystal clear there’s some serious chemistry involved for flavor extraction and the sugar definitely wasn’t caramelized. In short, such brews seem highly unlikely to have a robust flavor profile. They do look cool and different though, so full points for novelty.

The Body is sweet with a mild, generic root beer flavor. It’s refreshing and a little acidic and there’s a slight hint of wintergreen and vanilla. The Bite is mild as well. There is a little spice and decent carbonation. The Head is medium and fizzes down quickly. The Aftertaste is mild and soda-ish.

This really isn’t particularly good. It’s almost like my experience with previous clear root beers and my reasons as to why they failed may actually be universally applicable. It may be impossible to make a colorless root beer be quality. We’ll never know until I find one. Till then, see how it rates against other root beers.

Snow Eagle Brewing & Grill Homemade Root Beer

Draft and Keg Root Beers No Responses »

Sep 062023

In June I took a lovely long road trip with the family to Idaho. On the way back we went through Idaho falls and I had discovered this place the day before while scoping out if there was anything worth seeing near the supercharger. Snow Eagle Brewing is about a 15 minute walk along the Snake River park from the charger, right across from the scenic Idaho Falls themselves. Their website is very scant on details on their history, but they brew beer and have food and most importantly, brew their own root beer. Their glasses feature a samurai, which is a bit odd for Idaho, but Idaho Falls has a sister city in Japan, Tokai-Mura, so I guess they’re just taking that friendship to a new level.

It has a dark, old fashioned Body with a lot of licorice, some vanilla, and a little wintergreen. There’s too much licorice and it isn’t very sweet. The Bite is mild with a distict lack of spices for a dark, old fashioned brew. The Head is not there, not there at all. No foam that I could see. Very sad. The Aftertaste is licorice with hints of vanilla and a bitter wintergreen finish.

Sadly, this isn’t a particularly great root beer, it has too much licorice and just falls flat (both figuratively and literally) in every other category. It was a beautiful walk to see it, but I think I’d rather not walk near as far and check out some of the sites along the way next time. I have no idea how their food tastes because I didn’t get any, but it probably is decent. So if you find yourself craving a root beer while admiring the Idaho Falls, this will probably leave you disappointed, but it is at least, there.

The Snow Eagle taps. Root Beer on top, as it should be.

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